Seems to me such stuff could be defeated (or at least rendered easily findable) if the browser is only allowed to write data to certain directories regardless of what some script might wish, unless the user actively specifies elsewhere (such as to save a download). Also seems to me this could be programmed into the browser so the user need not worry about it (indeed, would not need to even know about it).
Someone will probably point out flaws in this scheme, but the concept is to make the "cure" as simple as possible.
That's a very good point. Sometimes it's not the plethora of choices that confuses, it's how they're presented. Too often only the technical-jargon names are given, with no guidelines or "common-sense descriptions".
Um... this is more like Joe Driver who's been running around in his 1985 Ford since forever... goes to the Saturn lot, sees 50 different models all with every sort of gadget imaginable included... he reads a bunch of reviews and only learns that reviewers love anything gadgetry... gives up trying to decide which is the best choice and goes to the used-car lot where the choices are, at least by his lights, saner.
I think you misunderstood the parent post's complaint:
Choice is great -- so long as you understand the choices.
But when you don't, then they're just confusing. And not everyone has the time or inclination to become an expert just so they can make the INITIAL choices.
For average folks, think of choice as a synonymy -- for a foreign language that you've just begun learning and have no working knowledge beyond the most basic meanings of basic words. (Should you call a horse 'equus' or 'caballus', and why??)
"My friend can certainly bang out a FoxPro application quickly, even quicker than me most of the time, but it won't be the app you want to use, because it also looks like it came out of that era."
This may be a dumb question (IANA database person) but couldn't someone throw together a front end that would fit over the top of stuff like that DOS-era-looking FoxPro app, to make it more usable for young moderns?? seems to me even if that's custom work, there's a market niche there.
Plug both into the same power strip/surge unit and leave their switches on all the time, then just turn the strip on and off -- are they amenable to that??
Ah, okay, thanks. Our radio station went with UPI because it was some tiny fraction of what AP charged for the same level of news feed, and if I recall right, UPI threw in use of the teletype machine for free. As you can tell this was a long time ago.:)
I'd hazard that one reason people are unwilling to pay for news content is that most of it is essentially eyeball-collecting, and functionally news-free.
I'm reminded of the last interview I saw with some local earthquake expert, I forget her name but the TV news reporter was trying to goad her into making a doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world statement, and was clearly disappointed that her reply was a dispassionate "no, just the facts, this happens all the time" type thing, of absolute no use for scare-mongering. But a good example of how typical "news content" now is all about collecting terrified eyeballs that can't look away [thus are sellable to advertisers] lest some new horror emerge, and not about news at all.
I'd suggest that's also the dividing line for whether we the readers would perceive news content as worth paying for.
Interesting... was UPI the same sort of deal? (I don't know if it's even still around; it was our college radio station's newsfeed, because it was cheaper than AP.)
Speaking as a pro dog trainer -- you nailed it dead on.
Yeah, dispositions vary. I've had dead-serious dogs, and dogs that were SO cheerful ALL the time that you wanted to smack 'em. But the "separation anxiety" thing is a symptom of lack of human leadership, nothing to do with the dog's outlook on life -- other than that those more perceptive of reality are more likely to notice when the human isn't really in charge.
Actually that's a good suggestion, but the problem for me and most people is that each book is hugely time consuming to process, especially the mass of data in old technical books. Try working on a Distributed Proofreading project (even a simple text volume) for a while and you'll see what I mean.
Trouble is, it's extremely tough to eliminate the average fungus, being they're opportunistic. Ask anyone who's battled a fungal infection -- treatment isn't one-shot, it can continue for months or years and still not succeed in eliminating the problem. (Frex, blastomycosis has about a 40% fatality rate even with the best of treatment, which if you're lucky can drag out for 6-9 months.)
A vaccine against the virus is more likely to be successful, and more likely to succeed with only one or two treatments. Also, it may be possible to incorporate viral immunity into the bees' DNA.
And that was my first thought when I saw TFA... "so much for the cellphone towers tinfoil asshattery!"
I live in the desert. I have a wild honeybee colony on my property. It's a sad affair that barely stays alive. The ONE time in the past nine years that it got up enough numbers to generate a swarm, you could have stuffed the entire swarm into a shoebox and had room to spare. I've tried feeding them but they don't seem interested (tho they show up to get water every day).
