We don't need any steenkin' new paradigms...
on
GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 4, Interesting
...absolutely all we need is halfway thoughtful, somewhat intelligent application of the paradigms we already have.
If software developers just spent an extra hour to watch an untrained user play with their software... and their managers gave them a couple of extra weeks to incorporate what they learned by watching... that would have more effect on software usability than the introduction of new techniques.
The problem today is that so much software leaves you gasping with amazement at the seeming perversity of their design. It's been observed since the day Windows 95 was introduced that it is stupid to turn off your computer from a button labelled "Start." Microsoft has had over a decade and one, two, three, four, five major software releases to do something about it, and they haven't. If they don't get it yet, all the pie menus and gestures and voice recognition isn't going to help them.
You may cry foul because this isn't strictly speaking, a software problem, but will you take a gander at the button layout on this portable DVD player? In case you don't get it--it's so mind-boggling it took me a while to get it--the northeast button moves you east, the southeast button moves you south, and so forth. That's why every button has a little printed arrow next to it.
An awful lot of modern software design seems to me to be be putting little printed arrows next to utterly misplaced buttons.
To those who say Microsoft shouldn't be blamed for the failings of driver vendors......what law of physics says that the only way to add support for new hardware to an OS is by writing kernel-level, privileged code?
If Microsoft's OS model requires that vendors write bug-free code, their model is deficient.
Sure, this is common practice... just as it used to be common practice for personal computer software to give application programs full access to all of RAM... but it's not the only way it can be done.
This is not a particularly good counterexample since most OS X hardware support involves kernel-level coding, too... but, for the record, my company uses a non-standard, vendor-specific SCSI interface. As it happens, only a limited number of applications, which we supply, need to access our devices. And it turns out that Mac OS X has all the tools for us to do everything we need, with adequate performance, at the application level. So, that's how we do it. It's a great development convenience, too, because we can use ordinary debugger tools to debug our code... and I don't need to wait for a reboot every time I have a silly bug in my code. (I know none of you ever have bugs in your I/O code, so that's not an issue for you...)
Mac OS X is not designed in such a way that hardware vendors never need to do kernel-level coding. Most hardware vendors do. But it is an existence proof that it is possible to have a situation where new hardware can be supported without using any privileged code.
Yes, I know that under current law everything is automatically copyrighted in the U. S. (although I believe including a notice may make some difference overseas). But there's no harm at all in asserting that one know's ones' rights, it might give teachers pause, and it might ultimately make turnitin's legal situation clearer, by forcing them either to accept the submission copyright notice and all, or to remove it.
The Internet is not a substance, does not induce physiological dependence, does not have a characteristic withdrawal syndrome, does not produce intoxication, does not induce tolerance requiring increasing dosages, and in general does not meet any of the criteria for what used to be the standard definition of the word "addiction."
To talk about addiction to the Internet, or to sex, or to chocolate, or to breathing, is nonsense. If these things are to be called "addictions" then we are using the same word to describe utterly different things. Internet addiction is not the same thing as heroin or nicotine addiction.
I'm not sure why the word is continually being redefined downward so that more and more trivial things can be labelled "addictions" or whom this redefinition benefits.
It seems that we become tolerant to "addictions" and have an controllable craving to label more and more things as "addictions"
But it appears as if there's an equally effective solution in Windows:
kb 307877 simply Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Windows Explorer, locate the file that you want, right-click the file, and then click Properties, on the General tab, click Advanced, Under Compress or Encrypt attributes, select the Encrypt contents to secure data check box, and then click OK If the file is located in an unencrypted folder, you receive an Encryption Warning dialog box. Use one of the following steps: If you want to encrypt only the file, click Encrypt the file only, and then click OK. If you want to encrypt the file and the folder in which it is located, click Encrypt the file and the parent folder, and then click OK.
(yesyesyes, if you detailed the procedure for enabling FileVault it would be nearly as long).
But, I'm 100% serious about this, why don't both Microsoft and Windows enable file encryption by default?
(Full disclosure. Do I use FileVault? No. Why not? Well, to tell the truth, I'm worried about bugs and glitches. There is safety in numbers. If Macs had FileVault enabled by default, then any bugs in it would cause problems for millions of users, and Apple would find out and fix them quickly. As it is, I suspect about 0.01% of all Mac users use it, and I've felt for a long time that one of the keys to avoiding OS trouble is to stay in the mainstream and avoid using anything that lots of people aren't using--unless I have a good reason).
