"I don't have many important apps that access the internet like that anyway."
You sure?
You don't use, for example, any of: Anything from Adobe (including Reader), anything from Apple (including Quicktime player), anything from Logitech (such as a webcam driver), anything from Real, anything from Google, anything from Blackberry, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, any web browser, any antivirus?
Because on my machine, all of the above ship with their own Internet-connected auto-updatey thingies. Even if you didn't ask them to. They're doing Net connections in the background and could potentially be exposed to security issues.
Except without any Africa, America, India, or Pacific Islands on the other side: nobody out there to trade with or fight, no tradeable commodities, and therefore no commercial or military reason to drive exploration. Just vacuum, rock, and a little bit of ice.
But otherwise, yes, exactly the same as the Age of Sail.
"The problem with a set specification (the "waterfall" model) is you discover after something was implemented that it was a bad idea, the whirlpool model prevents this."
Hold on, let me draw a chart. So, our project starts in the cathedral at the top of the cliff, we get swept over the waterfall and into the whirlpool. Then the Extreme Bazaar... is Rapture at the bottom of the ocean?
"Reading text on a video screen is very taxing on the eyes. Additionally, and especially in the case of textbooks, interaction with the paper media is something which is important to readers. While its very logical in the case of texts with the capacity to scrawl notes in margins, highlight passages, and tape stickies to pages, there is also an emotional/comfort aspect to the interaction with the paper itself which is simply not there on digital versions."
Actually it's the other way around for me. I start to feel cramped now when I don't have a 'search' box in my paper books.
"Seriously, its just us tech guys now, the RIAA isn't in the room, we can be honest."
*click* Yes. That assertion is correct. It is in fact, 'just us tech guys'. Ha. Ha. Ha. Now, would you kindly repeat that incriminating statement? For, uh. Technical purposes. *click*
Actually, I'm one of those strange people who still mostly buy music. Call it a lingering desire to support musicians, I guess.
"This, I think, the paradigm which bothers me most: That the computer switches from being told by the user what it should be doing, to telling (or at least suggesting to) the user what to do."
Right, except that it's not actually "the computer" which is telling the user what to do, but "the corporation" which sold the computer and publishes the software/media for it.
Which is just the same way companies (and lets face it, most other large social and industrial groups) have been relating to their consumers for years. Since the dawn of mass manufacturing and marketing, at least.
"Trust us. We're the experts. Buy this. We know what you want. You need this product. It's an update. You (might) need it to be safe. It (might) be healthy. It (might) make you happier, cooler, smarter and an all-round better person.Listen to us: we need to educate you about the benefits of our new product. It's for your own good. Can you take the risk that you know better than us? We're the Company. Would we lie to you?"
It's the same power/knowledge differential, it's just being exploited through different media.
In other words, it's a social, not a technical problem, and the root of the problem is that we have a society with tolerates and in fact *rewards* white-lying and sharp-dealing high-pressure sales, if it gets marketshare.
"Rarely does the main protagonist die, it's only the bit players that don the red shirt."
That was one of the great tricks of the original Alien movie. Fool you into thinking one character is the protagonist... then mid-story, wham! A few other thrillers have done that too. When it works, it's very effective.
"The significant difference between video games and epic tales of heroes is that in video games, the hero seldom dies at the end"
Although in video games, the hero dies countless times in the middle, then reverses time until they 'get it right' and complete the level.
This is a very interesting feature of interactive narrative, IMO - the 'do-over' or 'repeat until optimised' effect. Classical epics have a shape, a structure, which is fated. Games have rulesets which define what actions can be taken and what their results are, and whether it's a comedy or tragedy depends on the player.
Btw need walkthru for Hamlet plz. Ophelia keeps dying even when I kill everyone else.
Personally I prefer death trapdoors to death panels. They can be elegantly covered with a nice rug. I use panels for walk-in weapons closets, secret control rooms, and the always practical escape pod tunnel. Cliche perhaps, but functional and discreet.
If you must use a death panel - and for some lairs it can give you that extra touch of chic - make sure you get the interior decorator to cover it with something that washes down easily. A hinged or rotating frame is best. There are many options for the actual mechanism: guillotine, laser, portal to nameless dimension... use your imagination, but remember to work with gravity, not against it. And stay practical. A giant shark in a piranha tank that explodes outwards toward your guest is dramatic, but hardly suitable if you have carpet or expensive furnishings.
Don't forget to think 'outside the box', so to speak. Have you considered a death ceiling? Tasmanian drop bears make delightful companions and can be trained to attack on command.
