On average, simplicity is not any cultural standard. What is standard though, is the high tolerance to complexity. Japanese is inherently a complex language, and with everyone being fairly well educated, we don't need things to be dumbed down to get a message. If there are 26 buttons, we will read the labels, and click on the right one.
And yes, it would be better if all sites were sublime and beautiful, but I would say the same about US sites.
There are those who practice simplicity, and our Japanese masters are probably some of the best in the world. Gardens, caligraphy, and the refined aesthetic principles that are eye opening to foreign practitioners. But even then, if you cannot understand reasons behind things, sophistication will only read as complex.
The clutter on the streets and online has a lot to do with commercialism. How do you make your tiny shop stand out? Well, a minimalist sign won't do it. Of course, in the end, everyone has a huge animated neon sign, and they all look the same, but like I said, it is commercialism. Go to a mall or a department store, and you will see less clutter. But again, how is that different from the US? There is plenty of clutter in the cities where stores fight for visibility. New York anyone?
So all of you who just argued for what Japanese is and what American is, you might want to give this blogger a tweet and call him out for making you think hard about the offensive stereotypes you just helped uphold.
Seriously people, if these sites look complex, its because you can't read Kanji.
If the internet remembered everything to begin with, the invention of deletion would be the revolution. What use does remembering have if you can't distinguish what is important?
Nature is fully capable of remembering, yet it has built us to forget.
Mother nature knows best. Let go of what doesn't matter. Forgive and forget. We need to trust in the process (or whatever) that created us. Wanting to retain everything is simply being greedy, and no good will come of it.
We cannot prove what cannot be theoretically disproved (falsified). So we cannot prove "no terrorist attacks because of Top Secret work" just because "no attacks occurred", for there is no evidence to challenge. If there were a direct link, there would be, and we would be able to.
This is an extremely powerful fake fact generating technique that politicians are all too well aware of, and what conspiracies are made of. No one can disprove UFOs, hence they exist. No, they don't exist because there is no proof. Unfalsifiable evidence is not proof, but conspiracy.
With our brilliant free market capitalism in place, a competitor should be here to the rescue to innovate and beat the crap out of these guys who don't take care of their customers. For we have a choice, and that makes our way of life the envy of everyone.
Any minute now. Any minute!!!
I am also waiting for a better cable company, better internet service, a better bank, and oh, a better PC...
Consumer report couldn't have illustrated it simpler. You put your finger *here* and the signal strength drops by 15 to 20% or whatever the number was.
There really isn't much mystery. If the signal is strong, then 20% isn't going to change anything. But people generally move around in the same areas, so if your activites are concentrated in a dodgy signal area, that means your calls could go from a 25% drop rate to completely unusable.
Right. Except in the media, and especially politics, every side claims different facts, and it is far from scientific. In fact, they abuse science to support their version of the facts. Statistics especially, since they can always claim science when they bring out statistics.
What is most unfortunate, it that with politics it is always *only* about words. No one ever has to prove anything. Hence it is more or less complete fantasy, occasionally based on a true story.
Some of us who know or who can determine which of the facts are actually FACT do have an edge in assessing which words are accurate. But with all votes counting equally, it is going to be a very long time before our minds catch up with the game. IF EVER. It will definitely be quicker to change the game.
There is nothing in words that prove truth. Truth is always in the context, and without being able to cross reference what is claimed to be true with the definitive reference which is reality, then there really is no way for anyone to tell if something is true or not for sure. Hence, we either guess (however educated), go with our gut (however experienced), or try to read between the lines (however insightful). The result though is simple. Basically if they manage to make sense, and entertain us in the process, they usually win.
If they dont release a patch, their stock will be useful only as wallpaper by the weekend.
Except, that is what many savvy investors are counting on, because the fall in their stock price is really a reaction of fear.
Savvy investors never trade on emotion, and they bank on the emotion of others by reading the emotions that drive the market. This still works because the majority of those who trade stocks are still very emotional.
Apple basically shot themselves in the foot, and their wounds are bound to heal. That is far better than if someone else (like MS) shot them and they got hurt, as that would be a sign of vulnurability to competition.
The programmers here should know. If there is a bug, it won't show itself one in a million times!!! There is nothing random about code, and I am assuming code behind a car can't be all that complicated, at least with respect to the crucial components.
