You have a VCR and you can afford to rent one movie every week for the rest of your life. Let's say you have 60 years left to live.
This means you can watch a total of 3,120 videos. But does that mean that a video store that keeps 3,120 would keep you satisfied? Of course not. You'd want a wider choice than that, even though you wouldn't want to watch every film.
And it doesn't 'break' Fitt's Law at all. Fitt's Law is related to the distance to, and size of, targets, not their absolute position.
Positioning the tabs in the middle of a dialog or to the left makes no real difference. You are mistaking the fact that Fitt's Law says that putting things at far edges of the screen improves the user's ability to target them. But.. since these tabs are not at the edge of the screen, the target area is the same whether they're in the middle or not.
Forgetting Fitt's Law, the Apple dialog is actually better in this example, since the drop down box in the Windows dialog encompasses a range of different options (hours, minutes, don't switch monitor off), whereas the Apple dialog splits the actions into logical parts.
They're certainly going to pollute the visual enviroment,
Maybe.. but will they 'pollute' it as much as catastrophic flooding caused by global warming.. or will they 'pollute' it as much as smog, fumes and nasty smells coming off of power stations?
Your comments are true of large continental land masses like North America, but Europe is a different story.
Remember that countries like France, UK, Denmark, Germany, are at a higher latitude than even Newfoundland.. yet those countries enjoy much higher temperatures than the average Canadian will get.
London's (51oN 00' lat) temperatures are generally similar to those of New York (40oN 42' lat) even though London is over ten degrees 'higher'.
This is because of the Gulf Stream, but also because the land masses in Europe are, generally, quite small and broken up with lots of lakes, fjords, rivers, and seas (North Sea, Baltic Sea, Mediterranean Sea).
This gives Europe cooler summers and mild winters, and a climate that remains quite the same throughout six months of the year. We don't get many 'surprise' weather events, like the US. Nor is our weather as extreme as that in the US.
Therefore, we might not get big hurricanes and sudden gales like the US can experience.. but.. we get a metered regulated amount of wind, that is perfect for generating electricity.
Most of the money went in salaries and advertising.
Salaries generally form a company's largest expense, other than stock, and most of these Internet companies had no stock (consultancies, design agencies, etc) or were drop shipping.
Dot com companies were also keen on advertising, so a lot of money went into the new media magazines of the time.. but even then, the money ended up in the pockets of the writers and editors.. so, really, it all went in salaries.
A lot of people were employed to do almost nothing during the dot com boom. This means that they added little to production, yet took a paycheck every month. That's where the money was 'wasted' and why we can see no remnant of it today.. effectively the wealth was used to buy a few years' 'free time' for a group of lazy bastards.
Nowadays the market is not so great, but is much more realistic. People who are productive earn their money, people who aren't don't.
MP3s are not like-for-like copies of CDs, they're extremely lossy, and you only get a tenth of what's on the CD.. but.. you can still get busted for swapping them! I believe the copyright laws specify that any 'likeness' to which a third-party could associate with the original, is covered as such.
Ditto for music encoded within images, though this is a hoax.
I can't believe the amount of morons that have fallen for this story yet. The explanations the guy gives are shoddy, and logically it makes no sense.
Not only that, but he's extrapolating a higher amount of data from a smaller amount, and that just does not work people! Listen to that MP3 on his site. That is just a recording of a record playing.. there are no hideous artefacts or giant gaps.. all of which would be expected with such a crazy new idea like this. It reeks of a hoax.
Just because it's not April 1st doesn't mean you haven't been fooled, folks! I have to give the guy credit for trying though.
I should point out, I've never owned a Mac in my life, do not use them on a regular basis, and have used Mac OS X for all of perhaps 30 seconds in PC World.
However, I am aware that BSD (not just in Darwin form) is becoming rather popular, with numerous people leaving Linux to go the BSD route.
While I might not have been totally correct about the statistics, it's fair to say that BSD has certainly eaten into the amount of people who may have chosen Linux instead.
Statistics are nice to look at, but often have glaring loopholes that some people choose to conveniently look over.
The biggest problem with this survey is that Unix usage has gone through the roof in the last two years with the advent of Mac OS X.
