"My underlying point is that Moore's law won't help this because Moore's law assumes we're moving in a single direction: forward."
Which is obviously not true, hence Intel's new ads: "Twice as slow as our last processor!"
Look, it's always been that way: Hardware got faster, software got slower. It'll always be that way. It has to be that way, without adding abstractions we couldn't build today's complex software as easily.
Even when we have short-term changes in that (netbooks made processors slower), it's only temporary. My 300$ netbook isn't fast, but it's still faster than my notebook from two generations ago.
Outlook isn't free, and it's not a standard. I can't install it on my friends' computers. It's never going to amount to anything outside of the Enterprise.
See, that's not really helping. Look, there are two different things we're discussing here. GP wrote "The fact that your iPod may catch fire and burn down your house is not something to keep quiet about, no matter to what extent the problem goes." So is the problem that they catch fire, or that Apple tries to suppress this using lawyers? If it's the first, I'd say bollocks. If it's the second, he probably has a point.
There's a difference between a toy that is unsuitable for children because it is a choking hazard, and an electronic device that was sold 175 million times and had 15 reported cases of overheating. Given what we know, there's a high likelihood that the reported issues were not due to an inherent problem with the devices, but due to user error (I would guess getting an iPod wet or leaving it in a hot car could in some cases cause overheating). If it were an inherent problem with the product, there would very likely be more cases.
So we don't know what actually happened. There's a chance Apple is behaving unethically. There's also a chance that there is nothing wrong with these devices. Given what we know, my bet would be on the latter.
Batteries are small containers which contain ever larger amounts of energy. They are bombs. Sometimes, they catch fire. This happens with all electronic devices. The question is whether iPods are worse than other devices; so far, the data isn't in, but since it's Apple, a high-profile company which sells a ton of devices, people will be quick to blame them for everything.
So we can either have a discussion about the data, or we can yell at each other. Your post started out as if you wanted to go with the first idea. Too bad you ended up with calling Apple's customers "more pathetic than followers of scientology" and implying that it would be good if they died in a fire.
Loving a business that doesn't employ you (or, in fact, any kind of business) is just as sick as hating the customers of a specific business.
"I claim that most people who can drive properly can actually learn to talk over the phone while driving safely."
Based on what data do you claim that?
I'm pretty sure humans are by design not good at multitasking. I would guess - based on my admittedly weak knowledge of psychology - that learning to do two cognitively difficult things at the same time is about as hard as learning to grow a second head. It's just not something humans can do. Even Schumacher stops talking when he gets into a difficult situation.
I could be wrong, though, but I've never seen any data or anything at all that would somehow imply that you might be right.
So, how viable is dog cloning? Is it easy to clone dogs? The Wikipedia article mentions a success rate of one in 123. Is that one in 123 embryos? Is that considered to be a good or a bad result? Also, do the cloned animals have a normal life expectancy? I seem to remember there were some problems with cloned animals dying quicker than "normal" animals.
Really curious about this, haven't heard much about it since Dolly.
You're essentially arguing that somebody who copies a work of art then co-owns the copyright to that work of art. The fact that it takes work and skill to take a good photograph of a painting does not mean that the photograph of that painting then becomes its own piece of art. A photograph of a piece of art may be a good copy, but it's still just a copy of the original piece.
Now, if the composition of the photograph somehow happens to include a work of art, that is a different matter of course. But these are not photographs which just happen to include paintings; they are photographs of paintings.
Yes, there are a lot of interesting spatial user interfaces. Personally, I think 3D interfaces are not too great because they reduce three spatial dimensions into two screen dimensions, and most people not used to videogames get confused by that. But there are cool 2D spatial interfaces, like Microsoft's Canvas for OneNote.
We use hierarchies to explain these things, but really, they're not there in the real world. It's just a bunch of things floating through space; they are not really contained within each other until we start creating hierarchies to explain them.
They're quite capable of understanding, they just can't be bothered. That's reasonable given that it's really not important to them to perform their function. I guess that's what sets us geeks apart - we care about how EVERYTHING works, within (or sometimes not) reason.
Yeah, that may be the main difference between us and normal people.
A branch in real life is not part of a hierarchy. It's just a piece of wood attached to a tree; it's not contained in the tree in any way.
I think I get your point about hierarchies being a human cognitive construct, but a branch is a _part_ of a tree...?
Yes, but I would say it's a different kind of "part of."
