Every one of the people who has to use their poorly made software hates the people responsible for it.
It's just that Gates happens to be responsible for a poorly-made piece of software that everyone uses.
Therefore, everyone hates Bill Gates?
Captcha wastes (human) time and frustrates users
on
Evolution of the 'Captcha'
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So rather than put the burden of proof on humans to prove they're not a machine, put the burden of proof on the machines to prove they're a human?
Take your average HTML form:
Rather than have 1 textbox for a field value, have 10. UserName1, UserName2, UserName3, etc.
Use javascript to randomly assign one of them as visible. The rest are hidden from the user.
On the server, watch to see which textbox is filled. Presumably, with decent enough javascript skills, and stupid enough bots, your humans will fill out what they see, which is the correct combination. The bots won't.
Granted, this method can be defeated if the bot checks for field level visibility after the page finishes loading, but even then, with decent enough javascript, you can continue to provide unobtrusive checks to ensure that your user is real -- e.g., unless the bot is running a macro through a web browser itself, your onblur events probably won't be tripped. And so on.
This puts a burden on the developers to come up with clever ways of defeating the bots, but in reality, that's where the battle is -- html application devs. vs spambot devs. Users shouldn't have to be dragged into the middle.
Re:Not THAT surprising...
on
Region-free PS3
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They can ship me 100 backups for all I care. If I buy something it's mine and I will still do whatever I want with it. Like installing modchips and making backups.
The disk they sell you most definitely is yours.
The software contained on that disk is legally owned property of the company that sold it to you.
So, you can do anything you want with the disk. You can paint it, tie a string through the center, and wear it as a necklace for all they care. But the software contanied on that disk isn't in any way shape or form yours. You are simply granted rights to use that software in the way the company wants you to.
So GTK+ commits some Windows fashion faux pas? I don't give a crap how the application looks as long as it does what it should. GTK+ is easy to build applications with and very powerful, and that's all I care about, not whether or not it clashes with the decor.
You may not give a crap, but you're far from a typical user (just posting at Slashdot in a GTK+ discussion tells me this), and it's completely foolish to believe your users think the same way you do.
A lack of consistency and not following native conventions is a HUGE hinderance to user acceptance. As long as there's a choice between similar/identical software packages with similar/identical functionality, your users almost always pick the one that feels more comfortable to them, sometimes (much to our chagrin), at the expense of using the *better* program. In computer UIs, a good amount of comfort comes from familiarity. An example: If you use Gnome, you're probably reluctant to run QT applications when a GTK+ alternative is available, and vice-versa. Providing a familiar look and feel really helps with acceptance amongst non-power users. Your users may not know *what* they can do in your application, but at least the decor looks familiar so they're more apt to explore, and they can recover more gracefully from usability mistakes (and continue to use your application) because they've done so before in familiar looking interfaces.
Some UIs have completely shucked conventions (most of Metacreations' software comes to mind), and have still been very usable; but if you're going to build an application for a particular environment, unless you have a few Ph.Ds dictating your interface, you should make it look and behave like other programs in the environment as much as possible.
The window manager I use, ratpoison, is a good example of open source innovation. Granted, it is a product for a small group of people (keyboard driven WM with fullscreen of every program and gnu/screen like keyboard shortcuts) but something like that simply would not exist without open source.
That dosen't sound THAT innovative. It sounds quite like screen.
In fact, this is the first line of the website:
"Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence. It is largely modelled after GNU Screen which has done wonders in the virtual terminal market."
since Clear Channel is a huge holder of XM, its the same crap for music that I hear on every station in the country.
Get your fucking facts straight.
First of all, Clear Channel is in no way a controlling interest in XM. In fact, they sold off most of their shares, and aren't even on the radar as far as major investors go
Second, XM has a music library of about 2 million songs, Sirius has a music library of about 600,000 songs. XM's programming is based around PD/DJ choice; Sirius's programming is based around genre research. As a result, you will hear more of that crap you hear on terrestrial radio on Sirius. Sirius believes that people want to hear frequent "hits", and that in programming an effective station, you'll have a mixture of familiar and the unfamiliar.
