"According to people who've handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you've got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone.'"
Oh? When I hear that "according to people who've handled the device, the Droid is the most comfortable, pleasant-to-use device to hit the market to date," then I'll pay attention.
I don't really know how Apple does it. Their UI and usability aren't all THAT great, yet they consistently manage to turn out stuff that really is usable. Maybe the mystery is how everyone else manages to screw it up. With the average gadget, it takes about ten minutes before you come across something so inexplicably, bafflingly sucky that you just can't figure out how it ever could have gotten out the door. Of course, I've worked in a company where the CEO dictated UI decisions and, unfortunately, had _bad_ taste. And I've also worked in a big company where the marketers simply would put down "ease of use" as a bullet point, and from that point on everyone just assumed the product had it because it was on the list.
I still can't figure out what Apple did that made iTunes the first viable online music store, or made the App Store the first viable software store for smart phones. It seems as if all they did was to avoid gross stupidity. That must be a lot harder to do than you'd think.
Afterthought: It occurs to me that one area in which vendors do get the usability consistently right, or at least "good enough," are digital cameras. I wonder why digital cameras are easy, or at least POSSIBLE to use, and cell phones aren't? I notice that digital camera makers do seem to be willing to spend a few extra cents to give the controls different shapes and turn in different directions, instead of confronting you with a uniform sea of buttons.
Am I the only one reminded of H. G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads?"
"Their rifles... had the most remarkable sights imaginable, sights which threw a bright little camera-obscura picture into the light-tight box in which the rifleman sat below. This camera-obscura picture was marked with two crossed lines, and whatever wascovered by the intersection of these two lines, that the rifle hit... Changes in the clearness of the atmosphere, due to changes of moisture, were met by an ingenious use of that meteorologically sensitive substance, catgut, and when the land ironclad moved forward the sights got a compensatory deflection in the direction of its motion. The rifleman stood up in his pitch-dark chamber and watched the little picture before him. One hand held the dividers for judging distance, and the other grasped a big knob like a door-handle... When he saw a man he wanted to shoot he brought him up to the cross-lines, and then pressed a finger upon a little push like an electric bell-push, conveniently placed in the centre of the knob. Then the man was shot. If by any chance the rifleman missed his target he moved the knob a trifle, or readjusted his dividers, pressed the push, and got him the second time."
There is no law of physics guaranteeing the U. S. a monopoly on these things. Yet so much of the discussion implicitly assumes this is something "we" can do to "them."
The U. S. was certain that the Russians didn't have the technology capability to produce nuclear weapons, yet the U. S. had the monopoly on nuclear weapons for less than four years. (And the Russians then scared us by being the first to produce a fusion device that was capable of being a deliverable weapon--the U. S. had the first fusion explosion but it was a ground-based, building-sized device.
How difficult are these things to build? Are we sure you can't cobble a crude but effective one out of a video cell phone, an R/C model aircraft, and a couple of iPods? How long before we see these things over U. S. skies?
Gartner predicted circa 1990 that OS/2 would quickly pass MS-DOS, Unix, and Windows to become the dominant operating system in three or four years. This was a detailed prediction with graphs showing exactly how the percentages would unfold over time. At the time I was working for a Fortune 500 that took that guff seriously and accordingly shifted resources from DOS, Unix, and Windows to OS/2.
There is always a market for predictions. People seem to assume that an organization that charges a lot of money for its predictions must make good ones. I don't know why bad predictions don't discredit the predictors, but they don't. People selectively remember the accurate ones. There are ten people who know that Jeane Dixon predicted that Kennedy would die in office for every one that remembers that she predicted Nixon would win the election in the first place.
As a software engineer, I feel some sympathy for those who release patches for desktop computer OSes. A computer is a general-purpose device that is intended to allow users to install third-party applications that have full access to a huge API; to install applications like antivirus utilities that dig deep into the OS; and add hardware and the low-level drivers that go with them. The OS update is applied to an environment that may have wandered far from its starting point. Every customer has a unique configuration that probably has meaningful differences from any box in the SQA department.
But a game console? A game console is a walled garden, the applications need only a circumscribed set of functions, the vendor has total control over what goes on it, and nobody is adding third-party hardware to it.
Sony should be ashamed of itself, and should have volunteered to fix damaged systems for free--long before anyone complained.
This is good. There is much to be said for and against an "ownership society" but I can't recall publicly advocating our transformation into a "licensure society."
I have no doubt that the same people who are trying to outlaw analog recording devices are planning a campaign behind closed doors for the eradication of "ownership" as a concept in U. S. culture, but they would never dare to say it in public.