A subdirectory is contained within its parent directory. A branch is not contained within its tree in the same way. You can't collapse a real-world tree, thus getting rid of all the branches; a real-world tree is not a hierarchical list of tree parts. A real-world tree is always a full tree, and every part of the tree has a clearly defined spatial position. For example, you can never get confused by where a tree's branch should be, because it's always obvious where it is; it never disappears into a taxonomy of tree parts. We can make up such a taxonomy and look at the real-world tree as a hierarchical structure, but only programmers and biologists do that:-)
Thus, people can't apply their real-world knowledge of trees to virtual tree structures; even though we use the same words, they are vastly different things, and virtual tree structures require skills humans don't naturally acquire by studying real-world trees.
I would argue a slightly different angle. I think most folks do actually "get" the idea of hierarchies; I think the problem is more what you describe later in the paragraph: people are not sure how to properly categorize things... there's no naturally correct way of categorizing files. There's no obvious taxonomy. And, for that matter, which hierarchy makes more sense depends on the context, further complicating the issue.
This is where systems closer to what we see with iTunes come to the fore -- you get different hierarchies as different contexts, all at the click of a button: by year, by album, by artist, alphabetically, what have you.
Yes, that is true. But I would argue that the fact that this is shown as a hierarchy in iTunes is incidental. What you're really doing is applying more and more filters to your list. "I only want to see audiobooks... Okay, now I only want to see audiobooks written by Connelly... Okay, now I only want to see Audiobooks written by Connelly called "Black Echo".
It's not obvious to the user that there is a hierarchy, and he doesn't have to worry about the hierarchy, and the hierarchy shown by iTunes is ephemeral. If the user started out with "I want to see everything written by Connelly", the hierarchy would look differently; as you say, it depends on context. That is different from the rigid type of hierarchy you find in a file system.
So I will agree that users are capable of getting hierarchies used to filter down on metadata. I was overreaching when I said that users don't get hierarchies; in some cases, hierarchies are useful and easily understood by users.
Part of the difficulty in expanding this to be usable for a full filesystem, rather than just for media files, is that doing so expands the number of relevant contexts -- who created the file, who modified the file, versions, perms, file type, usage frequency, yada yada.
I believe operating systems should default to a temporal view instead of the current hierarchical view. Instead of putting files into a specific place inside a hierarchy, users should just create and save the file, and the operating system would display that view attached to the date it twas used, perhaps in a calendar view. In my experience, most people simply throw files into a single directory and sort by date anyway.
All those other contexts - users, versions, types, "heat", tags - could be shown as filters, similar to what iTunes does.
As for alternatives, tagging is easier to understand since it gets rid of the whole hierarchy
Don't cross the swords! It would lead to all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
I'm pretty sure Sony intends to release a huge number of all PSP games as downloadable games with the release of the PSP Go. Whether they will appear on the PS3 as well as the PSP remains to be seen.
That's hilarious. In the future, if you start a post like that, you should try to make sure to continue by not making yourself look like the fucking idiot.
"It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe, after centuries and centuries of contrary evidence, that more government will make their lives better."
I'm glad I live in a country with public health care. It gives people the security to start their own companies without fear of eternal debt should they should get sick while not employed. I'm glad I live in a country with public roads. They cost me little and are well maintained. I'm glad I live in a country with a well-paid and well-trained police force who will help me if my shit gets stolen, and well-trained firefighters who will help me for free if my asshole neighbours accidentally set my house on fire. I'm glad I live in a country with working public transport. I pay a few hundred bucks a year and can get anywhere in my country in little time, without paying any additional fee.
The government can make people's lives better. The fact that there are sanctimonious assholes who are happy to force their own moral views on others does not change that. The fact that there are misguided idiots who think it's a good idea to censor what others can say or see does not change that.
It's important and good to fight censorship and repression and all that other shit that is currently happening. But to claim that nothing any government can do can make people's lives better is not only extremist, it's insane, and it's contradicting reality.
A branch in real life is not part of a hierarchy. It's just a piece of wood attached to a tree; it's not contained in the tree in any way.
And no, explaining doesn't fix this problem. People know how hierarchies work; they just don't get them. They are not sure how to properly categorize things, and if they decide on a given hierarchy, later, they won't remember where they decided to put things because there's no naturally correct way of categorizing files. There's no obvious taxonomy; the problem becomes even worse when people have to use hierarchies created by other people.
