However, that was some 240 hours ago. As any coder under a deadline knows, a LOT can be done in 240 hours if you have enough caffine.
Fixing a flaw in the basic interaction design to compensate flaws in the functional specification is not on that list.
Unless the team is extraordinarily lucky by stumbling on a cheaply-implementable solution. Which seems unlikely regarding the comments here of how the functional specification is flawed in that it didn't properly account for user motivation. ("Where's the fun?", "What do I do?", "What's the point?").
I haven't played this thing, I admit that. Just sharing my perspective as a developer on the fundamental problems coming forth from the comments here.
The language is. To quite a degree. So engaging them in that language is not a denial of reality.
These people are mentally divergent, and need help understanding that Klingon's don't fucking exist.
Perhaps they actually know that. The artcile does not in any way address what reality is or is not being engaged in by delivering services in language that actually exists.
Maybe they are dealing with schizophrenics who resort to speaking Klingon to keep Echelon at bay because the Walt Disney Inc. / CIA / Apple conspiracy is after them and if they speak English they may trigger the floating nano-microphones that hang in the air. That is a 'reality' that a mental-health professional may not want to engage either, but you still want to know if these people are having side-effects when they have started taking their medication.
I am so jealous of you. I am still working on a PCG-C1VN, which is somewhat bigger. I can still type on it fine.
One thing that struck me was how ugly the Vulcan minipc is. Compared with Sony's U1, U3, the upcoming U10, or Samsung's Nexio or Sharp's keyboard Zaurus, the minipc just screams "I got this with my HotWheels!"
I wouldn't want to be seen with that cheap-looking thing.
You don't need a midlet for IMAP -- you can set up IMAP and POP3/SMTP mailboxes natively in the messaging application.
There are also C++ based clients for IRC available at Handango, as well as another C++ based HTML browser (Emily or something). I am not even sure if Opera has released for the 3650.
Um, the keypad lights up at the first touch. Very bright. Like most Nokia phones. You can actually see the keys.
The screen itself is so bright that one of the apps you can download at Handango.com is a flashlight app. It sets the screen to blank with the backlight on. Handahngo declined to put up a screenshot.
Stop whining, there are Nokias coming out with Bluetooth. The 3650's Bluetooth implementation has worked just fine for me when I tested it. In fact, it was great fun to stand outside the Apple store in the Cambridge galleria and send pics to whatever new Apple laptop was listening for the signal, surprising the people trying them out.
Available at T-Mobile soon, I believe. The thing's shipping.
What we were NOT promised was the computing power that took up a city block in the 30s, in a laptop. Nor 500 channels (and still nothing on). We were promised alot of cool looking things that were already invented. They just would look stream lined.
Note, for example, that all his telephones are wired. In the space-hospital, it even looks like some of the patients are going to get remarkably tied up, if they aren't outright doing a lesbian space-bondage scene.
Why not try to take a look at some of the long time methods used by engineering industries to see how they go about designing bridges and cars and stuff like?
I live in Boston, home of the Big Dig. Right now is not the best time to impress me with construction as a model for controllable effective on-time on-budget engineering of large-scale projects.
In fact, we get to hear this a lot as software engineers "Look at construction! They got it right!" Well, of all big construction projects I remember (Betuwe tunnels in the Netherlands, Stopera in Amsterdam, Big Dig in Boston) went into time and costs overruns, often by 100 to 400% on either variable.
And then there is my bathroom which I had remodelled a year ago, and the stories of my hoemwoner friends who did the same. On time? On budget? Don't make me laugh. Go do the rounds among people who have had remodelling done: horror story after horror story. Construction people were like software engineers in the dot-com boom: flooded with offers, so they would overbook and the customer who complained loudest would get his project done. Many sub-teams (projects, tilers) did and do not communicate, project leads are at the mercy of the scheduling of the sub-contractors, the quality os not standardised at all but incredibly variable so you have to get "lucky" with who has a slot free to do the work on your project, many of the people are overworked or "self-medicated" to deal with their stress and the conditions of labor.
I bought the whole "Look at construction!" mantra, and then I actually looked at how construction was done. These guys wing it as much as we do for the small projects, and when they can't wing it for the big ones, major shit happens like on our projects. And the old COBOL software is still running after 40 years and will keep running as long as the environment doesn't change, just like bridges stay up for decades as long as the environment doesn't radically change.
