One example in which Hollywood is somewhat realistic is in their depiction of progress bars to build suspense. I rather like this device.
In "Under Siege 2", Steven Seagal is desperately trying to send a fax from an Apple Newton (!)... which he has wired into the satellite transmission system on a moving train using, if I recall correctly (not), some nailclippers and his native SEAL instincts to identify the correct wires. The progress bar moves slowly, slowly, slowly as we hear bad guys coming closer, closer, closer to Seagal's hiding place.
...from the customer side. But if you're an ISP tech, read the second one first, you'll like it better.
Story number 1. My Verizon DSL modem one day refuses to sync up. No signal. No connectivity. Only light on is the power light. I call Verizon. They give me an trouble tag number. Three days later: still dead. I call them for an update. They insist that they have no record of the number. After many call transfers I am told that they simply cancelled every trouble report received during a two-day window, because some worm, I forget which one, hit. I'm, yes, a bit angry, because I insist the virus couldn't have been responsible and that the report shouldn't have been cancelled. Tech says, sure it could. I say, no, because my machine is a Mac and my wife's machine is running Windows 98 and this virus doesn't affect either and she just ran a Norton AV scan and came up clean. And anyway, I say, on my DSL modem the only light on is the power light. And a guy I know in town who also has Verizon DSL says his is out, too. And it's not likely to be a wiring problem on my side of the interface because the phones work. He says the virus could have infected my LinkSys home DSL router. He wants me to cycle power on everything and review through all the network email settings with him, etc. etc. I humor him--well, actually I have no choice--and after we work through his routine he issues a trouble tag number. About twelve hours later, the other lights on my DSL modem start flashing and it syncs up and everything works.
Story number 2. We suddenly lose all connectivity with the Internet. I call Verizon, he wants me to power-cycle and reboot everything, I explain all sorts of excellent reasons why it can't be that and has to be a problem at their end, he tells me he can't go any farther unless I do what he asks, I power-cycle the DSL modem, the LinkSys Router, and my Mac... and bingo, everything worked fine. (Yes, I apologized to the tech for being testy).
Anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean?
Or, alternatively, can you think of any really funny misinterpretations?
What good is an unavailable word processor?
on
ThinkFree Online Review
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I was about to try a quick "reality check" test, namely seeing whether ThinkFree could properly render and edit the actual Microsoft Word document I am actually working on right now. Not a deliberate stress test, nothing very fancy, no equations, but, yes, some style sheets, some tables that would lose all usefulness if not rendered with reasonably high fidelity (including some shaded in boxes, some split and merged cells), and quite a few strategically placed manual page breaks, so the document will be more or less ruined if font metrics and margin settings aren't handled accurately.
The site says it's "unavailable from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. on April 25th."
Well, it just so happen I need to do some work on this document soon. (Actually, of course, I should be working on it right now instead of reading Slashdot).
Guess what? Microsoft Word is available from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. on April 25th.
As always, in such things I may be mistaken, or the condition may be transient, but I no longer seem to be able to access their web-based email with Firefox for Windows 1.0. It used to work perfectly. Of course, IE works...
The concept of "delivering on the promise..."
on
Viiv Falls Flat
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
...has always been a bit alien to the PC industry.
PC types keep scratching their heads trying to figure out what people like about Apple. It never seems to cross their mind that it's because Apple at least delivers some of what it promises.
The article says: "The worst experience of all came when I tried to view Intel's own showcase of Viiv content. At first, clicking this button yielded a "Windows Media Center Edition required" error. After rebooting the computer to try again, I was presented with a lengthy license agreement and an ActiveX installation dialog. The subsequent download seemed to stall out when the HP-bundled Norton Internet Security firewall warned that "EntriqMediaServer" was a high-risk program that it should always block. Naturally, that was a Viiv component."
I cannot ever imagine that Apple would ever, ever, ever ship a product in a state like that. Words fail me. Did nobody at HP or Intel ever try actually using the product even once? Does anything think they have responsibility for what the user finds when they take the product out of the box?
Our local CVS pharmacy, on Nahatan Street (which is the "high street" of my population-30,000 U. S. burg) does carry Polaroid film. Two kinds, in fact: Polaroid 600 and Polaroid SX70.