One problem with the western US deserts is that the dirt is loaded with fungus and bacteria spores (thus explosive growth anytime it rains or in any dampness including dew), and now that we mention it, I wonder how that affects the bees. -- I've found that I cannot let young puppies be out in the dirt until their eyes are fully developed (about 4 weeks of age) or they are likely to get eye infections.
Point was, it looked wrong, so I examined it at the pixel level to find out why, and to see if it could be fixed.
That slashdotters persistently and deliberately misunderstand this... well, maybe they need to simply read posts rather than examining them pixel by pixel;)
I was working from a full colour scan of a print, not from a preset. I did try using an outline and single colour fill, but it looked wrong; it needed shading to look right onscreen, even tho it *appears* as all one colour. What I used for the adjacent text (cited numbers) was the closest visual match to the total effect.
Yeah, I know there's no such colour as... [insert combo-of-whatevers here]...but it's still a convenient shorthand for what we SEE. Imagine if these what-we-see colours had no names and you had to refer to each by its numbers!
As to examining pixels, that's what I wound up doing because the initial brown looked wrong (like it wanted to be a bruised purple instead). There's nothing stupid about taking something down to its component parts to see why it's not working.
I've seen exactly *one* LCD that I deemed entirely suitable, and the damned thing cost $2200 (and that was at the trade-show discount). A wee ways out of my budget, probably for the next century. -- One of the issues that drives me nuts is that they're sensitive to viewing angle. Not so much from side-to-side anymore but still from up-to-down. So if you don't always slouch at the same height, the image changes. The very expensive one lacked this visual defect.
And as you note there's the issue of matching the video card to the LCD, notably the resolution. Not an issue with a CRT. I really hate being stuck on someone else's notion of MY ideal resolution, because otherwise the aspect ratio is munged, or it displays interlaced (I've seen both problems).
I've also found the average LCD's total light output wearing on my eyes.
I suppose if I was made of money, or doing graphics as a fulltime job, it would be worth whatever investment was required to get it how I want it. As it is, my stone-age solution works better for me, for a fraction of the investment.
IBM had such a technology, intended for retail advertising sites (so you could zoom in on product images to the level of fine details) in 1998, and it didn't need flash or much else that was fancy -- it worked in Netscape v3. However, I've never seen it deployed, so maybe it never made it past the marketing stage. They did demo it at trade shows, tho.
What you see, if you look closer (at the pixel level), is not precisely brown; it's a conglomeration of other colours. And no, I'm not only *not* colour-blind, I see fine shades of colour that most people don't. Which is why I'm so damned persnickety about my work monitor (only ViewSonic CRTs are sufficiently true).
HTML approximates brown as "Milk Chocolate", #780000. In RBG it's R120-B0-G0, in CMYK it's C52-M98-Y96-K12.
If you see a "perfect brown" it's because something did a good job of balancing those other colours to fool your eye (just as a mix of red and yellow pigment fools you into seeing orange). I know, I had to do that by hand with the aforementioned logo.
I did get it to where it looks good, but it took a lot of swearing. And I'd started with a scan of the original (best copy available -- it was an existing print logo to be used on their website). Had to do a lot of finagling with the tint to get it to where what the eye *sees* on a monitor is the intended shade of brown. On examining it at the pixel level, the reason became clear -- there ain't no such shade as 'brown' in the CRT spectrum.
On that note, I was appalled at what I saw on the discard table at my university's library. Huge pile of old technical and research volumes, some dating to the mid-1800s. Outdated? Yeah. Often wrong? Sure. But a snapshot of the state of science at the time, which is itself a valuable historical resource.
We no longer believe in (most of) the gods and demons our ancestors did, but it's still culturally useful to have information on the beliefs of the era. We no longer practice the styles of government, the human sacrifices, and whatever else our ancestors did, but it's still valuable to know where we came from. Add more examples as the spirit moves you.
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In the case of my old truck, so is the dirt -- it keeps everything else from leaking out of the engine!!
Seems to me such stuff could be defeated (or at least rendered easily findable) if the browser is only allowed to write data to certain directories regardless of what some script might wish, unless the user actively specifies elsewhere (such as to save a download). Also seems to me this could be programmed into the browser so the user need not worry about it (indeed, would not need to even know about it).