Since people who have Mac OS X are technically 'UNIX users', but are unlikely to uninstall OS X to run Yellow Dog Linux, it is fair to say that less UNIX users that ever are going over to Linux. Why? Because they're happy staying on BSD.
BSD classifies as 'UNIX'.. and we need to remember a LOT of people are going over to BSD from old style UNIX. Yet.. they aren't factored in here. Legacy UNIX to BSD is not taken into account, when really it's a pretty important shift.
I'd love to have someone pump my gas for me, for example, but it's not worth 50% more than self-serve.
In the UK, this service is generally free, although only rural garages tend to provide it at all. I can't see the fascination Americans have with getting their gas pumped for them though.. it's not as if it's hard.
There was a discussion on the I-Sales mailing list recently about this, and the general concensus that these 'LivePerson' style systems can sometimes be quite intrusive.
Some sites have live helper systems that allow staff to automatically send messages to you as you're browsing the site, and this is rather offputting. It's the equivalent of being hassled while walking round the store.
Service, however, is important, and someone should be able to get it if they want it.. but giving your sales people more commission just to harass customers out of their money is not the way to do it.. and, I've been enjoying the service-less face-less consumer society of late, simply because I don't have to deal with awkwards sales people.
But the main question is this.. Would you rather buy from somewhere that's really cheap and get little service, or buy from an exclusive expensive outlet and get tons of service? I'd actually say the former for myself, this is why I do not shop at Gucci or Ralph Lauren.
With the recent dip in the economy, it has shown that many previously high-flying Americans feel the same, and would rather go and shop at CostCo and Target, than at Sears. Budget brands are IN, and we're not feeling too upset about it. Many Americans are finally learning you sometimes can get more for less, and budget brands are taking off.
We're witnessing the same in the airline industry. Budget flights are popular.. whereas prestigious companies are going down the pan.
So, who cares about humans? If we can get our premium products at a budget price.. we can put up with having to deal with automated support.. AS LONG AS IT WORKS. I'd rather 'help myself' than pay a premium for customer care.
Mostly I agree with you. The discussions on AI on Slashdot really haven't been of the highest quality.. but then again, neither have the stories.
I do believe, however, that AI is experiencing exponential growth at the moment, and that AI is becoming what people twenty years dreamt of. Sure, we have no HAL yet (another ten years, I bet ya) but there are going to be enough stories coming along that are directly related to AI that I think a designated topic would be useful.
Then again, I also believe topics like 'PHP', 'Perl' and 'C++' should also be culled, and instead use 'Programming'.. but hey.
And anyway.. how comes there's no area on Slashdot where we can actually discuss the workings of Slashdot? A 'MetaSlash', if you will? Journals are good, but there are none that are particularly popular for this type of discussion.
In the past few weeks we've had a lot of stories relating to Artificial Intelligence. Yesterday we had that game characters one, we had the computer that built an oscillator, news about 'Ai' and 'Cyc', and so forth.
AI is definitely becoming a reality. Everyone was interested in AI ten or twenty years ago, but it's NOW that things are starting to really happen. The technology is here.
So why doesn't Slashdot have an 'AI' topic? I think it's time we had one here, as AI is clearly becoming a popular topic on the site.
P.S. I believe in this enough that I'm willing to burn some karma by posting this almost offtopic post, which will probably be modded down as such. Mod me up if you agree, or mod me down if you think it's a bad idea.
I think I have a editor stalker. I had a comment a few days ago modded down as on-topic, despite the fact it wasn't and that it went onto to get 4, Insightful, or something like that.
Doesn't really bother me though, but it'd piss me off if I was a newbie here trying to get some karma.
The Guide to Advertising By Stealth on Slashdot
on
Cappuccino PC, Round 3
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
1. Don't hype up the benefits we've already had for years with existing equipment.
The Mocha P4 PC size advantage makes it ideal for places where space is at a premium or for those who work in several fixed locations at once and want to be able to access the same data everywhere
Really? Wow, that's a really new concept. I mean, I could just use the Internet to access the same data from multiple locations.. but no, instead I can lug around a whole PC with me instead! Hang on.. wouldn't I just buy a notebook if I wanted to do that?
