Anyone else think this is overkill? I can't pull 15,000 faces a second. Hell I don't think I know how to pull more than about 50 faces. Maybe 100 with variations. I can pull maybe 2 a second. Does this technology recognise middle fingers too?
Seems even better than mummification for preserving the dead. We should figure out how to make it, and stick some creatures from our own time in it, including larger specimens for future paleontologists to ponder over. Like, famous politicians, as a reward for their service.
Shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted? By the time they're famous politician's they've already done their damage.
You don't understand addiction if you think it something to be fought with logical persuasion. And you are probably normal in saying to ditch him, but really, I'm disgusted by how callous people are today. Friendships and relationships involve a little inconvenience, not just saying, 'well, I told him it's a bad idea, fuck him!'
Take it from someone who tried to save an ex-girlfriend once. If you get too close and they're on a downward spiral they can take you down with them, then just as you think you're making progress they can turn on you. Now THAT is callous! If you can put in time and effort to help a friend with a reasonable chance of success, fair enough. If they're just going to drag you down with them, the right thing to do is walk away.
I'm not sure I buy into "usage tracking is an invasion of privacy" mantra. It seems to me this is a modern day "taking your photograph will steal your soul" sort of superstition. Is the internet not a public place? I'm not sure what kind of privacy people expect while using it.
What complete nonsense. Here's proof by counter example. Please post your web browsing history, your bookmarks, any bank accounts and passwords you've used on the Internet, your passwords at work - after all you use the Internet there too.
Can we collectively as a community agree to stop answering these with things like "here's a solution: don't do what you're trying to do"?
Just as soon as people stop asking stupid questions that amount to "I can't be bothered googling, but...", or "I'm too cheap to do it the right way. Got any other suggestions?" or "I just bit off way more than I can chew at work but I expect a post on slashdot to overcome years lacking in knowledge and experience".
In other words, no we can't collectively agree. Hell, we can't even collectively agree on the colour of the sky on a bright sunny day. Slashdot is a diverse place, and some of us have more social skills and subtlety than others. So could YOU please stop asking questions you know won't change a thing?
IMAX recently started selling out and allowing theaters with smaller screens to use the IMAX brand. Be careful when you choose an IMAX theater... it may not be what you expect.
So when is the new IMAX iPhone app coming out? You know what they say. 2 i's are better than 1!
The era of movie theatres is gone. People play games because they're convenient.
Is this really any surprise? Movie theatres are inconvenient, relatively expensive, and you have to take pot luck when it comes to movie goers you might have to put up with. Most people have a TV and a DVD player. Anyone who cares about sound and can afford it has decent speakers. Likewise those who care about big screens they're not so expensive that they're completely out of reach for most. So the advantage that movie theatres had when that technology was out of reach is gone. What's more nothing beats the privacy of your own home. If you live alone or with people who'll put up with it you can watch in your underwear if you like. If you're on call, no problem, just hit pause if the phone rings. Want to get intimate with your date? Well you're much less likely to get arrested if you do at home. If that's not enough the price of food at home isn't overblown and the quality is as good as you make it.
A much better comparison would be spend on DVD vs computer games. Even that's not a fair comparison if you count mobile games because most people would still prefer a decent size screen and don't want to re-encode to watch on a postage stamp sized on. It's a hell of a lot easier to pull out your mobile on your commute than to pull out (and carry) a laptop or DVD player. What's more if your commute isn't very long chances are you can find a game that can be played in the short time you have, vs watching a movie or DVD over several days.
What's even more amazing is that the 5 year arc had to adapt to the whims of actors - at least 2 called it quits. Claudia Christian (Susan Ivanova) made unreasonable demands for cash, so the character had to go away. Andrea Thompson (Talia Winters) wanted out to persue other non-sci-fi acting projects. The story arc still required a strong telepath as a super weapon so Patricia Tallman (Lyta Alexander) was brought in. Instead of the characters of Talia and her lover Jason Ironheart fulfilling the role, the character of Byron was brought in to play against Lyta. That's not the only case where actors forced a change to the plot but JMS managed to rework it and hold together the arc.