"Even if the guy who seems like the lesser evil during his advertising campaign does get into power, there's always the chance that his promises will turn out to be lies and I won't even be able to change my vote for 2 to 6 years."
So don't just vote.
Get involved in the organisation of the party of your choice. Become an activist. Articulate your political philosophy. Find others of your viewpoint and network. Blog. Start a think tank. Push for reform within the party ranks. Attend conferences. Go back to school and get a law degree. Start an innovative social business. Test out your ideas. Write papers. Attend a discussion group. Refine your philosophy in the crucible of real life. Talk to strangers. Start a petition. Create a movement. Go door to door.
Support friends who want to enter politics. Research and identify the small-time, passionate, heart-led activists who are stepping into a political career. Meet with them regularly. Keep them honest. Fight with them, work with them, argue with them, cry with them as they move up the party ranks. Keep involved every step of the way. Wrestle out the planks of your platform. Debate. Study. Identify the causes which are achievable and those which are impractical. Prioritise. Form a long-term game-plan. Don't hide your agenda but find ways to sell your ideas, honestly and simply, to the public. Consider everyone you meet not only as a potential ally, but as a friend and a person with sense and conscience. Trust your heart. Trust others. Live your dream.
Do any or all of these and you'll end up with a movement and a political party that's not 'the system' but is yours, inside and out, and which can step onto the national stage with its conscience intact.
Do the same within the business system.
And then you won't have to choose between 'government' and 'market' and 'people' and 'self'. It'll all be good.
"Once I get these structures into place, I'll teach others, and I'll build more such tools out of nothing and give them away for free. Or, I'll die still struggling with the task half finished. Either is fine."
I admire your dedication, and I too share some of these ideals for self-sufficiency. I'm a member of a local Hacker Space group, run a neighbourhood association, know people in a local community garden, and have been involved in a complementary currency (Green Dollars) market. I'm tinkering with my own from-scratch programming language design.
However, my experience in this has taught me so far that there are very definite limits to how self-sufficient I can be. My time and brain just fill up. I can't keep a garden running. I can't write my own OS from scratch. I'm actually moving in the other direction now: I want to learn how to be interdependent with my neighbours, and realise how to efficiently delegate the skills I'm not good at.
I think we need to find a medium between the ideals of self-sufficiency and 'letting the market do it'. At some point, we do have to create social structures and trust them; otherwise we'll spend all our time sharpening adzes rather than writing code. We only need to reinvent what's actually broken, not the whole deal.
The problem is sorting out what *is* broken and what can be recycled.
"Instead of people choosing their foods based on preference, we'll have politicians picking our foods based on how much money is contributed to their campaigns!"
And this would be different to the current situation, where giant agribusiness / retail / media conglomerates pick our foods for us based on how much profit they generate via their ad compaigns - how exactly?
"As technology and communication have improved efficiency (especially since design for usability has grown tremendously), the average problem solving skill level of the population has dropped. The sense of entitlement that is said to have developed is related -- people expect that solutions will be provided, or at least easy-to-follow solution paths."
Well, yeah. Is that really an unrealistic expectation?
The claim of science and progress is that things *will* improve and that science *is* building a better world which we are all entitled to. That's why we pursue science - so it will make our lives better. Better meaning simpler, more capable, more usable, more ergonomic, more accessible devices through which we can do more with less effort.
Are you saying science *shouldn't* aim to improve our lives but to make it harder?
Remember, science is also massively increasing the complexity of our daily lives, and the amount of sheer rote knowledge and time-consuming learned skills needed to successfully navigate it -- yet our individual brainpower isn't necessarily increasing at the same rate, and the complexity means we all have *less* time to learn new skills. Therefore, unless we can leverage our technology to make things easier and require less mental effort, we're all likely, even the brightest of us, to increasingly struggle just to get by each day.
Are you really advocating a sort of Klingon/Nietzschean/Dune design aesthetic - that technology *should* be built to be deliverately hard to use, time-consuming to figure out, and everything should be much harder than necessarily, so that we force ourselves to engage in a titanic moment-to-moment mental contest against our machines? Massively reducing our efficiency and productivity in the meantime?
Who's the real failure - the person who doesn't have time to learn the irrational quirks of a badly-designed device, or the designer who refuses to make the design rational to operate?
