Go get your cell phone. Now compose an email. Use your speech to text software to dictate the contents of that email. And now review the email. How did the dictation go? This is about how advanced computer hearing is at this time.
"A UI's purpose isn't to be enjoyable, it's to let the user do what he wants/needs to do and otherwise stay out of the way."
Not necessarily so. Look at Apple. They released the iPhone, and for its time it was quite the piece of crap. It took many generations of the product to reach par with what other phones can do. But it sold, and it sold well. Why? Because it's shiny, and it's "fun" to use. This is the way UIs are going. An interactive, fun, rewarding experience is going to sell more than a functional experience. It's just like anything else, really. If A is more fun to use than B, and they both do the same thing, A will appeal to more people. There will always be people who are sticklers for efficiency such as yourself, but you're increasingly in the minority.
"Where others may see intractable, overly difficult methods, we see enlightenment, borne from years of learning, experience, and overall, logic."
Really? Rather than doing something a simple way, over the years veterans learn that complicated and difficult is better? K.I.S.S! There's even an acronym for it!
This sounds like it was written by a junior admin or programmer who's in awe of what some of the more seasoned vets are doing.
Where are you interviewing where this is the case? So I can never apply there. This is definitely not what we do, and if you interview with me and you give me mechanical answers you're out the door. This is for a fairly large multinational, interviewing for a technical software job. In the technical interviews I'll usually give problems that are borderline unsolvable. There's usually a trick to solve it really efficiently, but if you come up with just the trick and nothing else you're not getting hired. I want to see you get it wrong. I want to see you get it wrong a dozen times, and learn why it's wrong, and try to think your way out of the pit you've dug again and again and again. I want to see you get creative, use tricks of the architecture to solve theoretical problems, and come up with half a dozen different kinds of approaches. I want you to see why each one is brilliant or stupid, what's good about it, what's bad about it, and try again and again and again. People who show up expecting the usual canned standard answers usually look sort of like a deer in the headlights and are back out the door in 15 minutes.
Doing things this way works. I know this because most of the really brilliant people I've worked with have done fantastic in this situation. I don't want to hear the right answer because there is no right answer. The more you can show me about how you think about a problem and how sneaky you can get, the better you do.
I'm a fan of the punctuation possibilities myself.
Is it the world's strongest, most expensive beer, served inside a squirrel? Or of all the beers served inside a squirrel, is this the strongest and most expensive? Nobody knows. Nobody knows.
"Attention, ecomentals: what do you think is generating the electricity to power the (energy intensive) construction and use of your "green" car? Fairy farts? "
Yes, in a sense. Specifically, 25% of my power is generated by wind. 50% is Nuclear. 75% of the electricity I use is exhaust-free.
Yep. I went through comp eng at Waterloo (before the program started circling the bowl these last 5 years or so) and for most of my class, $60k was settling. I know people who started at 6 figures. Lucky bastards.
Are the differences south of the border really that significant?
What different worlds we live in. When weather permits, I ride my bike in daily. There are a bunch of routes I can take - almost all of them have bike lanes, some of them have trails through various parks and green space, and for the one route that doesn't have bike lanes, I've never had much of an issue with vehicles trying to run me off the road. I stick to the right, they get around me, and when the road gets tight most people understand that I'm going as fast as I can, and wait for the road to widen again before passing. If I ride my bike to the city center, I often have trouble finding a place to lock it up due to all the other bikes on the street.
This is in a relatively major urban center (700k+ people in the region). Interesting to see what a difference city policies and local culture can make.
Also, this is the first year that blu ray players have started to drop in price to the point where most people can afford them. A *lot* of people I know have commented on how players are cheap enough to consider now. This holiday season we're going to see a lot of households get the ability to play blu ray discs
Looking at app world now, it looks like there's at least a few thousand on there. I was able to download a network file manager, VNC client, and SSH client, all of which I use pretty much daily. Plus good old Shazam.
I get it, you have so far installed a dozen flashlight applications, some tetris clones, and a winnie-the-pooh theme. But there's more out there. Just open up the application and take a look.
That's too bad. Otherwise this would have been a serious contender for my next media box.