"En masse, they are led by a Music Director, Lee Abrams, who has set forth the prime directive: "Respect the listener, respect the artist." As long as this rule is adhered to, the individual Program Directors are free to play what they want. Except for one other tiny rule: "If it sounds like FM, you're out." That means play music, lots of it, with lots of variety within the channel's genre." -- http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/ISEO-rgbtcspd/re views/20030623/xm_hq.html?print=1&page=all
For the question that asks you to find the picture that's the same as the mirror image, just cross or blur your eyes to create a stereogram of any two images.
Look for the spot in the two images makes your eyes hurt, and that's what's different about that image.
Repeat until you can match up each of those differences to the main image, and there's your solution.
Unfortunately, this tecnique has the slight side effect of leaving you unable to focus on anything on your monitor, so I cannot be held respponsible if this message has any typos.
Oh and I was able to load the PDF in my browser, not saving it to disk first. They should give me extra points for that!
Hopefully you don't anymore -- hell, I used to myself. If you do, take a look at Fitts' Law, from which can be concluded that such a design is actually best for users.
If you want to see this in action, try moving your mouse to any point on the center of your screen as quickly as possible, and see how much you overshoot or undershoot. Also, count the number of corrections you have to make -- using the mouse normally, I overshoot targets at least two or three times. If I'm really slow and deliberate, I can get there on the first try.
What does this mean then? Apple's "menu at the top" allows you to select commands without worrying about Fitts' law. It's impossible to overshoot a target at the edge of a screen; despite how far you use your mouse, your pointer shouldn't extend beyond the top boundry of the screen. Which means it's quite easier to hit the menus in an Apple environment than it is in a menu-under-the-application-title-bar environment such as MS Windows (as well as KDE and Gnome).
Call me paranoid, and mod me down because I'm sharing a negative opinion of Google, but I don't think I'm going to be giving this same company the ability to sift through my entire hard drive.
The real problem, IMO, is that there seems to be a couple of guys in any given CS class who seriously cannot handle women, and who one way or the other make life hell for the women in the class [...] Then there are the usual stalker types who get their jollies sending out creepy emails and eyeballing girls in the class [...] What can we do to fix it? I just don't know.
I do.
These students who misogynistically harass, eyeball, or even stalk the girls in CS have serious social defecits. Therein is the problem -- CS has long been a career path which emphasizes a lifestyle for the lone, antisocial type. This isn't anywhere near the romantic view of loners, portrayed by such legendary jobs like cowboys; this is cold, hard reality: many men in CS don't know how to handle themselves in a social environment. Especially one which includes members of the opposite sex.
The solution, thus, is simple. We need to stop emphasizing the IT industry as one for antisocial individuals. In any IS course, you'll hear again and again how computers are merely the tool, the instrument, and the most important part of any system is the user(s). As such, someone in the field needs to be able to work with people as well as they're able to work with computers. End the tendencies for antisocial types to pursue careers in IT, and you'll end the discriminatory behavior.
It doesn't bother Joe Consumer what his browser does, whether it supports ActiveX et al. As long as he can double-click on "The Internet" he'll be happy.
Damn straight!
I want my Internet the same way I want my women...
The idea of all this P2P crap is that you can find the content you want from many providers, and new files quickly get spread all over the network.
Yep, and tagging a particular user or server as 'good' or 'bad' would cause downloaders to flock towards the 'good' users/servers, and stay away from the neutral or bad ones.
You wouldn't really be looking at a P2P system anymore -- the idea of everybody being a 'peer' would go out the window if users had some type of status through such moderation.
Unfortunately, that would lead to bias from potential downloaders of music, as well as for manipulation of ratings by an individual or a group of individuals. Ultimately, this would only serve to flesh out targets by would-be P2P 'hunters', i.e. RIAA agents.
If I see a list of servers, and a rating, I'm instinctively going to select one of the top rated servers. Most people's ratings of such servers would be a function of two distinct factors:
- Does the server have what I'm looking for? - How quickly can I get this file from this server?
If both factors are very favorable to me, I'm going give this server a good rating. If I can't connect, or the server doesn't have what I'm looking for, I'm going give the server a poor rating.
