Hm, that must vary from one area to another. In Los Angeles, T-Mobile piggybacks on Cingular's (suckass) network, so they wouldn't have this kind of control over the infrastructure.
Actually, the systems to which I was comparing have greyscale displays. Archos does offer devices with color displays, but they appear to run to $750, not $350, and be much larger still.
Hah. The "they don't corrupt data" was a nice little jibe; you didn't actually make the incorrect accusation that ipods corrupt data, you just implied it. Very cute.
Traditionally the Archos devices have been perfectly fine as long as you don't mind that they're huge. But actually, a quick glance at the site at the moment does not in fact show any products that are either larger higher capacity than ipods or lower price, much less both. The players they're offering appear to top out at 20G for $350, versus a 20G ipod for $300. And given that they're based around the same 1.8" drives that ipods are, I'd be very surprised if there's any difference in speed.
So mostly this looks like a low-end ipod, 31% bulkier, with a quarter the cache, and $50 more expensive. In what way is this "better"?
If there is a fundamental flaw in the hash algorithm itself, simply using it more often will probably not solve the problem.
It absolutely is incredibly hard to make an encryption algorithm more secure. Just "doing some math with the hashes" is the type of bit-twiddling at which cryptologists both wince and sneer. "Then I'll multiply the second one by three, then add them together! Then modulo it 17! Then oohoohooh, square root the whole thing and drop the first digit! No one will _ever_ figure this out!" Crap like this does not add any new cryptographic strength, just a dependency on a secret algorithm. And any method which relies on a secret algorithm is hopelessly flawed.
There is still considerable debate in the cryptographic community about whether 3des is actually any stronger than des. Many people feel that if an attack is found to be effective against the des algorithm, the extra layers of stirring the bits around will not make the plaintext any more secure.
I'm afraid that Schneier covered this succinctly: "Anyone who creates his or her own cryptographic primitive is either a genius or a fool. Given the genius/fool ratio for our species, the odds aren't very good."
The only interesting part of the book was a study of the interactions between an educated, literate, erudite, refined, fastidious Arab diplomat/poet and a comparatively brutal, impoverished, rudimentary Norse society.
The notion that anyone would believe that a uniquely complex and wise Arab character should be played by Antonio Banderas is simply dumbfounding.
I wouldn't call it anywhere near the worst, but it was pretty bad. I have extremely mixed feelings about Heinlein, but taking one of his worse books and stripping it of the few interesting bits is not a way to make a good movie.
There were two interesting parts to the book: an exploration of how a much more militaristic society would look, and the technology and methods used by that society. The movie discarded them both:
There was a scene in the boot camp in which one of the trainees asks why they have any need to train humans to use simple weapons when they have the technology to effortlessly obliterate people at a distance. In the book, this prompts the instructor to explain that the goal of war is almost never to actually kill all your opponents, but rather to convince them behave differently, ideally in the least destructive way possible. And that tactics of varying harshness and efficiency are sometimes needed for that convincing. In the movie, this prompts the instructor to engage in pointless brutality and an inane quip.
In the book, the armored infantry are a very flexible and personal weapon, and are used only in the above-mentioned situations in which complete extermination is not wanted. Whereas in the movie, our spacefaring race appeared to have no more effective tools for planetary-scale warfare than sending fifty thousand kids with machine guns.
We already have a language which was designed to scale very far up or down, and to adapt itself to disparate display environments: HTML.
And if people would just use it as intended, rather than trying to smother it in ecmascript, flash, et al, we wouldn't need to come up with a whole new protocol every time a new display gadget becomes popular.
Uh, I think that just means that there are drivers and config software for the MegaRAID line of controllers.
Entirely separate from the software raid support, which sanely only does 0 and 1. 5 is awfully slow even with dedicated hardware, and you really don't want to even think about it in software.
The biggest consumer of power is most laptops is memory. Display, disk, and cpu can sometimes be contenders, but all of those can have their use moderated in such a way as to preserve battery life. Whereas I'm not aware of any system with a facility for dynamically turning on and off parts of the ram.
So, as contrary as this is to general geek wisdom, get systems with as little ram as will allow you to do the necessary work without swapping.