Even in more detail and from more angles, I find it still looksat least as much like a face as the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire, the image of the Virgin Mary in a fogged thermopane window in Milton Hospital, Massachusetts.
It also looks at least as much like a face as human-constructed faces that have been ravaged by time, such as the Sphinx, or Michael Jackson.
"depending upon where your protected files came from, you might be able to restore your rights over the Internet."
This language sounds to me like an acknowledgement that Microsoft has deprived you of rights that you legally possess. You can't "restore" something that you never had.
...I have no idea what goes on at Microsoft in 2006 but let me tell you what went on circa 1990 at a (now-defunct) Fortune 500 minicomputer company, in the days of so-called "CHUI" interfaces (GUI-like interfaces implemented via line-drawing and X-Y character addressing on 80x24 green-screen terminals). I think I've told this story before on Slashdot, so apologies if you've heard it.
A developer was proudly showing off his spiffy new application. I started playing with it, and discovered that there were _three consecutive screens_ each containing the same field, into which the user was required to type the same entry, manually, three consecutive times. And there were no "copy" or "paste" functions. You actually needed to type your phone number or your SSN whatever it was three times in a row.
When I asked about this, he pulled a 150-page functional spec out of a drawer and showed me that he had implemented that the spec called for. It had slipped by. It's not that easy to previsualize how a UI will work based on a paper description.
When I suggested he change it, he said "No way. It took nine months to get that spec approved. Any change would require a review cycle and several meetings to get it approved. And if I change it without getting the spec changed, it won't pass SQA. This project is already behind schedule. I'm implementing it exactly the way this piece of paper says."
Another source of UI weirdness at another company I worked at was a CEO who fancied himself a UI expert. Or at least felt entitled to have the UI tailored to his personal tastes. He was always dictating changes in details of UIs. Unfortunately, he sometimes didn't previsualize how that change would interact with other details, and if you wanted to ask him "Say, now that we've done this thing here hadn't we better change this other thing there so that thus-and-such-bad thing won't happen," his secretary would schedule the appointment for a date a couple weeks from today.
I don't say this is how incomprehensibly strange UI happens at Microsoft. I say these are two ways in which it can happen.
When people catch on that Zune purchasers can't play music downloaded from Napster and its ilk... that Napster and other Microsoft customers have been suckered by the biggest Microsoft head-fake since 1990... I suspect there will be a rash of failures.
It will be comparable to the wave of software development companies that folded or were seriously wounded after hitching their wagon to the OS/2 star (as Microsoft convinced them to do while secretly developing its own products for Windows).
So, "the Mac OS had 4.35 per cent of the world's operating system share last December. Now it only has 4.33 per cent." Is that, by any chance, a share of a "market" that consists mostly of corporations and IT departments?
The Mac has always had that problem. "Market share" depends entirely on how you choose to define the market. Among people who don't want Apple computers, Apple's market share is small.
Cessna has a market share of about 4% of the airplane market (Cessna has revenues of $3.5 billion, Boeing $52.45 billion, Airbus $34.4 billion) but nobody worries about Cessna. If you define "the market" as "general aviation," then suddenly Cessna's market share becomes 33%.
What next? The Seattle Caviar Company's share of the egg market is slipping? Sunkist Oranges only has an 0.001% share of the apple market? Shinola has only a 1% market share of the shit market?
I don't understand why Microsoft didn't, or doesn't provide something similar to they were rumored to provide for iPod owners.
Why can't the Zune store recognize that that you own a PlaysForSure-protected version of a music title, and allow you to download the same title in Zune-protected format at no charge?
...but, isn't that the "J" in AJAX, the underpinnings of Web 2.0?
Why do people even bother to give advice that is basically impossible to follow?
It's not my fault that so many of the websites I want to use now rely on Javascript, but the fact is they do.
Saying "This exploit can be mitigated by turning off Javascripting" is true, but as about as useful as saying "the risks of plane crashes can be mitigated by not flying."
If people could agree on this three-layer monster.
on
A Triple-Standard Disk
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· Score: 1
...why couldn't they just get together on HDTV or Blu-Ray in the first place?
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you can get this cobbled-together monstrosity to work, you could do something equally clever that would make better use of the storage capacity than storing three identical copies of the same movie in three different formats.
As it is, the average DVD has glitches playing in some players. A randomly-selected DVD player probably has only a 98% chance of playing a randomly-selected DVD. It is certain that these disks will play more reliably in one format or the other--and not as reliably as a native-format disk does.