Software licensing made sense when software was a semi-custom low-volume craft product; when there were small numbers of transactions and actual negotiations took place on every purchase; where the amounts of money involved were in six figures, and both parties had lawyers on retainer.
Today it makes no more sense than to say "this T-shirt is licensed, not sold" or "these skis are licensed, not sold."
...why should the Kindle? Public libraries "napsterized" books a couple of hundred years ago, and it's done nothing but good.
It's very noticeable that authors, who you'd think would be the ones most affected by public libraries, are universally in favor of them. Carlyle wrote: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books." Franklin, who founded the first public library in America, wrote "This library... repair'd in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me." Asimov wrote "My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. Stephen King has spoke eloquently in support of public libraries, despite the fact that a hundred people can read one of his books and he only gets paid once.
Writers understand that the value of public libraries to writers far exceeds the value of any "lost" royalties.
1) Before the show premiered, a science fiction writer named Charles Beaumont, one of whose stories was adapted for an early script, wrote a piece in one of the magazines raving about the show and the big budget and production values. I recall him saying "I couldn't believe it! They actually built a roller-coaster on the set." According to him SF was finally getting taken seriously and getting the respect it deserved.
2) But, personally, I never liked it. My recollection is that none of the stories ever resolved. That always seemed sloppy and lazy to me. The basic Twilight Zone plot always seemed to be: a) Creepy, weird, moderately intriguing things start to happen for no reason. b) Things continue to happen. c) Finally, things stop happening, for no reason. I always felt cheated. Couldn't the writer at least have taken the time to, say, have someone throw a bucket of water on whatever creepy entity was doing the weird things, and have the entity scream "No! No! I can't stand water! I'm melllltttting! I'm melllllttting!" Or end with the main character waking up and finding out that It Was All A Dream?:-) Well, maybe a little bit more clever than that; but it's those little touches of verisimilitude that distinguish SF from fantasy and help suspend disbelief. I always felt that The Twilight Zone was unequivocally fantasy, not science fiction.
Here's why it takes so long. If it's not a clean install, it takes a really long time to scan every frame of every video you have on the hard drive, ship them to the MPAA to match them against their archives of copyrighted material, then pull credit card numbers from your disk and scan your purchase history to see whether you paid for them.
Especially when you add the network latency from routing all of those packets through the NSA.
Oh, there, I think, I disagree. I once read a book entitled "Indexing, The Art Of," about how book indexes are created, and it was an eye-opener.
Conversely, there's nothing more useless than a completely computer-generated book index. You're looking for a topic that's discussed in three substantial sections and mentioned in passing fifty times, and the index lists fifty-three page numbers because the computer doesn't know which are the important ones.
The same principle probably applies to card catalogs and other indexes. Indexing is a deeply human activity; the person doing the indexing has to have a feeling for importance and organization and be able to guess how the user probably thinks about things.
P. S. Our local public library's card catalog used to have all of the first world war material listed under "Great European War 1914-18", though fortunately someone had stuck in "SEE" cards under "First World War" and "World War I."
I asked a librarian. And there's probably a lesson there, because the librarian found it right away.
My recollection is that she didn't actually know it off the top of her head, but knew that in this card catalog the city of publication was the primary entry--most journals also were alphabetized under their, you know, names, but that was just for lagniappe. And she had some volume at hand--or maybe it was five or six volumes on a nearby shelf--at which you could look up a journal title and find the city of publication.
In reality, if you'd clicked a stopwatch it probably took less than fifteen minutes to find it, including the time I spent looking in the card catalog and not finding it.
Nostalgia: those card catalogs were veritable museums of typewriter type fonts, the cards having been typed over periods of many decades.
Tangential, but "card catalogs." Ha! I once had a compelling need to look up an article in the Occasional Papers of the Bingham Oceanographic Collection. So I went to the card catalog.
It wasn't under O. It wasn't under P. It wasn't under B. It wasn't under C.
It was under N.
Why? Because, naturally, as of course everybody knows, the Bingham Oceanographic Collection is part of the Peabody Museum. Which is part of Yale. Which (drum roll...)......is in New Haven.
The great thing here is that you can't even say there was an error in the card catalog, unless filing something under a heading that is perfectly correct, but under which nobody would dream of looking for it, is considered an error.
Google's brilliance, and woe, is its sloppy imprecision.
You type in a query. It returns a bunch of stuff. Quite a lot of it is irrelevant and as perceived as not meeting the requirements of the search, but you don't mind because all you care about is that it finds what you want, not that it finds other stuff. Unfortunately, Google is so good that it tricks you into believing that it always finds everything that matches your query. But, of course, there's no way to find out what it _missed_.
I've personally noticed and been puzzled by the publication dates. I'd noticed it particularly with periodicals. What seems to be the case here is that Google is very prone to give the date that a journal began publication as the publication date of every article that has ever appeared in that journal.