I'm an enthusiastic mac user. I read most of the stories in the apple.slashdot.org section.
I hate people who put up posts saying, "This isn't news! I'm a nerd and this doesn't matter to me! I want a refund!"
I usually find stories about updates to, say, the OS and major applications to be useful. It provides a forum for people to compare notes about the new version.
And yet, despite all this... Did this really merit an article? I'd think that if there's anyone in the world who'd be interested in this it'd be me, and I'm just not. I really don't think that every update, however minor, to every application, however minor, needs to have a piece here.
From the meager data available, it sounds as if the settlement specifies certain popularities of artists, but not particular CDs. So the libraries are getting the dud albums of artists whose other works have sold well.
While I'm not really disputing that governments put their troops in danger in many ways, I think you may be misinterpreting the article a bit.
The story is not asserting that eating pissy chicken once will cause health problems over the long term. It's saying that eating pissy chicken over the long term will cause health problems. Resorting to it a few times when it's the only alternative to starvation will not have any long term consequences.
Most of the protocols involved are open, but there are a few very critical ones which aren't. Most notably FairPlay and daap. (There are some efforts to reverse-engineer or work around both of these, but that's substantially different from a genuinely open protocol.)
Given the reference to smb, it's also possible that the grandparent was talking about afp, but that's getting pretty far afield from the article topic.
But having every page designer make their own arbitrary choice that gets forced on all of us is always wrong.
Says who? You? Is it not better that page designers get better control over how the finished product looks?
Um. Says everyone from Sir Tim Berners-Lee on down? Really, how many times do I and everyone else need to repeat this? One of the original, paramount design goals of the Web, and part of the reason that it has been successful and we use it today, is the idea that content is presented with only loose suggestions of formatting, and that end display systems interpret that as they see fit.
Everyone could've just continued ftping around Wordperfect files, and documents would be guaranteed to look the same on all systems. Turns out that there's a reason that people chose to stop doing that, much as you'd like to send us back there.
And if this flash app had you scrolling down the page you'd be the first to complain. Having to scroll down a page to see information that could easily be displayed without having to scroll is a problem.
How nice of you to decide on my own opinions for me. My point is that this Flash jobbie doesn't easily display information all at once. I can't view the room types at once, and I can't even view all of the text description of a single type at once, despite having metric tons of window available in which that information could be easily presented.
So it's not a choice between displaying the information all at once and displaying parts of it exclusively; it's a choice between displaying it exclusively using non-standard widgets and rollovers, or displaying it exclusively using system-standard mechanisms where necessary, and using whatever the available window size is to display exactly as much of it as is possible.
As for looking different from system-standard scrollbars, what's the problem with that? If they're consistent with the look of the application then it's a good thing, especially if it's a slick looking app.
This statement seems to suggest that you've never read anything about any usability research ever. Consistency and predictability are some of the most important attributes that any computer system can have.
As to the last part of this statement, I'm starting to wonder whether you're actually opposed to Flash yourself, and just doing an especially viscious job of parodying Flash advocates. The idea that anyone would sincerely asserting that being usable is less important than being "slick looking" is so absurd that I'm having a hard time believing that you're not engaging in satire.
...because you have a prejudiced dislike for this technology and a personal problem with the type of people who develop it.
For a person who's never met me, you seem to have an amazing grasp of my prejudices and personal problems. Can you remind me how I feel about broccoli? You seem to feel that you're a more authoritative source of my opinions than I am.
The designer has decided that you don't need to select text. And he's right...
How can the designer possibly be omniscient about what I "need" to do? How about when something breaks and I want to try and send mail to tech support describing the point at which things failed? How about when I see a word used with which I'm not familiar and I want to look it up? How about when I want to add to my collection of the most profoundly- and poignantly-phrased web pages? How about when I want to have a conversation with the developer complimenting him on his elegant design?
...an example of how to piss off open-source fundamentalists by showing that proprietary standards are sometimes better than any open-source alternative...
Fair enough, that's a good point. As long as the site functions well both with and without scripting, I can't take offense. If it provides scripticacious features to someone else who might want them without interfering with my ability to avoid them, that's certainly fine by me.