Do you think that GM people stand around and talk about Extreme Engineering for their engineers who design high tech engines?
Actually, yes, these people are constantly re-evaluating their process because their time-to-market requirements are constantly getting tighter and tighter. Just read Business Week for six months and follow the changes in the auto industry through their articles: they are all about faster, faster, and listen-to-the-customer constant process-reengineering, with CEO ans design heads being hired and fired depending on how well they can make theri human- and machine-assembly-lines line up and fire.
The camera gets more useful as you carry it, because you find more uses. For instance, recently I travelled and arrived in a strange city at night, and drove a rental car to a hotel. When I arrived, I just snapped a pic of the license plate so I could find it the next morning. I wouldn't have remembered otherwise, and yes, I could have used pen and paper, but this was way more convenient.
Yes, a real digital camera takes far better pictures, but veing able to send quick snaps from the same box without any switching or downloading is way too easy. Like my partner was recently shopping for dishwashers and wanted to show me one so I could say if I liked it. You don't need megapixels for that, you need quick sending. Alas, only I have a cam phone, and he didn't.
The N-Gage is a Series 60 phone, like the 7650. That means it runs the SYmbian OS, which is a new generation of a PDA OS for Psion PDAs. It is a real OS, but optimized for phone-usage. Outside developers have already written the module to shut off the phone part while leaving other parts of the software running.
If this capability isn't included in the phone outright -- and I'll be stunned if it isn't -- I am sure you will be able to download it from places like handango.com.
I know you were being flip, but the Nokia 3650 I am testing has, like its older brother, a pretty good screen for this sort of thing. It scales the pic automatically, but also allows you to zoom in and out.
I got so tired of al the pet-and-other-cuteness pcitures we testers were MMS'ing and Bluetoothing to each-other that I enabled the POP3 mailboxes (yes, it can check POP3 mailboxes over GPRS, and decode MIME mail attachments like pix) and told my friends to send me some skinpics.
I can safely report that a porno MMS service, or a dating/hook-up service over XHTML & MMS is completly feasible and probably will be a massive hit. Use the browser to check out the profiles of the people logged on looking as well, send your instant pic to the ones you like, exchange locations, get laid. The operator will love it, the service-maker will love it, and sex will be driving technology forward again, as it should.
If, however, you don't care too much what your company does, and you just need a salary, a paycheck - then why do you do it? You just need the salary, the paycheck, to pay bills and buy necessities, right? And to purchase some entertainment from time to time?
No, I work because if I don't, the USA will throw me out of the country for being a goshdarn furriner, and furriners need to be working while they are being processed or they get thrown out, and I do not want to leave my U.S. partner and my U.S. house.
Otherwise I'd quit in a heartbeat once my partner has a steady stream of income again, and look for something else to do.
Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You!
I've been waiting for ages for a place like that. Guilt free music I can purchase, with an engine that helps me find it.
There will always be a job for a man of your skills when your ready (if your ready) to settle down. Jesus, 3 languages and how many tech skills? Write your own ticket.
Speaking three languages and having 7 years of pro experience in tech skills and looking for work for a while, I am skeptical.
Well, there is the fact that they didn't actually have time to cruft up their design. It was written for a multi-processor abstraction layer, and the team added the latest ideas availabkle in the marketplace. However, they esseintially stayed during their lifetime in the same class of boxes and applications. They didn't get a decade of use in various settings to have to adapt to.
Hit the weights. Eat 5 small meals. Feh. I have hit the weights hard for years, have had my small meals for three years, and it isn't making me ripped, and it isn't kickstarting my metabolism into high gear. It is making me stronger and bigger, but not ripped. Unles you have jock genes, weights and low fat diet ain't gonna do it. As you say:
It helps to be a good athlete who can pack on muscle easily.
I wish this would be plastered everywhere on gyms and fitness magazines, before everyone who isn't ripped gets seen as not trying hard enough, or a pussy. Asking me to mirror myself after Owen is like asking women to take Callista Flockhart as their example.
Sorry, that was 6 per GB. I think I put MB everywhere I should have put GB in that story.