"I'm marking the bug wontfix on the basis that we are confident the behaviour as at 9.04 release is a good one. I wouldn't be surprised for the conversation to continue though I do ask that it continue in a good spirit. If significant data shows this to be a suboptimal choice in future, we will revisit the point, but for now the question is settled."
but it was still a WONTFIX in the face of overwhelming public opinion to the contrary.
I'll believe he listens to users when he actually listens to the users.
"However Ribbon's "contextual" system is horrible to user too. People get used to where things are, even more so with computers. That is why static, normal menus and buttons are good. When the system is trying to contextually offer the "best" options to user, in seemingly random places it thinks are most relevant, they just get confused."
Yes, exactly.
There are three big pluses with a menu:
1. It keeps out of your way when you're not using it.
2. It's discoverable. If you don't know if an entry is there, you can just sweep over all entries to see if it appears. Text is crucial for this - icons are not discoverable unless you already know what they mean, or can tooltip-hover over them.
3. It's predictable. 'Greying out' entries was invented for exactly this reason: so that items don't randomly change position depending on context but can be learned and remembered. Any 'context-sensitive' ribbon-like thing abandons this.
Re:Some would call X3 the successor...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
"warp into a system, take my ship that's in space 10,000 AU from the nearest planet, point it at that blue looking planet over yonder (all the while dealing with Newtonian physics)"
That might take some time... perhaps you want to handwave in some non-Newtonian (and non-Einsteinian) physics instead?
"First, a brick wall doesn't continually generate money."
Neither does a copyrighted work - it *transfers* money from one person to another. The total amount of money in the cosmos remains constant. Actually, since the transaction itself imposes a processing cost, I'd say money was lost to entropy.
Now, bank loans - those do generate money, for some definition of 'money'. They also destroy money when the loans come due, apparently.
But perhaps you were thinking about generating *wealth* rather than merely reallocating money? I'd say the most obvious thing that does that is living biomass - food and medicine. But shelter for sentient beings would have to come a close second.
Slashdot Mirror
"And then magically, the other 19 programs stop working because they are not compatible with the updated library."
Good. The update's working as designed. Better they magically stop working than magically silently root your system, no?
"I don't have many important apps that access the internet like that anyway."
You sure?
You don't use, for example, any of: Anything from Adobe (including Reader), anything from Apple (including Quicktime player), anything from Logitech (such as a webcam driver), anything from Real, anything from Google, anything from Blackberry, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, any web browser, any antivirus?
Because on my machine, all of the above ship with their own Internet-connected auto-updatey thingies. Even if you didn't ask them to. They're doing Net connections in the background and could potentially be exposed to security issues.
Except without any Africa, America, India, or Pacific Islands on the other side: nobody out there to trade with or fight, no tradeable commodities, and therefore no commercial or military reason to drive exploration. Just vacuum, rock, and a little bit of ice.
But otherwise, yes, exactly the same as the Age of Sail.
World of Nethack, sort of thing?
"The problem with a set specification (the "waterfall" model) is you discover after something was implemented that it was a bad idea, the whirlpool model prevents this."
Hold on, let me draw a chart. So, our project starts in the cathedral at the top of the cliff, we get swept over the waterfall and into the whirlpool. Then the Extreme Bazaar ... is Rapture at the bottom of the ocean?
I call dibs on the fireball plasmid!
"Reading text on a video screen is very taxing on the eyes. Additionally, and especially in the case of textbooks, interaction with the paper media is something which is important to readers. While its very logical in the case of texts with the capacity to scrawl notes in margins, highlight passages, and tape stickies to pages, there is also an emotional/comfort aspect to the interaction with the paper itself which is simply not there on digital versions."
Actually it's the other way around for me. I start to feel cramped now when I don't have a 'search' box in my paper books.
"Seriously, its just us tech guys now, the RIAA isn't in the room, we can be honest."
*click* Yes. That assertion is correct. It is in fact, 'just us tech guys'. Ha. Ha. Ha. Now, would you kindly repeat that incriminating statement? For, uh. Technical purposes. *click*
Actually, I'm one of those strange people who still mostly buy music. Call it a lingering desire to support musicians, I guess.
You've never seen Time Cube before? Wow, I feel old.
"This, I think, the paradigm which bothers me most: That the computer switches from being told by the user what it should be doing, to telling (or at least suggesting to) the user what to do."
Right, except that it's not actually "the computer" which is telling the user what to do, but "the corporation" which sold the computer and publishes the software/media for it.
Which is just the same way companies (and lets face it, most other large social and industrial groups) have been relating to their consumers for years. Since the dawn of mass manufacturing and marketing, at least.