And they _have_ to cost more to manufacture than a single-format disc.
This makes about as much sense as a vinyl phonograph record recorded at 33-1/3 RPM on one side and 45 RPM on the other. That never happened, and this isn't going to happen, either.
The only thing this has going for it is an appeal to trinitarian theology. (But which format is the Father, which is the Son, and which is the Holy Spirit?)
...that the actual sales of the protected disks are not detectably higher than the sales of the unprotected disks, while the extra manufacturing costs are a meaningful nibble out of the profit.
Of course, I have always wondered whether the push to DRM is actually driven by any clear-headed, realistic, cost/benefit analysis based on good, real data... or whether it's an irrational emotional response on the part of media executives. Or the result of very good, misleading sales pitches by the vendors of DRM technology.
I believe it is the law (i.e. state law, but similar in most states) that gas stations post prices.
We have an unusual situation here in that we have a commodity product--despite advertising efforts to the contrary, few motorists truly believe that it matters whether they buy Shell or Exxon--whose price is very easily compared.
One of the odd features of life in the last few decades is that it is now apparently relatively cheap for companies to launch new products and product variations, and the result is that it is fairly hard to compare prices because it is fairly hard to find exactly _the same_ product in two different stores. The stores that promise to match other stores' advertised price on "the same" product are on fairly safe ground. Two supermarkets may both carry Jif peanut butter, but store A may carry Jif Peanut Butter and Honey but not Simply Jif while store B may carry Simply Jif but not Jif Peanut Butter and Honey. If they both carry the same product, they may not carry it in the same size; store A may carry Jif Crunchy Peanut Butter in the 18 oz and 40 oz size, while store B may carry only the 28 oz size, and so forth.
My state requires unit prices to be posted on shelf labels, and even here the waters are muddied because it is very common to find that adjacent products on the shelf are unit-priced using _different units_ (fluid ounces vs. gallons, etc.)
Generally speaking, it appears as if companies fight commoditization tooth and nail by doing everything they can to withhold real information from consumers and sell "the sizzle" instead. Whether the proliferation of huge numbers of product variations is a deliberate strategy to avoid price comparison I don't know, but it has that effect and I'm sure that corporations find it to be beneficial.
Gasoline prices are one arena where information is available--as a result of government regulation, I believe--and you have something approaching a free market.
Even here, of course, deception is possible. The Boston Globe recently reported that a number of gas stations have taken to calling 89-octane gasoline "regular" and 87-octane gasoline "economy" in hopes that inattentive consumers will inadvertently purchase a more expensive grade of gasoline than they meant to.
(I say "something approaching" because, at least where I live, the number of brands of gasoline has dropped dramatically in the last twenty years, the number of independent stations relative to company-owned stations has dropped, and the percentage price difference between the cheapest and most expensive gasoline in the stations I drive by regularly has narrowed very considerably).
...at least, it precisely parallels my personal usage.
My iTunes library contains 2977 items, of which 215 were purchased from the iTunes Music Store.
Most all the rest were: ripped from CDs and/or transferred from LPs, but:
There is also a considerable smattering of "personal content" including home recordings of my brother's piano recitals, radio shows recorded off the air with a Griffin RadioShark and "time-shifted" (I play them on my iPod in the car, then delete them), some downloaded public domain material (cylinder recordings from the UCSB's absolutely amazingCylinder Recording and Preservation Project. That probably accounts for about 100-200 items.
But, to a first approximation, 7% iTMS purchases, and the rest "RIPS" in the broad sense of digitized copies of material purchased on other media.
...for most of the things I care about. And this device only had double thecapacity of an an alkaline battery. Capacity is mAh. Power is watts.
An alkaline battery might have a capacity of (say) 2000 mAh, meaning that it could power a three-watt bulb for about an hour. This device, if it lives up to the claims, could do so for about two hours.
An alkaline battery couldn't power a 100-watt bulb at all, because it can't deliver more than a few amps. This device apparently _could_ power a 100-watt bulb... but only for about four minutes.
The ability to deliver power, that is to deliver energy in a short, intense burst, might be very useful for some applications. But it wouldn't let you recharge your laptop once a week or anything like that.
(There's another question I have. A battery hold an almost steady voltage for a long time, then declines fairly rapidly. Almost a square wave. This is one reason why it's hard to measure discharge state. Presumably these ultracapacitors have a smooth, exponential voltage decline, like radioactive decay. That probably means that you need tricky circuitry to exploit them... and there is probably always a significant amount of power in the device that you can't use, because the voltage has dropped too low).
