The Internet is like a slot machine
on
Hooked On The Web
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· Score: 1
You're familiar with the idea of Pavlovian conditioning - stimulus / response. There are a lot of other conditioning structures, particularly operant conditioning that reinforces specific behaviors.
The strongest conditioning comes from something called a variable reinforcement schedule - the reinforcement comes after a random number of repetitions of the behavior (so, say for a rat, between 1 and 20 presses on a lever to get a food pellet).
You can see that same reinforcement pattern in slot machines that pay out at a random interval of behavior...and you can see it online, with a random amount of clicking between the reinforcement of finding relevant content...
Is it addiction? Well, it's conditioning for sure...and that can lead to addiction.
The part of the story that I found most interesting was the guy just screwed around in his kitchen, without any sort of plan for replicating his results. At one point, he created a bouncing bubble - one that didn't break, and was flexible, bouncing 'like a superball'. And he couldn't duplicate it again, since he's just been putting in a bit of this and a bit of that....
Sad, and educational.
The lesson: When you screw around inventing stuff in the kitchen, you should video tape yourself...because nothing beats having footage of you making exploding potions on America's Funniest Home Videos.
The ipod functions better as an mp3 player than any competitor, largely because of the functional UI and industrial design. The scroll wheel and interface are what's worth the premium, not support for fringe formats or feature creeping.
You seem to suggest that creating a Dyson sphere is possible in the same timeframe as very early terraforming...given that we don't have any tech. capable of the kind of thing you're talking about, but that we do have genetic splicing for extremophile organisms, I think you're optimistic.
Deja View camera does this on a smaller scale (only the last 30 seconds are cached).
>It could have a wifi setup as well and a wearable interface as well so not only could I edit my content on the go, but I could also upload it right away to Google's service and start making money.
Even with a longer timeframe, I'm not sure about the underpants gnomes business model you're suggesting... 1. Upload video to Google 2. ????? 3. Profit!
faster LCD response lower color depth
on
Are CRTs History?
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· Score: 1
the 8ms LCDs I've seen have dropped color depth in order to get the speed boost. Not important if all you do is play Doom 3 with its palette of gloom, but maybe not a good choice if you also want to do things with Photoshop, video, watch movies, etc.
This guy doesn't get it. Security is much more about people, not about 50 character passwords and redundant firewalls. Social engineering is much more of an issue than triple firewalls.
14 Character pwds for his kids, on his home network, that isn't connected to the outside (his VMware box is for internet). Yeah, that's useful.
He reminds me of the guy in town who advertises websites that a backwards compatible to Netscape 1.2 - very shrill, gets some attention, but is really clueless.
>Don't want your data exposed? Don't put it on the web?
Uhh...in this case, that would mean not applying to Harvard, since it was the university that put the data on the web, not the individuals involved.
That's also the case in a lot of other personal data leaks - it's info you need to provide an organization to get a loan, get a job, etc.
Saying 'just don't do it' is naive, and deflects the conversation from the real issue, which is how do we get organizations to be accountable and responsible for the information that we provide?
Bill Gates is the founder of Corbis...along with having investments in a lot of other companies.
Limit is about marketing and ROI, not engineering
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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· Score: 1
I fully agree that we *could* see significant speed increases. However, the benefit for AMD and Intel in boosting speeds just isn't there - Intel delayed their 4Ghz offering not because they couldn't bin some chips into a 4ghz bucket, but because the return for hitting higher clock speeds just isn't there - there's not enough of a market, they need to get the return out of existing investments before moving on, and there are few applications that demand that kind of horsepower.
It's not just about free tagging your own content.
The other key part of social categorization is that there is a *feedback loop* based on tag popularity that reinforces common tags - the more people who use a tag, the more prominence it gets in the system, encouraging people to use the common term.
Flickr and 43things use bigger type to show tag popularity.
Social categorization is useful because it is fuelled by self-interest - people tag info in these systems to find it later themselves - but it has a public benefit in finding related information.
It's also no silver bullet - but it's useful as part of a bigger information architecture effort (my business partner started the whole discussion about social categorization, and we're starting to use it on some projects)
In usability testing sessions, we often ask people how they would find a web site. Many just type the name into the address bar, without www. or a tld. In many browsers, that triggers a search (though often on MSN instead of Google).