"Trust us. We're the experts. Buy this. We know what you want. You need this product. It's an update. You (might) need it to be safe. It (might) be healthy. It (might) make you happier, cooler, smarter and an all-round better person.Listen to us: we need to educate you about the benefits of our new product. It's for your own good. Can you take the risk that you know better than us? We're the Company. Would we lie to you?"
It's the same power/knowledge differential, it's just being exploited through different media.
In other words, it's a social, not a technical problem, and the root of the problem is that we have a society with tolerates and in fact *rewards* white-lying and sharp-dealing high-pressure sales, if it gets marketshare.
You've seen this version, right?
"Rarely does the main protagonist die, it's only the bit players that don the red shirt."
That was one of the great tricks of the original Alien movie. Fool you into thinking one character is the protagonist... then mid-story, wham! A few other thrillers have done that too. When it works, it's very effective.
"The significant difference between video games and epic tales of heroes is that in video games, the hero seldom dies at the end"
Although in video games, the hero dies countless times in the middle, then reverses time until they 'get it right' and complete the level.
This is a very interesting feature of interactive narrative, IMO - the 'do-over' or 'repeat until optimised' effect. Classical epics have a shape, a structure, which is fated. Games have rulesets which define what actions can be taken and what their results are, and whether it's a comedy or tragedy depends on the player.
Btw need walkthru for Hamlet plz. Ophelia keeps dying even when I kill everyone else.
"DEATH PANELS! and SOCIALISM! and NAZIS!"
Personally I prefer death trapdoors to death panels. They can be elegantly covered with a nice rug. I use panels for walk-in weapons closets, secret control rooms, and the always practical escape pod tunnel. Cliche perhaps, but functional and discreet.
If you must use a death panel - and for some lairs it can give you that extra touch of chic - make sure you get the interior decorator to cover it with something that washes down easily. A hinged or rotating frame is best. There are many options for the actual mechanism: guillotine, laser, portal to nameless dimension... use your imagination, but remember to work with gravity, not against it. And stay practical. A giant shark in a piranha tank that explodes outwards toward your guest is dramatic, but hardly suitable if you have carpet or expensive furnishings.
Don't forget to think 'outside the box', so to speak. Have you considered a death ceiling? Tasmanian drop bears make delightful companions and can be trained to attack on command.
"Even if the guy who seems like the lesser evil during his advertising campaign does get into power, there's always the chance that his promises will turn out to be lies and I won't even be able to change my vote for 2 to 6 years."
So don't just vote.
Get involved in the organisation of the party of your choice. Become an activist. Articulate your political philosophy. Find others of your viewpoint and network. Blog. Start a think tank. Push for reform within the party ranks. Attend conferences. Go back to school and get a law degree. Start an innovative social business. Test out your ideas. Write papers. Attend a discussion group. Refine your philosophy in the crucible of real life. Talk to strangers. Start a petition. Create a movement. Go door to door.
Support friends who want to enter politics. Research and identify the small-time, passionate, heart-led activists who are stepping into a political career. Meet with them regularly. Keep them honest. Fight with them, work with them, argue with them, cry with them as they move up the party ranks. Keep involved every step of the way. Wrestle out the planks of your platform. Debate. Study. Identify the causes which are achievable and those which are impractical. Prioritise. Form a long-term game-plan. Don't hide your agenda but find ways to sell your ideas, honestly and simply, to the public. Consider everyone you meet not only as a potential ally, but as a friend and a person with sense and conscience. Trust your heart. Trust others. Live your dream.
Do any or all of these and you'll end up with a movement and a political party that's not 'the system' but is yours, inside and out, and which can step onto the national stage with its conscience intact.
Do the same within the business system.
And then you won't have to choose between 'government' and 'market' and 'people' and 'self'. It'll all be good.
"Once I get these structures into place, I'll teach others, and I'll build more such tools out of nothing and give them away for free. Or, I'll die still struggling with the task half finished. Either is fine."
I admire your dedication, and I too share some of these ideals for self-sufficiency. I'm a member of a local Hacker Space group, run a neighbourhood association, know people in a local community garden, and have been involved in a complementary currency (Green Dollars) market. I'm tinkering with my own from-scratch programming language design.
However, my experience in this has taught me so far that there are very definite limits to how self-sufficient I can be. My time and brain just fill up. I can't keep a garden running. I can't write my own OS from scratch. I'm actually moving in the other direction now: I want to learn how to be interdependent with my neighbours, and realise how to efficiently delegate the skills I'm not good at.