2. Don't blind us with meaningless adjectives.
Mocha P4 is a PC that is so flexible, efficient, compact and portable technically knocks down all existing desk top PCs.
Gee whiz. Lots of adjectives. It must be good! How does the size of a computer make it more 'efficient' anyway?
3. Don't blatantly admit you're connected to the item you're promoting.
The over all technology of other mini-book PCs around is still far from our achievement today.
Hemos deserves a big slap down for posting this when this one sentence ADMITS it's just an ad! Other computers are still far from our achievement? Hello editors, this is an ad!
4. Don't sound so cheesy that anyone still reading will just ignore your ad anyway.
Take advantage of the new breed PC of tomorrow and experience the next generation way of computing.
This sounds just as corny as the fake ads in Grand Theft Auto 3 for 'The House of Tomorrow'.
Here's my current list of Windows software I would need replaced in order to maintain productivity - MS Project, MS Visio, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Macromedia Fireworks.
Yeah, but you're a Web designer, so you'd be more at home with a Mac anyway.
Brown University built a thing just like this and created the world's largest Tetris game. Steve Wozniak, a confessed Tetris addict, even went to play on it.
I think it was only a 10 * 12 matrix though.. so perhaps Blinkenlights' attempt will beat their record.. depends on the height of the tower rather than the resolution I guess.
Anyone remember AT Robots? You created EXE files that called routines in the server's API and did robot style stuff. The aim of the game was simply to kill the other robots though, and to survive the longest.
You could use any language (that produced a DOS compatible EXE), and I remember coding robots in the early 90's and having a lot of fun. Tournaments still continue for that game!
There was another game in which you had to program a robot that was a race car and get it to go around a track that it had to learn. I forget the name of that, but I heard tournaments also take place for that too.
Does anyone have any links to other cool programming games?
As a lone programmer, I say not. How many even slightly successful games these days are produced by single programmers or even small teams? Sure, there are a few verysuccessful examples but they're all lo-fi or Shockwave games.. and not the typical 'computer games' we're used to.
It might be a great time to be in games for the coders like John Carmack who have about 20 art guys behind them, or for individual members of their teams who get control over a tiny aspect of the game (like Tim Willits), but on a personal level, it kinda sucks right now.
Games have taken the same track as movies. In the early days of movies, a small team would make a simple enjoyable film of 10 minutes or so.. but then as time went by, the land of Hollywood came in and hundreds of people were required to make a single movie. In the 90s, we had indie efforts like the Blair Witch Project that took movies back to small teams again.. could we experience the same with computer games one day?
I know I just sound cynical, and I am ready for the 'Troll' and 'Flamebait' moderation points, but I just don't feel it's such a great time to be in the gaming industry right now.
Even as a -consumer- many of the games now are unoriginal and not as good (relatively) as they were in the 80s. Why is now such a good time?
Quake never had it, but UT allowed you to adjust the game speed between 50% and 200%. It seems as if Doom 3 might give you some control over this, even if it's just a variable in the game you have to adjust.
Why is adjusting the game speed a good idea? Well.. I used to play UT all the time, and then moved to Quake 3. Quake 3 was a far faster game (in gameplay terms) and I got to love it, and my 'skills' improved. When I went back to UT, the levels felt too big, the moving about felt slow and nasty, and I yearned for more speed.. so I just put it to 110% gamespeed, and it was more like playing Q3!
Adjusting game speed is quite important and I wish more games would allow you to do it. One of the first was Maxis's 'way ahead of its time' 1993 sim A-Train.
Yeah, but in the UK if you pay $45 a month, you can get every channel including some of the premium ones, and those are small beans on top of that.
The problem is.. THEN you have $15 a month extra for a bunch of channels you might not even watch. At least I chose to pay for those in the $45 a month package, whereas I have pay the $15 a month just to have the TV sat in the corner of my room doing nothing!
Slashdot Mirror
Oh hang on.. I forgot.. PHP is just a Perl ripoff that has even less features.
Continue with your code.
Hate to point this out, but my Sharp 16" 1280x1024 screen is 112dpi across.. and it only cost $650.
You have a VCR and you can afford to rent one movie every week for the rest of your life. Let's say you have 60 years left to live.
