And yes, you are reading into it, drawing from your knowledge of MIT admission process and overall atmosphere. Not having this background greatly diminishes the impression of author's skill - the essay does not stand on its own.
I was never under the impression that we were having a conversation about writing for the general public, here. This is an article about applications essays to MIT, not a book of random non-fiction.
That's like saying that the "ls" man page doesn't hold up on its own, and it's only good writing when you read into it the context of the Unix command-line using audience. Kind of an odd skew to put on it, and it sounds a bit like back-peddling from a statement about the quality of the writing that simply wasn't taking its stated context into account.
I wrote a longish reply, but lost it to a "[tab][backspace]." Anyway, the short of it is that I'm not reading into it. There are some points made about college parties and trespassing that are clearly targeted at an MIT sensibility. This is a carefully crafted essay whose audience is MIT admissions.
So you're saying that the problem is with the people who work in admissions? That essay is horrible.
You are, apparently, wrong. It worked, which is the only valid measure of quality in this case.
Personally, I think it reads like a very bright high school student's essay. There's some of that "in ten years, you'll avoid some of these pitfalls," feeling I get when reading it, but overall it does exactly what it sets out to do in a way that I don't think many kids that age are capable of.
She could have written "I'm aware of the world outside my chosen field, capable of ignoring rules and aware of consequences".
Shorter and more to the point.
Actually, it's very nearly the same length. The original poster was claiming that the whole sentence was empty and should have been left out, and yet you're re-stating it in a minimal way (that doesn't indicate any communications skills at all beyond the ability to write technical documentation, a third purpose of the sentence) that's still around 5% of the total length of the essay requirement.
Interesting how a sentence that struck one reader as pointless turns out to be so important when you sit down and think about it in-context.
We want our APPLICATIONS back. start/save/load/undo/redo/import/export/exit - QUICKLY.. that kind.
I find all of those operations vastly faster and easier to use on, e.g. Google docs than in Office (Open or Microsoft), but again, I'm talking about Google and to be fair, most of the Web isn't as good as Google at developing clean, easy to use UIs in HTML/JavaScript.
We want the application features that were common BEFORE the Internet, that we occasionally still have in SPITE OF the Internet.
How did the Internet take away your apps? Or are you confusing the Internet and the World Wide Web? And for that matter, how did the Web take away your apps? I can't think of a single app I used to use pre-Web that I don't have now as a stand-alone app if I want it. The fact that I sometimes prefer the Web app variant is just a matter of using the right tool for the job.
We expect a web browser to be a fucking web browser.
No, we don't. You might, but I like using UIs from dozens of companies without having to install apps for each one. I enjoy the fact that I can load up one set of tools that enforce a uniform experience regardless of whose service I'm interacting with (e.g. Flashblock, AdBlock, GreaseMonkey, etc.)
Go back to the drawing board and invent a new client/server framework, and use MODERN UI standards. A dynamic web is useful, but application platform it is not.
I await your contribution to the field with anticipation.
It's just the Web serving up text and images like the old days, but because of the unusual source (physical media, yikes!) it requires some special UI elements to read conveniently. Sure, they could have just given you an HTML page with an image from the book, but then your search terms wouldn't be highlighted, making it easier to find what you were looking for, nor would you have the same kinds of control over page layout and pagination.
Now, I'll admit: I'm cheating. I'm pointing to Google and they've been working quite hard to make Web apps as usable as possible. There are thousands of examples of BAD Web apps out there, and you're right that there are some serious usability problems out there right now. That needs to change, but it's not the Web app that's the problem, it's the fact that the interaction between the user, the browser, the traditional Web and Web apps is still being figured out.
Google Maps works in an emergency, but it's annoying. Sometimes a square won't load for some weird reason.
Well, that's always going to be a problem unless you have all umteen terabytes of data on your local system. You're not describing the difference between a native app and a Web app, you're describing the difference between local and remote storage (keep in mind that Web apps now have the capability to take advantage of local storage for caching or even full datasets where that makes sense, so it's not even a fair distinction in many cases).