Wikipedia editors are well aware of the dangers of using Google hit counts as data. It's amusing to see that there are 1,930,000 hits on "Ghandi" compared to 22,900,000 for "Gandhi" and conclude that Gandhi's name is misspelled 10% of the time... or to notice, as I have, that that percentage is increasing and project the year in which "Ghandi" must inevitably become the accepted spelling... but it is, as they say, "for amusement purposes only."
I think it would be sweet if my toilet seat could tweet, and announce each major feat every time that I excrete. If the flowing bowl's replete I don't want to be discrete; I would tweet to the elite "Look at how I can compete!"
Much as I admire Kahle and archive.org, people have been talking about putting libraries online for decades, talking and talking and talking. archive.org has put a lot of good stuff online, but it's a grab-bag. Ditto the Library of Congress. Ditto university libraries. There are many places that offer interesting collections that make fascinating browsing.
But as far as I know, if you have the title of a specific oldish book that you actually need or want to read, there are only two places you can go with any serious likelihood of finding them:
a) Project Gutenberg
b) Google Books
I think Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo should shut up until they've done as much for readers as Project Gutenberg and Google have.
The problems with ported software exist with all software, they are just much harder to hide in games.
An awful lot of software that appears to be available on more than one platform is smooth, sweet, and stable on one of those platforms, and weird, clunky, and unreliable on another. Things like odd screen refresh bugs. Sometimes, applications that just don't look or act like good citizens of the world then run in. Sometimes, the application will seem to run all right but there's some difference in buffering or caching or memory management strategy, and on the "bad" platform it will have a tendency to freeze up mysteriously for unpleasantly long periods of time, or crash. Or work fine when installed in the exact place the installer puts it by default but act funny if you put it somewhere else. Or fail to follow the proper OS conventions for where preferences and configuration settings and other persistent program "state" should be placed. Or show you a literal view of your disk volume and directory structure instead of the slightly abstract view that "normal" programs show (e.g. "Desktop" at the top, root level in Windows).
I think it's wonderful that gamers are able to yell and scream and try to exercise some market discipline about this. I think it's because a game you don't enjoy is valueless. Alas, when it comes to "productivity" software it's hard to quantify things like "feels klunky."
My Rocket eBook, manufactured by Nuvomedia (and later by Gemstar), finally dropped dead. I have about $300 worth of purchased content for it. It is DRM-protected and keyed to a serial number that is embedded in the device.
The customer representatives that could tell the server to re-encode it for a device with a different serial number have been laid off. The servers capable of re-encoding it have been shut down. And the company who has the records proving I own the content is long out of business.
What good would an open format have done me? I believe the Rocket eBook file format has long since been reverse-engineered. An open format would be nice, but the problem is the DRM, not the format. The free market has shown itself to be fairly capable producing format converters via reverse-engineering; they're not perfect, but they're at least as good as Microsoft's ability to convert from one version of Word to another!
DRM is not acceptable to me until it meets these criteria:
a) It indeed manages digital rights. That is, it is actually aligned with the true legal rights the vendor has, and does not permit the vendor to arbitrarily impose any restrictions it wishes.
b) It must give me what I get from a book: the right to fair use (such as photocopying portions of it if they are short enough for me to have taken longhand notes); the right to lend it to a friend, the right to sell it to a used-book store, the right to buy used copies, the right to expect it to be readable for a hundred years.
c) It must be fail-safe. If the company goes out of business, the book must not become worthless just because some electronic gadget reached its natural end-of-life.
ScienceWorks Hands-On Museum in Ashland, Oregon. It's not big. It's for kids. It's a bunch of cheaply made science demonstrations. But this is the most brilliant museum I've ever seen.
First, there's enough stuff in it that kids actually get to do hands-on, rather than crowding around in a big group watching one kid do hands-on. Second, the stuff is either tough and durable or well-maintained or both, because it all works.
When I walked in, the first thing I saw was a column, with two ends of a long length of 3" flexible pipe hanging down within reach, and a placard suggesting you put one to your ear and talk into the other. On craning your neck back, you see that the pipe runs up the column, across the ceiling of the building in big hanging loops, across, around, back, and down the column again. You talk in one end. You hear your voice come back with a half-second delay.
You can stand on a platform surrounded by a little moat of soapy water, and pull on a rope which lifts a ring out of the moat and surrounds you so that you are inside a cylindrical soap bubble.
No kidding, it's sensational. The nearby Crater Rock Museum in Central Point is also small--five or six big rooms--but, dare I say it, a little gem and worth a stop if you happen to be in the area anyway.
IIRC I read this in one of Lawrence Lessig's books.