Someone will probably point out flaws in this scheme, but the concept is to make the "cure" as simple as possible.
That's a very good point. Sometimes it's not the plethora of choices that confuses, it's how they're presented. Too often only the technical-jargon names are given, with no guidelines or "common-sense descriptions".
Um... this is more like Joe Driver who's been running around in his 1985 Ford since forever... goes to the Saturn lot, sees 50 different models all with every sort of gadget imaginable included... he reads a bunch of reviews and only learns that reviewers love anything gadgetry... gives up trying to decide which is the best choice and goes to the used-car lot where the choices are, at least by his lights, saner.
And my response was the opposite:
Why does the linux desktop look more like a Mac every time I see a fresh one?? Why would I want a cheap copy of a desktop I dislike??
I think you misunderstood the parent post's complaint:
Choice is great -- so long as you understand the choices.
But when you don't, then they're just confusing.
And not everyone has the time or inclination to become an expert just so they can make the INITIAL choices.
For average folks, think of choice as a synonymy -- for a foreign language that you've just begun learning and have no working knowledge beyond the most basic meanings of basic words. (Should you call a horse 'equus' or 'caballus', and why??)
"My friend can certainly bang out a FoxPro application quickly, even quicker than me most of the time, but it won't be the app you want to use, because it also looks like it came out of that era."
This may be a dumb question (IANA database person) but couldn't someone throw together a front end that would fit over the top of stuff like that DOS-era-looking FoxPro app, to make it more usable for young moderns?? seems to me even if that's custom work, there's a market niche there.
Nonsense. The PCX is on the floppy in Drive #2.
Now get off my lawn!!
Plug both into the same power strip/surge unit and leave their switches on all the time, then just turn the strip on and off -- are they amenable to that??
Ah, okay, thanks. Our radio station went with UPI because it was some tiny fraction of what AP charged for the same level of news feed, and if I recall right, UPI threw in use of the teletype machine for free. As you can tell this was a long time ago. :)
I'd hazard that one reason people are unwilling to pay for news content is that most of it is essentially eyeball-collecting, and functionally news-free.
I'm reminded of the last interview I saw with some local earthquake expert, I forget her name but the TV news reporter was trying to goad her into making a doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world statement, and was clearly disappointed that her reply was a dispassionate "no, just the facts, this happens all the time" type thing, of absolute no use for scare-mongering. But a good example of how typical "news content" now is all about collecting terrified eyeballs that can't look away [thus are sellable to advertisers] lest some new horror emerge, and not about news at all.
I'd suggest that's also the dividing line for whether we the readers would perceive news content as worth paying for.
Interesting... was UPI the same sort of deal? (I don't know if it's even still around; it was our college radio station's newsfeed, because it was cheaper than AP.)
Speaking as a pro dog trainer -- you nailed it dead on.
Yeah, dispositions vary. I've had dead-serious dogs, and dogs that were SO cheerful ALL the time that you wanted to smack 'em. But the "separation anxiety" thing is a symptom of lack of human leadership, nothing to do with the dog's outlook on life -- other than that those more perceptive of reality are more likely to notice when the human isn't really in charge.
Okay... you have recording finite space. Which one do you keep -- Plato or Aristotle??
Actually that's a good suggestion, but the problem for me and most people is that each book is hugely time consuming to process, especially the mass of data in old technical books. Try working on a Distributed Proofreading project (even a simple text volume) for a while and you'll see what I mean.
http://www.pgdp.net/
Trouble is, it's extremely tough to eliminate the average fungus, being they're opportunistic. Ask anyone who's battled a fungal infection -- treatment isn't one-shot, it can continue for months or years and still not succeed in eliminating the problem. (Frex, blastomycosis has about a 40% fatality rate even with the best of treatment, which if you're lucky can drag out for 6-9 months.)
A vaccine against the virus is more likely to be successful, and more likely to succeed with only one or two treatments. Also, it may be possible to incorporate viral immunity into the bees' DNA.
And that was my first thought when I saw TFA... "so much for the cellphone towers tinfoil asshattery!"
Don't worry, we'll just raise taxes to compensate.
