I find Schneiderman's argument on speech using the same memory-capacity as though very, well, argumentative. For one thing, people tend to pull it off to think and speak concurrently, maybe not at the same time if his scientific research is correct, but in fast alternation. Admittedly, some people are better at it than others. Anyhow, remember the olden days when the boss would dictate a letter to his secretary? I'd like doing that with my computer. It may not be the fastest way to enter a text, but the process of thinking about something and then verbalizing it is natural and is, in my perception, a natural way to use my brain (as opposed to the many other unnatural things I do with my brain =). Although I agree with Schneiderman that vocal input probably won't become the sole way of interaction with computers, it will in my estimation become an important part of our relations with computers.
Programmers and IT geeks will be the factory workers of the future
As they were in the past. The first (female!) programmers were actually looked upon as a sort of secretaries, and AFAIK, working with computers has gained the little sex-appeal it has only in the 80's and 90's. I'd say it's rather remarkable that it has the status that it has now, more than that it's remarkable that programming work will be seen as run-of-the-mill work in a couple of decades.
.. beowulf cluster, eeeuh, no, I mean, a suit of this stuff with the colour being dynamically altered to match the surroundings. You'd be practically invisible!
What this all boils down to is security vs. user-friendliness. What the reviewer basically says about security is that the older 9x windows versions are not secure -- which is true, and that the newer NT based versions are but the lazy users don't bother to configure their systems in a secure way. Then he chalks down a point for linux and goes on. But this is not a inherent linux strenght or windows weakness; it's just user behaviour. It's comparable with doing regular backups and such. Basically, the reviewer is saying: "My installation of linux runs a cronjob which makes a tarball of my important files daily, and my installation of windows doesn't; hence linux is less prone to data loss" It's just a differance in accent; windows puts more of an accent on user-friendliness and linux more on security.
I disagree. We have two standards for storing office-like information: the current, MS-office doc, xls and ppt, and more importantly, the upcoming, most likely an XML-variant. As long as all these office-suites comply to both the current and the upcoming standard, the only reason not to want so much different suites is fragmentation of the sparse resource of open sources programmers, because to make a good open source office suite, you need a whole lot of voluntary programming hours.
X rules: - it's flexible, allowing a multitude of different window managers to front-end for it - it's network portable, allowing me to run X-sessions off another box completely over a ssh-connection - it's cross-platform, running on almost any architecture and operating system (with the obvious exceptions of course) - it allows me to run a screensaver in root-window as background, dazzeling all those MSWindows folks =) - it's free!
In my opinion, there are very little GUI's able to beat that, not OSX for all it's beauty but lack of flexibility and not MSWindows for it's compatibility but ugliness.
I just went for the low-tech solution to making my computer quiet: bought extension cables for the monitor, keyboard and mouse and put the cabinet itself in a closet in my study. Hmmmm.. no noise to be heard anymore.
I find it pretty strange that the same guy who is secretary in the standards committe now works for a company that market a definetly non-standard compatible C++ developement suite.
I've worked with Visual Studio in the past, and was always irritated by the microsoft-specific stuff and especially the automatically generated code, which is inserted at compilation time and thus can't be read or seen. I don't like using mystery code in my appilications.
... but couldn't it be that people sleeping shorter actually do so because they have something to look forward to, because they enjoy life so much they want to restart it as soon as possible?
I think one thing has proved itself to significantly lengthen life: a lust for life.
"We're going to make our systems more resistant and more resilient," said Microsoft's director of security assurance, Steve Lipner. "We want to be unquestionably, unequivocally the best."
Nobody should say Microsoft isn't taking security serious; they've even got a official 'no worries mate' person.
"Yes sir, I positively assure you that security is no problem whatsoever, I just checked with our very talented programmers, and they, on their part, assured me that they knew of no faults in our great software, and thus, I feel secure to absolutely assure you that you are safe as a lamb."
"But our server just got hacked this morning"
"So? How is this our problem sir? I suggest you contact the hackers and work it out with them. Good day sir."
I remember about plans to win energy from the sun by solar panels in low orbit and then emiting this energy to relay stations on earth by way of a narrow focus ion beam or something -- sorry, I ain't no rocket scientist.