The only time I've seen "normal" people successfully use hierarchies is when they created directories for years; every year got a new directory. But that's something that shouldn't require hierarchies; the OS should allow users to have temporal views on their data automatically.
As for alternatives, tagging is easier to understand since it gets rid of the whole hierarchy aspect, and since people can just add as many tags as they want to.
To most people, hierarchies are confusing. They work for programmers and technical people (the people who visit/. obviously understand hierarchies, otherwise they would be confused by/.'s comment system), but most people don't get hierarchies. My parents store all of their files into a single folder. Most people do that. Humans look at their environment in terms of spatial and temporal aspects. Humans understand where things are in space, and when things are in time. I've written a letter yesterday. I've put the printout next to the phone. Those are things people get.
But they don't get hierarchies, because hierarchies don't exist in nature.
There's no need to be catty or insulting about this. You're not like everybody else, and the fact that other people have different strengths doesn't make them idiots.
Clearly, photographs can have creative value. In this particular case, though, I don't think so. It's a picture of Obama's head. It's not unique, there are probably dozens or hundreds that look very similar. Furthermore, Fairey's work bears little resemblance to the original image; for a long time, it was unclear which image the original source was since there are so many similar photographs and Fairey's final result is not particular similar to the original photograph.
Your argument that Fairey would not have needed the original image if the original image had little or no creative value does not hold water. A sheet of paper doesn't hold creative value, yet you still need it if you want to create a drawing. Similarly, Fairey used the picture as a tool to create his work; he could have chosen any of the dozens of the pictures and achieved a similar result, just like you can choose any piece of paper and create a similar drawing on it. The fact that he chose this particular picture does not prove that it was special, just like the fact that you pick a certain piece of paper does not make that particular piece special.
Also, if the picture was not taken with a digital camera, the person who developed the picture had a huge influence on how it looks. If it's digital, the programmer who wrote the algorithms used by the camera and by the camera software on the computer has altered colors and contrast white balance; he must be compensated as well. Since the photographer most likely used Windows or a Mac, either Microsoft or Apple had some influence on the image since they wrote the operating system's graphic subsystem, which renders pixels on the screen and influences how the picture looks. They must be compensated as well. Fairey probably printed the picture before working on it. The algorithms used to control the printer influence how the picture looks, so the programmers who wrote them also deserve compensation, as does the printer manufacturer. The tools used to cut up the picture had a small influence on how the end result looks, so they must receive money, too. And so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Pirates are typically not terrorists. Their goal is to steal the cables, not harm them.
"My underlying point is that Moore's law won't help this because Moore's law assumes we're moving in a single direction: forward."
Which is obviously not true, hence Intel's new ads: "Twice as slow as our last processor!"
Look, it's always been that way: Hardware got faster, software got slower. It'll always be that way. It has to be that way, without adding abstractions we couldn't build today's complex software as easily.
Even when we have short-term changes in that (netbooks made processors slower), it's only temporary. My 300$ netbook isn't fast, but it's still faster than my notebook from two generations ago.
Outlook isn't free, and it's not a standard. I can't install it on my friends' computers. It's never going to amount to anything outside of the Enterprise.
So what? That's what we've been doing regularly in since the Apple ][. We're trading efficiency for abstraction.
NO YUO R PATHETHIC!
See, that's not really helping. Look, there are two different things we're discussing here. GP wrote "The fact that your iPod may catch fire and burn down your house is not something to keep quiet about, no matter to what extent the problem goes." So is the problem that they catch fire, or that Apple tries to suppress this using lawyers? If it's the first, I'd say bollocks. If it's the second, he probably has a point.
That is the goal, but I have yet to see an electronic device that could not be broken in some catastrophic way.
There's a difference between a toy that is unsuitable for children because it is a choking hazard, and an electronic device that was sold 175 million times and had 15 reported cases of overheating. Given what we know, there's a high likelihood that the reported issues were not due to an inherent problem with the devices, but due to user error (I would guess getting an iPod wet or leaving it in a hot car could in some cases cause overheating). If it were an inherent problem with the product, there would very likely be more cases.
So we don't know what actually happened. There's a chance Apple is behaving unethically. There's also a chance that there is nothing wrong with these devices. Given what we know, my bet would be on the latter.
Batteries are small containers which contain ever larger amounts of energy. They are bombs. Sometimes, they catch fire. This happens with all electronic devices. The question is whether iPods are worse than other devices; so far, the data isn't in, but since it's Apple, a high-profile company which sells a ton of devices, people will be quick to blame them for everything.