Movie studio executives, of course, hated the idea of home video. Their business model was tied to getting paid for each showing, payment per showing, and also per viewer; the rents charged to movie theatres were set on a sliding scale based on the seating capacity of the house).
RCA thought they had a breakthrough, when they showed Disney executives a cassette they had developed. It was designed for rental and could only be played once. A mechanical locking arrangement was engaged when the cassette had finished playing. The consumer would then have to return it to the rental store, which had the special tool needed to unlock and rewind it.
They demonstrated it proudly to Disney execs who said, dismissively, "This is no good to us. We have absolutely no way of knowing how many people are in the room."
I'll consider getting another eBook device when they make it possible to lend an eBook the way I can lend a physical book.
I want to be able to lend Kindle books... commercial, protected, bestseller-type books... to a person with a Sony reader. I want to be able to replace my Sony reader three years down the road with whatever eBook reading device appeals to me and move all my books to the new device.
And I want to be able to make the transfers just as I can today with a physical book.
I have $300 worth of ebooks I purchased for my Rocket eBook. When I bought them I was assured that if I ever needed to replace the device, I could just give them the new serial number and re-download the books re-coded for the new device. Well, I my eBook device finally bit the dust. I now have $300 worth of eBooks that can be read only on a device that no longer exists, unless I buy a replacement device that doesn't exist, contact a customer service department that no longer exists, and re-download them from a server that no longer exists, operated by a company that no longer exists.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
"Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. The Copyright Act of 1976 and its predecessor, the Copyright Act of 1909, leave no doubt that originality is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. The 1976 Act explains that copyright extends to "original works of authorship," 17 U.S.C. 102(a), and that there can be no copyright in facts, 102(b). [499 U.S. 340, 341]... A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship....
Lower courts that adopted a "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" test - which extended a compilation's copyright protection beyond selection and arrangement to the facts themselves - misconstrued the 1909 Act and eschewed the fundamental axiom of copyright law that no one may copyright facts or ideas."--Feist vs. Rural Telephone, U. S. Supreme Court, 1991.
Obviously it's not cut-and-dried, because Wolfram Alpha does more in the way of selecting and compiling facts than the average computer program, but it is still a mechanical process.
The person who designed the wind chime that hangs outside my house put some creative originality into it, but I would hate to think that the output of the wind chime itself is copyrightable, just because the wind chime's mechanism rearranges the notes into patterns that no human thought of before.
If the court decides that the output of a machine meets the test of originality, and if there's any validity to the theory that an identity of seven consecutive notes constitute plagiarism of music, then I am certainly going to set my computer to work producing as many different seven-note sequences as it can as fast as it can, and try to copyright them all.
Way way back in the days before the Internet, CompuServe Information Services ($6 an hour plus phone bill, often referred to as CI$) important. At that time, there was a guy named Steve Roberts, aka "Wordy," who travelled around the country on a recumbent bicycle with a TRS-100, posting updates to CIS.
Googling suggests that he is still experimenting with a nomadic lifestyle... I think... Some posting suggest he has an email address at microship.com It's not clear to me whose website that is or what, exactly it is about... but perhaps it is his and perhaps he is still experimenting with a nomadic lifestyle.
This "game" is about as much fun to play as those "fun with subtraction" pages in the fourth grade arithmetic book. It's bewildering, pointless, and laborious. And as nearly as I can tell there are no prizes. It's too clever by half.
A straightforward feedback link asking whether an ordinary Bing search got you the results you wanted would surely be more effective. Better yet would be an option to submit failed Bing searches to a human being who would attempt to find the answer and email it to you.
Well, first off, I can't remember anyone saying they miss Windows Me.
Second off, this is what a friend of mine called a "data-free observation." Instead of addressing any specific characteristics of this specific OS, its specific predecessor, and its specific successor, he's making the dismissive observation "Ah, it's always that way, you complain about it when it's there and but you'll praise it when it's gone." So he can go on pretending Vista wasn't really a disaster.
It's just convenient rhetoric for deflecting criticism. A bunch of verbal bandaids to protect their corporate egos from bruises. A great answer to a question, if the question has nothing to do with Vista--if the question is "How can I save face if someone asks me an embarrassing question?"
If Microsoft "got it" they could take a leaf from Jeff Bezos' book and say "This is an apology for the way we handled the release of Windows Vista. "Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received." But that sort of frankness just isn't in Microsoft's DNA.
Slashdot Mirror
"According to people who've handled the device, the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. When you combine that with the Verizon network, you've got something that is most definitely a challenger to the Jesus phone.'"
Oh? When I hear that "according to people who've handled the device, the Droid is the most comfortable, pleasant-to-use device to hit the market to date," then I'll pay attention.