I'll bet all of Microsoft's partners who designed to the PlaysForSure standard are real happy about this. Microsoft lobbies all of them to adopt PlaysForSure because that's Microsoft's strategic direction and it's what everyone is going to be using... while Microsoft quietly develops their own product that goes off in a completely different direction.
Remember when Microsoft was (successfully) getting everyone else to develop for OS/2 while they themselves were developing for Windows?
One of the pleasures of graduate school was access to a very good research library. The university I was at had the Transactions of the Royal Society back to volume 1, number 1. (When I commented positively on this to a librarian, meaning I was delighted by this, she missed my point and tut-tutted, say, "Yes, I know, it's just terrible, but they won't approve the budget for expanding the Rare Books room...)
It was fascinating to open volumes at random at publication intervals of about fifty years and see the evolution of the scientific writing style. Before 1800, it was lively and enthusiastic and communicated a sense of excitement and joy. Around the mid-1800s a transformation took place and it acquired the stodgy, distanced, passive-voice writing style that persists to this day.
This sounds like an urban legend, if not outright made up.
I am old enough to remember the introduction of the Xerox 914, and while it was revolutionary, the only things revolutionary about it were the speed, the copy quality, the copy durability, etc. I never ever ever heard of anyone suggesting that the copies needed to be proofread.
Similar processes had been available literally for centuries. There was nothing new about the idea of an exact image copy. The "Shovel Museum" at Stonehill College in Easton, MA has bound volumes containing hundreds of copies of letters sent to the Ames Shovel Company, which were copied by a "letter press," a device which squeezed the handwritten letter against a piece of moist paper, transferring enough ink to make a copy. These copies were perfectly legible, even though more than a century old.
Before the Xerox machine there was the 3M Thermofax, which made instantaneous dry copies. They were expensive, and the coated paper was nasty, curly stuff, and being heat-sensitive the copies were not exactly archival, and the "exposure" tended to be hard to adjust and uneven across the page. And since the image was produced by heat absorption, in effect it was an image made by far-infrared light, and idiosyncratic: some inks wouldn't copy well. Heck, a Thermofax copy needed to be proofread--but I never heard of anyone doing it.
Before the Thermofax there were photostats, a fast but not instantaneous wet chemical process that made negative images on paper. And of course architects used blueprints and Azos and so forth...
So, Xerox copies were not unprecedented. They were just an amazingly fast, cheap, high-quality way of doing what Thermofaxes and photostats and azos and blueprints and letter presses had done before.
The idea of unsophisticated office personnel gawking at the miraculous Xerox machine and thinking they needed to proofread the copies sounds to me like an anecdote made up to prove a point.
(Or... someone might have been confusing photocopying with OCR. I remember representatives of an OCR company trying to sell OCR equipment to the editorial services department of the company I worked for, circa the late 1970s. A substantial part of their job involved having typists rekey manuscripts which scientists had typed on their own typewriters, prior to word processing.
The OCR people told the chief editor would save incredible amounts of time by avoiding the need for rekeying. "How accurate it is?" she asked. "99.5% accurate," they claimed. She said, "Unless you can guarantee 100% accuracy, your machines are practically valueless to us... because in the reentry process, 20% of the time is spent keying and 80% is spend proofreading, and unless you are 100% accurate we are still going to need to proofread the results.")
The children of the poor are denied a "real" childhood by early immersion in the problems of the adult world, including of course child labor at various times and places in history ("The golf links lie so near the mill/That almost every day/The laboring children can look out/And see the men at play." --Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorne).
The children of the rich are granted over-structured, over-scheduled "privileges" that tend to consist of training lessons for things their parents consider important.
In the 1950s, Robert Paul Smith's "Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing." which complained that children in comfortable suburbs seemed to be spending all their time in adult-sponsored activities and did not know how to play mumblety-peg or conkers...
Wertheimer's "The Seduction of the Innocent" told of the terrible havoc being wreaks on youthful minds by comic books.
Heck, even David Elkind's "The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon" is in its third printing and approaching its 25th anniversary.
Slashdot Mirror
...absolutely all we need is halfway thoughtful, somewhat intelligent application of the paradigms we already have.
If software developers just spent an extra hour to watch an untrained user play with their software... and their managers gave them a couple of extra weeks to incorporate what they learned by watching... that would have more effect on software usability than the introduction of new techniques.