It definitely never loads images for any zoom level other than the one you're at.
I think that's actually not true. I believe that Google Maps does try to do some predictive downloading if it has a chance, and may cache some relatively small images like the map of the globe, even when you don't need them.
On a slow connection, it's unberable to use.
How would that change if you used a non-Web mapping program with as much image and vector data as Google Maps?
Even crappy GPS phone applications are vastly more responsive than google maps.
And if that's all you want, you're good to go. I prefer having much more data at my fingertips. Try downloading satellite, vector map and terrain data for the entire world at several scales onto your phone and let me know how that works out.
You don't really need to use JS to show images. Just make a big, page-wide grid of image thumbnails. A lot easier, and much more comfortable to find things in than by clicking "next" 20 times.
There are times that works well (Wikipedia comes to mind), and other times when it works very, very poorly (any image gallery where the user wants to look at many or every image at full size). There are always problem domains to consider and a good UI does so.
Looking at the eassy provided in the last link i can only think to myself "geez i'm glad i didn't have to write bullshit like that to get into my university".
The world I come from is full of oak trees and rain, warm cats on cold nights, and raucous college parties across the street. The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.
Am i the only one who puked at that?
I went into why the lake/hip bit was important above, but I'd like to take on the start of that bit as well:
She's attempting to establish character, here, and that's hard to do. She can't simply say, "hey, I've seen college life done UofState style, and that's not for me," because it doesn't convey anything that gives a sense that she understands what that means. By describing the things she enjoys and the fact that she takes her joy from her environment rather than from partying, she's establishing a fuller picture. You might "puke" when you read it, but someone in admissions sees enough of these essays to understand what's being said.
For concrete ways to downsize essays like hers, refer to the Elements of Style.
My favorite quote from the book,
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
And as with most manuals of style, this can be taken wildly out of context.
The poster you're referring to is complaining that the mechanical details of what's being discussed didn't need the descriptive and alliterative treatment in order to convey their meaning. Of course, that's true on some level, but it's also not what the manual of style that you quote is trying to caution against. Let's take an example
The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.
What's being communicated, here? I read it as a nod to some of the informal check-lists that MIT admissions wants to fill up. She's aware of the world outside of her chosen field, capable of ignoring rules when exploring and aware of the consequences of doing so. This is an admission of trespassing in an application essay. It's exactly the kind of honesty that they want to see, but at the same time, it requires careful introduction so that the reader understands that the student has matured from the experience and isn't simply bragging.
Also, not surprisingly, manuals of style mean little to someone reviewing an application to a top school (though MIT perhaps slightly less so than some). The assumption is that you could probably quote from it. What's interesting is where and when you choose to deviate from the standard and when you don't. The same is true in poetry. Iambic pentameter to novices is about 5 iambs per line. To those who understand the form, it's not nearly so simple. It's about setting the reader up to expect a certain rhythm and then deviating at key times in order to control the experience.
grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Ah... no.
I interviewed with MIT, and they were quite clear: there are far more students with excellent (by MIT standards) test scores and grades. What they're looking for in an applicant is someone who they think will take the education they're given and run with it. Someone who will excel with or without MIT, but (they hope) moreso with than without.
My guess is that they're removing the essay in order to speed the process up and get more people in front of the interviewers, which is really where they do their selection. The interviewer is an alum who will size up the potential student on several different scales. Some of the people admitted aren't even traditional successful students (though these are a tiny fraction each year).
This is the rallying cry of the anti-Web-app crowd. "I liked the good old Internet."
The problem is that the good old Internet kind of sucked.
Look at the original MapQuest vs. Google Maps. I spent large amounts of time trying to find things on MQ back in the day. When Google Maps came out, it changed the way mapping worked. Dragging the map around to pan alone was worth having to suffer slow (now much better) JavaScript interpreters. Now, of course, MQ uses a Google Maps-like JavaScript UI for that very reason.