I don't really know how Apple does it. Their UI and usability aren't all THAT great, yet they consistently manage to turn out stuff that really is usable. Maybe the mystery is how everyone else manages to screw it up. With the average gadget, it takes about ten minutes before you come across something so inexplicably, bafflingly sucky that you just can't figure out how it ever could have gotten out the door. Of course, I've worked in a company where the CEO dictated UI decisions and, unfortunately, had _bad_ taste. And I've also worked in a big company where the marketers simply would put down "ease of use" as a bullet point, and from that point on everyone just assumed the product had it because it was on the list.
I still can't figure out what Apple did that made iTunes the first viable online music store, or made the App Store the first viable software store for smart phones. It seems as if all they did was to avoid gross stupidity. That must be a lot harder to do than you'd think.
Afterthought: It occurs to me that one area in which vendors do get the usability consistently right, or at least "good enough," are digital cameras. I wonder why digital cameras are easy, or at least POSSIBLE to use, and cell phones aren't? I notice that digital camera makers do seem to be willing to spend a few extra cents to give the controls different shapes and turn in different directions, instead of confronting you with a uniform sea of buttons.
Am I the only one reminded of H. G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads?"
"Their rifles... had the most remarkable sights imaginable, sights which threw a bright little camera-obscura picture into the light-tight box in which the rifleman sat below. This camera-obscura picture was marked with two crossed lines, and whatever wascovered by the intersection of these two lines, that the rifle hit... Changes in the clearness of the atmosphere, due to changes of moisture, were met by an ingenious use of that meteorologically sensitive substance, catgut, and when the land ironclad moved forward the sights got a compensatory deflection in the direction of its motion. The rifleman stood up in his pitch-dark chamber and watched the little picture before him. One hand held the dividers for judging distance, and the other grasped a big knob like a door-handle... When he saw a man he wanted to shoot he brought him up to the cross-lines, and then pressed a finger upon a little push like an electric bell-push, conveniently placed in the centre of the knob. Then the man was shot. If by any chance the rifleman missed his target he moved the knob a trifle, or readjusted his dividers, pressed the push, and got him the second time."
There is no law of physics guaranteeing the U. S. a monopoly on these things. Yet so much of the discussion implicitly assumes this is something "we" can do to "them."
The U. S. was certain that the Russians didn't have the technology capability to produce nuclear weapons, yet the U. S. had the monopoly on nuclear weapons for less than four years. (And the Russians then scared us by being the first to produce a fusion device that was capable of being a deliverable weapon--the U. S. had the first fusion explosion but it was a ground-based, building-sized device.
How difficult are these things to build? Are we sure you can't cobble a crude but effective one out of a video cell phone, an R/C model aircraft, and a couple of iPods? How long before we see these things over U. S. skies?
Gartner predicted circa 1990 that OS/2 would quickly pass MS-DOS, Unix, and Windows to become the dominant operating system in three or four years. This was a detailed prediction with graphs showing exactly how the percentages would unfold over time. At the time I was working for a Fortune 500 that took that guff seriously and accordingly shifted resources from DOS, Unix, and Windows to OS/2.
There is always a market for predictions. People seem to assume that an organization that charges a lot of money for its predictions must make good ones. I don't know why bad predictions don't discredit the predictors, but they don't. People selectively remember the accurate ones. There are ten people who know that Jeane Dixon predicted that Kennedy would die in office for every one that remembers that she predicted Nixon would win the election in the first place.
As a software engineer, I feel some sympathy for those who release patches for desktop computer OSes. A computer is a general-purpose device that is intended to allow users to install third-party applications that have full access to a huge API; to install applications like antivirus utilities that dig deep into the OS; and add hardware and the low-level drivers that go with them. The OS update is applied to an environment that may have wandered far from its starting point. Every customer has a unique configuration that probably has meaningful differences from any box in the SQA department.
But a game console? A game console is a walled garden, the applications need only a circumscribed set of functions, the vendor has total control over what goes on it, and nobody is adding third-party hardware to it.
Sony should be ashamed of itself, and should have volunteered to fix damaged systems for free--long before anyone complained.
This is good. There is much to be said for and against an "ownership society" but I can't recall publicly advocating our transformation into a "licensure society."
I have no doubt that the same people who are trying to outlaw analog recording devices are planning a campaign behind closed doors for the eradication of "ownership" as a concept in U. S. culture, but they would never dare to say it in public.
Software licensing made sense when software was a semi-custom low-volume craft product; when there were small numbers of transactions and actual negotiations took place on every purchase; where the amounts of money involved were in six figures, and both parties had lawyers on retainer.
Today it makes no more sense than to say "this T-shirt is licensed, not sold" or "these skis are licensed, not sold."