The problem today is that so much software leaves you gasping with amazement at the seeming perversity of their design. It's been observed since the day Windows 95 was introduced that it is stupid to turn off your computer from a button labelled "Start." Microsoft has had over a decade and one, two, three, four, five major software releases to do something about it, and they haven't. If they don't get it yet, all the pie menus and gestures and voice recognition isn't going to help them.
You may cry foul because this isn't strictly speaking, a software problem, but will you take a gander at the button layout on this portable DVD player? In case you don't get it--it's so mind-boggling it took me a while to get it--the northeast button moves you east, the southeast button moves you south, and so forth. That's why every button has a little printed arrow next to it.
An awful lot of modern software design seems to me to be be putting little printed arrows next to utterly misplaced buttons.
Insert comment here about how this technology could be used to render highly detailed and accurate images of the undraped human form.
To those who say Microsoft shouldn't be blamed for the failings of driver vendors... ...what law of physics says that the only way to add support for new hardware to an OS is by writing kernel-level, privileged code?
If Microsoft's OS model requires that vendors write bug-free code, their model is deficient.
Sure, this is common practice... just as it used to be common practice for personal computer software to give application programs full access to all of RAM... but it's not the only way it can be done.
This is not a particularly good counterexample since most OS X hardware support involves kernel-level coding, too... but, for the record, my company uses a non-standard, vendor-specific SCSI interface. As it happens, only a limited number of applications, which we supply, need to access our devices. And it turns out that Mac OS X has all the tools for us to do everything we need, with adequate performance, at the application level. So, that's how we do it. It's a great development convenience, too, because we can use ordinary debugger tools to debug our code... and I don't need to wait for a reboot every time I have a silly bug in my code. (I know none of you ever have bugs in your I/O code, so that's not an issue for you...)
Mac OS X is not designed in such a way that hardware vendors never need to do kernel-level coding. Most hardware vendors do. But it is an existence proof that it is possible to have a situation where new hardware can be supported without using any privileged code.
Every student should write "Copyright ©2006 by so-and-so, all rights reserved."
Yes, I know that under current law everything is automatically copyrighted in the U. S. (although I believe including a notice may make some difference overseas). But there's no harm at all in asserting that one know's ones' rights, it might give teachers pause, and it might ultimately make turnitin's legal situation clearer, by forcing them either to accept the submission copyright notice and all, or to remove it.
The Internet is not a substance, does not induce physiological dependence, does not have a characteristic withdrawal syndrome, does not produce intoxication, does not induce tolerance requiring increasing dosages, and in general does not meet any of the criteria for what used to be the standard definition of the word "addiction."
To talk about addiction to the Internet, or to sex, or to chocolate, or to breathing, is nonsense. If these things are to be called "addictions" then we are using the same word to describe utterly different things. Internet addiction is not the same thing as heroin or nicotine addiction.
I'm not sure why the word is continually being redefined downward so that more and more trivial things can be labelled "addictions" or whom this redefinition benefits.
It seems that we become tolerant to "addictions" and have an controllable craving to label more and more things as "addictions"
I was going to stay
1) Use a MacBookPro
2) Turn on FileVault
3) Problem solved.
But it appears as if there's an equally effective solution in Windows:
kb 307877 simply Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Windows Explorer, locate the file that you want, right-click the file, and then click Properties, on the General tab, click Advanced, Under Compress or Encrypt attributes, select the Encrypt contents to secure data check box, and then click OK If the file is located in an unencrypted folder, you receive an Encryption Warning dialog box. Use one of the following steps: If you want to encrypt only the file, click Encrypt the file only, and then click OK. If you want to encrypt the file and the folder in which it is located, click Encrypt the file and the parent folder, and then click OK.
(yesyesyes, if you detailed the procedure for enabling FileVault it would be nearly as long).
But, I'm 100% serious about this, why don't both Microsoft and Windows enable file encryption by default?
(Full disclosure. Do I use FileVault? No. Why not? Well, to tell the truth, I'm worried about bugs and glitches. There is safety in numbers. If Macs had FileVault enabled by default, then any bugs in it would cause problems for millions of users, and Apple would find out and fix them quickly. As it is, I suspect about 0.01% of all Mac users use it, and I've felt for a long time that one of the keys to avoiding OS trouble is to stay in the mainstream and avoid using anything that lots of people aren't using--unless I have a good reason).
Even in more detail and from more angles, I find it still looksat least as much like a face as the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire, the image of the Virgin Mary in a fogged thermopane window in Milton Hospital, Massachusetts.