It's not like cars are being hacked. And if they were, then the cause is the hackers anyway, not the code (the code may have an exploitable weakness, but the exploitation is done by people).
Clearly, it's about how you use it. I don't know about kids, but I do all my learning online. Anything I want to know is at my fingertips.
Every modern home has a computer. Those households that didn't have them clearly have parents who don't know how to instruct or guide their child's use of computers. Of course they won't study on it. They're probably surfing p0rn all day. No, seriously.
Students will cope with bad teachers. But the best lessons are learned from the good ones.
Do children benefit from bad parents? No. They will cope, but they suffer their entire lives.
The real solution is have good teachers teach about bad teachers.
Now, with all that being said, this person's words are being put way out of context. She's just looking on the bright side, if you ask me, given bad teachers will never go away.
I don't doubt that there is life elsewhere, there just has to be, right.
I also don't doubt that space travel is possible, though this may well be.
What I am beginning to doubt is if intelligent life really survives long enough. Seriously, the more intelligent we get, the more damage we do, and it seems that extinction is an inevitable consequence of any combination of freedom and destructive power, aka technology, over any long period of time.
One of these days someone will trip on a cord or spill their coffee, and we are all going to die!!!
And I am sure others have reached similar conclusions also, but Paul Adams is definitely not the first to mention the problems of having one "public". Danah goes further and challenges the common notion of privacy more generically than just focusing on social network systems.
Clearly facebook is a book of faces, not a book of friends. Friends just means you are connected to someone really, and that's it. That usually just means you came in contact with them.
Google will obviously have an invested interest in anything online, and the slides are very good. Two thumbs up!
Will it matter though? Seriously, 90% of the reason why facebook and dreaded myspace became so huge are because of referrals and because of their simplicity. Even with facebook a huge part of the user base are clueless about most of the features as demonstrated every time they introduce new ones and it leads to privacy catastrophy.
The moment you start geeking out you are making it harder for people to adopt, and although the author acknowledges this and avoids geeking out on technical details, clearly he has geeked out on the social ones.
Re:It is the beginning. Not the end.
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
Does anyone of our young generation really watch Faux news let alone cable news?
The question isn't whether you still want to read your newspaper. The question is would you want someone filtering the words of your grandmother?
And really, once the world model of tweets and social news grows to critical mass, most of us will be very good at organizing and consuming tons of small pieces of information.
IMO.
It is the beginning. Not the end.
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 1
Companies will always find ways to make money, because they are created when people come up with strategies to do so. And that is a main goal for many. Hence, there will always be growth in that direction, and it will always grow towards its maximum. Is it at its maximum? Nowhere close. And it is nowhere close even for Apple's closed garden, or for Facebook's closed social network.
HOWEVER.
Twitter and Facebook are leading the way to a new model of news and media all together. Anyone can follow anyone instantly. The viewer is connected directly to the publisher, and there are no middlemen. Distribution is a dead concept. Instant direct access by anyone to anything. And we can follow *exactly* what we want with no Ads. Not only is it free, it is superfree (no revenue model whatsoever). As long as we want to be heard, no strings will ever be attached. Furthermore, this unfiltered content directly from the source is the best kind of content for most. Goodbye big media.
Although the original article is interesting and informative, it misses one key point in its conclusion, and that is the inevitable arrival of the peer-to-peer social network platforms. GeoCities was great, but it never made the web better, and where is it now? The web is peer-to-peer and that is what makes it great. Apache never owned any of our content, and we the people will own the future social web as well. We already feel it would be better that way, and we're all just waiting for a company to make that value proposition.
Music teaches focus. Art cannot be done without fully applying yourself. Sports teaches teamwork and pragmatic execution. Yet we cut all that and emphasize stuff in text books, as if they were bibles. No wonder creativity is stuck in a pot hole.
An iPad is a big iPod Touch. It's a toy. Fun for the whole family, and even geeks love them... but it is still a toy.
A Netbook is another name for a cheap laptop. You can do real work on a netbook, and by work I mean Microsoft Office and Quickbooks work.
So if people were buying netbooks just for fun, then maybe those who think they could have more fun with an iPad are opting for those instead, but it seems like the iPad is selling to a whole new audience that wouldn't have bought a Netbook to begin with like...
Apple users who wanted a Netbook (Apple only has expensive laptops)
Nikkei has had many many failed internet ventures, and this is just another one of their bad ideas that passed through their over-aged internet-illiterate bureaucracy.