The issues you raise are valid, and I think we're about to exit the age of one-off JavaScript UIs for that very reason. Some standardization needs to take place in order to bring back the sense that knowing how to use "the Web" means that you know how to use any given Web page, even if the domain-specific information on that page might not be comprehensible to you. Things like opening a link in a new tab (Gmail, I'm looking at you) are very important, and should be well supported. On the other hand, as a publisher, I want things like the image-popup you mentioned because it allows me to publish images in a way that maintains my site's flow (e.g. the ability to navigate to the next image in a set, comment on an image, and so on). These features need to be revised, smoothed and made more friendly to the kinds of browsing that people do and the way they expect their browser to behave, I agree, but throwing away the JavaScript UI isn't the way to do that.
And the person sharing Rocky 17 CAN'T say "I had no idea that file was being shared", which has been a defense in the past.
And now someone using that as a defense will have no excuse...
Interesting.
This "person" is named "AndrewNeo". Presumably derived from The Matrix (Neo) and Buffy (Andrew), both characters that dealt with simulacra.
The comment itself is a sophisticated transformation of the original statement which shows a strong grasp of English grammar and even some semantics, but no ability to generate original concepts. It also ends with a poorly constructed sentence fragment, but that's not new on Slashdot;)
I've seen a number of posts like this today. I wonder how many "AndrewNeos" there are on Slashdot these days....
And open a new one where the FBI (or RIAA investigators) can simply "ask" the program, "What files were shared?", get a convenient generated list, and find all the evidence they need to make your day in court miserable.
I think you're mis-reading the bill. Can you point me to the provision that requires for remote activity log polling?
No, not really. The bill is being funded ebasue secret government documents keep getting leaks via P2P programmers from the machines of privets contractors.
Modern browsers come with spell checkers. I suggest using them.
That said, the federal government typically doesn't do that, as I said in a previous post. I could see that being a lever that the RIAA used in pushing this bill along, but I would be shocked to find out that they weren't the primary motivating force, here. This is the RIAA's job for the music industry and they're very good at it.
I don't think that's true, as the government itself has been burned several times by having contractors sharing files from internal networks.
True, but not pertinent. The federal government doesn't pass laws to make software less harmful to itself, it simply bars the use of such software internally.
The RIAA, however, has a tremendous amount of influence of Capitol Hill, and when they need a provision that supports them in court, as long as it doesn't look too terribly blatant, then it goes in.
However, even if it were the case of reducing cases between the RIAA and the public.. how is this bad?
I'll have to re-read. I wasn't aware that I'd used the word "bad". I thought I was just pointing out the obvious source.
Now, you might say that the RIAA having as much pull in Congress as they do is "bad," but that's a judgment call you have to make for yourself.
As for the law... I think this should have been an FCC regulation, but there's no explicit harm done as far as I can tell. Then again, I'm not a lawyer.
To the general public starts=pretty. There's not much more to be said than that. If you know what "warm" means in an astronomical sense, then then you already know what you're looking for in terms of color variation. If you don't, then what's interesting is that it's pretty (and I don't want to belittle that sense of awe that comes from looking at the sky, but let's not confuse it with an understanding of what you're looking at).
Almost certainly groups like the RIAA and the MPAA.
Their goal is in ratchet up the personal liability of the users who use these systems. By forcing applications to be much more explicit about what's being shared, they reduce the number of cases they lose against file sharers on the grounds that they didn't know what they were sharing.
Because almost every other type of unintentional sharing of files (if not all) are already covered by electronic privacy laws.
However, in the case of applications which are designed to share files, there's a legal gray area, where the author can claim that they have no obligation to have disclosed which files were being shared, and that the user consented to sharing their files by installing file sharing software.
Since multi-taskers do poorly on both tasks, those who grow up thinking heavy multitasking is the way to go will wonder why the old farts seem so smart.
No. No, they won't. People who know how to dip into a rich world of simultaneous communication and then extract themselves from it for contemplation will make our generation seem extremely slow and addled. Sure, the average schmo will have a hard time because that kind of discipline is hard, but those who manage it well will be able to accomplish far more than we ever did.