Unfortunately JMS succumbed and gave us Crusade which wasn't nearly as compelling. He also turned into an egomaniac that would break into tantrums about fans distributing work that never made it to screen. Pity, because B5 was one hell of a show, even if it had it's crap moments. It's the only show I have on VHS and DVD.
GNU is about freedom. Let's say I wanted to punch you in the face. I have the freedom to do so, unless you have the power to stop me. But trying to stop me is taking away my freedom to swing my fist, under your definition of freedom. Under my definition of freedom, your right not to get hit in the face outweighs my freedom to swing my fist wherever I like.
Wait till he's not looking THEN hit him in the face. Problem solved.
I take everything Sun says these days with 10 grains of salt. They still have some great products but they are not without their problems. They talk everything up big and have grandiose plans that have sometimes proven to be vaporware.
I was at a Sun Developer Day earlier this week. In a room full of 600+ people they took a show of hands about who was using JavaFX (almost no one) and MySQL (10%). They then proceeded to do 1.5 hour long in depth sessions on each. Then look at VirtualBox. Awesome software, and improving more quickly than VMWare - lighter weight too. Yet they insist that no one wants Parallel port virtual devices even though people are clamouring for it.
Oh well, Sun will fade into Oracle in the near future...
This is just one site that shows how murders have NOT CHANGED and that gun related accidents have changed. They even state that assaults & other crime cannot be seen as a direct result of gun control laws.
Well lets see. We spent huge amounts of money and resources on the gun buyback. We curtailed EVERYONE's freedom. Farmers have less tools to get rid of pests. The barrier to entry for learning to shoot as a sport is way up.
What did we get in return? A few less idiots shot themselves and others. If I'm reading this right 20 or so less assaults all year Australia wide. No impact on the murder rate. A small temporary dip on the number of accidental deaths.
I'd call that a massive failure, but people still want to go further and ban everything from knives (which have been restricted) to hand held laser pointers (which have effectively been banned unless you're using it for astronomy). Nanny state sounds about right to me.
There's nothing wrong with living your life by various rules of thumb, because it's impossible to get into all of the details in one lifetime. But insisting on the dogmatic conclusions of your heuristics, is sheer insanity.
Must be one of the side effects of drinking too much orange juice!
Governor Schwartz, when asked for comment said "Youu continant sizzed eloments think you're all thaat? Califooornia is just one state and we haf an eloment named after ous"
Fall gracefully, as in like a 3rd rate theatre actor playing Hamlet that staggers about for 5 minutes and gets up 3 more times to exaggerate the death.
Not Fail gracefully, as in take out a bank or two but still get $100 million in severance while everyone who worked for you is turfed out on the street without even their entitelments.
clue: no one cares about 'lives'. the world is only about money and power and control.
See: Rule of Law
Clue: Laws were invented and should be revised to protect people and allow society to function more smoothly. Your condescension, cynicism and defeatism are unhelpful.
Basically the ODF spec isn't clear and precise. So there are areas where you kinda have to decide how you want to do shit.
So what you're saying is the ODF spec is a potty training manual??? That's insane!!! What 1-2 year old is going to be able to read such technical jargon?
Its one thing to introduce DRM to protect the copyright on a song, book or video. That isn't fair but it's also unlikely to get anyone killed. (Laws that introduce overly harsh penalties like jail time, ruin a career, or bankrupt someone are a whole other kettle of fish). How can any company justify pricing people out of having their car repaired? Lives are at stake. I wonder how long it'll take before people start suing because repair work was so unreasonably expensive via authorized channels that it leads to injury and death? It should be illegal to lock up certain kinds of information. It should be illegal to use laws like these to prevent competition where lives are at stake.