The last time I checked, the local Best Buy carried not one but two LP turntables... AudioTechnica and Sony if I remember correctly. And our local Radio Shack has LP cartridges. I haven't seen an LP "player" in the flesh, but I get a number of mail-order catalogs that offer functional modern reproductions of vintage Crosley "record players."
Polaroid film and LP players are not hard to find. And they are real physical objects that need to be manufactured.
But SmallFurryCreature is too lazy to put in a few lines of code to ensure that customers with older PCs can access a website? I assure you that people with screen resolutions set at 800x600 or 640x480 are quite common in "the real world."
When people with those displays can't access SmallFurryCreature's website, they are NOT going to jump up and go to CompUSA and buy a new PC. No, what they'll do is, they'll go to some other company's website. There are plenty of them on the Web that work on low-resolution screens.
Maybe SmallFurryCreature works for a company that thinks losing, say, 1% of their customer base to the competition is no big deal. Good luck to him and his company: they're going to need it.
This is the animated equivalent of chartjunk. It does not improve a bar chart to make the bars look like Cuisinaire rods instead of rectangles. It does not improve a slide show to move and zoom the pictures in random directions.
This is a silly demonstration of technology for technology's sake.
...the San Jose Quicksilver reports that according to court filings, "Segway" Delmonte Jr. said that an Apple director, former vice president Al Gorithm, told him to leak the information, saying that he had direct authorization from Steve Jobs to do so. Under Apple law, Jobs has the legal right to declassify documents, but Delmonte said this was the only time he recalled in his experience when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by virtue of the CEO's authorization that it be disclosed.
I wish I could remember who told me that it was a warning sign when a company builds fancy new headquarters.
This held true for Wang Laboratories, which built The Towers just a few years before imploding... RCA's computer division build a huge, shiny building in Marlboro, Massachusetts, then collapsed, Digital BOUGHT that building and collapsed... Come to think of it, just when did Apple build the first Infinite Loop campus?
(If the new-headquarters effect is more than coincidence, the cause and effect is that it tends to indicate a degree of overconfidence, ego, hubris...)
I'm completely baffled. The article says that the system transmits bits of "key" over a quantum-secured channel, and that "The rules of quantum mechanics ensure that anyone intercepting the key is detected." It then says that video is encrypted, using one key bit per video bit.
Why not just send the video itself over the quantum-secured channel?
In both cases, if someone was "detected" intercepting the key, you'd have to stop sending your information, so why not just send the information of the quantum channel and stop immediately if interception were detected?
So, I dealt with it slowly and passively, you dealt with it quickly and actively, but in both cases we treated it as a big deal, and we dealt with it, and the end result was... we were gone.
Michael Brundage says, "28% of the managers I had at Microsoft were so awful" that in future, there wouldn't be room for him and either of them in the same organization... but it's not big deal.
"Did I mention I've had six or seven managers in five years? Two were so awful that if they were hired into my current organization (even on another team), I'd quit on the spot."
One has to wonder why he didn't "quit on the spot" previously... say, about the time the second was assigned to supervise him.
In thirty years, working in mid-sized nonprofit, one Fortune 500 company, one ten-person startup, and two mid-sized for-profits, I've only had no managers "so awful that if they were hired into my current organization (even on another team) I'd quite on the spot." I've only had one so awful that if they were hired to supervise me, I'd quit... and when he was, I did. (Honesty compels me to say that it took me a year before I did... but I did).
How can you die happy without ever having seen the photo of the log book with the moth taped into it?
How can you die happy without ever having read about Maurice Wilkes' Aha! moment: "It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that...the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs."
Well, it wasn't just important in the history of PCs. The introduction of the 4004 was a pivotal event in the history of electronics (right up there with the Audion, the Klystron, and the transistor itself) and in the history of computing (same league as the Norden bombsight, the ENIAC, and the IBM 360).
If you don't know what those are, either, you may find that they are really quite worth finding out about.
At the time it was introduced, there was no other microprocessor that came close to matching it.
It was indisputably not only the best microprocessor Intel had produced to date, but the best microprocessor on the market.