And what part of only being able to post a URL or, if you're careful, a URL and a short headline, makes Twitter NOT like an underfeatured RSS system?
What part of being able to write down just the text of a conversation makes a book like an underfeatured (sic) traveling bard or troupe of players?
All media have their limitations in exchange for which they have certain advantages. Subscribing to several dozen people's tweets is only reasonable because those tweets are guaranteed to be short and easily digested, often with links to more information should you want it. I find that I click on links from Twitter about 1/10 times or so. I don't have to dig through more than that.
However you've also set up a false dichotomy. I also use RSS aggregators, and sometimes I even feed particularly informative or entertaining Twitter feeds through them (for example, Kevin Rose's Twitter feed goes into my Google Reader account).
I think you just decided that you don't like Twitter. That's fine, but I think you should stop trying to justify that as anything more than a gut reaction.
I know nothing about what this person is doing, just that they don't punctuate, spell, or use proper grammar.
I think it's safe to say that if I became privy to any random snippit of conversation between you and a friend, I could make fun of it. But there's some problems with your analysis:
a) You're calling out the least common denominator as the single defense of the use of Twitter.
b) Your example shows that you're not privy to the local dialect of Twitter users, but not much else.
c) Twitter is a broadcast medium. To say that that lacks value really requires that you evaluate the shape of the current user base's connectedness, an analysis which you appear to have avoided.
I have an RSS reader that does the same thing. Except that if the interesting person has more to say than 140 characters I can read that too.
I don't think anyone should be allowed to post to Slashdot if they can't figure out how to encode arbitrarily large content into 140 characters. Hint: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
Except for if you have something to say in twitter you can't... making it more of a waste of time than other tools. At least it might waste less time by not allowing you to say much.
I believe that the same point was made about books when the printing press was developed. Communications media are constrained... all of them. 140 characters is a pretty tight constraint, but some pretty astoundingly important things have been communicated via Twitter. The Iran elections come to mind, but that was a Twitter perfect storm, and perhaps not a valid example in general... I see information flowing out of places that it never flowed out of before. Corporate boardrooms; executive producers and directors of TV shows and films; politicians commenting on bills as their being written; etc.
It's a communications tool. If you use it wisely it supports certain kinds of communications and not others.
Wow - didn't take long for the apologists to come out of the woodwork. Here's what I'd like to see instead: A balanced comment
It's hard to get much more meta than, here's the type of comment I'd like to see someone post on Slashdot about the article about the patent about the capability to limit services in upcoming devices. Wow, just wow.
Anyway, your core point appears to confuse service providers with utilities and overall confuse a response that takes physical infrastructure into account for a defense of corporatism. It's also a rather silly point in that you seem to feel that users have some inherent right to use any feature of any device they like on cell networks.
On the Internet, you'd have a fair point because the Internet is purely a connectivity medium where providers simply offer a way for your local infrastructure to talk to that of other parties. On cell networks you are being offered a very specific set of services which use their communications infrastructure. Providers that don't wish to provide specific features really have no requirement to do so, nor should they. If you want to use the network however you like, you can use VOIP and play with whatever features you wish.
After watching the demo, a lot of people were commenting that the major problem is that it runs counter to how the brain operates...we aren't designed to heavily multitask.
Welcome to old age. We'll set up a rocking chair for you on the porch.
The generation that grows up with heavily multitasking-oriented tools will make us seem rather sad.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, you are reading into it, drawing from your knowledge of MIT admission process and overall atmosphere.
Not having this background greatly diminishes the impression of author's skill - the essay does not stand on its own.
I was never under the impression that we were having a conversation about writing for the general public, here. This is an article about applications essays to MIT, not a book of random non-fiction.
That's like saying that the "ls" man page doesn't hold up on its own, and it's only good writing when you read into it the context of the Unix command-line using audience. Kind of an odd skew to put on it, and it sounds a bit like back-peddling from a statement about the quality of the writing that simply wasn't taking its stated context into account.