While the internet has gone mainstream, that doesn't mean that the conceptual model of sites, servers, domains, etc. jumped the chasm from early adopters over to soccer moms.
cz
Just Do It doesn't have to be blind= go visit site
on
Switching to Contracting?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Telephone interview from 10 miles away???
'Just do it' doesn't have to be a blind decision. If they're only 10 miles from home, talk to the hiring manager about coming on site for a few hours.
You'll want to meet the people you'll be working with, maybe go for lunch, talk about what work is like, find out if contracting is the norm, etc. Get any promises of actions, benefits, etc. in writing-especially things like 3 day weeks. That should be in a contract, reviewed by YOUR lawyer, and include things like rate increases or other compensation for extra hours past 3 days (if that's what they're promising).
You should also try to have an offline, unofficial conversation later with some of the non-PHBs that you meet in a site visit.
You may also already know someone who knows someone who works there through local user groups, former colleagues, etc. who would be open to a chat.
Also consider your options - are you already gainfully employed, will this advance your career in a way you're interested in, what other options do you have for job, etc.
It's a nice thought - open source user experience design (user research, interaction design, functionality, UI, not just visual design).
However, on most OSS projects, if you don't code, you're a second-class citizen. There are regular threads every year on user experience lists about "why the OSS community should listen to us" that are filled with anecdotes of rejection by dev teams when a designer or usability person has tried to get involved.
I don't have any particular answers either, other than that I'm sure there are good OSS developers who would like UX design talent on the team - but there's not a real venue for getting them to work together, and there's not a culture of involving noncoders in most OSS projects.
Open Usability is trying to bridge the gap, but still has a long long way to go. (from getting profile in the OSS community and UX community to getting rid of the focus on 'usability' professionals and a focus on testing / evaluation)
Usability testing often takes the 'throw crap at the wall and see what sticks' mentality. However, testing only acts as a natural selector in the population of features - it selects features that perform better, but only from those features that are in the prototype that gets tested.
What if necessary features aren't in the prototype?
Testing is a poor tool for doing feature selection and coming up with the concept, functional spec, and interaction design for a product.
Better than testing is doing up front field research to really understand user needs; internal business interviews to understand business goals; and then looking at features that will meet needs (instead of going on a feature frenzy first, as many many open source projects do)
Because they almost universally don't know what they really need. Asking them to draw screens is great - but don't take it as gospel.
Instead you need to understand that Feature requests are symptoms of goals. If you follow up a particular feature request or screen widget with 'Why' you'll be able to design a UI that actually meets their needs, instead of something that they think will meet their needs.
ps developers shouldn't design UI either. That's why we have user researchers, information architects, interaction designers, ui designers, etc. Even if someone is able to code and to design (very very rare) there is a significant conflict of interest between design and implementation.
Well, the cost of living is also around 40% less (or close enough - sometimes less, sometimes more). Toronto and Vancouver are more spendy than Ottawa, Montreal, or Calgary. But you can have a very nice lifestyle making 40% of a New York or San Jose salary in those three cities. Even more so in places like Edmonton, Regina, or Winnipeg.
One challenge would be paying any US debt load (student loan, US car payment, credit card debt) with Canadian dollars.
The equivalent to A3 paper is tabloid or ledger paper; at 11x17" (28x43cm) ( it is twice the size of a standard 8.5x11" (21.6x28cm) letter-size sheet. (you're on your own for the rest of the metric conversion in this post)
Typical printers do letter and legal (8.5x14"), large format office printers also does tabloid. Some large format photo places will do prints up to 24x36". Plotters typically work on a 36 or 48" wide roll.
Having lived a couple years in Australia, the elegance of metric papers is appreciated, though I'm not sure what the 'legal' paper equivalent would be - B something.
If you actually read the article, you'd see that the author is comparing carnal lust with the lust for power. It's a hypothetical game that involves the quote where you inserted D&D.
But yeah, it's a poor analogy...FUD indeed.
And while it's hard to argue that D&D doesn't encourage a "must find the +5 vorpal blade so I can kill Ztha the dragon and reach level 15" mindset, that's not really likely to encourage a megalomanic rush for glory - play D&D, become obsessed with being elected President...or a subsequent decline in family values.
While DBA types have used the info. architecture label, the term was coined in 1975 by Richard Saul Wurman to refer to something far removed from entity-relationship diagrams.