This means you can watch a total of 3,120 videos. But does that mean that a video store that keeps 3,120 would keep you satisfied? Of course not. You'd want a wider choice than that, even though you wouldn't want to watch every film.
You mean Fitt's Law, of course.
And it doesn't 'break' Fitt's Law at all. Fitt's Law is related to the distance to, and size of, targets, not their absolute position.
Positioning the tabs in the middle of a dialog or to the left makes no real difference. You are mistaking the fact that Fitt's Law says that putting things at far edges of the screen improves the user's ability to target them. But.. since these tabs are not at the edge of the screen, the target area is the same whether they're in the middle or not.
Forgetting Fitt's Law, the Apple dialog is actually better in this example, since the drop down box in the Windows dialog encompasses a range of different options (hours, minutes, don't switch monitor off), whereas the Apple dialog splits the actions into logical parts.
They're certainly going to pollute the visual enviroment,
Maybe.. but will they 'pollute' it as much as catastrophic flooding caused by global warming.. or will they 'pollute' it as much as smog, fumes and nasty smells coming off of power stations?
Your comments are true of large continental land masses like North America, but Europe is a different story.
Remember that countries like France, UK, Denmark, Germany, are at a higher latitude than even Newfoundland.. yet those countries enjoy much higher temperatures than the average Canadian will get.
London's (51oN 00' lat) temperatures are generally similar to those of New York (40oN 42' lat) even though London is over ten degrees 'higher'.
This is because of the Gulf Stream, but also because the land masses in Europe are, generally, quite small and broken up with lots of lakes, fjords, rivers, and seas (North Sea, Baltic Sea, Mediterranean Sea).
This gives Europe cooler summers and mild winters, and a climate that remains quite the same throughout six months of the year. We don't get many 'surprise' weather events, like the US. Nor is our weather as extreme as that in the US.
Therefore, we might not get big hurricanes and sudden gales like the US can experience.. but.. we get a metered regulated amount of wind, that is perfect for generating electricity.
..the answer is simple.
Most of the money went in salaries and advertising.
Salaries generally form a company's largest expense, other than stock, and most of these Internet companies had no stock (consultancies, design agencies, etc) or were drop shipping.
Dot com companies were also keen on advertising, so a lot of money went into the new media magazines of the time.. but even then, the money ended up in the pockets of the writers and editors.. so, really, it all went in salaries.
A lot of people were employed to do almost nothing during the dot com boom. This means that they added little to production, yet took a paycheck every month. That's where the money was 'wasted' and why we can see no remnant of it today.. effectively the wealth was used to buy a few years' 'free time' for a group of lazy bastards.
Nowadays the market is not so great, but is much more realistic. People who are productive earn their money, people who aren't don't.
Okay, I throw my hands up. I didn't read the writing about the mp3 link, so I went and got the WAV files to check it out again.
IT'S STILL A HOAX. You'd have to be a flake to think otherwise.
No, of course not.
MP3s are not like-for-like copies of CDs, they're extremely lossy, and you only get a tenth of what's on the CD.. but.. you can still get busted for swapping them! I believe the copyright laws specify that any 'likeness' to which a third-party could associate with the original, is covered as such.
Ditto for music encoded within images, though this is a hoax.
I can't believe the amount of morons that have fallen for this story yet. The explanations the guy gives are shoddy, and logically it makes no sense.
Not only that, but he's extrapolating a higher amount of data from a smaller amount, and that just does not work people! Listen to that MP3 on his site. That is just a recording of a record playing.. there are no hideous artefacts or giant gaps.. all of which would be expected with such a crazy new idea like this. It reeks of a hoax.
Just because it's not April 1st doesn't mean you haven't been fooled, folks! I have to give the guy credit for trying though.
I should point out, I've never owned a Mac in my life, do not use them on a regular basis, and have used Mac OS X for all of perhaps 30 seconds in PC World.
However, I am aware that BSD (not just in Darwin form) is becoming rather popular, with numerous people leaving Linux to go the BSD route.
While I might not have been totally correct about the statistics, it's fair to say that BSD has certainly eaten into the amount of people who may have chosen Linux instead.