I also distincly remember this being a bad idea because the chance of failure and was too high -- the thought of a high power beam coursing it's destructive path along the earth ad random would make you think twice even about the lowest chances of failure.
Wouldn't this system be prone to the same kind of risks?
Sure, maybe eight years ago there was no such thing as advertisement on the internet, and it was almost completely free of commercial activities. But it was also pretty expensive to run your own website, and most websites that were actually useful or fun were contributed for free by universities and other non-profit organisations.
Sure, 50% of all American time spent online is spent on sites of 4 coporate giants, but let's assume this 50% wouldn't have even been online if
the popularisation of internet made possible by banners wouldn't have taken place.
It's simple: if it's cheaper and easier to run your own website, more people will do so, making more content available, making the web more interesting for people, getting more people on the web, making it more interesting for advertisers, etc. etc.
I personally seldomly go to sites run by AOL, microsoft or whatever, but I'm pretty happy with the extra infrastructure their money provided for me to do my thing on the net.
The commercialisation of internet is in essence the incorporation of internet into mainstream economics and culture, and this has its good sides and its bad sides of course, but as long as the other 50% of the users (and remember, these are only american figures) can do their thing without being dominated by money, I think we have a pretty good thing going here.
A big company like Microsoft floats on it's image with customers, and having a negative labels like 'anti-inovative' won't do them any good.
For comparison think of the Shell case with the sinking of the Brent Sparr oil rig, the consumer boycot cost them peanuts in a financial sense, but loads in a public image sense, and I sincerely believe it changed them for the better.
Indeed too bad he didn't say much about OSS, because it has quite a different developement strategy, owing to it not costing anything while being developed. There are more releases and thus more user feedback.
In that light, I don't understand his comments about Mozilla. For one, he says he's making fun of them because they haven't released after four years of development, for another he's saying that of the ten years you supposedly need to develop good software, eight should be with user feedback.
So? I've been crashing with the mozilla team for over a year now;-), submitting talkback reports and bug reports now and then, and with version 0.9.2 Mozilla is really becoming a serious alternative for, well, any other browser I know of, and is, in my opinion, only second to (and that only slightly) Explorer. So what's he laughing about?
English and Korean, Thai, Chinese, Arabic, Albanian, Spanish, and other major European languages.
Wow. I knew the European Community was expanding, but I didn't know yet we'd come that far!
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Living is a way of life...
Some drama for daily life ...
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
I've been around with the likes of these people, and these ppl are just too simplistic to see real life situations in their real light, and try to reduce everything to a 'good guys, bad guys' perspective. And in this view, someone has to be the bad guy.So much for the car dealer or the greenery guy. You're evil!
The scary thing is that this automatically makes them the good guys, and thus leaves them no room at all to have a relativistic approach to life. They will not recognize the 'bad' impulses that also temp them to buy big cars, turn the airco up, leave the computer running all night (oh my!) and leaving the bathroom light on.
These guys are redirecting their own frustration with their imperfectness on others, and that's pretty lame, and walking around with personal problems like that won't change shit, and we should hope that they'll catch on to that soon.
As an option, this would make sense, be it that it should be announced in big red letters 'ET PHONE HOME?', and the default should be off. It's just another one of those 'helping illiterate users vs. protecting their privacy' issue, and I'd say that this scores pretty low on a privacy related scale.
Even if functions like this are options, there should be an authority checking companies collecting these kinds of info, and their use of it.
My experience, having access to and having designed several database driven internet sites containing sensitive information like credit card numbers, addresses and phone numbers and such that usually the intentions of the company are clean (if money orientated of course) but the real danger arises from very sloppy security, security being only available at extra expense, which is exactly what most companies are not willing to do.
Same goes here: how would this kind of information be sent (SSL?). Would it be stored at Phoenix? If yes, who would have access to the database containing the info? Etc. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I find Schneiderman's argument on speech using the same memory-capacity as though very, well, argumentative. For one thing, people tend to pull it off to think and speak concurrently, maybe not at the same time if his scientific research is correct, but in fast alternation. Admittedly, some people are better at it than others.
Anyhow, remember the olden days when the boss would dictate a letter to his secretary? I'd like doing that with my computer. It may not be the fastest way to enter a text, but the process of thinking about something and then verbalizing it is natural and is, in my perception, a natural way to use my brain (as opposed to the many other unnatural things I do with my brain =).