Simply no contest. No argument. It superlative in every way, the fastest, the cheapest, the lowest in power consumption, the most advanced in architecture, the widest path. It was king of the hill, the top of the tree, the Cadillac of microprocessors, the ne plus ultra, it bestrode the world of microprocessors like a colossus.
The world will never again see the day when one manufacturer so dominated the microprocessor market that a single product had a 100.0% market share.
In the early days of stereo, recording companies made, and in some cases sold at bargain prices, demo disks that would show off the capabilities of the new medium.
These disks usually had a mixture of material on them, some quite gimmicky (marching bands marching across the soundstage, jet planes, steam engines, popular music arranged with extreme separation between left and right channels), but always recorded with truly high fidelity and often genuinely impressive.
Under the right circumstances... the difference between a high-fidelity mono recording of a symphony orchestra belting out something like the 1812 Overture and a stereo recording of the same material... was extremely dramatic. And wallet-loosening. Alas, the average classical stereo LP was not as well recorded as the demo disks...
Similarly, the early presentations of Cinerama, which represented very roughly the same improvement factor over traditional 35 mm as HD does over NTSC, were anthology-travelogues that just plain grabbed you by the eyeballs and thrilled you. OK, after an hour or so it was hard to maintain a constant "wow!" level, but just about the time you were starting to yawn at the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, boom! they'd stick you in a plane flying over the Grand Canyon.
So, where are the $3.95 demo HD-DVDs with, I don't know, slo-mo shots where you can count the stitches in the seam of the spinning pitched baseball, the glorious aerial shots of America from sea to shining sea, the shuttle launches in full surround sound.... what the heck, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir... or, if you prefer, Fifty Cent... something to show you instantly why you need this gadget NOW?
The whole purposes of these EULAs is not to communicate clearly, nor to negotiate a good-faith bargain, but to manipulate consumers in putting their apparent agreement on record.
A landlord has no interest in pointing out that the "standard lease form" he shoves at you is one of many, and that he picked the most one-sided one he could find. He is certainly not going to say "Actually clause 16 is against the law and unenforceable in this state, but I hope you don't know that because most of my tenants don't and its a minor but valued source of extra profit for me."
Car rental companies were required to print their agreements in a certain type size so that at least it was possible to read them... if you didn't mind holding up a line of people behind you... and they responded by printing them in larger type, but using a color scheme of dark grey on white grey.
Food companies don't list their ingredients on the label because they like the idea, but because they were dragged kicking and screaming by the Pure Food and Drug Act and its successors. And they constantly negotiate for weaselly exceptions. For example, ingredients must be listed in order of predominance, but they are allowed to say "beef and pork" as long as the food includes both beef and pork, even if there is more pork than beef...
In what way would a clear-language EULA serve the interest of the vendor?
If it did, in fact, serve the interest of the vendor better than the current murky EULAs, I suspect some vendors would be using them already. If, as I believe, it does not serve the interest of the vendor, then why on earth would they agree to use them unless required to by law?
In 1995, in "Under Siege 2," Steven Segal saves America by faxing critical data using an Apple Newton. He secretly taps into into a satellite communication system while hiding from approaching bad guys on a moving train. The camera cuts back and forth from the surroundings to an extreme closeup of the snot-green Newton screen which happens to say "Newton Fax" on it in huge letters, and its slow-moving progess bar, creeping, creeping toward completion as we become aware of the bad guys approaching closer, closer.
In "Independence Day," 1996, Jeff Goldblum saves civilization by using an Apple PowerBook to infect the alien spaceship with a computer virus. (Impossible, of course, since we all know Macs aren't subject to viruses). One charcoal-grey laptop looks pretty much like another, but the camera just happens to get a nice closeup shot with the Apple logo placed just right.
Slashdot Mirror
One example in which Hollywood is somewhat realistic is in their depiction of progress bars to build suspense. I rather like this device.
In "Under Siege 2", Steven Seagal is desperately trying to send a fax from an Apple Newton (!)... which he has wired into the satellite transmission system on a moving train using, if I recall correctly (not), some nailclippers and his native SEAL instincts to identify the correct wires. The progress bar moves slowly, slowly, slowly as we hear bad guys coming closer, closer, closer to Seagal's hiding place.