It also looks at least as much like a face as human-constructed faces that have been ravaged by time, such as the Sphinx, or Michael Jackson.
"depending upon where your protected files came from, you might be able to restore your rights over the Internet."
This language sounds to me like an acknowledgement that Microsoft has deprived you of rights that you legally possess. You can't "restore" something that you never had.
...I have no idea what goes on at Microsoft in 2006 but let me tell you what went on circa 1990 at a (now-defunct) Fortune 500 minicomputer company, in the days of so-called "CHUI" interfaces (GUI-like interfaces implemented via line-drawing and X-Y character addressing on 80x24 green-screen terminals). I think I've told this story before on Slashdot, so apologies if you've heard it.
A developer was proudly showing off his spiffy new application. I started playing with it, and discovered that there were _three consecutive screens_ each containing the same field, into which the user was required to type the same entry, manually, three consecutive times. And there were no "copy" or "paste" functions. You actually needed to type your phone number or your SSN whatever it was three times in a row.
When I asked about this, he pulled a 150-page functional spec out of a drawer and showed me that he had implemented that the spec called for. It had slipped by. It's not that easy to previsualize how a UI will work based on a paper description.
When I suggested he change it, he said "No way. It took nine months to get that spec approved. Any change would require a review cycle and several meetings to get it approved. And if I change it without getting the spec changed, it won't pass SQA. This project is already behind schedule. I'm implementing it exactly the way this piece of paper says."
Another source of UI weirdness at another company I worked at was a CEO who fancied himself a UI expert. Or at least felt entitled to have the UI tailored to his personal tastes. He was always dictating changes in details of UIs. Unfortunately, he sometimes didn't previsualize how that change would interact with other details, and if you wanted to ask him "Say, now that we've done this thing here hadn't we better change this other thing there so that thus-and-such-bad thing won't happen," his secretary would schedule the appointment for a date a couple weeks from today.
I don't say this is how incomprehensibly strange UI happens at Microsoft. I say these are two ways in which it can happen.
When people catch on that Zune purchasers can't play music downloaded from Napster and its ilk... that Napster and other Microsoft customers have been suckered by the biggest Microsoft head-fake since 1990... I suspect there will be a rash of failures.
It will be comparable to the wave of software development companies that folded or were seriously wounded after hitching their wagon to the OS/2 star (as Microsoft convinced them to do while secretly developing its own products for Windows).
So, "the Mac OS had 4.35 per cent of the world's operating system share last December. Now it only has 4.33 per cent." Is that, by any chance, a share of a "market" that consists mostly of corporations and IT departments?
The Mac has always had that problem. "Market share" depends entirely on how you choose to define the market. Among people who don't want Apple computers, Apple's market share is small.
Cessna has a market share of about 4% of the airplane market (Cessna has revenues of $3.5 billion, Boeing $52.45 billion, Airbus $34.4 billion) but nobody worries about Cessna. If you define "the market" as "general aviation," then suddenly Cessna's market share becomes 33%.
What next? The Seattle Caviar Company's share of the egg market is slipping? Sunkist Oranges only has an 0.001% share of the apple market? Shinola has only a 1% market share of the shit market?
I don't understand why Microsoft didn't, or doesn't provide something similar to they were rumored to provide for iPod owners.
Why can't the Zune store recognize that that you own a PlaysForSure-protected version of a music title, and allow you to download the same title in Zune-protected format at no charge?
...but, isn't that the "J" in AJAX, the underpinnings of Web 2.0?
Why do people even bother to give advice that is basically impossible to follow?
It's not my fault that so many of the websites I want to use now rely on Javascript, but the fact is they do.
Saying "This exploit can be mitigated by turning off Javascripting" is true, but as about as useful as saying "the risks of plane crashes can be mitigated by not flying."
...why couldn't they just get together on HDTV or Blu-Ray in the first place?
There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you can get this cobbled-together monstrosity to work, you could do something equally clever that would make better use of the storage capacity than storing three identical copies of the same movie in three different formats.
As it is, the average DVD has glitches playing in some players. A randomly-selected DVD player probably has only a 98% chance of playing a randomly-selected DVD. It is certain that these disks will play more reliably in one format or the other--and not as reliably as a native-format disk does.
And they _have_ to cost more to manufacture than a single-format disc.
This makes about as much sense as a vinyl phonograph record recorded at 33-1/3 RPM on one side and 45 RPM on the other. That never happened, and this isn't going to happen, either.