So we can either have a discussion about the data, or we can yell at each other. Your post started out as if you wanted to go with the first idea. Too bad you ended up with calling Apple's customers "more pathetic than followers of scientology" and implying that it would be good if they died in a fire.
Loving a business that doesn't employ you (or, in fact, any kind of business) is just as sick as hating the customers of a specific business.
In the 80s and early 90s, I've seen a ton of cars with these lights. I think you could buy and install them pretty cheaply.
"I claim that most people who can drive properly can actually learn to talk over the phone while driving safely."
Based on what data do you claim that?
I'm pretty sure humans are by design not good at multitasking. I would guess - based on my admittedly weak knowledge of psychology - that learning to do two cognitively difficult things at the same time is about as hard as learning to grow a second head. It's just not something humans can do. Even Schumacher stops talking when he gets into a difficult situation.
I could be wrong, though, but I've never seen any data or anything at all that would somehow imply that you might be right.
So, how viable is dog cloning? Is it easy to clone dogs? The Wikipedia article mentions a success rate of one in 123. Is that one in 123 embryos? Is that considered to be a good or a bad result? Also, do the cloned animals have a normal life expectancy? I seem to remember there were some problems with cloned animals dying quicker than "normal" animals.
Really curious about this, haven't heard much about it since Dolly.
You're essentially arguing that somebody who copies a work of art then co-owns the copyright to that work of art. The fact that it takes work and skill to take a good photograph of a painting does not mean that the photograph of that painting then becomes its own piece of art. A photograph of a piece of art may be a good copy, but it's still just a copy of the original piece.
Now, if the composition of the photograph somehow happens to include a work of art, that is a different matter of course. But these are not photographs which just happen to include paintings; they are photographs of paintings.
Yes, there are a lot of interesting spatial user interfaces. Personally, I think 3D interfaces are not too great because they reduce three spatial dimensions into two screen dimensions, and most people not used to videogames get confused by that. But there are cool 2D spatial interfaces, like Microsoft's Canvas for OneNote.
We use hierarchies to explain these things, but really, they're not there in the real world. It's just a bunch of things floating through space; they are not really contained within each other until we start creating hierarchies to explain them.
They're quite capable of understanding, they just can't be bothered. That's reasonable given that it's really not important to them to perform their function. I guess that's what sets us geeks apart - we care about how EVERYTHING works, within (or sometimes not) reason.
Yeah, that may be the main difference between us and normal people.
I think I get your point about hierarchies being a human cognitive construct, but a branch is a _part_ of a tree...?
Yes, but I would say it's a different kind of "part of."
A subdirectory is contained within its parent directory. A branch is not contained within its tree in the same way. You can't collapse a real-world tree, thus getting rid of all the branches; a real-world tree is not a hierarchical list of tree parts. A real-world tree is always a full tree, and every part of the tree has a clearly defined spatial position. For example, you can never get confused by where a tree's branch should be, because it's always obvious where it is; it never disappears into a taxonomy of tree parts. We can make up such a taxonomy and look at the real-world tree as a hierarchical structure, but only programmers and biologists do that :-)
Thus, people can't apply their real-world knowledge of trees to virtual tree structures; even though we use the same words, they are vastly different things, and virtual tree structures require skills humans don't naturally acquire by studying real-world trees.
Yes, that is true. But I would argue that the fact that this is shown as a hierarchy in iTunes is incidental. What you're really doing is applying more and more filters to your list. "I only want to see audiobooks... Okay, now I only want to see audiobooks written by Connelly... Okay, now I only want to see Audiobooks written by Connelly called "Black Echo".
It's not obvious to the user that there is a hierarchy, and he doesn't have to worry about the hierarchy, and the hierarchy shown by iTunes is ephemeral. If the user started out with "I want to see everything written by Connelly", the hierarchy would look differently; as you say, it depends on context. That is different from the rigid type of hierarchy you find in a file system.
So I will agree that users are capable of getting hierarchies used to filter down on metadata. I was overreaching when I said that users don't get hierarchies; in some cases, hierarchies are useful and easily understood by users.
I believe operating systems should default to a temporal view instead of the current hierarchical view. Instead of putting files into a specific place inside a hierarchy, users should just create and save the file, and the operating system would display that view attached to the date it twas used, perhaps in a calendar view. In my experience, most people simply throw files into a single directory and sort by date anyway.