And no, it wasn't my front page that got linked here.
The difference is that with the slashdot effect the server is saturated by preforming its intended function - showing the information to people who wish to see it, or atleast as many of them as it can manage. When you publish information it is reasonable to assume you want people to see it.
Yes, but which people? I just put it up to show it to my friends and their friends. It is also a reasonable assumption that I don't want my server to go down by having hoardes and hoardes of requests from complete strangers I don't care about. To the webserver it doesn't matter whether it is a scriptkiddie running the gazillion resuests or hit-and-run slashdotters, and from my POV, it isn't either.
The whole situation just sucks, and the editors know it is happening, and don't care. That's just really sad.
You are not the Internet Community. The Internet Community I know was about sharing links, about sharing resources in a new structure, of saying you attach your subnet to me and then you can route my mail through you and isn't this WWW thing cool? The Internet Community I know was about taking care of information, of wanting it to be free and to be accessible. If anything, bandwidth and bottleneck issues have been researched by the Internet Community for years -- that's exactly what P2P is all about.
You are that new Internet Community that thinks that just because the word 'Internet' is involved, all notions of reality, responsability, or reasonable, have been thrown out the window. Well, to that I say 'Bullshit', and if you don't get it, the law will, as is evidenced by the bill being discussed in the UK.
As I explained, as a user of a standard webhoster these things are not within my control. You are just blaming the victim because it is easier for you. The Internet luminaries I know would die of shame if their networks were causing their downstream users crashing problems, or throughput problems, or service problems. You are just another version of "gimmie, gimmie, gimmie".
Be reasonable. That is all I ask. The existance of the slashdot effect for the last couple of years now should be a very big pointer that something very unreasonable is happening. It's making content inaccessible while nominally trying to get people to see it. I am sorry, am I the only one that sees the utter, utter, utter ridiculousness of that notion?
The first time a link to my site got posted on Slashdot, the onslaught on the first day and subsequent spreading through blogs and mailing lists got me kicked off my hoster for generating an excess of 30 MB of netrowk traffic in 20 days -- they thought I was trading MP3s or warez. When they found out it was just my page, they still invoked their "upsetting normal working of server" clause and kicked me out on Dec 23d.
I found a new hoster, but this one charges me 6 bucks for any extra MB of traffic over my 2MB. That's just the breaks, the rest of the package is good. Of course, since it is hosted I can't actually do neat tricks like change the webserver to block slashdot referrers or anything, I just have what I have. But I wouldn't get slashdotted asgain, would I?
Of course I would, and without warning or consultation Chris posts the link again on the front page. My billing is monthly, the link was put the last day of the month, so I got the bill for this stunt after one day in the May billing: 54 bucks. June, of course, is yet to come in, and Lord knows what that bill is going to be.
All Slashdot editors know this will happen when they post a link. They know. They have known for years now. When I complained, I got a pointer to their standard policy "We don't warn people", as pointing to some webpage somehow mitigates the slashdot effect or precludes them from responsability for what their site does to websites. Further pressing got a "Change your webserver to deny referrals from slashdot (because you should just anticipate that we will Slashdot you some day, so you should have done this already)" and pointer to their FAQ on why they don't use Google cash: "But it's so hard to use it!"
I don't mind at all if a bill comes along somewhere that points out to editors of popular sites that wield this kind of power that there is no difference between them and a DDoS attack from a web-publishers point of view.
Re:Physician heal thyself
on
Amazon.Heartbreak
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
he led people to believe that they were participating in a dream of changing commerce forever
He did. Instant buying, audio previewing, amazing selection, customer feedback from real customers, available from any location with a web browser and a phone line, delivered, for reasonable prices. It is way beyond what any print catalog ever provided in breadth and preview and convenience. He did. Commerce has radically been changed by the WWW, and Bezos was part of it and harnessed it.
If you had gotten rich off amazon, would you have written this book?
Slashdot Mirror
However, that was some 240 hours ago. As any coder under a deadline knows, a LOT can be done in 240 hours if you have enough caffine.
Fixing a flaw in the basic interaction design to compensate flaws in the functional specification is not on that list.