...why should the Kindle? Public libraries "napsterized" books a couple of hundred years ago, and it's done nothing but good.
It's very noticeable that authors, who you'd think would be the ones most affected by public libraries, are universally in favor of them. Carlyle wrote: "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books." Franklin, who founded the first public library in America, wrote "This library... repair'd in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me." Asimov wrote "My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. Stephen King has spoke eloquently in support of public libraries, despite the fact that a hundred people can read one of his books and he only gets paid once.
Writers understand that the value of public libraries to writers far exceeds the value of any "lost" royalties.
1) Before the show premiered, a science fiction writer named Charles Beaumont, one of whose stories was adapted for an early script, wrote a piece in one of the magazines raving about the show and the big budget and production values. I recall him saying "I couldn't believe it! They actually built a roller-coaster on the set." According to him SF was finally getting taken seriously and getting the respect it deserved.
2) But, personally, I never liked it. My recollection is that none of the stories ever resolved. That always seemed sloppy and lazy to me. The basic Twilight Zone plot always seemed to be: a) Creepy, weird, moderately intriguing things start to happen for no reason. b) Things continue to happen. c) Finally, things stop happening, for no reason. I always felt cheated. Couldn't the writer at least have taken the time to, say, have someone throw a bucket of water on whatever creepy entity was doing the weird things, and have the entity scream "No! No! I can't stand water! I'm melllltttting! I'm melllllttting!" Or end with the main character waking up and finding out that It Was All A Dream? :-) Well, maybe a little bit more clever than that; but it's those little touches of verisimilitude that distinguish SF from fantasy and help suspend disbelief. I always felt that The Twilight Zone was unequivocally fantasy, not science fiction.
Here's why it takes so long. If it's not a clean install, it takes a really long time to scan every frame of every video you have on the hard drive, ship them to the MPAA to match them against their archives of copyrighted material, then pull credit card numbers from your disk and scan your purchase history to see whether you paid for them.
Especially when you add the network latency from routing all of those packets through the NSA.
This is a joke. I think.
Oh, there, I think, I disagree. I once read a book entitled "Indexing, The Art Of," about how book indexes are created, and it was an eye-opener.
Conversely, there's nothing more useless than a completely computer-generated book index. You're looking for a topic that's discussed in three substantial sections and mentioned in passing fifty times, and the index lists fifty-three page numbers because the computer doesn't know which are the important ones.
The same principle probably applies to card catalogs and other indexes. Indexing is a deeply human activity; the person doing the indexing has to have a feeling for importance and organization and be able to guess how the user probably thinks about things.
P. S. Our local public library's card catalog used to have all of the first world war material listed under "Great European War 1914-18", though fortunately someone had stuck in "SEE" cards under "First World War" and "World War I."
I asked a librarian. And there's probably a lesson there, because the librarian found it right away.
My recollection is that she didn't actually know it off the top of her head, but knew that in this card catalog the city of publication was the primary entry--most journals also were alphabetized under their, you know, names, but that was just for lagniappe. And she had some volume at hand--or maybe it was five or six volumes on a nearby shelf--at which you could look up a journal title and find the city of publication.
In reality, if you'd clicked a stopwatch it probably took less than fifteen minutes to find it, including the time I spent looking in the card catalog and not finding it.
Nostalgia: those card catalogs were veritable museums of typewriter type fonts, the cards having been typed over periods of many decades.
Tangential, but "card catalogs." Ha! I once had a compelling need to look up an article in the Occasional Papers of the Bingham Oceanographic Collection. So I went to the card catalog.
It wasn't under O. It wasn't under P. It wasn't under B. It wasn't under C.
It was under N.
Why? Because, naturally, as of course everybody knows, the Bingham Oceanographic Collection is part of the Peabody Museum. Which is part of Yale. Which (drum roll...)... ...is in New Haven.
The great thing here is that you can't even say there was an error in the card catalog, unless filing something under a heading that is perfectly correct, but under which nobody would dream of looking for it, is considered an error.
This is much like Google itself.
Google's brilliance, and woe, is its sloppy imprecision.
You type in a query. It returns a bunch of stuff. Quite a lot of it is irrelevant and as perceived as not meeting the requirements of the search, but you don't mind because all you care about is that it finds what you want, not that it finds other stuff. Unfortunately, Google is so good that it tricks you into believing that it always finds everything that matches your query. But, of course, there's no way to find out what it _missed_.
I've personally noticed and been puzzled by the publication dates. I'd noticed it particularly with periodicals. What seems to be the case here is that Google is very prone to give the date that a journal began publication as the publication date of every article that has ever appeared in that journal.