It seems there's no "do-it-all" media center on the market. Games, Blu-Ray, XBMC. Pick any two. I'm waiting for someone to get XBMC going on a PS3. When that happens, I will have chosen my corner in this fight.
Interesting. I installed DD-WRT on my wrt54g and I noticed a dramatic speed increase. Running vendor's firmware, samba transfers in my house over the wifi would cap out at about 1.3 megs/sec. After changing only the router firmware, I can often pull in 2.2 megs/sec. I noticed similar speedups with my cable connection.
For sure they are. I went through University around the turn of the century, and the lecture method of choice were pdfs with lecture slides. Put up the slides, talk about them, let students download the pdf. Unfortunately, this was also used as a method of teaching for professors whose English skills weren't up to par. I recall one prof who spent most of the lecture pointing at equations on the projector. The upside of this method is that you do get to download the slides, and for cases like I just mentioned, you can more or less teach yourself the content.
I'd have to agree. It was great when I was younger, but since then my tastes have expanded somewhat.
I got into it about the same time, maybe junior high. I was pretty much riveted until the end of book 7 or 8. Then it got *really old* *really fast*. However, I was so smitten with the series back when I was a teen that I made a solemn promise to myself that I would finish the series, no matter what. And here we are, with me approaching 30, and damnit I am still determined to finish this, one way or another. I read book 11 (is that the latest? I don't even care) recently and somehow managed to plod through it. I'll finish the series, but only out of pure determination.
"Obviously the iPhone isn't as hot to non-geeks as you think, as almost half the smartphone buyers still pick a Nokia."
That's true. I remember talking to a couple one time, and the man (stocky, pudgy, eccentric, classic geek type) had just bought his fiancee (relatively normal, had a job in HR or something like that) an iPhone. She didn't seem to getting the emphasis he was putting on this phone.
Her: "I just got a new phone" Him: "WHAT? Not just ANY phone! It's an iPhone!!!" Her: "Uhhh....yeah I guess so. It doesn't have any buttons, if that's what you mean."
Most people don't give nearly the kind of a shit that people on tech forums give about smart phones.
I really don't understand this. Just about every iPhone user on the web loves to shout to the heavens about how fantastic the browser is. What makes it so great? Technically it's the most capable browser on a mobile device, but not by very much. Take a look at this http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html . Iris browser and Bolt browser both fare very well, but nobody ever talks about them like they do with Safari. I tried Opera Mini 5 the other day and I was extremely impressed. It basically gave me web pages like my desktop does. Still, it gets no love. I have one of the newest blackberries, and its browser gets me by just fine. I make it tell web pages that it's a firefox browser, and I get full versions of pages like I would at a PC. I use it at least a half a dozen times a day, and have no real complaints about it (except maybe the lack of tabbed browsing but that's not a big deal for me). Yet every iPhone user loves to get smug about how they have Safari. Every time I've asked someone for clarification, they either ignore me or they say something to the effect of "oh you wouldn't understand, you don't use an iPhone". So I figure I'll try my luck and ask again.
What makes the iPhone's browser that noteworthy? Is it that great in other ways? Or is this just the users being vocal again?
Are you talking about how on a Mac, ProgramName->Preferences is always the prefs dialog? In Windows it's always Tools->Options. Getting the program version on a mac is ProgramName->About, Windows is Help->About.
I'd really be interested in hearing some examples of how Macs are more usable. Everyone loves to sound off about how easy it is to use their Mac/iPhone/whatever compared to everything else out there, but I've found neither one any more usable than any of my other devices or computers. In a lot of cases, Apple's products are actually pretty damn annoying to use compared to the competition. I have yet to hear any good evidence to back up this claim of alleged "usability". It seems to come from people who just prefer Apple. That's fine, but please don't pass off preference as fact.
Once you're ssh'd in, wouldn't you have those CLI tools available?
With the exception of the CLI tools, sounds like you're looking for one of the new blackberries. I use mine to ssh into my servers all the time, and it does pretty much everything else on your list. I've even done some basic vim over ssh, although at that point it's worth it to switch to a laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Go get your cell phone. Now compose an email. Use your speech to text software to dictate the contents of that email. And now review the email. How did the dictation go? This is about how advanced computer hearing is at this time.
"A UI's purpose isn't to be enjoyable, it's to let the user do what he wants/needs to do and otherwise stay out of the way."