Statistics are nice to look at, but often have glaring loopholes that some people choose to conveniently look over.
The biggest problem with this survey is that Unix usage has gone through the roof in the last two years with the advent of Mac OS X.
Since people who have Mac OS X are technically 'UNIX users', but are unlikely to uninstall OS X to run Yellow Dog Linux, it is fair to say that less UNIX users that ever are going over to Linux. Why? Because they're happy staying on BSD.
BSD classifies as 'UNIX'.. and we need to remember a LOT of people are going over to BSD from old style UNIX. Yet.. they aren't factored in here. Legacy UNIX to BSD is not taken into account, when really it's a pretty important shift.
I'd love to have someone pump my gas for me, for example, but it's not worth 50% more than self-serve.
In the UK, this service is generally free, although only rural garages tend to provide it at all. I can't see the fascination Americans have with getting their gas pumped for them though.. it's not as if it's hard.
There was a discussion on the I-Sales mailing list recently about this, and the general concensus that these 'LivePerson' style systems can sometimes be quite intrusive.
Some sites have live helper systems that allow staff to automatically send messages to you as you're browsing the site, and this is rather offputting. It's the equivalent of being hassled while walking round the store.
Service, however, is important, and someone should be able to get it if they want it.. but giving your sales people more commission just to harass customers out of their money is not the way to do it.. and, I've been enjoying the service-less face-less consumer society of late, simply because I don't have to deal with awkwards sales people.
But the main question is this.. Would you rather buy from somewhere that's really cheap and get little service, or buy from an exclusive expensive outlet and get tons of service? I'd actually say the former for myself, this is why I do not shop at Gucci or Ralph Lauren.
With the recent dip in the economy, it has shown that many previously high-flying Americans feel the same, and would rather go and shop at CostCo and Target, than at Sears. Budget brands are IN, and we're not feeling too upset about it. Many Americans are finally learning you sometimes can get more for less, and budget brands are taking off.
We're witnessing the same in the airline industry. Budget flights are popular.. whereas prestigious companies are going down the pan.
So, who cares about humans? If we can get our premium products at a budget price.. we can put up with having to deal with automated support.. AS LONG AS IT WORKS. I'd rather 'help myself' than pay a premium for customer care.
Mostly I agree with you. The discussions on AI on Slashdot really haven't been of the highest quality.. but then again, neither have the stories.
I do believe, however, that AI is experiencing exponential growth at the moment, and that AI is becoming what people twenty years dreamt of. Sure, we have no HAL yet (another ten years, I bet ya) but there are going to be enough stories coming along that are directly related to AI that I think a designated topic would be useful.
Then again, I also believe topics like 'PHP', 'Perl' and 'C++' should also be culled, and instead use 'Programming'.. but hey.
And anyway.. how comes there's no area on Slashdot where we can actually discuss the workings of Slashdot? A 'MetaSlash', if you will? Journals are good, but there are none that are particularly popular for this type of discussion.
Suggestions?
In the past few weeks we've had a lot of stories relating to Artificial Intelligence. Yesterday we had that game characters one, we had the computer that built an oscillator, news about 'Ai' and 'Cyc', and so forth.
AI is definitely becoming a reality. Everyone was interested in AI ten or twenty years ago, but it's NOW that things are starting to really happen. The technology is here.
So why doesn't Slashdot have an 'AI' topic? I think it's time we had one here, as AI is clearly becoming a popular topic on the site.
P.S. I believe in this enough that I'm willing to burn some karma by posting this almost offtopic post, which will probably be modded down as such. Mod me up if you agree, or mod me down if you think it's a bad idea.
I think I have a editor stalker. I had a comment a few days ago modded down as on-topic, despite the fact it wasn't and that it went onto to get 4, Insightful, or something like that.
Doesn't really bother me though, but it'd piss me off if I was a newbie here trying to get some karma.
1. Don't hype up the benefits we've already had for years with existing equipment.
The Mocha P4 PC size advantage makes it ideal for places where space is at a premium or for those who work in several fixed locations at once and want to be able to access the same data everywhere
Really? Wow, that's a really new concept. I mean, I could just use the Internet to access the same data from multiple locations.. but no, instead I can lug around a whole PC with me instead! Hang on.. wouldn't I just buy a notebook if I wanted to do that?