You don't seem to understand. It has nothing to do with bias. It's about gathering real, measurable, metrics of performance (such as time taken, mistakes made, etc) and usability and comparing them to expected metrics, making changes, and measuring the result once again
You can't take a measurement without some bias. If you're trying to be scientific about things, you conduct a double blind trial. If you don't understand that you're the wrong person to be doing the measurement and metrics.
It has nothing to do with opinion and a lot to do with statistical analysis and cognitive psychology.
Attitudes like yours lead to quips like "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics". You really need to get a grip on how the scientific method works and why it gets used before you talk about analysis and psychology.
With web pages, for example, when a page loads slowly, many users assume it's the connection and not a fault with the page. As such, it often doesn't occur to them to say "Optimize the page to load faster." At best you'll get a "Wow, this is taking a while" in situations where the load times are extreme.
Most users don't want to know why it's loading slowly. It's not their problem. In this case the worst case is actually that you do yourself a lot of reputational damage ("Microsoft's web site is slow") and lose customers ("Sod this, that's the last straw. I've had enough. I'm going to try Open Office").
The most common issue is users thinking that the mistake was theirs, and not an issue with the product, and no matter how much you tell them otherwise, it's common for them not to speak up about an issue due to pride pr embarrassment.
Complete garbage. You've obviously never worked on product support. In my experience, many users are much more likely to assume the product is junk than admit a fault on their part.
Yet whether they realize it or not, users react subconsciously to changes such as these, and they are more often than not more influential than more obvious changes (such as UI changes, which are often little more than "This looks weird"). Trust me, I've done usability tests.
More scientific thinking: "Trust me". No, I'm sorry but I'm required to be skeptical and consider the evidence I have at hand rather than trust you.
This is an absolutely pointless discussion. What the hell are you possibly going to learn from slowing down your web site? How to re-allocate an insignificant number of computers by making your web site acceptably slow? The money you spend studying this will probably outweigh the cost of the equipment. I'm amazed what moronic "studies" people will attempt to justify.
Sometimes you get amazing insight from users, but usually you get nothing of substance from them verbally. A great deal of the real juicy stuff is subconscious.
A lot more insight is gained from putting yourself in the position of the user. Get the developer to do the user's job for a few weeks. THAT will give you insight. Slowing down web pages in the name of a study? That'll give you reputational damage. What's more if the users don't consciously realise why you've made a change they won't appreciate it. If there was any visible trade off whatsoever, they'll see a net negative even if you do in fact improve the system.
The best way to improve a system is to work with the user, not employ subterfuge. Help them understand how they're behaving and they'll actually likely to change their own behaviour to achieve their goals. The trick is they have to be convinced the change is worthwhile.
That's a fair point. The users are legally obligated to know their rights during such tests and special permits are sometimes needed for using a pool of human test subjects, and in that sense, yes, what Microsoft is doing is rather less than ethical.
I'm glad we at least agree on that. It doesn't even need to be explicit in terms of detail. A simple "Do you want to take part in an experiment? We won't be letting you know what the goals were until afterwards but you'll be helping improve the site" and allow opt out.
Experimenting by delaying a pageload for 500ms is worthy of ethical considerations? Would you like to sue Microsoft for emotional damage? Too many people are afraid of doing anything these days.
Behaving ethically isn't something you do part time, or only under certain circumstances. You either behave ethically or you don't. A 500ms delay may be at the very top of that slippery slope - it ain't going to kill anyone - but it's still part of it.
The other thing you're failing to consider is that you should always be trying to serve your customers as best you can, in order to remain competitive and act in good faith. Sacrificing that for some dubious experiment which may or may not benefit your customers in the long run is just plain stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if there is a fork, it can be White Wine and the original can be Red Wine.
Only a drunk man tries to eat wine with a fork then quibbles about the colour.
Anyone else think this is overkill? I can't pull 15,000 faces a second. Hell I don't think I know how to pull more than about 50 faces. Maybe 100 with variations. I can pull maybe 2 a second. Does this technology recognise middle fingers too?
Seems even better than mummification for preserving the dead. We should figure out how to make it, and stick some creatures from our own time in it, including larger specimens for future paleontologists to ponder over. Like, famous politicians, as a reward for their service.
Shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted? By the time they're famous politician's they've already done their damage.
You want accurate? How about "In post-Soviet Russia, ISS module deorbits you" and "In modern America, components fail you".
You don't understand addiction if you think it something to be fought with logical persuasion. And you are probably normal in saying to ditch him, but really, I'm disgusted by how callous people are today. Friendships and relationships involve a little inconvenience, not just saying, 'well, I told him it's a bad idea, fuck him!'
Take it from someone who tried to save an ex-girlfriend once. If you get too close and they're on a downward spiral they can take you down with them, then just as you think you're making progress they can turn on you. Now THAT is callous! If you can put in time and effort to help a friend with a reasonable chance of success, fair enough. If they're just going to drag you down with them, the right thing to do is walk away.
I've seen people give up several of these for an MMORPG (Star Wars Galaxies ruined lives).
Not as many as religion, and that was the first thing you listed to help him get over it. Try not to replace one fantasy world with another.
I'm not sure I buy into "usage tracking is an invasion of privacy" mantra. It seems to me this is a modern day "taking your photograph will steal your soul" sort of superstition. Is the internet not a public place? I'm not sure what kind of privacy people expect while using it.
What complete nonsense. Here's proof by counter example. Please post your web browsing history, your bookmarks, any bank accounts and passwords you've used on the Internet, your passwords at work - after all you use the Internet there too.
RMS actually thinks it's a good idea :-) ...but does he want to rename it the GNU Hurd Creative Commons License?
Can we collectively as a community agree to stop answering these with things like "here's a solution: don't do what you're trying to do"?
Just as soon as people stop asking stupid questions that amount to "I can't be bothered googling, but...", or "I'm too cheap to do it the right way. Got any other suggestions?" or "I just bit off way more than I can chew at work but I expect a post on slashdot to overcome years lacking in knowledge and experience".
In other words, no we can't collectively agree. Hell, we can't even collectively agree on the colour of the sky on a bright sunny day. Slashdot is a diverse place, and some of us have more social skills and subtlety than others. So could YOU please stop asking questions you know won't change a thing?
IMAX recently started selling out and allowing theaters with smaller screens to use the IMAX brand. Be careful when you choose an IMAX theater... it may not be what you expect.
So when is the new IMAX iPhone app coming out? You know what they say. 2 i's are better than 1!
The era of movie theatres is gone. People play games because they're convenient.
Is this really any surprise? Movie theatres are inconvenient, relatively expensive, and you have to take pot luck when it comes to movie goers you might have to put up with. Most people have a TV and a DVD player. Anyone who cares about sound and can afford it has decent speakers. Likewise those who care about big screens they're not so expensive that they're completely out of reach for most. So the advantage that movie theatres had when that technology was out of reach is gone. What's more nothing beats the privacy of your own home. If you live alone or with people who'll put up with it you can watch in your underwear if you like. If you're on call, no problem, just hit pause if the phone rings. Want to get intimate with your date? Well you're much less likely to get arrested if you do at home. If that's not enough the price of food at home isn't overblown and the quality is as good as you make it.
A much better comparison would be spend on DVD vs computer games. Even that's not a fair comparison if you count mobile games because most people would still prefer a decent size screen and don't want to re-encode to watch on a postage stamp sized on. It's a hell of a lot easier to pull out your mobile on your commute than to pull out (and carry) a laptop or DVD player. What's more if your commute isn't very long chances are you can find a game that can be played in the short time you have, vs watching a movie or DVD over several days.
Do you think it would raise any suspicion if I posted it on eBay now? Nokia 1100 L000000K! RARE! HACK BANKS!!!
A++++++ thief. Would steal with him again!