Although I agree with Schneiderman that vocal input probably won't become the sole way of interaction with computers, it will in my estimation become an important part of our relations with computers.
Programmers and IT geeks will be the factory workers of the future
As they were in the past. The first (female!) programmers were actually looked upon as a sort of secretaries, and AFAIK, working with computers has gained the little sex-appeal it has only in the 80's and 90's. I'd say it's rather remarkable that it has the status that it has now, more than that it's remarkable that programming work will be seen as run-of-the-mill work in a couple of decades.
Enjoy while it lasts!
.. beowulf cluster, eeeuh, no, I mean, a suit of this stuff with the colour being dynamically altered to match the surroundings. You'd be practically invisible!
What this all boils down to is security vs. user-friendliness. What the reviewer basically says about security is that the older 9x windows versions are not secure -- which is true, and that the newer NT based versions are but the lazy users don't bother to configure their systems in a secure way. Then he chalks down a point for linux and goes on.
But this is not a inherent linux strenght or windows weakness; it's just user behaviour. It's comparable with doing regular backups and such. Basically, the reviewer is saying: "My installation of linux runs a cronjob which makes a tarball of my important files daily, and my installation of windows doesn't; hence linux is less prone to data loss"
It's just a differance in accent; windows puts more of an accent on user-friendliness and linux more on security.
I disagree. We have two standards for storing office-like information: the current, MS-office doc, xls and ppt, and more importantly, the upcoming, most likely an XML-variant. As long as all these office-suites comply to both the current and the upcoming standard, the only reason not to want so much different suites is fragmentation of the sparse resource of open sources programmers, because to make a good open source office suite, you need a whole lot of voluntary programming hours.
X rules:
- it's flexible, allowing a multitude of different window managers to front-end for it
- it's network portable, allowing me to run X-sessions off another box completely over a ssh-connection
- it's cross-platform, running on almost any architecture and operating system (with the obvious exceptions of course)
- it allows me to run a screensaver in root-window as background, dazzeling all those MSWindows folks =)
- it's free!
In my opinion, there are very little GUI's able to beat that, not OSX for all it's beauty but lack of flexibility and not MSWindows for it's compatibility but ugliness.
I just went for the low-tech solution to making my computer quiet: bought extension cables for the monitor, keyboard and mouse and put the cabinet itself in a closet in my study. Hmmmm.. no noise to be heard anymore.
I find it pretty strange that the same guy who is secretary in the standards committe now works for a company that market a definetly non-standard compatible C++ developement suite.
I've worked with Visual Studio in the past, and was always irritated by the microsoft-specific stuff and especially the automatically generated code, which is inserted at compilation time and thus can't be read or seen. I don't like using mystery code in my appilications.
Couldn't they just chuck the audio-cassette and insert one with some cool new c64 gamez?
If the presidential intelligence binder is the top piece of the exhibition ....
... but couldn't it be that people sleeping shorter actually do so because they have something to look forward to, because they enjoy life so much they want to restart it as soon as possible?
I think one thing has proved itself to significantly lengthen life: a lust for life.
"Is anyone else distrubed by the graphic on the top of his home page?"
Yes, very much so, as it makes my mozilla segfault.
"We're going to make our systems more resistant and more resilient," said Microsoft's director of security assurance, Steve Lipner. "We want to be unquestionably, unequivocally the best."
Nobody should say Microsoft isn't taking security serious; they've even got a official 'no worries mate' person.
"Yes sir, I positively assure you that security is no problem whatsoever, I just checked with our very talented programmers, and they, on their part, assured me that they knew of no faults in our great software, and thus, I feel secure to absolutely assure you that you are safe as a lamb."
"But our server just got hacked this morning"
"So? How is this our problem sir? I suggest you contact the hackers and work it out with them. Good day sir."
I remember about plans to win energy from the sun by solar panels in low orbit and then emiting this energy to relay stations on earth by way of a narrow focus ion beam or something -- sorry, I ain't no rocket scientist.
I also distincly remember this being a bad idea because the chance of failure and was too high -- the thought of a high power beam coursing it's destructive path along the earth ad random would make you think twice even about the lowest chances of failure.
Wouldn't this system be prone to the same kind of risks?