...from the customer side. But if you're an ISP tech, read the second one first, you'll like it better.
Story number 1. My Verizon DSL modem one day refuses to sync up. No signal. No connectivity. Only light on is the power light. I call Verizon. They give me an trouble tag number. Three days later: still dead. I call them for an update. They insist that they have no record of the number. After many call transfers I am told that they simply cancelled every trouble report received during a two-day window, because some worm, I forget which one, hit. I'm, yes, a bit angry, because I insist the virus couldn't have been responsible and that the report shouldn't have been cancelled. Tech says, sure it could. I say, no, because my machine is a Mac and my wife's machine is running Windows 98 and this virus doesn't affect either and she just ran a Norton AV scan and came up clean. And anyway, I say, on my DSL modem the only light on is the power light. And a guy I know in town who also has Verizon DSL says his is out, too. And it's not likely to be a wiring problem on my side of the interface because the phones work. He says the virus could have infected my LinkSys home DSL router. He wants me to cycle power on everything and review through all the network email settings with him, etc. etc. I humor him--well, actually I have no choice--and after we work through his routine he issues a trouble tag number. About twelve hours later, the other lights on my DSL modem start flashing and it syncs up and everything works.
Story number 2. We suddenly lose all connectivity with the Internet. I call Verizon, he wants me to power-cycle and reboot everything, I explain all sorts of excellent reasons why it can't be that and has to be a problem at their end, he tells me he can't go any farther unless I do what he asks, I power-cycle the DSL modem, the LinkSys Router, and my Mac... and bingo, everything worked fine. (Yes, I apologized to the tech for being testy).
No, just check Microsoft. The hack to fix this is out already. And a what a diabolically clever and sneaky hack it is, too!
...the nag screens. TFA says
"You can uninstall Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications by using Add or Remove Programs in Control Panel."
Did I just violate the DMCA by disclosing this?
...because I want to be like Gandhi and Edison and Amelia Earhart and Jim Henson and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Anyone have any idea what this is supposed to mean?
Or, alternatively, can you think of any really funny misinterpretations?
I was about to try a quick "reality check" test, namely seeing whether ThinkFree could properly render and edit the actual Microsoft Word document I am actually working on right now. Not a deliberate stress test, nothing very fancy, no equations, but, yes, some style sheets, some tables that would lose all usefulness if not rendered with reasonably high fidelity (including some shaded in boxes, some split and merged cells), and quite a few strategically placed manual page breaks, so the document will be more or less ruined if font metrics and margin settings aren't handled accurately.
The site says it's "unavailable from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. on April 25th."
Well, it just so happen I need to do some work on this document soon. (Actually, of course, I should be working on it right now instead of reading Slashdot).
Guess what? Microsoft Word is available from 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. on April 25th.
As always, in such things I may be mistaken, or the condition may be transient, but I no longer seem to be able to access their web-based email with Firefox for Windows 1.0. It used to work perfectly. Of course, IE works...
...has always been a bit alien to the PC industry.
PC types keep scratching their heads trying to figure out what people like about Apple. It never seems to cross their mind that it's because Apple at least delivers some of what it promises.
The article says: "The worst experience of all came when I tried to view Intel's own showcase of Viiv content. At first, clicking this button yielded a "Windows Media Center Edition required" error. After rebooting the computer to try again, I was presented with a lengthy license agreement and an ActiveX installation dialog. The subsequent download seemed to stall out when the HP-bundled Norton Internet Security firewall warned that "EntriqMediaServer" was a high-risk program that it should always block. Naturally, that was a Viiv component."
I cannot ever imagine that Apple would ever, ever, ever ship a product in a state like that. Words fail me. Did nobody at HP or Intel ever try actually using the product even once? Does anything think they have responsibility for what the user finds when they take the product out of the box?
I call bullshit on SmallFurryCreature's comment.
Our local CVS pharmacy, on Nahatan Street (which is the "high street" of my population-30,000 U. S. burg) does carry Polaroid film. Two kinds, in fact: Polaroid 600 and Polaroid SX70.