I wrote a longish reply, but lost it to a "[tab][backspace]." Anyway, the short of it is that I'm not reading into it. There are some points made about college parties and trespassing that are clearly targeted at an MIT sensibility. This is a carefully crafted essay whose audience is MIT admissions.
So you're saying that the problem is with the people who work in admissions? That essay is horrible.
You are, apparently, wrong. It worked, which is the only valid measure of quality in this case.
Personally, I think it reads like a very bright high school student's essay. There's some of that "in ten years, you'll avoid some of these pitfalls," feeling I get when reading it, but overall it does exactly what it sets out to do in a way that I don't think many kids that age are capable of.
She could have written "I'm aware of the world outside my chosen field, capable of ignoring rules and aware of consequences".
Shorter and more to the point.
Actually, it's very nearly the same length. The original poster was claiming that the whole sentence was empty and should have been left out, and yet you're re-stating it in a minimal way (that doesn't indicate any communications skills at all beyond the ability to write technical documentation, a third purpose of the sentence) that's still around 5% of the total length of the essay requirement.
Interesting how a sentence that struck one reader as pointless turns out to be so important when you sit down and think about it in-context.
We want our APPLICATIONS back. start/save/load/undo/redo/import/export/exit - QUICKLY.. that kind.
I find all of those operations vastly faster and easier to use on, e.g. Google docs than in Office (Open or Microsoft), but again, I'm talking about Google and to be fair, most of the Web isn't as good as Google at developing clean, easy to use UIs in HTML/JavaScript.
We want the application features that were common BEFORE the Internet, that we occasionally still have in SPITE OF the Internet.
How did the Internet take away your apps? Or are you confusing the Internet and the World Wide Web? And for that matter, how did the Web take away your apps? I can't think of a single app I used to use pre-Web that I don't have now as a stand-alone app if I want it. The fact that I sometimes prefer the Web app variant is just a matter of using the right tool for the job.
We expect a web browser to be a fucking web browser.
No, we don't. You might, but I like using UIs from dozens of companies without having to install apps for each one. I enjoy the fact that I can load up one set of tools that enforce a uniform experience regardless of whose service I'm interacting with (e.g. Flashblock, AdBlock, GreaseMonkey, etc.)
Go back to the drawing board and invent a new client/server framework, and use MODERN UI standards. A dynamic web is useful, but application platform it is not.
I await your contribution to the field with anticipation.
The problem is that the good old Internet kind of sucked.
Depending for what kind of use. If you want to make apps on it, indeed it did. But I don't want apps, so the current one sucks more for me.
I don't always want apps... well, at least, that's not what I think I want. I want to do this search:
http://books.google.com/books?q=flywheel%20braking&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wp and find this: http://books.google.com/books?id=VWTF3my04Q0C&pg=PA70&dq=flywheel+braking&ei=FinMSrGHB5OMzgSXtcneBw&client=firefox-a#v=onepage&q=flywheel%20braking&f=false
It's just the Web serving up text and images like the old days, but because of the unusual source (physical media, yikes!) it requires some special UI elements to read conveniently. Sure, they could have just given you an HTML page with an image from the book, but then your search terms wouldn't be highlighted, making it easier to find what you were looking for, nor would you have the same kinds of control over page layout and pagination.
Now, I'll admit: I'm cheating. I'm pointing to Google and they've been working quite hard to make Web apps as usable as possible. There are thousands of examples of BAD Web apps out there, and you're right that there are some serious usability problems out there right now. That needs to change, but it's not the Web app that's the problem, it's the fact that the interaction between the user, the browser, the traditional Web and Web apps is still being figured out.
Google Maps works in an emergency, but it's annoying. Sometimes a square won't load for some weird reason.
Well, that's always going to be a problem unless you have all umteen terabytes of data on your local system. You're not describing the difference between a native app and a Web app, you're describing the difference between local and remote storage (keep in mind that Web apps now have the capability to take advantage of local storage for caching or even full datasets where that makes sense, so it's not even a fair distinction in many cases).