Slashdot Mirror
You're familiar with the idea of Pavlovian conditioning - stimulus / response. There are a lot of other conditioning structures, particularly operant conditioning that reinforces specific behaviors.
The strongest conditioning comes from something called a variable reinforcement schedule - the reinforcement comes after a random number of repetitions of the behavior (so, say for a rat, between 1 and 20 presses on a lever to get a food pellet).
You can see that same reinforcement pattern in slot machines that pay out at a random interval of behavior...and you can see it online, with a random amount of clicking between the reinforcement of finding relevant content...
Is it addiction? Well, it's conditioning for sure...and that can lead to addiction.
The part of the story that I found most interesting was the guy just screwed around in his kitchen, without any sort of plan for replicating his results. At one point, he created a bouncing bubble - one that didn't break, and was flexible, bouncing 'like a superball'. And he couldn't duplicate it again, since he's just been putting in a bit of this and a bit of that....
Sad, and educational.
The lesson: When you screw around inventing stuff in the kitchen, you should video tape yourself...because nothing beats having footage of you making exploding potions on America's Funniest Home Videos.
Calling the article pure speculation is generous - it's making an outrageous claim to drive traffic to ZDnet...
The ipod functions better as an mp3 player than any competitor, largely because of the functional UI and industrial design. The scroll wheel and interface are what's worth the premium, not support for fringe formats or feature creeping.
cz
You seem to suggest that creating a Dyson sphere is possible in the same timeframe as very early terraforming...given that we don't have any tech. capable of the kind of thing you're talking about, but that we do have genetic splicing for extremophile organisms, I think you're optimistic.
More on Dyson spheres:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
and the 3 Dead Trolls In a Baggie site
Deja View camera does this on a smaller scale (only the last 30 seconds are cached).
>It could have a wifi setup as well and a wearable interface as well so not only could I edit my content on the go, but I could also upload it right away to Google's service and start making money.
Even with a longer timeframe, I'm not sure about the underpants gnomes business model you're suggesting...
1. Upload video to Google
2. ?????
3. Profit!
the 8ms LCDs I've seen have dropped color depth in order to get the speed boost. Not important if all you do is play Doom 3 with its palette of gloom, but maybe not a good choice if you also want to do things with Photoshop, video, watch movies, etc.
>waiting for my wife to finish eating (she pushes her food around and pouts at it instead of actually eating)
If your wife is with you for dinner, and you start typing while she is eating, it may not be the food she is pouting about...
On the other hand, this is slashdot, so any relationship advice here is suspect...
This guy doesn't get it. Security is much more about people, not about 50 character passwords and redundant firewalls. Social engineering is much more of an issue than triple firewalls.
14 Character pwds for his kids, on his home network, that isn't connected to the outside (his VMware box is for internet). Yeah, that's useful.
He reminds me of the guy in town who advertises websites that a backwards compatible to Netscape 1.2 - very shrill, gets some attention, but is really clueless.
Uhh...in this case, that would mean not applying to Harvard, since it was the university that put the data on the web, not the individuals involved.
That's also the case in a lot of other personal data leaks - it's info you need to provide an organization to get a loan, get a job, etc.
Saying 'just don't do it' is naive, and deflects the conversation from the real issue, which is how do we get organizations to be accountable and responsible for the information that we provide?
Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001
thanks Google
Bill Gates is the founder of Corbis...along with having investments in a lot of other companies.
I fully agree that we *could* see significant speed increases. However, the benefit for AMD and Intel in boosting speeds just isn't there - Intel delayed their 4Ghz offering not because they couldn't bin some chips into a 4ghz bucket, but because the return for hitting higher clock speeds just isn't there - there's not enough of a market, they need to get the return out of existing investments before moving on, and there are few applications that demand that kind of horsepower.
The other key part of social categorization is that there is a *feedback loop* based on tag popularity that reinforces common tags - the more people who use a tag, the more prominence it gets in the system, encouraging people to use the common term.
Flickr and 43things use bigger type to show tag popularity.
Social categorization is useful because it is fuelled by self-interest - people tag info in these systems to find it later themselves - but it has a public benefit in finding related information.