I suspect this is more about politics within the market and about them preparing to strong arm those they think can be strong armed... It isn't like they're going to put up a notice, and sue all the referrers.
In the old days, a ton of Japanese web sites would have "link free" or "links not permitted" notices on their sites. For some reason, many felt the web was linked with permission, and that they had a say. As if anyone could do anything about outside links, when I would tell them the internet was all about free linking, and that you wouldn't put pages up that you didn't want linked in the first place, people would seem to get the idea...
This Nikkei thing is not about individuals linking to news articles. There site is practically unlinkable because they keep deleting stuff anyway.
You don't have to be a liar to be a great politician, but a great liar will make a great politician, and the ability to lie and act would give any politician a great advantage over others who can't.
Lying only works on people. You cannot build a house on false measurements. The measurements have to be honest. But you can build a church on lies. You can gather people and make them work for you under false premises. Imagine the advantage you would have if your words were not restricted to what is true?
A stack of lies will only crumble if challenged, or rather, until challenged. So once in power, using your power to prevent people from challenging your lies becomes half the battle of staying in power. History illustrates this time and time again.
Ultimately though, there is nothing stronger than structure built on truth, and I would argue that the best leaders got where they were with the truths they told, and that their lies were their weakness.
Slashdot Mirror
On average, simplicity is not any cultural standard. What is standard though, is the high tolerance to complexity. Japanese is inherently a complex language, and with everyone being fairly well educated, we don't need things to be dumbed down to get a message. If there are 26 buttons, we will read the labels, and click on the right one.
And yes, it would be better if all sites were sublime and beautiful, but I would say the same about US sites.
There are those who practice simplicity, and our Japanese masters are probably some of the best in the world. Gardens, caligraphy, and the refined aesthetic principles that are eye opening to foreign practitioners. But even then, if you cannot understand reasons behind things, sophistication will only read as complex.
The clutter on the streets and online has a lot to do with commercialism. How do you make your tiny shop stand out? Well, a minimalist sign won't do it. Of course, in the end, everyone has a huge animated neon sign, and they all look the same, but like I said, it is commercialism. Go to a mall or a department store, and you will see less clutter. But again, how is that different from the US? There is plenty of clutter in the cities where stores fight for visibility. New York anyone?
Wow. I should have caught this post sooner. Major slashdot emergency.
Here is Japan Airlines:
http://www.jal.co.jp/
So here is American Airlines:
http://www.aa.com/
Jp Gov site:
http://www.stat.go.jp/
US Gov site:
http://www.uspto.gov/
Ugly Jp Consulting site:
http://www.e-netten.ne.jp/
Horrible US Consulting site:
http://www.bryantwebconsulting.com/
Now for some better pages:
http://www.au.kddi.com/
http://www.sony.co.jp/
http://www.vaio.sony.co.jp/
http://bape.com/ (you cannot see the JP site from the US)
http://www.capcom.co.jp/sf4/
This got world attention:
http://www.uniqlo.com/calendar/
And a typical web site gallery site will quickly help you find more:
http://www.webdesignclip.com/
So all of you who just argued for what Japanese is and what American is, you might want to give this blogger a tweet and call him out for making you think hard about the offensive stereotypes you just helped uphold.
Seriously people, if these sites look complex, its because you can't read Kanji.
If the internet remembered everything to begin with, the invention of deletion would be the revolution.
What use does remembering have if you can't distinguish what is important?
Nature is fully capable of remembering, yet it has built us to forget.
Mother nature knows best. Let go of what doesn't matter. Forgive and forget. We need to trust in the process (or whatever) that created us. Wanting to retain everything is simply being greedy, and no good will come of it.
We cannot prove what cannot be theoretically disproved (falsified). So we cannot prove "no terrorist attacks because of Top Secret work" just because "no attacks occurred", for there is no evidence to challenge. If there were a direct link, there would be, and we would be able to.
This is an extremely powerful fake fact generating technique that politicians are all too well aware of, and what conspiracies are made of. No one can disprove UFOs, hence they exist. No, they don't exist because there is no proof. Unfalsifiable evidence is not proof, but conspiracy.
With our brilliant free market capitalism in place, a competitor should be here to the rescue to innovate and beat the crap out of these guys who don't take care of their customers. For we have a choice, and that makes our way of life the envy of everyone.