2. Don't blind us with meaningless adjectives.
Mocha P4 is a PC that is so flexible, efficient, compact and portable technically knocks down all existing desk top PCs.
Gee whiz. Lots of adjectives. It must be good! How does the size of a computer make it more 'efficient' anyway?
3. Don't blatantly admit you're connected to the item you're promoting.
The over all technology of other mini-book PCs around is still far from our achievement today.
Hemos deserves a big slap down for posting this when this one sentence ADMITS it's just an ad! Other computers are still far from our achievement? Hello editors, this is an ad!
4. Don't sound so cheesy that anyone still reading will just ignore your ad anyway.
Take advantage of the new breed PC of tomorrow and experience the next generation way of computing.
This sounds just as corny as the fake ads in Grand Theft Auto 3 for 'The House of Tomorrow'.
Have the technology of tomorrow.. today!
Here's my current list of Windows software I would need replaced in order to maintain productivity - MS Project, MS Visio, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Macromedia Fireworks.
Yeah, but you're a Web designer, so you'd be more at home with a Mac anyway.
Brown University built a thing just like this and created the world's largest Tetris game. Steve Wozniak, a confessed Tetris addict, even went to play on it.
I think it was only a 10 * 12 matrix though.. so perhaps Blinkenlights' attempt will beat their record.. depends on the height of the tower rather than the resolution I guess.
I meant PC Robots.. AT Robots is also good but it uses a proprietary x86 style language.
Anyone remember AT Robots? You created EXE files that called routines in the server's API and did robot style stuff. The aim of the game was simply to kill the other robots though, and to survive the longest.
You could use any language (that produced a DOS compatible EXE), and I remember coding robots in the early 90's and having a lot of fun. Tournaments still continue for that game!
There was another game in which you had to program a robot that was a race car and get it to go around a track that it had to learn. I forget the name of that, but I heard tournaments also take place for that too.
Does anyone have any links to other cool programming games?
it is a great time to be in games!!
I'm not so sure that I agree with this.
Is it really a great time to be 'in games'?
As a lone programmer, I say not. How many even slightly successful games these days are produced by single programmers or even small teams? Sure, there are a few very successful examples but they're all lo-fi or Shockwave games.. and not the typical 'computer games' we're used to.
It might be a great time to be in games for the coders like John Carmack who have about 20 art guys behind them, or for individual members of their teams who get control over a tiny aspect of the game (like Tim Willits), but on a personal level, it kinda sucks right now.
Games have taken the same track as movies. In the early days of movies, a small team would make a simple enjoyable film of 10 minutes or so.. but then as time went by, the land of Hollywood came in and hundreds of people were required to make a single movie. In the 90s, we had indie efforts like the Blair Witch Project that took movies back to small teams again.. could we experience the same with computer games one day?
I know I just sound cynical, and I am ready for the 'Troll' and 'Flamebait' moderation points, but I just don't feel it's such a great time to be in the gaming industry right now.
Even as a -consumer- many of the games now are unoriginal and not as good (relatively) as they were in the 80s. Why is now such a good time?
Quake never had it, but UT allowed you to adjust the game speed between 50% and 200%. It seems as if Doom 3 might give you some control over this, even if it's just a variable in the game you have to adjust.
Why is adjusting the game speed a good idea? Well.. I used to play UT all the time, and then moved to Quake 3. Quake 3 was a far faster game (in gameplay terms) and I got to love it, and my 'skills' improved. When I went back to UT, the levels felt too big, the moving about felt slow and nasty, and I yearned for more speed.. so I just put it to 110% gamespeed, and it was more like playing Q3!
Adjusting game speed is quite important and I wish more games would allow you to do it. One of the first was Maxis's 'way ahead of its time' 1993 sim A-Train.
Yeah, but in the UK if you pay $45 a month, you can get every channel including some of the premium ones, and those are small beans on top of that.
The problem is.. THEN you have $15 a month extra for a bunch of channels you might not even watch. At least I chose to pay for those in the $45 a month package, whereas I have pay the $15 a month just to have the TV sat in the corner of my room doing nothing!