I think we need to find a medium between the ideals of self-sufficiency and 'letting the market do it'. At some point, we do have to create social structures and trust them; otherwise we'll spend all our time sharpening adzes rather than writing code. We only need to reinvent what's actually broken, not the whole deal.
The problem is sorting out what *is* broken and what can be recycled.
"Instead of people choosing their foods based on preference, we'll have politicians picking our foods based on how much money is contributed to their campaigns!"
And this would be different to the current situation, where giant agribusiness / retail / media conglomerates pick our foods for us based on how much profit they generate via their ad compaigns - how exactly?
"As technology and communication have improved efficiency (especially since design for usability has grown tremendously), the average problem solving skill level of the population has dropped. The sense of entitlement that is said to have developed is related -- people expect that solutions will be provided, or at least easy-to-follow solution paths."
Well, yeah. Is that really an unrealistic expectation?
The claim of science and progress is that things *will* improve and that science *is* building a better world which we are all entitled to. That's why we pursue science - so it will make our lives better. Better meaning simpler, more capable, more usable, more ergonomic, more accessible devices through which we can do more with less effort.
Are you saying science *shouldn't* aim to improve our lives but to make it harder?
Remember, science is also massively increasing the complexity of our daily lives, and the amount of sheer rote knowledge and time-consuming learned skills needed to successfully navigate it -- yet our individual brainpower isn't necessarily increasing at the same rate, and the complexity means we all have *less* time to learn new skills. Therefore, unless we can leverage our technology to make things easier and require less mental effort, we're all likely, even the brightest of us, to increasingly struggle just to get by each day.
Are you really advocating a sort of Klingon/Nietzschean/Dune design aesthetic - that technology *should* be built to be deliverately hard to use, time-consuming to figure out, and everything should be much harder than necessarily, so that we force ourselves to engage in a titanic moment-to-moment mental contest against our machines? Massively reducing our efficiency and productivity in the meantime?
Who's the real failure - the person who doesn't have time to learn the irrational quirks of a badly-designed device, or the designer who refuses to make the design rational to operate?
D'oh. Let's try that url again. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/332945
this is the same Mark Shuttleworth who removed update-notifier and then when hundreds of beta-testers said 'please put that back' on the infamous https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/332945 he personally said 'no, I'm not listening to you'.
He said it politely:
"I'm marking the bug wontfix on the basis that we are confident the behaviour as at 9.04 release is a good one. I wouldn't be surprised for the conversation to continue though I do ask that it continue in a good spirit. If significant data shows this to be a suboptimal choice in future, we will revisit the point, but for now the question is settled."
but it was still a WONTFIX in the face of overwhelming public opinion to the contrary.
I'll believe he listens to users when he actually listens to the users.
"However Ribbon's "contextual" system is horrible to user too. People get used to where things are, even more so with computers. That is why static, normal menus and buttons are good. When the system is trying to contextually offer the "best" options to user, in seemingly random places it thinks are most relevant, they just get confused."
Yes, exactly.
There are three big pluses with a menu:
1. It keeps out of your way when you're not using it.
2. It's discoverable. If you don't know if an entry is there, you can just sweep over all entries to see if it appears. Text is crucial for this - icons are not discoverable unless you already know what they mean, or can tooltip-hover over them.
3. It's predictable. 'Greying out' entries was invented for exactly this reason: so that items don't randomly change position depending on context but can be learned and remembered. Any 'context-sensitive' ribbon-like thing abandons this.
"Deviate from your normal routine in very absurd and unusual ways for no apparent reason."
But I do that every day already!
Except for Jedi Outcast - done by Raven, and one of the best Star Wars games ever.
"you, your ancestors"
Bloody time portals! That's just not cricket!
"warp into a system, take my ship that's in space 10,000 AU from the nearest planet, point it at that blue looking planet over yonder (all the while dealing with Newtonian physics)"
That might take some time... perhaps you want to handwave in some non-Newtonian (and non-Einsteinian) physics instead?
"First, a brick wall doesn't continually generate money."
Neither does a copyrighted work - it *transfers* money from one person to another. The total amount of money in the cosmos remains constant. Actually, since the transaction itself imposes a processing cost, I'd say money was lost to entropy.
Now, bank loans - those do generate money, for some definition of 'money'. They also destroy money when the loans come due, apparently.
But perhaps you were thinking about generating *wealth* rather than merely reallocating money? I'd say the most obvious thing that does that is living biomass - food and medicine. But shelter for sentient beings would have to come a close second.