Unless the team is extraordinarily lucky by stumbling on a cheaply-implementable solution. Which seems unlikely regarding the comments here of how the functional specification is flawed in that it didn't properly account for user motivation. ("Where's the fun?", "What do I do?", "What's the point?").
I haven't played this thing, I admit that. Just sharing my perspective as a developer on the fundamental problems coming forth from the comments here.
Or a 3Com Wireless Bluetooth PC Card. Which is how I got my Win2K laptops connected to T-Mobile's GPRS network over my Nokia 3650.
Klingons aren't fucking real.
The language is. To quite a degree. So engaging them in that language is not a denial of reality.
These people are mentally divergent, and need help understanding that Klingon's don't fucking exist.
Perhaps they actually know that. The artcile does not in any way address what reality is or is not being engaged in by delivering services in language that actually exists.
Maybe they are dealing with schizophrenics who resort to speaking Klingon to keep Echelon at bay because the Walt Disney Inc. / CIA / Apple conspiracy is after them and if they speak English they may trigger the floating nano-microphones that hang in the air. That is a 'reality' that a mental-health professional may not want to engage either, but you still want to know if these people are having side-effects when they have started taking their medication.
I am so jealous of you. I am still working on a PCG-C1VN, which is somewhat bigger. I can still type on it fine.
One thing that struck me was how ugly the Vulcan minipc is. Compared with Sony's U1, U3, the upcoming U10, or Samsung's Nexio or Sharp's keyboard Zaurus, the minipc just screams "I got this with my HotWheels!"
I wouldn't want to be seen with that cheap-looking thing.
You don't need a midlet for IMAP -- you can set up IMAP and POP3/SMTP mailboxes natively in the messaging application.
There are also C++ based clients for IRC available at Handango, as well as another C++ based HTML browser (Emily or something). I am not even sure if Opera has released for the 3650.
Um, the keypad lights up at the first touch. Very bright. Like most Nokia phones. You can actually see the keys.
The screen itself is so bright that one of the apps you can download at Handango.com is a flashlight app. It sets the screen to blank with the backlight on. Handahngo declined to put up a screenshot.
I dunno, I have been testing it for months on end now, and am totally used to it. I even managed to get to level 11 in Bounce with the scroll-pad.
Don't trust me, though, I work for the manufacturer...
Stop whining, there are Nokias coming out with Bluetooth. The 3650's Bluetooth implementation has worked just fine for me when I tested it. In fact, it was great fun to stand outside the Apple store in the Cambridge galleria and send pics to whatever new Apple laptop was listening for the signal, surprising the people trying them out.
Available at T-Mobile soon, I believe. The thing's shipping.
What we were NOT promised was the computing power that took up a city block in the 30s, in a laptop. Nor 500 channels (and still nothing on). We were promised alot of cool looking things that were already invented. They just would look stream lined.
Note, for example, that all his telephones are wired. In the space-hospital, it even looks like some of the patients are going to get remarkably tied up, if they aren't outright doing a lesbian space-bondage scene.
Why not try to take a look at some of the long time methods used by engineering industries to see how they go about designing bridges and cars and stuff like?
I live in Boston, home of the Big Dig. Right now is not the best time to impress me with construction as a model for controllable effective on-time on-budget engineering of large-scale projects.
In fact, we get to hear this a lot as software engineers "Look at construction! They got it right!" Well, of all big construction projects I remember (Betuwe tunnels in the Netherlands, Stopera in Amsterdam, Big Dig in Boston) went into time and costs overruns, often by 100 to 400% on either variable.
And then there is my bathroom which I had remodelled a year ago, and the stories of my hoemwoner friends who did the same. On time? On budget? Don't make me laugh. Go do the rounds among people who have had remodelling done: horror story after horror story. Construction people were like software engineers in the dot-com boom: flooded with offers, so they would overbook and the customer who complained loudest would get his project done. Many sub-teams (projects, tilers) did and do not communicate, project leads are at the mercy of the scheduling of the sub-contractors, the quality os not standardised at all but incredibly variable so you have to get "lucky" with who has a slot free to do the work on your project, many of the people are overworked or "self-medicated" to deal with their stress and the conditions of labor.