The last time I checked, the local Best Buy carried not one but two LP turntables... AudioTechnica and Sony if I remember correctly. And our local Radio Shack has LP cartridges. I haven't seen an LP "player" in the flesh, but I get a number of mail-order catalogs that offer functional modern reproductions of vintage Crosley "record players."
Polaroid film and LP players are not hard to find. And they are real physical objects that need to be manufactured.
But SmallFurryCreature is too lazy to put in a few lines of code to ensure that customers with older PCs can access a website? I assure you that people with screen resolutions set at 800x600 or 640x480 are quite common in "the real world."
When people with those displays can't access SmallFurryCreature's website, they are NOT going to jump up and go to CompUSA and buy a new PC. No, what they'll do is, they'll go to some other company's website. There are plenty of them on the Web that work on low-resolution screens.
Maybe SmallFurryCreature works for a company that thinks losing, say, 1% of their customer base to the competition is no big deal. Good luck to him and his company: they're going to need it.
This is the animated equivalent of chartjunk. It does not improve a bar chart to make the bars look like Cuisinaire rods instead of rectangles. It does not improve a slide show to move and zoom the pictures in random directions.
This is a silly demonstration of technology for technology's sake.
...the San Jose Quicksilver reports that according to court filings, "Segway" Delmonte Jr. said that an Apple director, former vice president Al Gorithm, told him to leak the information, saying that he had direct authorization from Steve Jobs to do so. Under Apple law, Jobs has the legal right to declassify documents, but Delmonte said this was the only time he recalled in his experience when he disclosed a document to a reporter that was effectively declassified by virtue of the CEO's authorization that it be disclosed.
I wish I could remember who told me that it was a warning sign when a company builds fancy new headquarters.
This held true for Wang Laboratories, which built The Towers just a few years before imploding... RCA's computer division build a huge, shiny building in Marlboro, Massachusetts, then collapsed, Digital BOUGHT that building and collapsed...
Come to think of it, just when did Apple build the first Infinite Loop campus?
(If the new-headquarters effect is more than coincidence, the cause and effect is that it tends to indicate a degree of overconfidence, ego, hubris...)
speaking off the record, said "I, for one, welcome our new canid overlords."
I'm completely baffled. The article says that the system transmits bits of "key" over a quantum-secured channel, and that "The rules of quantum mechanics ensure that anyone intercepting the key is detected." It then says that video is encrypted, using one key bit per video bit.
Why not just send the video itself over the quantum-secured channel?
In both cases, if someone was "detected" intercepting the key, you'd have to stop sending your information, so why not just send the information of the quantum channel and stop immediately if interception were detected?
So, I dealt with it slowly and passively, you dealt with it quickly and actively, but in both cases we treated it as a big deal, and we dealt with it, and the end result was... we were gone.
Michael Brundage says, "28% of the managers I had at Microsoft were so awful" that in future, there wouldn't be room for him and either of them in the same organization... but it's not big deal.
But then again, I notice he's posted his resume
"Did I mention I've had six or seven managers in five years? Two were so awful that if they were hired into my current organization (even on another team), I'd quit on the spot."
One has to wonder why he didn't "quit on the spot" previously... say, about the time the second was assigned to supervise him.
In thirty years, working in mid-sized nonprofit, one Fortune 500 company, one ten-person startup, and two mid-sized for-profits, I've only had no managers "so awful that if they were hired into my current organization (even on another team) I'd quite on the spot." I've only had one so awful that if they were hired to supervise me, I'd quit... and when he was, I did. (Honesty compels me to say that it took me a year before I did... but I did).
How can you die happy without ever having seen the photo of the log book with the moth taped into it?
How can you die happy without ever having read about Maurice Wilkes' Aha! moment: "It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that...the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs."
Yeah, well, Apple had the same idea several years ago, and that's why OS X is open source.
Perhaps the FSF doesn't consider Apple's source license to be free--I haven't read the latest papal nuncios on that--but it is open.
Dvorak! Pssst! Here it is. Right up to version 10.4.6, fresh, tasty, and just the griddle. Enjoy!
Well, it wasn't just important in the history of PCs. The introduction of the 4004 was a pivotal event in the history of electronics (right up there with the Audion, the Klystron, and the transistor itself) and in the history of computing (same league as the Norden bombsight, the ENIAC, and the IBM 360).