What's even more amazing is that the 5 year arc had to adapt to the whims of actors - at least 2 called it quits. Claudia Christian (Susan Ivanova) made unreasonable demands for cash, so the character had to go away. Andrea Thompson (Talia Winters) wanted out to persue other non-sci-fi acting projects. The story arc still required a strong telepath as a super weapon so Patricia Tallman (Lyta Alexander) was brought in. Instead of the characters of Talia and her lover Jason Ironheart fulfilling the role, the character of Byron was brought in to play against Lyta. That's not the only case where actors forced a change to the plot but JMS managed to rework it and hold together the arc.
Unfortunately JMS succumbed and gave us Crusade which wasn't nearly as compelling. He also turned into an egomaniac that would break into tantrums about fans distributing work that never made it to screen. Pity, because B5 was one hell of a show, even if it had it's crap moments. It's the only show I have on VHS and DVD.
GNU is about freedom. Let's say I wanted to punch you in the face. I have the freedom to do so, unless you have the power to stop me. But trying to stop me is taking away my freedom to swing my fist, under your definition of freedom. Under my definition of freedom, your right not to get hit in the face outweighs my freedom to swing my fist wherever I like.
Wait till he's not looking THEN hit him in the face. Problem solved.
You should have tried someone from Copenhagen.... they have Hafnium, and they are just a city. Don't know any toughies from there, though ;)
Yes, but they don't have a T-1000 running the place!
I take everything Sun says these days with 10 grains of salt. They still have some great products but they are not without their problems. They talk everything up big and have grandiose plans that have sometimes proven to be vaporware.
I was at a Sun Developer Day earlier this week. In a room full of 600+ people they took a show of hands about who was using JavaFX (almost no one) and MySQL (10%). They then proceeded to do 1.5 hour long in depth sessions on each. Then look at VirtualBox. Awesome software, and improving more quickly than VMWare - lighter weight too. Yet they insist that no one wants Parallel port virtual devices even though people are clamouring for it.
Oh well, Sun will fade into Oracle in the near future...
This is just one site that shows how murders have NOT CHANGED and that gun related accidents have changed. They even state that assaults & other crime cannot be seen as a direct result of gun control laws.
Well lets see. We spent huge amounts of money and resources on the gun buyback. We curtailed EVERYONE's freedom. Farmers have less tools to get rid of pests. The barrier to entry for learning to shoot as a sport is way up.
What did we get in return? A few less idiots shot themselves and others. If I'm reading this right 20 or so less assaults all year Australia wide. No impact on the murder rate. A small temporary dip on the number of accidental deaths.
I'd call that a massive failure, but people still want to go further and ban everything from knives (which have been restricted) to hand held laser pointers (which have effectively been banned unless you're using it for astronomy). Nanny state sounds about right to me.
There's nothing wrong with living your life by various rules of thumb, because it's impossible to get into all of the details in one lifetime. But insisting on the dogmatic conclusions of your heuristics, is sheer insanity.
Must be one of the side effects of drinking too much orange juice!
Take that, Americium!
Governor Schwartz, when asked for comment said "Youu continant sizzed eloments think you're all thaat? Califooornia is just one state and we haf an eloment named after ous"
Fall gracefully, as in like a 3rd rate theatre actor playing Hamlet that staggers about for 5 minutes and gets up 3 more times to exaggerate the death.
Not Fail gracefully, as in take out a bank or two but still get $100 million in severance while everyone who worked for you is turfed out on the street without even their entitelments.
see: big pharma.
clue: no one cares about 'lives'. the world is only about money and power and control.
See: Rule of Law
Clue: Laws were invented and should be revised to protect people and allow society to function more smoothly. Your condescension, cynicism and defeatism are unhelpful.
Basically the ODF spec isn't clear and precise. So there are areas where you kinda have to decide how you want to do shit.
So what you're saying is the ODF spec is a potty training manual??? That's insane!!! What 1-2 year old is going to be able to read such technical jargon?