I live in the desert. I have a wild honeybee colony on my property. It's a sad affair that barely stays alive. The ONE time in the past nine years that it got up enough numbers to generate a swarm, you could have stuffed the entire swarm into a shoebox and had room to spare. I've tried feeding them but they don't seem interested (tho they show up to get water every day).
One problem with the western US deserts is that the dirt is loaded with fungus and bacteria spores (thus explosive growth anytime it rains or in any dampness including dew), and now that we mention it, I wonder how that affects the bees. -- I've found that I cannot let young puppies be out in the dirt until their eyes are fully developed (about 4 weeks of age) or they are likely to get eye infections.
[PS. I used to work for a beekeeper.]
Point was, it looked wrong, so I examined it at the pixel level to find out why, and to see if it could be fixed.
That slashdotters persistently and deliberately misunderstand this... well, maybe they need to simply read posts rather than examining them pixel by pixel ;)
I was working from a full colour scan of a print, not from a preset. I did try using an outline and single colour fill, but it looked wrong; it needed shading to look right onscreen, even tho it *appears* as all one colour. What I used for the adjacent text (cited numbers) was the closest visual match to the total effect.
Yeah, I know there's no such colour as... [insert combo-of-whatevers here] ...but it's still a convenient shorthand for what we SEE. Imagine if these what-we-see colours had no names and you had to refer to each by its numbers!
As to examining pixels, that's what I wound up doing because the initial brown looked wrong (like it wanted to be a bruised purple instead). There's nothing stupid about taking something down to its component parts to see why it's not working.
I've seen exactly *one* LCD that I deemed entirely suitable, and the damned thing cost $2200 (and that was at the trade-show discount). A wee ways out of my budget, probably for the next century. -- One of the issues that drives me nuts is that they're sensitive to viewing angle. Not so much from side-to-side anymore but still from up-to-down. So if you don't always slouch at the same height, the image changes. The very expensive one lacked this visual defect.
And as you note there's the issue of matching the video card to the LCD, notably the resolution. Not an issue with a CRT. I really hate being stuck on someone else's notion of MY ideal resolution, because otherwise the aspect ratio is munged, or it displays interlaced (I've seen both problems).
I've also found the average LCD's total light output wearing on my eyes.
I suppose if I was made of money, or doing graphics as a fulltime job, it would be worth whatever investment was required to get it how I want it. As it is, my stone-age solution works better for me, for a fraction of the investment.
IBM had such a technology, intended for retail advertising sites (so you could zoom in on product images to the level of fine details) in 1998, and it didn't need flash or much else that was fancy -- it worked in Netscape v3. However, I've never seen it deployed, so maybe it never made it past the marketing stage. They did demo it at trade shows, tho.
What you see, if you look closer (at the pixel level), is not precisely brown; it's a conglomeration of other colours. And no, I'm not only *not* colour-blind, I see fine shades of colour that most people don't. Which is why I'm so damned persnickety about my work monitor (only ViewSonic CRTs are sufficiently true).
HTML approximates brown as "Milk Chocolate", #780000. In RBG it's R120-B0-G0, in CMYK it's C52-M98-Y96-K12.
If you see a "perfect brown" it's because something did a good job of balancing those other colours to fool your eye (just as a mix of red and yellow pigment fools you into seeing orange). I know, I had to do that by hand with the aforementioned logo.
I did get it to where it looks good, but it took a lot of swearing. And I'd started with a scan of the original (best copy available -- it was an existing print logo to be used on their website). Had to do a lot of finagling with the tint to get it to where what the eye *sees* on a monitor is the intended shade of brown. On examining it at the pixel level, the reason became clear -- there ain't no such shade as 'brown' in the CRT spectrum.
On that note, I was appalled at what I saw on the discard table at my university's library. Huge pile of old technical and research volumes, some dating to the mid-1800s. Outdated? Yeah. Often wrong? Sure. But a snapshot of the state of science at the time, which is itself a valuable historical resource.
We no longer believe in (most of) the gods and demons our ancestors did, but it's still culturally useful to have information on the beliefs of the era. We no longer practice the styles of government, the human sacrifices, and whatever else our ancestors did, but it's still valuable to know where we came from. Add more examples as the spirit moves you.