It definitely never loads images for any zoom level other than the one you're at.
I think that's actually not true. I believe that Google Maps does try to do some predictive downloading if it has a chance, and may cache some relatively small images like the map of the globe, even when you don't need them.
On a slow connection, it's unberable to use.
How would that change if you used a non-Web mapping program with as much image and vector data as Google Maps?
Even crappy GPS phone applications are vastly more responsive than google maps.
And if that's all you want, you're good to go. I prefer having much more data at my fingertips. Try downloading satellite, vector map and terrain data for the entire world at several scales onto your phone and let me know how that works out.
You don't really need to use JS to show images. Just make a big, page-wide grid of image thumbnails. A lot easier, and much more comfortable to find things in than by clicking "next" 20 times.
There are times that works well (Wikipedia comes to mind), and other times when it works very, very poorly (any image gallery where the user wants to look at many or every image at full size). There are always problem domains to consider and a good UI does so.
Looking at the eassy provided in the last link i can only think to myself "geez i'm glad i didn't have to write bullshit like that to get into my university".
The world I come from is full of oak trees and rain, warm cats on cold nights, and raucous college parties across the street. The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.
Am i the only one who puked at that?
I went into why the lake/hip bit was important above, but I'd like to take on the start of that bit as well:
She's attempting to establish character, here, and that's hard to do. She can't simply say, "hey, I've seen college life done UofState style, and that's not for me," because it doesn't convey anything that gives a sense that she understands what that means. By describing the things she enjoys and the fact that she takes her joy from her environment rather than from partying, she's establishing a fuller picture. You might "puke" when you read it, but someone in admissions sees enough of these essays to understand what's being said.
For concrete ways to downsize essays like hers, refer to the Elements of Style.
My favorite quote from the book,
Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
And as with most manuals of style, this can be taken wildly out of context.
The poster you're referring to is complaining that the mechanical details of what's being discussed didn't need the descriptive and alliterative treatment in order to convey their meaning. Of course, that's true on some level, but it's also not what the manual of style that you quote is trying to caution against. Let's take an example
The sky over my home matches the grey in my eyes; the barbed wire fence around Lake Sequoyah is commemorated eternally by the disfiguration of my left hip.
What's being communicated, here? I read it as a nod to some of the informal check-lists that MIT admissions wants to fill up. She's aware of the world outside of her chosen field, capable of ignoring rules when exploring and aware of the consequences of doing so. This is an admission of trespassing in an application essay. It's exactly the kind of honesty that they want to see, but at the same time, it requires careful introduction so that the reader understands that the student has matured from the experience and isn't simply bragging.
Also, not surprisingly, manuals of style mean little to someone reviewing an application to a top school (though MIT perhaps slightly less so than some). The assumption is that you could probably quote from it. What's interesting is where and when you choose to deviate from the standard and when you don't. The same is true in poetry. Iambic pentameter to novices is about 5 iambs per line. To those who understand the form, it's not nearly so simple. It's about setting the reader up to expect a certain rhythm and then deviating at key times in order to control the experience.
grades and standardized testing scores are what matter at MIT. What you wrote in an essay's hardly going to influence what you do in a technical environment like that.
Ah... no.
I interviewed with MIT, and they were quite clear: there are far more students with excellent (by MIT standards) test scores and grades. What they're looking for in an applicant is someone who they think will take the education they're given and run with it. Someone who will excel with or without MIT, but (they hope) moreso with than without.
My guess is that they're removing the essay in order to speed the process up and get more people in front of the interviewers, which is really where they do their selection. The interviewer is an alum who will size up the potential student on several different scales. Some of the people admitted aren't even traditional successful students (though these are a tiny fraction each year).
Slashdot, for instance?
I much prefer the old interface.
This is the rallying cry of the anti-Web-app crowd. "I liked the good old Internet."
The problem is that the good old Internet kind of sucked.