The only thing this has going for it is an appeal to trinitarian theology. (But which format is the Father, which is the Son, and which is the Holy Spirit?)
...that the actual sales of the protected disks are not detectably higher than the sales of the unprotected disks, while the extra manufacturing costs are a meaningful nibble out of the profit.
Of course, I have always wondered whether the push to DRM is actually driven by any clear-headed, realistic, cost/benefit analysis based on good, real data... or whether it's an irrational emotional response on the part of media executives. Or the result of very good, misleading sales pitches by the vendors of DRM technology.
...from the off-center weight of the chip... makes the drive hum and vibrate enough to scare consumers.
A few damaged DVD players might put the kibosh on this scheme.
I believe it is the law (i.e. state law, but similar in most states) that gas stations post prices.
We have an unusual situation here in that we have a commodity product--despite advertising efforts to the contrary, few motorists truly believe that it matters whether they buy Shell or Exxon--whose price is very easily compared.
One of the odd features of life in the last few decades is that it is now apparently relatively cheap for companies to launch new products and product variations, and the result is that it is fairly hard to compare prices because it is fairly hard to find exactly _the same_ product in two different stores. The stores that promise to match other stores' advertised price on "the same" product are on fairly safe ground. Two supermarkets may both carry Jif peanut butter, but store A may carry Jif Peanut Butter and Honey but not Simply Jif while store B may carry Simply Jif but not Jif Peanut Butter and Honey. If they both carry the same product, they may not carry it in the same size; store A may carry Jif Crunchy Peanut Butter in the 18 oz and 40 oz size, while store B may carry only the 28 oz size, and so forth.
My state requires unit prices to be posted on shelf labels, and even here the waters are muddied because it is very common to find that adjacent products on the shelf are unit-priced using _different units_ (fluid ounces vs. gallons, etc.)
Generally speaking, it appears as if companies fight commoditization tooth and nail by doing everything they can to withhold real information from consumers and sell "the sizzle" instead. Whether the proliferation of huge numbers of product variations is a deliberate strategy to avoid price comparison I don't know, but it has that effect and I'm sure that corporations find it to be beneficial.
Gasoline prices are one arena where information is available--as a result of government regulation, I believe--and you have something approaching a free market.
Even here, of course, deception is possible. The Boston Globe recently reported that a number of gas stations have taken to calling 89-octane gasoline "regular" and 87-octane gasoline "economy" in hopes that inattentive consumers will inadvertently purchase a more expensive grade of gasoline than they meant to.
(I say "something approaching" because, at least where I live, the number of brands of gasoline has dropped dramatically in the last twenty years, the number of independent stations relative to company-owned stations has dropped, and the percentage price difference between the cheapest and most expensive gasoline in the stations I drive by regularly has narrowed very considerably).
I didn't mean that I have 100-200 cylinder recordings, but that the "smattering of personal content" comprises about 100-200 items total.
...at least, it precisely parallels my personal usage.
My iTunes library contains 2977 items, of which 215 were purchased from the iTunes Music Store.
Most all the rest were: ripped from CDs and/or transferred from LPs, but:
There is also a considerable smattering of "personal content" including home recordings of my brother's piano recitals, radio shows recorded off the air with a Griffin RadioShark and "time-shifted" (I play them on my iPod in the car, then delete them), some downloaded public domain material (cylinder recordings from the UCSB's absolutely amazing Cylinder Recording and Preservation Project. That probably accounts for about 100-200 items.
But, to a first approximation, 7% iTMS purchases, and the rest "RIPS" in the broad sense of digitized copies of material purchased on other media.
...for most of the things I care about. And this device only had double thecapacity of an an alkaline battery. Capacity is mAh. Power is watts.
An alkaline battery might have a capacity of (say) 2000 mAh, meaning that it could power a three-watt bulb for about an hour. This device, if it lives up to the claims, could do so for about two hours.
An alkaline battery couldn't power a 100-watt bulb at all, because it can't deliver more than a few amps. This device apparently _could_ power a 100-watt bulb... but only for about four minutes.
The ability to deliver power, that is to deliver energy in a short, intense burst, might be very useful for some applications. But it wouldn't let you recharge your laptop once a week or anything like that.
(There's another question I have. A battery hold an almost steady voltage for a long time, then declines fairly rapidly. Almost a square wave. This is one reason why it's hard to measure discharge state. Presumably these ultracapacitors have a smooth, exponential voltage decline, like radioactive decay. That probably means that you need tricky circuitry to exploit them... and there is probably always a significant amount of power in the device that you can't use, because the voltage has dropped too low).