Not necessarily so. Look at Apple. They released the iPhone, and for its time it was quite the piece of crap. It took many generations of the product to reach par with what other phones can do. But it sold, and it sold well. Why? Because it's shiny, and it's "fun" to use. This is the way UIs are going. An interactive, fun, rewarding experience is going to sell more than a functional experience. It's just like anything else, really. If A is more fun to use than B, and they both do the same thing, A will appeal to more people. There will always be people who are sticklers for efficiency such as yourself, but you're increasingly in the minority.
"Where others may see intractable, overly difficult methods, we see enlightenment, borne from years of learning, experience, and overall, logic."
Really? Rather than doing something a simple way, over the years veterans learn that complicated and difficult is better? K.I.S.S! There's even an acronym for it!
This sounds like it was written by a junior admin or programmer who's in awe of what some of the more seasoned vets are doing.
and now this! You guys just can't catch a break.
Where are you interviewing where this is the case? So I can never apply there. This is definitely not what we do, and if you interview with me and you give me mechanical answers you're out the door. This is for a fairly large multinational, interviewing for a technical software job. In the technical interviews I'll usually give problems that are borderline unsolvable. There's usually a trick to solve it really efficiently, but if you come up with just the trick and nothing else you're not getting hired. I want to see you get it wrong. I want to see you get it wrong a dozen times, and learn why it's wrong, and try to think your way out of the pit you've dug again and again and again. I want to see you get creative, use tricks of the architecture to solve theoretical problems, and come up with half a dozen different kinds of approaches. I want you to see why each one is brilliant or stupid, what's good about it, what's bad about it, and try again and again and again. People who show up expecting the usual canned standard answers usually look sort of like a deer in the headlights and are back out the door in 15 minutes.
Doing things this way works. I know this because most of the really brilliant people I've worked with have done fantastic in this situation. I don't want to hear the right answer because there is no right answer. The more you can show me about how you think about a problem and how sneaky you can get, the better you do.
I'm a fan of the punctuation possibilities myself.
Is it the world's strongest, most expensive beer, served inside a squirrel? Or of all the beers served inside a squirrel, is this the strongest and most expensive? Nobody knows. Nobody knows.
"Attention, ecomentals: what do you think is generating the electricity to power the (energy intensive) construction and use of your "green" car? Fairy farts? "
Yes, in a sense. Specifically, 25% of my power is generated by wind. 50% is Nuclear. 75% of the electricity I use is exhaust-free.
...and bust ghosts.
What needs do you have that Amarok satisfies but Rhythmbox doesn't? Just curious.
Yep. I went through comp eng at Waterloo (before the program started circling the bowl these last 5 years or so) and for most of my class, $60k was settling. I know people who started at 6 figures. Lucky bastards.
Are the differences south of the border really that significant?
What different worlds we live in. When weather permits, I ride my bike in daily. There are a bunch of routes I can take - almost all of them have bike lanes, some of them have trails through various parks and green space, and for the one route that doesn't have bike lanes, I've never had much of an issue with vehicles trying to run me off the road. I stick to the right, they get around me, and when the road gets tight most people understand that I'm going as fast as I can, and wait for the road to widen again before passing. If I ride my bike to the city center, I often have trouble finding a place to lock it up due to all the other bikes on the street.
This is in a relatively major urban center (700k+ people in the region). Interesting to see what a difference city policies and local culture can make.
So...SciFi Robin Hood?
I thought Droid had at least the processor and camera? And I hear the pics the Droid takes with that camera are pretty uninspiring.
Honestly this looks like YAAP (yet another android phone).
Also, this is the first year that blu ray players have started to drop in price to the point where most people can afford them. A *lot* of people I know have commented on how players are cheap enough to consider now. This holiday season we're going to see a lot of households get the ability to play blu ray discs
More than a day of battery life?
Looking at app world now, it looks like there's at least a few thousand on there. I was able to download a network file manager, VNC client, and SSH client, all of which I use pretty much daily. Plus good old Shazam.
I get it, you have so far installed a dozen flashlight applications, some tetris clones, and a winnie-the-pooh theme. But there's more out there. Just open up the application and take a look.