Its one thing to introduce DRM to protect the copyright on a song, book or video. That isn't fair but it's also unlikely to get anyone killed. (Laws that introduce overly harsh penalties like jail time, ruin a career, or bankrupt someone are a whole other kettle of fish). How can any company justify pricing people out of having their car repaired? Lives are at stake. I wonder how long it'll take before people start suing because repair work was so unreasonably expensive via authorized channels that it leads to injury and death? It should be illegal to lock up certain kinds of information. It should be illegal to use laws like these to prevent competition where lives are at stake.
You don't seem to understand. It has nothing to do with bias. It's about gathering real, measurable, metrics of performance (such as time taken, mistakes made, etc) and usability and comparing them to expected metrics, making changes, and measuring the result once again
You can't take a measurement without some bias. If you're trying to be scientific about things, you conduct a double blind trial. If you don't understand that you're the wrong person to be doing the measurement and metrics.
It has nothing to do with opinion and a lot to do with statistical analysis and cognitive psychology.
Attitudes like yours lead to quips like "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics". You really need to get a grip on how the scientific method works and why it gets used before you talk about analysis and psychology.
With web pages, for example, when a page loads slowly, many users assume it's the connection and not a fault with the page. As such, it often doesn't occur to them to say "Optimize the page to load faster." At best you'll get a "Wow, this is taking a while" in situations where the load times are extreme.
Most users don't want to know why it's loading slowly. It's not their problem. In this case the worst case is actually that you do yourself a lot of reputational damage ("Microsoft's web site is slow") and lose customers ("Sod this, that's the last straw. I've had enough. I'm going to try Open Office").
The most common issue is users thinking that the mistake was theirs, and not an issue with the product, and no matter how much you tell them otherwise, it's common for them not to speak up about an issue due to pride pr embarrassment.
Complete garbage. You've obviously never worked on product support. In my experience, many users are much more likely to assume the product is junk than admit a fault on their part.
Yet whether they realize it or not, users react subconsciously to changes such as these, and they are more often than not more influential than more obvious changes (such as UI changes, which are often little more than "This looks weird"). Trust me, I've done usability tests.
More scientific thinking: "Trust me". No, I'm sorry but I'm required to be skeptical and consider the evidence I have at hand rather than trust you.
This is an absolutely pointless discussion. What the hell are you possibly going to learn from slowing down your web site? How to re-allocate an insignificant number of computers by making your web site acceptably slow? The money you spend studying this will probably outweigh the cost of the equipment. I'm amazed what moronic "studies" people will attempt to justify.
Sometimes you get amazing insight from users, but usually you get nothing of substance from them verbally. A great deal of the real juicy stuff is subconscious.
A lot more insight is gained from putting yourself in the position of the user. Get the developer to do the user's job for a few weeks. THAT will give you insight. Slowing down web pages in the name of a study? That'll give you reputational damage. What's more if the users don't consciously realise why you've made a change they won't appreciate it. If there was any visible trade off whatsoever, they'll see a net negative even if you do in fact improve the system.
The best way to improve a system is to work with the user, not employ subterfuge. Help them understand how they're behaving and they'll actually likely to change their own behaviour to achieve their goals. The trick is they have to be convinced the change is worthwhile.
That's a fair point. The users are legally obligated to know their rights during such tests and special permits are sometimes needed for using a pool of human test subjects, and in that sense, yes, what Microsoft is doing is rather less than ethical.
I'm glad we at least agree on that. It doesn't even need to be explicit in terms of detail. A simple "Do you want to take part in an experiment? We won't be letting you know what the goals were until afterwards but you'll be helping improve the site" and allow opt out.
Experimenting by delaying a pageload for 500ms is worthy of ethical considerations? Would you like to sue Microsoft for emotional damage? Too many people are afraid of doing anything these days.
Behaving ethically isn't something you do part time, or only under certain circumstances. You either behave ethically or you don't. A 500ms delay may be at the very top of that slippery slope - it ain't going to kill anyone - but it's still part of it.
The other thing you're failing to consider is that you should always be trying to serve your customers as best you can, in order to remain competitive and act in good faith. Sacrificing that for some dubious experiment which may or may not benefit your customers in the long run is just plain stupid.