If the rumored product isn't terribly newsworthy, how can the rumor itself be newsworthy?
If I cared about hearing about the existence of every Apple announcement, I'd read Apple Hot News, not Slashdot.
Mutter, mutter, mumble, mutter, mutter...
I'll bet all of Microsoft's partners who designed to the PlaysForSure standard are real happy about this. Microsoft lobbies all of them to adopt PlaysForSure because that's Microsoft's strategic direction and it's what everyone is going to be using... while Microsoft quietly develops their own product that goes off in a completely different direction.
Remember when Microsoft was (successfully) getting everyone else to develop for OS/2 while they themselves were developing for Windows?
One of the pleasures of graduate school was access to a very good research library. The university I was at had the Transactions of the Royal Society back to volume 1, number 1. (When I commented positively on this to a librarian, meaning I was delighted by this, she missed my point and tut-tutted, say, "Yes, I know, it's just terrible, but they won't approve the budget for expanding the Rare Books room...)
It was fascinating to open volumes at random at publication intervals of about fifty years and see the evolution of the scientific writing style. Before 1800, it was lively and enthusiastic and communicated a sense of excitement and joy. Around the mid-1800s a transformation took place and it acquired the stodgy, distanced, passive-voice writing style that persists to this day.
This sounds like an urban legend, if not outright made up.
I am old enough to remember the introduction of the Xerox 914, and while it was revolutionary, the only things revolutionary about it were the speed, the copy quality, the copy durability, etc. I never ever ever heard of anyone suggesting that the copies needed to be proofread.
Similar processes had been available literally for centuries. There was nothing new about the idea of an exact image copy. The "Shovel Museum" at Stonehill College in Easton, MA has bound volumes containing hundreds of copies of letters sent to the Ames Shovel Company, which were copied by a "letter press," a device which squeezed the handwritten letter against a piece of moist paper, transferring enough ink to make a copy. These copies were perfectly legible, even though more than a century old.
Before the Xerox machine there was the 3M Thermofax, which made instantaneous dry copies. They were expensive, and the coated paper was nasty, curly stuff, and being heat-sensitive the copies were not exactly archival, and the "exposure" tended to be hard to adjust and uneven across the page. And since the image was produced by heat absorption, in effect it was an image made by far-infrared light, and idiosyncratic: some inks wouldn't copy well. Heck, a Thermofax copy needed to be proofread--but I never heard of anyone doing it.
Before the Thermofax there were photostats, a fast but not instantaneous wet chemical process that made negative images on paper. And of course architects used blueprints and Azos and so forth...
So, Xerox copies were not unprecedented. They were just an amazingly fast, cheap, high-quality way of doing what Thermofaxes and photostats and azos and blueprints and letter presses had done before.
The idea of unsophisticated office personnel gawking at the miraculous Xerox machine and thinking they needed to proofread the copies sounds to me like an anecdote made up to prove a point.
(Or... someone might have been confusing photocopying with OCR. I remember representatives of an OCR company trying to sell OCR equipment to the editorial services department of the company I worked for, circa the late 1970s. A substantial part of their job involved having typists rekey manuscripts which scientists had typed on their own typewriters, prior to word processing.
The OCR people told the chief editor would save incredible amounts of time by avoiding the need for rekeying. "How accurate it is?" she asked. "99.5% accurate," they claimed. She said, "Unless you can guarantee 100% accuracy, your machines are practically valueless to us... because in the reentry process, 20% of the time is spent keying and 80% is spend proofreading, and unless you are 100% accurate we are still going to need to proofread the results.")
The children of the poor are denied a "real" childhood by early immersion in the problems of the adult world, including of course child labor at various times and places in history ("The golf links lie so near the mill/That almost every day/The laboring children can look out/And see the men at play." --Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorne).
The children of the rich are granted over-structured, over-scheduled "privileges" that tend to consist of training lessons for things their parents consider important.
In the 1950s, Robert Paul Smith's "Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing." which complained that children in comfortable suburbs seemed to be spending all their time in adult-sponsored activities and did not know how to play mumblety-peg or conkers...
Wertheimer's "The Seduction of the Innocent" told of the terrible havoc being wreaks on youthful minds by comic books.
Heck, even David Elkind's "The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon" is in its third printing and approaching its 25th anniversary.