That's too bad. Otherwise this would have been a serious contender for my next media box.
It seems there's no "do-it-all" media center on the market. Games, Blu-Ray, XBMC. Pick any two. I'm waiting for someone to get XBMC going on a PS3. When that happens, I will have chosen my corner in this fight.
Interesting. I installed DD-WRT on my wrt54g and I noticed a dramatic speed increase. Running vendor's firmware, samba transfers in my house over the wifi would cap out at about 1.3 megs/sec. After changing only the router firmware, I can often pull in 2.2 megs/sec. I noticed similar speedups with my cable connection.
For sure they are. I went through University around the turn of the century, and the lecture method of choice were pdfs with lecture slides. Put up the slides, talk about them, let students download the pdf. Unfortunately, this was also used as a method of teaching for professors whose English skills weren't up to par. I recall one prof who spent most of the lecture pointing at equations on the projector. The upside of this method is that you do get to download the slides, and for cases like I just mentioned, you can more or less teach yourself the content.
I'd have to agree. It was great when I was younger, but since then my tastes have expanded somewhat.
I got into it about the same time, maybe junior high. I was pretty much riveted until the end of book 7 or 8. Then it got *really old* *really fast*. However, I was so smitten with the series back when I was a teen that I made a solemn promise to myself that I would finish the series, no matter what. And here we are, with me approaching 30, and damnit I am still determined to finish this, one way or another. I read book 11 (is that the latest? I don't even care) recently and somehow managed to plod through it. I'll finish the series, but only out of pure determination.
"Obviously the iPhone isn't as hot to non-geeks as you think, as almost half the smartphone buyers still pick a Nokia."
That's true. I remember talking to a couple one time, and the man (stocky, pudgy, eccentric, classic geek type) had just bought his fiancee (relatively normal, had a job in HR or something like that) an iPhone. She didn't seem to getting the emphasis he was putting on this phone.
Her: "I just got a new phone"
Him: "WHAT? Not just ANY phone! It's an iPhone!!!"
Her: "Uhhh....yeah I guess so. It doesn't have any buttons, if that's what you mean."
Most people don't give nearly the kind of a shit that people on tech forums give about smart phones.
I really don't understand this. Just about every iPhone user on the web loves to shout to the heavens about how fantastic the browser is. What makes it so great? Technically it's the most capable browser on a mobile device, but not by very much. Take a look at this http://www.quirksmode.org/webkit.html . Iris browser and Bolt browser both fare very well, but nobody ever talks about them like they do with Safari. I tried Opera Mini 5 the other day and I was extremely impressed. It basically gave me web pages like my desktop does. Still, it gets no love. I have one of the newest blackberries, and its browser gets me by just fine. I make it tell web pages that it's a firefox browser, and I get full versions of pages like I would at a PC. I use it at least a half a dozen times a day, and have no real complaints about it (except maybe the lack of tabbed browsing but that's not a big deal for me). Yet every iPhone user loves to get smug about how they have Safari. Every time I've asked someone for clarification, they either ignore me or they say something to the effect of "oh you wouldn't understand, you don't use an iPhone". So I figure I'll try my luck and ask again.
What makes the iPhone's browser that noteworthy? Is it that great in other ways? Or is this just the users being vocal again?
I was under the impression that there were *many* more apps available for Blackberry than Android.
Are you talking about how on a Mac, ProgramName->Preferences is always the prefs dialog? In Windows it's always Tools->Options. Getting the program version on a mac is ProgramName->About, Windows is Help->About.
I'd really be interested in hearing some examples of how Macs are more usable. Everyone loves to sound off about how easy it is to use their Mac/iPhone/whatever compared to everything else out there, but I've found neither one any more usable than any of my other devices or computers. In a lot of cases, Apple's products are actually pretty damn annoying to use compared to the competition. I have yet to hear any good evidence to back up this claim of alleged "usability". It seems to come from people who just prefer Apple. That's fine, but please don't pass off preference as fact.
Once you're ssh'd in, wouldn't you have those CLI tools available?
With the exception of the CLI tools, sounds like you're looking for one of the new blackberries. I use mine to ssh into my servers all the time, and it does pretty much everything else on your list. I've even done some basic vim over ssh, although at that point it's worth it to switch to a laptop.