Wikipedia editors are well aware of the dangers of using Google hit counts as data. It's amusing to see that there are 1,930,000 hits on "Ghandi" compared to 22,900,000 for "Gandhi" and conclude that Gandhi's name is misspelled 10% of the time... or to notice, as I have, that that percentage is increasing and project the year in which "Ghandi" must inevitably become the accepted spelling... but it is, as they say, "for amusement purposes only."
Aw, jeez, I meant "discreet," of course. "Preview" is just no substitute for "Edit," darn it.
I think it would be sweet if my toilet seat could tweet, and announce each major feat every time that I excrete. If the flowing bowl's replete I don't want to be discrete; I would tweet to the elite "Look at how I can compete!"
Much as I admire Kahle and archive.org, people have been talking about putting libraries online for decades, talking and talking and talking. archive.org has put a lot of good stuff online, but it's a grab-bag. Ditto the Library of Congress. Ditto university libraries. There are many places that offer interesting collections that make fascinating browsing.
But as far as I know, if you have the title of a specific oldish book that you actually need or want to read, there are only two places you can go with any serious likelihood of finding them:
a) Project Gutenberg
b) Google Books
I think Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo should shut up until they've done as much for readers as Project Gutenberg and Google have.
The problems with ported software exist with all software, they are just much harder to hide in games.
An awful lot of software that appears to be available on more than one platform is smooth, sweet, and stable on one of those platforms, and weird, clunky, and unreliable on another. Things like odd screen refresh bugs. Sometimes, applications that just don't look or act like good citizens of the world then run in. Sometimes, the application will seem to run all right but there's some difference in buffering or caching or memory management strategy, and on the "bad" platform it will have a tendency to freeze up mysteriously for unpleasantly long periods of time, or crash. Or work fine when installed in the exact place the installer puts it by default but act funny if you put it somewhere else. Or fail to follow the proper OS conventions for where preferences and configuration settings and other persistent program "state" should be placed. Or show you a literal view of your disk volume and directory structure instead of the slightly abstract view that "normal" programs show (e.g. "Desktop" at the top, root level in Windows).
I think it's wonderful that gamers are able to yell and scream and try to exercise some market discipline about this. I think it's because a game you don't enjoy is valueless. Alas, when it comes to "productivity" software it's hard to quantify things like "feels klunky."
My Rocket eBook, manufactured by Nuvomedia (and later by Gemstar), finally dropped dead. I have about $300 worth of purchased content for it. It is DRM-protected and keyed to a serial number that is embedded in the device.
The customer representatives that could tell the server to re-encode it for a device with a different serial number have been laid off. The servers capable of re-encoding it have been shut down. And the company who has the records proving I own the content is long out of business.
What good would an open format have done me? I believe the Rocket eBook file format has long since been reverse-engineered. An open format would be nice, but the problem is the DRM, not the format. The free market has shown itself to be fairly capable producing format converters via reverse-engineering; they're not perfect, but they're at least as good as Microsoft's ability to convert from one version of Word to another!
DRM is not acceptable to me until it meets these criteria:
a) It indeed manages digital rights. That is, it is actually aligned with the true legal rights the vendor has, and does not permit the vendor to arbitrarily impose any restrictions it wishes.
b) It must give me what I get from a book: the right to fair use (such as photocopying portions of it if they are short enough for me to have taken longhand notes); the right to lend it to a friend, the right to sell it to a used-book store, the right to buy used copies, the right to expect it to be readable for a hundred years.
c) It must be fail-safe. If the company goes out of business, the book must not become worthless just because some electronic gadget reached its natural end-of-life.
ScienceWorks in Ashland, Oregon. Am I right?
ScienceWorks Hands-On Museum in Ashland, Oregon. It's not big. It's for kids. It's a bunch of cheaply made science demonstrations. But this is the most brilliant museum I've ever seen.
First, there's enough stuff in it that kids actually get to do hands-on, rather than crowding around in a big group watching one kid do hands-on. Second, the stuff is either tough and durable or well-maintained or both, because it all works.
When I walked in, the first thing I saw was a column, with two ends of a long length of 3" flexible pipe hanging down within reach, and a placard suggesting you put one to your ear and talk into the other. On craning your neck back, you see that the pipe runs up the column, across the ceiling of the building in big hanging loops, across, around, back, and down the column again. You talk in one end. You hear your voice come back with a half-second delay.
You can stand on a platform surrounded by a little moat of soapy water, and pull on a rope which lifts a ring out of the moat and surrounds you so that you are inside a cylindrical soap bubble.
No kidding, it's sensational. The nearby Crater Rock Museum in Central Point is also small--five or six big rooms--but, dare I say it, a little gem and worth a stop if you happen to be in the area anyway.
IIRC I read this in one of Lawrence Lessig's books.