It's also no silver bullet - but it's useful as part of a bigger information architecture effort (my business partner started the whole discussion about social categorization, and we're starting to use it on some projects)
In usability testing sessions, we often ask people how they would find a web site. Many just type the name into the address bar, without www. or a tld. In many browsers, that triggers a search (though often on MSN instead of Google).
While the internet has gone mainstream, that doesn't mean that the conceptual model of sites, servers, domains, etc. jumped the chasm from early adopters over to soccer moms.
cz
Telephone interview from 10 miles away???
'Just do it' doesn't have to be a blind decision. If they're only 10 miles from home, talk to the hiring manager about coming on site for a few hours.
You'll want to meet the people you'll be working with, maybe go for lunch, talk about what work is like, find out if contracting is the norm, etc. Get any promises of actions, benefits, etc. in writing-especially things like 3 day weeks. That should be in a contract, reviewed by YOUR lawyer, and include things like rate increases or other compensation for extra hours past 3 days (if that's what they're promising).
You should also try to have an offline, unofficial conversation later with some of the non-PHBs that you meet in a site visit.
You may also already know someone who knows someone who works there through local user groups, former colleagues, etc. who would be open to a chat.
Also consider your options - are you already gainfully employed, will this advance your career in a way you're interested in, what other options do you have for job, etc.
I like the "Pixels are Code" mantra...thx.
I'm not so sure about the vocabulary thing - maybe UX peeps need to learn to talk with OSS people in 'OSS-ese'.
However, on most OSS projects, if you don't code, you're a second-class citizen. There are regular threads every year on user experience lists about "why the OSS community should listen to us" that are filled with anecdotes of rejection by dev teams when a designer or usability person has tried to get involved.
I don't have any particular answers either, other than that I'm sure there are good OSS developers who would like UX design talent on the team - but there's not a real venue for getting them to work together, and there's not a culture of involving noncoders in most OSS projects.
Open Usability is trying to bridge the gap, but still has a long long way to go. (from getting profile in the OSS community and UX community to getting rid of the focus on 'usability' professionals and a focus on testing / evaluation)
What if necessary features aren't in the prototype?
Testing is a poor tool for doing feature selection and coming up with the concept, functional spec, and interaction design for a product.
Better than testing is doing up front field research to really understand user needs; internal business interviews to understand business goals; and then looking at features that will meet needs (instead of going on a feature frenzy first, as many many open source projects do)
Instead you need to understand that Feature requests are symptoms of goals. If you follow up a particular feature request or screen widget with 'Why' you'll be able to design a UI that actually meets their needs, instead of something that they think will meet their needs.
ps developers shouldn't design UI either. That's why we have user researchers, information architects, interaction designers, ui designers, etc. Even if someone is able to code and to design (very very rare) there is a significant conflict of interest between design and implementation.
Well, the cost of living is also around 40% less (or close enough - sometimes less, sometimes more). Toronto and Vancouver are more spendy than Ottawa, Montreal, or Calgary. But you can have a very nice lifestyle making 40% of a New York or San Jose salary in those three cities. Even more so in places like Edmonton, Regina, or Winnipeg.
One challenge would be paying any US debt load (student loan, US car payment, credit card debt) with Canadian dollars.
The equivalent to A3 paper is tabloid or ledger paper; at 11x17" (28x43cm) ( it is twice the size of a standard 8.5x11" (21.6x28cm) letter-size sheet. (you're on your own for the rest of the metric conversion in this post)
Typical printers do letter and legal (8.5x14"), large format office printers also does tabloid. Some large format photo places will do prints up to 24x36". Plotters typically work on a 36 or 48" wide roll.
Having lived a couple years in Australia, the elegance of metric papers is appreciated, though I'm not sure what the 'legal' paper equivalent would be - B something.
If you actually read the article, you'd see that the author is comparing carnal lust with the lust for power. It's a hypothetical game that involves the quote where you inserted D&D.
But yeah, it's a poor analogy...FUD indeed.
And while it's hard to argue that D&D doesn't encourage a "must find the +5 vorpal blade so I can kill Ztha the dragon and reach level 15" mindset, that's not really likely to encourage a megalomanic rush for glory - play D&D, become obsessed with being elected President...or a subsequent decline in family values.
Errr...go ask O'Reilly
While DBA types have used the info. architecture label, the term was coined in 1975 by Richard Saul Wurman to refer to something far removed from entity-relationship diagrams.