Look at the original MapQuest vs. Google Maps. I spent large amounts of time trying to find things on MQ back in the day. When Google Maps came out, it changed the way mapping worked. Dragging the map around to pan alone was worth having to suffer slow (now much better) JavaScript interpreters. Now, of course, MQ uses a Google Maps-like JavaScript UI for that very reason.
The issues you raise are valid, and I think we're about to exit the age of one-off JavaScript UIs for that very reason. Some standardization needs to take place in order to bring back the sense that knowing how to use "the Web" means that you know how to use any given Web page, even if the domain-specific information on that page might not be comprehensible to you. Things like opening a link in a new tab (Gmail, I'm looking at you) are very important, and should be well supported. On the other hand, as a publisher, I want things like the image-popup you mentioned because it allows me to publish images in a way that maintains my site's flow (e.g. the ability to navigate to the next image in a set, comment on an image, and so on). These features need to be revised, smoothed and made more friendly to the kinds of browsing that people do and the way they expect their browser to behave, I agree, but throwing away the JavaScript UI isn't the way to do that.
And the person sharing Rocky 17 CAN'T say "I had no idea that file was being shared", which has been a defense in the past.
And now someone using that as a defense will have no excuse ...
Interesting.
This "person" is named "AndrewNeo". Presumably derived from The Matrix (Neo) and Buffy (Andrew), both characters that dealt with simulacra.
The comment itself is a sophisticated transformation of the original statement which shows a strong grasp of English grammar and even some semantics, but no ability to generate original concepts. It also ends with a poorly constructed sentence fragment, but that's not new on Slashdot ;)
I've seen a number of posts like this today. I wonder how many "AndrewNeos" there are on Slashdot these days....
Judge for yourself, visit http://slashdot.org/~AndrewNeo and tell me if you think this is a human....
And open a new one where the FBI (or RIAA investigators) can simply "ask" the program, "What files were shared?", get a convenient generated list, and find all the evidence they need to make your day in court miserable.
I think you're mis-reading the bill. Can you point me to the provision that requires for remote activity log polling?
No, not really. The bill is being funded ebasue secret government documents keep getting leaks via P2P programmers from the machines of privets contractors.
Modern browsers come with spell checkers. I suggest using them.
That said, the federal government typically doesn't do that, as I said in a previous post. I could see that being a lever that the RIAA used in pushing this bill along, but I would be shocked to find out that they weren't the primary motivating force, here. This is the RIAA's job for the music industry and they're very good at it.
I don't think that's true, as the government itself has been burned several times by having contractors sharing files from internal networks.
True, but not pertinent. The federal government doesn't pass laws to make software less harmful to itself, it simply bars the use of such software internally.
The RIAA, however, has a tremendous amount of influence of Capitol Hill, and when they need a provision that supports them in court, as long as it doesn't look too terribly blatant, then it goes in.
However, even if it were the case of reducing cases between the RIAA and the public.. how is this bad?
I'll have to re-read. I wasn't aware that I'd used the word "bad". I thought I was just pointing out the obvious source.
Now, you might say that the RIAA having as much pull in Congress as they do is "bad," but that's a judgment call you have to make for yourself.
As for the law... I think this should have been an FCC regulation, but there's no explicit harm done as far as I can tell. Then again, I'm not a lawyer.
To the general public starts=pretty. There's not much more to be said than that. If you know what "warm" means in an astronomical sense, then then you already know what you're looking for in terms of color variation. If you don't, then what's interesting is that it's pretty (and I don't want to belittle that sense of awe that comes from looking at the sky, but let's not confuse it with an understanding of what you're looking at).
Ok, so who funded this bill and why?
Almost certainly groups like the RIAA and the MPAA.
Their goal is in ratchet up the personal liability of the users who use these systems. By forcing applications to be much more explicit about what's being shared, they reduce the number of cases they lose against file sharers on the grounds that they didn't know what they were sharing.
Yeh, that's the important point. Why not just ban spyware, period?
Spyware violates electronic privacy laws that already exist.
Why is this limited to P2P software?
Because almost every other type of unintentional sharing of files (if not all) are already covered by electronic privacy laws.