Movie studio executives, of course, hated the idea of home video. Their business model was tied to getting paid for each showing, payment per showing, and also per viewer; the rents charged to movie theatres were set on a sliding scale based on the seating capacity of the house).
RCA thought they had a breakthrough, when they showed Disney executives a cassette they had developed. It was designed for rental and could only be played once. A mechanical locking arrangement was engaged when the cassette had finished playing. The consumer would then have to return it to the rental store, which had the special tool needed to unlock and rewind it.
They demonstrated it proudly to Disney execs who said, dismissively, "This is no good to us. We have absolutely no way of knowing how many people are in the room."
I'll consider getting another eBook device when they make it possible to lend an eBook the way I can lend a physical book.
I want to be able to lend Kindle books... commercial, protected, bestseller-type books... to a person with a Sony reader. I want to be able to replace my Sony reader three years down the road with whatever eBook reading device appeals to me and move all my books to the new device.
And I want to be able to make the transfers just as I can today with a physical book.
I have $300 worth of ebooks I purchased for my Rocket eBook. When I bought them I was assured that if I ever needed to replace the device, I could just give them the new serial number and re-download the books re-coded for the new device. Well, I my eBook device finally bit the dust. I now have $300 worth of eBooks that can be read only on a device that no longer exists, unless I buy a replacement device that doesn't exist, contact a customer service department that no longer exists, and re-download them from a server that no longer exists, operated by a company that no longer exists.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
"Article I, 8, cl. 8, of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. Since facts do not owe their origin to an act of authorship, they are not original, and thus are not copyrightable. The Copyright Act of 1976 and its predecessor, the Copyright Act of 1909, leave no doubt that originality is the touchstone of copyright protection in directories and other fact-based works. The 1976 Act explains that copyright extends to "original works of authorship," 17 U.S.C. 102(a), and that there can be no copyright in facts, 102(b). [499 U.S. 340, 341]... A compilation is not copyrightable per se, but is copyrightable only if its facts have been "selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship....
Lower courts that adopted a "sweat of the brow" or "industrious collection" test - which extended a compilation's copyright protection beyond selection and arrangement to the facts themselves - misconstrued the 1909 Act and eschewed the fundamental axiom of copyright law that no one may copyright facts or ideas."--Feist vs. Rural Telephone, U. S. Supreme Court, 1991.
Obviously it's not cut-and-dried, because Wolfram Alpha does more in the way of selecting and compiling facts than the average computer program, but it is still a mechanical process.
The person who designed the wind chime that hangs outside my house put some creative originality into it, but I would hate to think that the output of the wind chime itself is copyrightable, just because the wind chime's mechanism rearranges the notes into patterns that no human thought of before.
If the court decides that the output of a machine meets the test of originality, and if there's any validity to the theory that an identity of seven consecutive notes constitute plagiarism of music, then I am certainly going to set my computer to work producing as many different seven-note sequences as it can as fast as it can, and try to copyright them all.
Way way back in the days before the Internet, CompuServe Information Services ($6 an hour plus phone bill, often referred to as CI$) important. At that time, there was a guy named Steve Roberts, aka "Wordy," who travelled around the country on a recumbent bicycle with a TRS-100, posting updates to CIS.
Googling suggests that he is still experimenting with a nomadic lifestyle... I think... Some posting suggest he has an email address at microship.com It's not clear to me whose website that is or what, exactly it is about... but perhaps it is his and perhaps he is still experimenting with a nomadic lifestyle.
This "game" is about as much fun to play as those "fun with subtraction" pages in the fourth grade arithmetic book. It's bewildering, pointless, and laborious. And as nearly as I can tell there are no prizes. It's too clever by half.
A straightforward feedback link asking whether an ordinary Bing search got you the results you wanted would surely be more effective. Better yet would be an option to submit failed Bing searches to a human being who would attempt to find the answer and email it to you.
Well, first off, I can't remember anyone saying they miss Windows Me.
Second off, this is what a friend of mine called a "data-free observation." Instead of addressing any specific characteristics of this specific OS, its specific predecessor, and its specific successor, he's making the dismissive observation "Ah, it's always that way, you complain about it when it's there and but you'll praise it when it's gone." So he can go on pretending Vista wasn't really a disaster.
It's just convenient rhetoric for deflecting criticism. A bunch of verbal bandaids to protect their corporate egos from bruises. A great answer to a question, if the question has nothing to do with Vista--if the question is "How can I save face if someone asks me an embarrassing question?"
If Microsoft "got it" they could take a leaf from Jeff Bezos' book and say "This is an apology for the way we handled the release of Windows Vista. "Our 'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received." But that sort of frankness just isn't in Microsoft's DNA.