Has it occurred to you to wonder why we turn off javascript? It's not because we dislike javascript in particular, it's because we don't want people like you doing shit like that on our systems. And we don't like it any more when you do it with Flash.
The fact that ugliness is subjective is why every user should have full control over the presentation on his own system. I've heard some people say that they prefer un-antialiased text. Well, bully for them, those people should be able to choose that on their end, and have all their text rendered that way. And I'll continue looking at the antialiased text which prefer, and neither of us needs to be "right". But having every page designer make their own arbitrary choice that gets forced on all of us is always wrong.
Functionality could be greatly improved if the interface simply used more space (though of course in a manner which doesn't break horribly when viewed in a very low-resolution environment). Having to scroll through a page a bit isn't a problem. In-page "scrollbars" which aren't necessary and don't look or behave like system-standard scrollbars are.
The "form" is similarly awful: it doesn't look at all like a normal text entry field, so one can only discover its behaviour by clicking randomly. And once you've done that, the field labels disappear when you try using them, forcing you to just remember what each is. If you become distracted by something else mid-form, or wish to interleave this with other activities, too bad for you.
Similarly, the fact that the room-class descriptions and pictures are exclusive means that in order to compare them, I need to toggle back and forth between them, use the teeny little faux-scrollbar to scroll the teeny viewport across the teeny text, remember several attributes and repeat it all trying to see where they differ. Whereas a single page describing all of the classes of rooms would allow me to directly compare them visually and easily assess their differences.
So this Flash which you point out as being "designed properly" is rife with needless usability gaffes, and doesn't even do the things which you specifically claimed that properly designed Flash does, such as allowing text selection. This example seems to serve the argument against Flash much better than the argument for it.
For this discussion, I'm willing to stipulate that those criteria can't be met in pure html.
But... so? Why would anyone possibly consider it worthwhile to endure all the misery of ugliness and non-functionality of this site just to save a page reload?
Even if you do consider bytes transferred to be the only important measure of a site, this still loses. This flash jobbie appears to be 106K, presumably compressed internally. If I reloaded a 30K form thirty times over gzipped http, I'd still come out ahead.
And certainly you can't tell me that speed is the goal. This is slow enough to actualy display a progress bar even on a dual 1.8GHz g5 attached to a 6Mbit line.
Flash defeats the most fundamental design goals of the Web: flexibility, implementation-independence, and content over presentation.
Only when it's abused by bad designers. The exact same argument could be applied to a lot of sites out there done in DHTML.
Oh? So where's the tool I use to adjust the font colors and sizes used to display the Flash of non-bad designers?
...designed properly like the Broadmoor Hotel...
Uh... that's a joke, right? This site is an abomination:
- My normal gui browsing windows are around 1800x1100. HTML pages will flow and adapt to this (or whatever other) size; this site sits huddled in the corner, wasting most of my display on its stunning lack of content.
- The thing that wants to be a menu bar is inconsistent even within its minute self. Some of the "menus" turn into two columns, even though they've only used about 4% of the height of my window. Others are one column, and others don't have any menu drop down at all, but just want the header clicked on.
- The annoying pop-up-ish block of text in the middle not only can't be selected, it actually runs away if you try. Fun if you're looking to trick users into trying to race you, not so fun if you want it to actually be useful.
- And this thing thinks it has the right to open things in new windows? Window management is my job and my decision, not any site designer's.
- The in-Flash "text" 1) can't be selected, 2) can't be size- or color-adjusted, and 3) isn't antialiased, just for that extra spurt of ugly.
- The way that Flash pseudo-form cleverly puts the field labels into the form field until you select them means that it's never possible to see the function of the field you have currently selected.
- The little faux-scrollbar to scroll up and down the eight-line room description through a three-line viewport is needlessly irksome. This page goes through all sorts of awful contortions to cram itself into a tiny little bit of my much larger window. And yes, you're correct that the site and its designer don't have any idea how big my window is. If the design were civilized, they wouldn't need to.
Remember what I said about designers who abuse a technology not making the technology fundamentally flawed? Where are your howls of protest about the gif standard?