If you don't know what those are, either, you may find that they are really quite worth finding out about.
It was 100%.
It was 100.0%.
It was 100.00000000000%.
Everything I stated was indisputable objective fact, not opinion.
At the time it was introduced, there was no other microprocessor that came close to matching it.
It was indisputably not only the best microprocessor Intel had produced to date, but the best microprocessor on the market.
Simply no contest. No argument. It superlative in every way, the fastest, the cheapest, the lowest in power consumption, the most advanced in architecture, the widest path. It was king of the hill, the top of the tree, the Cadillac of microprocessors, the ne plus ultra, it bestrode the world of microprocessors like a colossus.
The world will never again see the day when one manufacturer so dominated the microprocessor market that a single product had a 100.0% market share.
In the early days of stereo, recording companies made, and in some cases sold at bargain prices, demo disks that would show off the capabilities of the new medium.
These disks usually had a mixture of material on them, some quite gimmicky (marching bands marching across the soundstage, jet planes, steam engines, popular music arranged with extreme separation between left and right channels), but always recorded with truly high fidelity and often genuinely impressive.
Under the right circumstances... the difference between a high-fidelity mono recording of a symphony orchestra belting out something like the 1812 Overture and a stereo recording of the same material... was extremely dramatic. And wallet-loosening. Alas, the average classical stereo LP was not as well recorded as the demo disks...
Similarly, the early presentations of Cinerama, which represented very roughly the same improvement factor over traditional 35 mm as HD does over NTSC, were anthology-travelogues that just plain grabbed you by the eyeballs and thrilled you. OK, after an hour or so it was hard to maintain a constant "wow!" level, but just about the time you were starting to yawn at the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, boom! they'd stick you in a plane flying over the Grand Canyon.
So, where are the $3.95 demo HD-DVDs with, I don't know, slo-mo shots where you can count the stitches in the seam of the spinning pitched baseball, the glorious aerial shots of America from sea to shining sea, the shuttle launches in full surround sound.... what the heck, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir... or, if you prefer, Fifty Cent... something to show you instantly why you need this gadget NOW?
The whole purposes of these EULAs is not to communicate clearly, nor to negotiate a good-faith bargain, but to manipulate consumers in putting their apparent agreement on record.
A landlord has no interest in pointing out that the "standard lease form" he shoves at you is one of many, and that he picked the most one-sided one he could find. He is certainly not going to say "Actually clause 16 is against the law and unenforceable in this state, but I hope you don't know that because most of my tenants don't and its a minor but valued source of extra profit for me."
Car rental companies were required to print their agreements in a certain type size so that at least it was possible to read them... if you didn't mind holding up a line of people behind you... and they responded by printing them in larger type, but using a color scheme of dark grey on white grey.
Food companies don't list their ingredients on the label because they like the idea, but because they were dragged kicking and screaming by the Pure Food and Drug Act and its successors. And they constantly negotiate for weaselly exceptions. For example, ingredients must be listed in order of predominance, but they are allowed to say "beef and pork" as long as the food includes both beef and pork, even if there is more pork than beef...
In what way would a clear-language EULA serve the interest of the vendor?
If it did, in fact, serve the interest of the vendor better than the current murky EULAs, I suspect some vendors would be using them already. If, as I believe, it does not serve the interest of the vendor, then why on earth would they agree to use them unless required to by law?
In 1995, in "Under Siege 2," Steven Segal saves America by faxing critical data using an Apple Newton. He secretly taps into into a satellite communication system while hiding from approaching bad guys on a moving train. The camera cuts back and forth from the surroundings to an extreme closeup of the snot-green Newton screen which happens to say "Newton Fax" on it in huge letters, and its slow-moving progess bar, creeping, creeping toward completion as we become aware of the bad guys approaching closer, closer.
In "Independence Day," 1996, Jeff Goldblum saves civilization by using an Apple PowerBook to infect the alien spaceship with a computer virus. (Impossible, of course, since we all know Macs aren't subject to viruses). One charcoal-grey laptop looks pretty much like another, but the camera just happens to get a nice closeup shot with the Apple logo placed just right.