Mr. Bill Gates
Chairman, Board of Directors
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
Is that line under Microsoft Corporation the address or Microsoft's motto?
I guess the RIAA has to get it's headaches elsewhere, as it doesn't seem that Nokia has plans to make the device available in the States ...
Sure, maybe eight years ago there was no such thing as advertisement on the internet, and it was almost completely free of commercial activities. But it was also pretty expensive to run your own website, and most websites that were actually useful or fun were contributed for free by universities and other non-profit organisations.
Sure, 50% of all American time spent online is spent on sites of 4 coporate giants, but let's assume this 50% wouldn't have even been online if the popularisation of internet made possible by banners wouldn't have taken place.
It's simple: if it's cheaper and easier to run your own website, more people will do so, making more content available, making the web more interesting for people, getting more people on the web, making it more interesting for advertisers, etc. etc.
I personally seldomly go to sites run by AOL, microsoft or whatever, but I'm pretty happy with the extra infrastructure their money provided for me to do my thing on the net.
The commercialisation of internet is in essence the incorporation of internet into mainstream economics and culture, and this has its good sides and its bad sides of course, but as long as the other 50% of the users (and remember, these are only american figures) can do their thing without being dominated by money, I think we have a pretty good thing going here.
A big company like Microsoft floats on it's image with customers, and having a negative labels like 'anti-inovative' won't do them any good.
For comparison think of the Shell case with the sinking of the Brent Sparr oil rig, the consumer boycot cost them peanuts in a financial sense, but loads in a public image sense, and I sincerely believe it changed them for the better.
AOL is hardly a player in the European ISP market, so why should the EU bother prosecuting them?
Indeed too bad he didn't say much about OSS, because it has quite a different developement strategy, owing to it not costing anything while being developed. There are more releases and thus more user feedback.
;-), submitting talkback reports and bug reports now and then, and with version 0.9.2 Mozilla is really becoming a serious alternative for, well, any other browser I know of, and is, in my opinion, only second to (and that only slightly) Explorer. So what's he laughing about?
...
In that light, I don't understand his comments about Mozilla. For one, he says he's making fun of them because they haven't released after four years of development, for another he's saying that of the ten years you supposedly need to develop good software, eight should be with user feedback.
So? I've been crashing with the mozilla team for over a year now
---
Living is a way of life
English and Korean, Thai, Chinese, Arabic, Albanian, Spanish, and other major European languages.
...
Wow. I knew the European Community was expanding, but I didn't know yet we'd come that far!
---
Living is a way of life
I've been around with the likes of these people, and these ppl are just too simplistic to see real life situations in their real light, and try to reduce everything to a 'good guys, bad guys' perspective. And in this view, someone has to be the bad guy.So much for the car dealer or the greenery guy. You're evil!
...
The scary thing is that this automatically makes them the good guys, and thus leaves them no room at all to have a relativistic approach to life. They will not recognize the 'bad' impulses that also temp them to buy big cars, turn the airco up, leave the computer running all night (oh my!) and leaving the bathroom light on.
These guys are redirecting their own frustration with their imperfectness on others, and that's pretty lame, and walking around with personal problems like that won't change shit, and we should hope that they'll catch on to that soon.
---
Living is a way of life
... that all my friends are cancerous non-fair-playing egalitarian communist Pac Mans, she would sleep at night!
...
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Living is a way of life
As an option, this would make sense, be it that it should be announced in big red letters 'ET PHONE HOME?', and the default should be off. It's just another one of those 'helping illiterate users vs. protecting their privacy' issue, and I'd say that this scores pretty low on a privacy related scale.
...
Even if functions like this are options, there should be an authority checking companies collecting these kinds of info, and their use of it.
My experience, having access to and having designed several database driven internet sites containing sensitive information like credit card numbers, addresses and phone numbers and such that usually the intentions of the company are clean (if money orientated of course) but the real danger arises from very sloppy security, security being only available at extra expense, which is exactly what most companies are not willing to do.
Same goes here: how would this kind of information be sent (SSL?). Would it be stored at Phoenix? If yes, who would have access to the database containing the info? Etc. Etc.
---
Living is a way of life
If you don't have enough money for a medical treatment, a company can refuse you. A humane government won't.
...
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Living is a way of life