Uh, my howls of protest about gif89a were pretty loud about seven years ago, until I turned it off. In fact, I have fond memories of the day that Netscape released the source to their browser. The first day it was released, I downloaded a copy, edited it to remove support for gif animations, recompiled, and was happy. I didn't really want my browser to do much more, but I very strongly wanted it to do less.
You seem to keep returning to the argument that because other technologies can be used for anti-useful annoyance, Flash must not be so bad. But you're wrong: it's perfect possible for Flash and those other technologies to be bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, that must vary from one area to another. In Los Angeles, T-Mobile piggybacks on Cingular's (suckass) network, so they wouldn't have this kind of control over the infrastructure.
Hm. I can't seem to find any product on Archos's site whose model name is anything like "JBM" or "20" or "140". Can you provide a url?
Actually, the systems to which I was comparing have greyscale displays. Archos does offer devices with color displays, but they appear to run to $750, not $350, and be much larger still.
Traditionally the Archos devices have been perfectly fine as long as you don't mind that they're huge. But actually, a quick glance at the site at the moment does not in fact show any products that are either larger higher capacity than ipods or lower price, much less both. The players they're offering appear to top out at 20G for $350, versus a 20G ipod for $300. And given that they're based around the same 1.8" drives that ipods are, I'd be very surprised if there's any difference in speed.
So mostly this looks like a low-end ipod, 31% bulkier, with a quarter the cache, and $50 more expensive. In what way is this "better"?
If there is a fundamental flaw in the hash algorithm itself, simply using it more often will probably not solve the problem.
It absolutely is incredibly hard to make an encryption algorithm more secure. Just "doing some math with the hashes" is the type of bit-twiddling at which cryptologists both wince and sneer. "Then I'll multiply the second one by three, then add them together! Then modulo it 17! Then oohoohooh, square root the whole thing and drop the first digit! No one will _ever_ figure this out!" Crap like this does not add any new cryptographic strength, just a dependency on a secret algorithm. And any method which relies on a secret algorithm is hopelessly flawed.
There is still considerable debate in the cryptographic community about whether 3des is actually any stronger than des. Many people feel that if an attack is found to be effective against the des algorithm, the extra layers of stirring the bits around will not make the plaintext any more secure.
I'm afraid that Schneier covered this succinctly: "Anyone who creates his or her own cryptographic primitive is either a genius or a fool. Given the genius/fool ratio for our species, the odds aren't very good."
You mean "Dirtworld"?
Yeah.
The only interesting part of the book was a study of the interactions between an educated, literate, erudite, refined, fastidious Arab diplomat/poet and a comparatively brutal, impoverished, rudimentary Norse society.
The notion that anyone would believe that a uniquely complex and wise Arab character should be played by Antonio Banderas is simply dumbfounding.
I wouldn't call it anywhere near the worst, but it was pretty bad. I have extremely mixed feelings about Heinlein, but taking one of his worse books and stripping it of the few interesting bits is not a way to make a good movie.
There were two interesting parts to the book: an exploration of how a much more militaristic society would look, and the technology and methods used by that society. The movie discarded them both:
There was a scene in the boot camp in which one of the trainees asks why they have any need to train humans to use simple weapons when they have the technology to effortlessly obliterate people at a distance. In the book, this prompts the instructor to explain that the goal of war is almost never to actually kill all your opponents, but rather to convince them behave differently, ideally in the least destructive way possible. And that tactics of varying harshness and efficiency are sometimes needed for that convincing. In the movie, this prompts the instructor to engage in pointless brutality and an inane quip.
In the book, the armored infantry are a very flexible and personal weapon, and are used only in the above-mentioned situations in which complete extermination is not wanted. Whereas in the movie, our spacefaring race appeared to have no more effective tools for planetary-scale warfare than sending fifty thousand kids with machine guns.
We already have a language which was designed to scale very far up or down, and to adapt itself to disparate display environments: HTML.
And if people would just use it as intended, rather than trying to smother it in ecmascript, flash, et al, we wouldn't need to come up with a whole new protocol every time a new display gadget becomes popular.
Entirely separate from the software raid support, which sanely only does 0 and 1. 5 is awfully slow even with dedicated hardware, and you really don't want to even think about it in software.