All those other contexts - users, versions, types, "heat", tags - could be shown as filters, similar to what iTunes does.
Don't cross the swords! It would lead to all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.
I'm pretty sure Sony intends to release a huge number of all PSP games as downloadable games with the release of the PSP Go. Whether they will appear on the PS3 as well as the PSP remains to be seen.
"Wow, are you a fucking idiot."
That's hilarious. In the future, if you start a post like that, you should try to make sure to continue by not making yourself look like the fucking idiot.
"It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe, after centuries and centuries of contrary evidence, that more government will make their lives better."
I'm glad I live in a country with public health care. It gives people the security to start their own companies without fear of eternal debt should they should get sick while not employed. I'm glad I live in a country with public roads. They cost me little and are well maintained. I'm glad I live in a country with a well-paid and well-trained police force who will help me if my shit gets stolen, and well-trained firefighters who will help me for free if my asshole neighbours accidentally set my house on fire. I'm glad I live in a country with working public transport. I pay a few hundred bucks a year and can get anywhere in my country in little time, without paying any additional fee.
The government can make people's lives better. The fact that there are sanctimonious assholes who are happy to force their own moral views on others does not change that. The fact that there are misguided idiots who think it's a good idea to censor what others can say or see does not change that.
It's important and good to fight censorship and repression and all that other shit that is currently happening. But to claim that nothing any government can do can make people's lives better is not only extremist, it's insane, and it's contradicting reality.
A branch in real life is not part of a hierarchy. It's just a piece of wood attached to a tree; it's not contained in the tree in any way.
And no, explaining doesn't fix this problem. People know how hierarchies work; they just don't get them. They are not sure how to properly categorize things, and if they decide on a given hierarchy, later, they won't remember where they decided to put things because there's no naturally correct way of categorizing files. There's no obvious taxonomy; the problem becomes even worse when people have to use hierarchies created by other people.
The only time I've seen "normal" people successfully use hierarchies is when they created directories for years; every year got a new directory. But that's something that shouldn't require hierarchies; the OS should allow users to have temporal views on their data automatically.
As for alternatives, tagging is easier to understand since it gets rid of the whole hierarchy aspect, and since people can just add as many tags as they want to.
To most people, hierarchies are confusing. They work for programmers and technical people (the people who visit /. obviously understand hierarchies, otherwise they would be confused by /.'s comment system), but most people don't get hierarchies. My parents store all of their files into a single folder. Most people do that. Humans look at their environment in terms of spatial and temporal aspects. Humans understand where things are in space, and when things are in time. I've written a letter yesterday. I've put the printout next to the phone. Those are things people get.
But they don't get hierarchies, because hierarchies don't exist in nature.
There's no need to be catty or insulting about this. You're not like everybody else, and the fact that other people have different strengths doesn't make them idiots.
Fairey may be a hack, but I don't think his personality or talent have anything to do with this particular case.
Clearly, photographs can have creative value. In this particular case, though, I don't think so. It's a picture of Obama's head. It's not unique, there are probably dozens or hundreds that look very similar. Furthermore, Fairey's work bears little resemblance to the original image; for a long time, it was unclear which image the original source was since there are so many similar photographs and Fairey's final result is not particular similar to the original photograph.
Your argument that Fairey would not have needed the original image if the original image had little or no creative value does not hold water. A sheet of paper doesn't hold creative value, yet you still need it if you want to create a drawing. Similarly, Fairey used the picture as a tool to create his work; he could have chosen any of the dozens of the pictures and achieved a similar result, just like you can choose any piece of paper and create a similar drawing on it. The fact that he chose this particular picture does not prove that it was special, just like the fact that you pick a certain piece of paper does not make that particular piece special.
Also, if the picture was not taken with a digital camera, the person who developed the picture had a huge influence on how it looks. If it's digital, the programmer who wrote the algorithms used by the camera and by the camera software on the computer has altered colors and contrast white balance; he must be compensated as well. Since the photographer most likely used Windows or a Mac, either Microsoft or Apple had some influence on the image since they wrote the operating system's graphic subsystem, which renders pixels on the screen and influences how the picture looks. They must be compensated as well. Fairey probably printed the picture before working on it. The algorithms used to control the printer influence how the picture looks, so the programmers who wrote them also deserve compensation, as does the printer manufacturer. The tools used to cut up the picture had a small influence on how the end result looks, so they must receive money, too. And so on.