Any minute now. Any minute!!!
I am also waiting for a better cable company, better internet service, a better bank, and oh, a better PC...
Any minute now!!!
Consumer report couldn't have illustrated it simpler. You put your finger *here* and the signal strength drops by 15 to 20% or whatever the number was.
There really isn't much mystery. If the signal is strong, then 20% isn't going to change anything. But people generally move around in the same areas, so if your activites are concentrated in a dodgy signal area, that means your calls could go from a 25% drop rate to completely unusable.
Right. Except in the media, and especially politics, every side claims different facts, and it is far from scientific. In fact, they abuse science to support their version of the facts. Statistics especially, since they can always claim science when they bring out statistics.
What is most unfortunate, it that with politics it is always *only* about words. No one ever has to prove anything. Hence it is more or less complete fantasy, occasionally based on a true story.
Some of us who know or who can determine which of the facts are actually FACT do have an edge in assessing which words are accurate. But with all votes counting equally, it is going to be a very long time before our minds catch up with the game. IF EVER. It will definitely be quicker to change the game.
The headline is far more interesting than the story...
This is exactly why people stop buying papers.
(or reading slashdot?)
There is nothing in words that prove truth. Truth is always in the context, and without being able to cross reference what is claimed to be true with the definitive reference which is reality, then there really is no way for anyone to tell if something is true or not for sure. Hence, we either guess (however educated), go with our gut (however experienced), or try to read between the lines (however insightful). The result though is simple. Basically if they manage to make sense, and entertain us in the process, they usually win.
Hence, I say the best story wins.
If they dont release a patch, their stock will be useful only as wallpaper by the weekend.
Except, that is what many savvy investors are counting on, because the fall in their stock price is really a reaction of fear.
Savvy investors never trade on emotion, and they bank on the emotion of others by reading the emotions that drive the market. This still works because the majority of those who trade stocks are still very emotional.
Apple basically shot themselves in the foot, and their wounds are bound to heal. That is far better than if someone else (like MS) shot them and they got hurt, as that would be a sign of vulnurability to competition.
The programmers here should know. If there is a bug, it won't show itself one in a million times!!! There is nothing random about code, and I am assuming code behind a car can't be all that complicated, at least with respect to the crucial components.
It's not like cars are being hacked. And if they were, then the cause is the hackers anyway, not the code (the code may have an exploitable weakness, but the exploitation is done by people).
Computers will teach how irrelevant everything they teach at school is.
Computers don't hinder education, people do.
Clearly, it's about how you use it. I don't know about kids, but I do all my learning online. Anything I want to know is at my fingertips.
Every modern home has a computer. Those households that didn't have them clearly have parents who don't know how to instruct or guide their child's use of computers. Of course they won't study on it. They're probably surfing p0rn all day. No, seriously.
Way to stand up to the evil empire! Yes, I believe Apple has surpassed Microsoft in the evil empire index (market cap).
Now, when will consumer report cover HTML5 vs FLASH!
Students will cope with bad teachers. But the best lessons are learned from the good ones.
Do children benefit from bad parents? No. They will cope, but they suffer their entire lives.
The real solution is have good teachers teach about bad teachers.
Now, with all that being said, this person's words are being put way out of context. She's just looking on the bright side, if you ask me, given bad teachers will never go away.
I don't doubt that there is life elsewhere, there just has to be, right.
I also don't doubt that space travel is possible, though this may well be.
What I am beginning to doubt is if intelligent life really survives long enough. Seriously, the more intelligent we get, the more damage we do, and it seems that extinction is an inevitable consequence of any combination of freedom and destructive power, aka technology, over any long period of time.
One of these days someone will trip on a cord or spill their coffee, and we are all going to die!!!
Danah Boyd had a lot of very similar things to say at www2010, and it is worth mentioning:
http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/futureweb2010/danah_boyd_www_keynote.xhtml
And I am sure others have reached similar conclusions also, but Paul Adams is definitely not the first to mention the problems of having one "public". Danah goes further and challenges the common notion of privacy more generically than just focusing on social network systems.
Clearly facebook is a book of faces, not a book of friends. Friends just means you are connected to someone really, and that's it. That usually just means you came in contact with them.
Google will obviously have an invested interest in anything online, and the slides are very good. Two thumbs up!