The biggest consumer of power is most laptops is memory. Display, disk, and cpu can sometimes be contenders, but all of those can have their use moderated in such a way as to preserve battery life. Whereas I'm not aware of any system with a facility for dynamically turning on and off parts of the ram.
So, as contrary as this is to general geek wisdom, get systems with as little ram as will allow you to do the necessary work without swapping.
I hate people who put up posts saying, "This isn't news! I'm a nerd and this doesn't matter to me! I want a refund!"
I usually find stories about updates to, say, the OS and major applications to be useful. It provides a forum for people to compare notes about the new version.
And yet, despite all this... Did this really merit an article? I'd think that if there's anyone in the world who'd be interested in this it'd be me, and I'm just not. I really don't think that every update, however minor, to every application, however minor, needs to have a piece here.
From the meager data available, it sounds as if the settlement specifies certain popularities of artists, but not particular CDs. So the libraries are getting the dud albums of artists whose other works have sold well.
Ah, network computers. Those are always a great plan, given that local storage is so expensive and small, and networks are so infinitely reliable.
While I'm not really disputing that governments put their troops in danger in many ways, I think you may be misinterpreting the article a bit.
The story is not asserting that eating pissy chicken once will cause health problems over the long term. It's saying that eating pissy chicken over the long term will cause health problems. Resorting to it a few times when it's the only alternative to starvation will not have any long term consequences.
Most of the protocols involved are open, but there are a few very critical ones which aren't. Most notably FairPlay and daap. (There are some efforts to reverse-engineer or work around both of these, but that's substantially different from a genuinely open protocol.)
Given the reference to smb, it's also possible that the grandparent was talking about afp, but that's getting pretty far afield from the article topic.
Um. Says everyone from Sir Tim Berners-Lee on down? Really, how many times do I and everyone else need to repeat this? One of the original, paramount design goals of the Web, and part of the reason that it has been successful and we use it today, is the idea that content is presented with only loose suggestions of formatting, and that end display systems interpret that as they see fit.
Everyone could've just continued ftping around Wordperfect files, and documents would be guaranteed to look the same on all systems. Turns out that there's a reason that people chose to stop doing that, much as you'd like to send us back there.
How nice of you to decide on my own opinions for me. My point is that this Flash jobbie doesn't easily display information all at once. I can't view the room types at once, and I can't even view all of the text description of a single type at once, despite having metric tons of window available in which that information could be easily presented.
So it's not a choice between displaying the information all at once and displaying parts of it exclusively; it's a choice between displaying it exclusively using non-standard widgets and rollovers, or displaying it exclusively using system-standard mechanisms where necessary, and using whatever the available window size is to display exactly as much of it as is possible.
This statement seems to suggest that you've never read anything about any usability research ever. Consistency and predictability are some of the most important attributes that any computer system can have.
As to the last part of this statement, I'm starting to wonder whether you're actually opposed to Flash yourself, and just doing an especially viscious job of parodying Flash advocates. The idea that anyone would sincerely asserting that being usable is less important than being "slick looking" is so absurd that I'm having a hard time believing that you're not engaging in satire.
For a person who's never met me, you seem to have an amazing grasp of my prejudices and personal problems. Can you remind me how I feel about broccoli? You seem to feel that you're a more authoritative source of my opinions than I am.
How can the designer possibly be omniscient about what I "need" to do? How about when something breaks and I want to try and send mail to tech support describing the point at which things failed? How about when I see a word used with which I'm not familiar and I want to look it up? How about when I want to add to my collection of the most profoundly- and poignantly-phrased web pages? How about when I want to have a conversation with the developer complimenting him on his elegant design?
Uh... where exactly did I mention the n
Fair enough, that's a good point. As long as the site functions well both with and without scripting, I can't take offense. If it provides scripticacious features to someone else who might want them without interfering with my ability to avoid them, that's certainly fine by me.
And if I can't tell whether it's there or not why bother writing it in the first place?
Has it occurred to you to wonder why we turn off javascript? It's not because we dislike javascript in particular, it's because we don't want people like you doing shit like that on our systems. And we don't like it any more when you do it with Flash.