However, in the case of applications which are designed to share files, there's a legal gray area, where the author can claim that they have no obligation to have disclosed which files were being shared, and that the user consented to sharing their files by installing file sharing software.
This bill would close that loophole.
Since multi-taskers do poorly on both tasks, those who grow up thinking heavy multitasking is the way to go will wonder why the old farts seem so smart.
No. No, they won't. People who know how to dip into a rich world of simultaneous communication and then extract themselves from it for contemplation will make our generation seem extremely slow and addled. Sure, the average schmo will have a hard time because that kind of discipline is hard, but those who manage it well will be able to accomplish far more than we ever did.
And what part of only being able to post a URL or, if you're careful, a URL and a short headline, makes Twitter NOT like an underfeatured RSS system?
What part of being able to write down just the text of a conversation makes a book like an underfeatured (sic) traveling bard or troupe of players?
All media have their limitations in exchange for which they have certain advantages. Subscribing to several dozen people's tweets is only reasonable because those tweets are guaranteed to be short and easily digested, often with links to more information should you want it. I find that I click on links from Twitter about 1/10 times or so. I don't have to dig through more than that.
However you've also set up a false dichotomy. I also use RSS aggregators, and sometimes I even feed particularly informative or entertaining Twitter feeds through them (for example, Kevin Rose's Twitter feed goes into my Google Reader account).
I think you just decided that you don't like Twitter. That's fine, but I think you should stop trying to justify that as anything more than a gut reaction.
I know nothing about what this person is doing, just that they don't punctuate, spell, or use proper grammar.
I think it's safe to say that if I became privy to any random snippit of conversation between you and a friend, I could make fun of it. But there's some problems with your analysis:
a) You're calling out the least common denominator as the single defense of the use of Twitter.
b) Your example shows that you're not privy to the local dialect of Twitter users, but not much else.
c) Twitter is a broadcast medium. To say that that lacks value really requires that you evaluate the shape of the current user base's connectedness, an analysis which you appear to have avoided.
I have an RSS reader that does the same thing. Except that if the interesting person has more to say than 140 characters I can read that too.
I don't think anyone should be allowed to post to Slashdot if they can't figure out how to encode arbitrarily large content into 140 characters. Hint: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
Except for if you have something to say in twitter you can't... making it more of a waste of time than other tools. At least it might waste less time by not allowing you to say much.
I believe that the same point was made about books when the printing press was developed. Communications media are constrained... all of them. 140 characters is a pretty tight constraint, but some pretty astoundingly important things have been communicated via Twitter. The Iran elections come to mind, but that was a Twitter perfect storm, and perhaps not a valid example in general... I see information flowing out of places that it never flowed out of before. Corporate boardrooms; executive producers and directors of TV shows and films; politicians commenting on bills as their being written; etc.
It's a communications tool. If you use it wisely it supports certain kinds of communications and not others.
Wow - didn't take long for the apologists to come out of the woodwork. Here's what I'd like to see instead: A balanced comment
It's hard to get much more meta than, here's the type of comment I'd like to see someone post on Slashdot about the article about the patent about the capability to limit services in upcoming devices. Wow, just wow.
Anyway, your core point appears to confuse service providers with utilities and overall confuse a response that takes physical infrastructure into account for a defense of corporatism. It's also a rather silly point in that you seem to feel that users have some inherent right to use any feature of any device they like on cell networks.
On the Internet, you'd have a fair point because the Internet is purely a connectivity medium where providers simply offer a way for your local infrastructure to talk to that of other parties. On cell networks you are being offered a very specific set of services which use their communications infrastructure. Providers that don't wish to provide specific features really have no requirement to do so, nor should they. If you want to use the network however you like, you can use VOIP and play with whatever features you wish.
After watching the demo, a lot of people were commenting that the major problem is that it runs counter to how the brain operates...we aren't designed to heavily multitask.
Welcome to old age. We'll set up a rocking chair for you on the porch.
The generation that grows up with heavily multitasking-oriented tools will make us seem rather sad.