Will it matter though? Seriously, 90% of the reason why facebook and dreaded myspace became so huge are because of referrals and because of their simplicity. Even with facebook a huge part of the user base are clueless about most of the features as demonstrated every time they introduce new ones and it leads to privacy catastrophy.
The moment you start geeking out you are making it harder for people to adopt, and although the author acknowledges this and avoids geeking out on technical details, clearly he has geeked out on the social ones.
Does anyone of our young generation really watch Faux news let alone cable news?
The question isn't whether you still want to read your newspaper. The question is would you want someone filtering the words of your grandmother?
And really, once the world model of tweets and social news grows to critical mass, most of us will be very good at organizing and consuming tons of small pieces of information.
IMO.
Companies will always find ways to make money, because they are created when people come up with strategies to do so. And that is a main goal for many. Hence, there will always be growth in that direction, and it will always grow towards its maximum. Is it at its maximum? Nowhere close. And it is nowhere close even for Apple's closed garden, or for Facebook's closed social network.
HOWEVER.
Twitter and Facebook are leading the way to a new model of news and media all together. Anyone can follow anyone instantly. The viewer is connected directly to the publisher, and there are no middlemen. Distribution is a dead concept. Instant direct access by anyone to anything. And we can follow *exactly* what we want with no Ads. Not only is it free, it is superfree (no revenue model whatsoever). As long as we want to be heard, no strings will ever be attached. Furthermore, this unfiltered content directly from the source is the best kind of content for most. Goodbye big media.
Although the original article is interesting and informative, it misses one key point in its conclusion, and that is the inevitable arrival of the peer-to-peer social network platforms. GeoCities was great, but it never made the web better, and where is it now? The web is peer-to-peer and that is what makes it great. Apache never owned any of our content, and we the people will own the future social web as well. We already feel it would be better that way, and we're all just waiting for a company to make that value proposition.
Music teaches focus. Art cannot be done without fully applying yourself. Sports teaches teamwork and pragmatic execution. Yet we cut all that and emphasize stuff in text books, as if they were bibles. No wonder creativity is stuck in a pot hole.
Anyone with any slight interest in the topic must see:
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&playnext_from=QL&playnext=1
An iPad is a big iPod Touch. It's a toy. Fun for the whole family, and even geeks love them... but it is still a toy.
A Netbook is another name for a cheap laptop. You can do real work on a netbook, and by work I mean Microsoft Office and Quickbooks work.
So if people were buying netbooks just for fun, then maybe those who think they could have more fun with an iPad are opting for those instead, but it seems like the iPad is selling to a whole new audience that wouldn't have bought a Netbook to begin with like...
Apple users who wanted a Netbook (Apple only has expensive laptops)
Nikkei has had many many failed internet ventures, and this is just another one of their bad ideas that passed through their over-aged internet-illiterate bureaucracy.
I suspect this is more about politics within the market and about them preparing to strong arm those they think can be strong armed... It isn't like they're going to put up a notice, and sue all the referrers.
In the old days, a ton of Japanese web sites would have "link free" or "links not permitted" notices on their sites. For some reason, many felt the web was linked with permission, and that they had a say. As if anyone could do anything about outside links, when I would tell them the internet was all about free linking, and that you wouldn't put pages up that you didn't want linked in the first place, people would seem to get the idea...
This Nikkei thing is not about individuals linking to news articles. There site is practically unlinkable because they keep deleting stuff anyway.
You don't have to be a liar to be a great politician, but a great liar will make a great politician, and the ability to lie and act would give any politician a great advantage over others who can't.
Lying only works on people. You cannot build a house on false measurements. The measurements have to be honest. But you can build a church on lies. You can gather people and make them work for you under false premises. Imagine the advantage you would have if your words were not restricted to what is true?
A stack of lies will only crumble if challenged, or rather, until challenged. So once in power, using your power to prevent people from challenging your lies becomes half the battle of staying in power. History illustrates this time and time again.
Ultimately though, there is nothing stronger than structure built on truth, and I would argue that the best leaders got where they were with the truths they told, and that their lies were their weakness.
768k DSL is fast enough for most people
Facebook, CNN, and webmail, sure. Xbox Live, Netflix, NBA, Youtube, Hulu... nope.
Also, you have to consider how fast 768K as advertised really is. That's nowhere near 768K.