The fact that ugliness is subjective is why every user should have full control over the presentation on his own system. I've heard some people say that they prefer un-antialiased text. Well, bully for them, those people should be able to choose that on their end, and have all their text rendered that way. And I'll continue looking at the antialiased text which prefer, and neither of us needs to be "right". But having every page designer make their own arbitrary choice that gets forced on all of us is always wrong.
Functionality could be greatly improved if the interface simply used more space (though of course in a manner which doesn't break horribly when viewed in a very low-resolution environment). Having to scroll through a page a bit isn't a problem. In-page "scrollbars" which aren't necessary and don't look or behave like system-standard scrollbars are.
The "form" is similarly awful: it doesn't look at all like a normal text entry field, so one can only discover its behaviour by clicking randomly. And once you've done that, the field labels disappear when you try using them, forcing you to just remember what each is. If you become distracted by something else mid-form, or wish to interleave this with other activities, too bad for you.
Similarly, the fact that the room-class descriptions and pictures are exclusive means that in order to compare them, I need to toggle back and forth between them, use the teeny little faux-scrollbar to scroll the teeny viewport across the teeny text, remember several attributes and repeat it all trying to see where they differ. Whereas a single page describing all of the classes of rooms would allow me to directly compare them visually and easily assess their differences.
So this Flash which you point out as being "designed properly" is rife with needless usability gaffes, and doesn't even do the things which you specifically claimed that properly designed Flash does, such as allowing text selection. This example seems to serve the argument against Flash much better than the argument for it.
For this discussion, I'm willing to stipulate that those criteria can't be met in pure html.
But... so? Why would anyone possibly consider it worthwhile to endure all the misery of ugliness and non-functionality of this site just to save a page reload?
Even if you do consider bytes transferred to be the only important measure of a site, this still loses. This flash jobbie appears to be 106K, presumably compressed internally. If I reloaded a 30K form thirty times over gzipped http, I'd still come out ahead.
And certainly you can't tell me that speed is the goal. This is slow enough to actualy display a progress bar even on a dual 1.8GHz g5 attached to a 6Mbit line.
Many of the issues I listed were specific to the room reservation page.
One might almost be inclined to wonder whether you actually read the list of problems, or just decided pre-emptively that they could not be relevant.
- My normal gui browsing windows are around 1800x1100. HTML pages will flow and adapt to this (or whatever other) size; this site sits huddled in the corner, wasting most of my display on its stunning lack of content.
- The thing that wants to be a menu bar is inconsistent even within its minute self. Some of the "menus" turn into two columns, even though they've only used about 4% of the height of my window. Others are one column, and others don't have any menu drop down at all, but just want the header clicked on.
- The annoying pop-up-ish block of text in the middle not only can't be selected, it actually runs away if you try. Fun if you're looking to trick users into trying to race you, not so fun if you want it to actually be useful.
- And this thing thinks it has the right to open things in new windows? Window management is my job and my decision, not any site designer's.
- The in-Flash "text" 1) can't be selected, 2) can't be size- or color-adjusted, and 3) isn't antialiased, just for that extra spurt of ugly.
- The way that Flash pseudo-form cleverly puts the field labels into the form field until you select them means that it's never possible to see the function of the field you have currently selected.
- The little faux-scrollbar to scroll up and down the eight-line room description through a three-line viewport is needlessly irksome. This page goes through all sorts of awful contortions to cram itself into a tiny little bit of my much larger window. And yes, you're correct that the site and its designer don't have any idea how big my window is. If the design were civilized, they wouldn't need to.
Uh, my howls of protest about gif89a were pretty loud about seven years ago, until I turned it off. In fact, I have fond memories of the day that Netscape released the source to their browser. The first day it was released, I downloaded a copy, edited it to remove support for gif animations, recompiled, and was happy. I didn't really want my browser to do much more, but I very strongly wanted it to do less.You seem to keep returning to the argument that because other technologies can be used for anti-useful annoyance, Flash must not be so bad. But you're wrong: it's perfect possible for Flash and those other technologies to be bad.
DHTML? Evil. Animated gifs? Evil. ECMAscript? Evil. Embedded midi? Evil.
Actually having some meaningful content and presenting it in simple text? Beautiful.