I bought the whole "Look at construction!" mantra, and then I actually looked at how construction was done. These guys wing it as much as we do for the small projects, and when they can't wing it for the big ones, major shit happens like on our projects. And the old COBOL software is still running after 40 years and will keep running as long as the environment doesn't change, just like bridges stay up for decades as long as the environment doesn't radically change.
Do you think that GM people stand around and talk about Extreme Engineering for their engineers who design high tech engines?
Actually, yes, these people are constantly re-evaluating their process because their time-to-market requirements are constantly getting tighter and tighter. Just read Business Week for six months and follow the changes in the auto industry through their articles: they are all about faster, faster, and listen-to-the-customer constant process-reengineering, with CEO ans design heads being hired and fired depending on how well they can make theri human- and machine-assembly-lines line up and fire.
The camera gets more useful as you carry it, because you find more uses. For instance, recently I travelled and arrived in a strange city at night, and drove a rental car to a hotel. When I arrived, I just snapped a pic of the license plate so I could find it the next morning. I wouldn't have remembered otherwise, and yes, I could have used pen and paper, but this was way more convenient.
Yes, a real digital camera takes far better pictures, but veing able to send quick snaps from the same box without any switching or downloading is way too easy. Like my partner was recently shopping for dishwashers and wanted to show me one so I could say if I liked it. You don't need megapixels for that, you need quick sending. Alas, only I have a cam phone, and he didn't.
The N-Gage is a Series 60 phone, like the 7650. That means it runs the SYmbian OS, which is a new generation of a PDA OS for Psion PDAs. It is a real OS, but optimized for phone-usage. Outside developers have already written the module to shut off the phone part while leaving other parts of the software running.
If this capability isn't included in the phone outright -- and I'll be stunned if it isn't -- I am sure you will be able to download it from places like handango.com.
Don't laugh, one of the upcoming Nokia's will have a flashlight. I am not making that up. It is pretty bright, I've seen it.
And a thermometer. And a calorie-counter.
I know you were being flip, but the Nokia 3650 I am testing has, like its older brother, a pretty good screen for this sort of thing. It scales the pic automatically, but also allows you to zoom in and out.
I got so tired of al the pet-and-other-cuteness pcitures we testers were MMS'ing and Bluetoothing to each-other that I enabled the POP3 mailboxes (yes, it can check POP3 mailboxes over GPRS, and decode MIME mail attachments like pix) and told my friends to send me some skinpics.
I can safely report that a porno MMS service, or a dating/hook-up service over XHTML & MMS is completly feasible and probably will be a massive hit. Use the browser to check out the profiles of the people logged on looking as well, send your instant pic to the ones you like, exchange locations, get laid. The operator will love it, the service-maker will love it, and sex will be driving technology forward again, as it should.
Netherlands.
And I paid for the house. And the INS made sure I earned the job. Trust me.
If, however, you don't care too much what your company does, and you just need a salary, a paycheck - then why do you do it? You just need the salary, the paycheck, to pay bills and buy necessities, right? And to purchase some entertainment from time to time?
No, I work because if I don't, the USA will throw me out of the country for being a goshdarn furriner, and furriners need to be working while they are being processed or they get thrown out, and I do not want to leave my U.S. partner and my U.S. house.
Otherwise I'd quit in a heartbeat once my partner has a steady stream of income again, and look for something else to do.
Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You Thank You!
I've been waiting for ages for a place like that. Guilt free music I can purchase, with an engine that helps me find it.
Thank You!
There will always be a job for a man of your skills when your ready (if your ready) to settle down. Jesus, 3 languages and how many tech skills? Write your own ticket.
Speaking three languages and having 7 years of pro experience in tech skills and looking for work for a while, I am skeptical.
Well, there is the fact that they didn't actually have time to cruft up their design. It was written for a multi-processor abstraction layer, and the team added the latest ideas availabkle in the marketplace. However, they esseintially stayed during their lifetime in the same class of boxes and applications. They didn't get a decade of use in various settings to have to adapt to.
To look like Owen? Choose my parents carefully.
Hit the weights. Eat 5 small meals. Feh. I have hit the weights hard for years, have had my small meals for three years, and it isn't making me ripped, and it isn't kickstarting my metabolism into high gear. It is making me stronger and bigger, but not ripped. Unles you have jock genes, weights and low fat diet ain't gonna do it. As you say:
It helps to be a good athlete who can pack on muscle easily.
I wish this would be plastered everywhere on gyms and fitness magazines, before everyone who isn't ripped gets seen as not trying hard enough, or a pussy. Asking me to mirror myself after Owen is like asking women to take Callista Flockhart as their example.
Sorry, that was 6 per GB. I think I put MB everywhere I should have put GB in that story.
And no, it wasn't my front page that got linked here.
The difference is that with the slashdot effect the server is saturated by preforming its intended function - showing the information to people who wish to see it, or atleast as many of them as it can manage. When you publish information it is reasonable to assume you want people to see it.
Yes, but which people? I just put it up to show it to my friends and their friends. It is also a reasonable assumption that I don't want my server to go down by having hoardes and hoardes of requests from complete strangers I don't care about. To the webserver it doesn't matter whether it is a scriptkiddie running the gazillion resuests or hit-and-run slashdotters, and from my POV, it isn't either.
The whole situation just sucks, and the editors know it is happening, and don't care. That's just really sad.
You are not the Internet Community. The Internet Community I know was about sharing links, about sharing resources in a new structure, of saying you attach your subnet to me and then you can route my mail through you and isn't this WWW thing cool? The Internet Community I know was about taking care of information, of wanting it to be free and to be accessible. If anything, bandwidth and bottleneck issues have been researched by the Internet Community for years -- that's exactly what P2P is all about.
You are that new Internet Community that thinks that just because the word 'Internet' is involved, all notions of reality, responsability, or reasonable, have been thrown out the window. Well, to that I say 'Bullshit', and if you don't get it, the law will, as is evidenced by the bill being discussed in the UK.
As I explained, as a user of a standard webhoster these things are not within my control. You are just blaming the victim because it is easier for you. The Internet luminaries I know would die of shame if their networks were causing their downstream users crashing problems, or throughput problems, or service problems. You are just another version of "gimmie, gimmie, gimmie".
Be reasonable. That is all I ask. The existance of the slashdot effect for the last couple of years now should be a very big pointer that something very unreasonable is happening. It's making content inaccessible while nominally trying to get people to see it. I am sorry, am I the only one that sees the utter, utter, utter ridiculousness of that notion?
I would damn well hope so, and it is about time.
The first time a link to my site got posted on Slashdot, the onslaught on the first day and subsequent spreading through blogs and mailing lists got me kicked off my hoster for generating an excess of 30 MB of netrowk traffic in 20 days -- they thought I was trading MP3s or warez. When they found out it was just my page, they still invoked their "upsetting normal working of server" clause and kicked me out on Dec 23d.
I found a new hoster, but this one charges me 6 bucks for any extra MB of traffic over my 2MB. That's just the breaks, the rest of the package is good. Of course, since it is hosted I can't actually do neat tricks like change the webserver to block slashdot referrers or anything, I just have what I have. But I wouldn't get slashdotted asgain, would I?
Of course I would, and without warning or consultation Chris posts the link again on the front page. My billing is monthly, the link was put the last day of the month, so I got the bill for this stunt after one day in the May billing: 54 bucks. June, of course, is yet to come in, and Lord knows what that bill is going to be.
All Slashdot editors know this will happen when they post a link. They know. They have known for years now. When I complained, I got a pointer to their standard policy "We don't warn people", as pointing to some webpage somehow mitigates the slashdot effect or precludes them from responsability for what their site does to websites. Further pressing got a "Change your webserver to deny referrals from slashdot (because you should just anticipate that we will Slashdot you some day, so you should have done this already)" and pointer to their FAQ on why they don't use Google cash: "But it's so hard to use it!"
I don't mind at all if a bill comes along somewhere that points out to editors of popular sites that wield this kind of power that there is no difference between them and a DDoS attack from a web-publishers point of view.
Depends; is your name actually Al?
he led people to believe that they were participating in a dream of changing commerce forever
He did. Instant buying, audio previewing, amazing selection, customer feedback from real customers, available from any location with a web browser and a phone line, delivered, for reasonable prices. It is way beyond what any print catalog ever provided in breadth and preview and convenience. He did. Commerce has radically been changed by the WWW, and Bezos was part of it and harnessed it.
If you had gotten rich off amazon, would you have written this book?