If a server wants to become highly rated in this type of a system, the operators must provide
- Lots of bandwidth - Lots of files
Not many people can afford to do both. As a result, a 'cartel' of sorts would be formed, where the top few servers serve to a majority of the users, and the rest of the servers, of which there may be 20 times or more of, all serve to the minority.
If the 'hunter' wants to kill this group, what does he do? He wouldn't want to poison each one systematically -- he'd want to go after the big targets that everyone feeds from. This rating system would only help him expedite this process.
I won't. I probably will never. The reason? I despite "Ogg", and "Ogg Vorbis", because they're such stupid names!
That's right. The biggest thing holding me back from using "Ogg" is the name.
I despise the name "Ogg Vorbis" and its shortened form, "Ogg". I don't care what books or video games of unparalleled nerddom conceived this name, it's still completely idiotic. I do not instinctively think "music" when I see "Ogg".
You know what I do think of? I think "Eggs". Eggs -- those little round bundles of fetid fetii sitting in my refrigerator. There's nothing about "Ogg" that makes me think right away 'ooh! Music!'.
Even though I've been trained to know what "Ogg" is, it still requires some amount of unconscious effort to process the idea that when I click on this "Ogg" file, I'm going to hear music.
This is, of course, because historically, common file extensions were named in conjunction with what the file actually did.
TXT. Text file
EXE. Executable file
DOC. Document file
Even the more cryptic extensions of generic filetypes, especially in the A/V world, are still fairly easy to decode.
AVI. Aviation? Birds? No, but there's a "VI" in there. Video.
AU. Aural. Sound. No contest.
WAV. Sound Wave.
MPG. A bit harder to semantically map, but the first letter is the giveaway -- M. Media. Movie. Music. Motion Picture. Now that that association's there, it's not that difficult to unconsciously map MP (Media Player, though I'm sure the MPEG group never had that in mind) to media files.
JPEG. What? Well, there's a P and a G. Picture, Graphic. Same case for MPEG -- G doesn't really stand for graphic -- but having the association helps.
GIF. Graphic.
PNG. Graphic.
Even though some of the above filetypes lead to unintentional mappings, at least those mappings are far more obvious than "Ogg".
In short, I do not want to use Ogg because at some unconscious level, my mind will never fully equate such a common file type with such a cryptic extension. If you think this is unreasonable, then imagine all your text files being renamed to *.poi, or all your images being renamed to *.q1t.
Just because something is "cool" to you doesn't mean it's a good idea to use it.
Here's a novel idea. Let's say you're working on a project. You're not getting paid for it (it's a labor of love... and in many cases, alcohol), but it's satisfying to know that so many people use it on a daily basis.
Yet the product itself is crap. You haven't the slightest idea about what makes a good end product, but damn if you're not good at putting together & maintaining the guts of it.
So what do you do?
You seek out similar projects, and model your end result after theirs.
So what's wrong with this picture?
Absolutely nothing, if you're content to lead a life of mediocracy. You don't take the wheel and turn it into a hoverboard. You just find new (and occasionally, innovative) ways of polishing the wheel, improving it's traction, and longevity. You leave the real innovation to the people in the large corporations. Your number one and two excuses: time and money. You don't have alot of each, so you don't even bother.
Sound familiar?
I don't really give two flying fucks about Linux on the desktop. BUT, if Miguel Iglecias & the KDE team want to really make an impact, they should start doing what these big companies do: through UI design and analysis. This means:
Get their designers together & start to think about radical new design paradigms. Build some of these into the next revision of their respective UI's.
Grab a few close friends and family members, the kind that aren't that familiar or comfortable with computers, and do some usability studies.
Grab a few computer experts that aren't directly associated with the project, and do the same thing.
Mitigate the results from b and c, run some more analysis, and figure out what needs to be fixed and what needs to be improved.
Repeat
There's no reason any GUI/WM team has to go chase the big companies who have already done all this, and more. It simply turns them into "me too's", and does little to really advance their cause. Sure, each iteration will look slightly prettier than the last, but they'll all look like something else -- and that's not innovation... that's just tinkering.
The fact that is has far superior cookie and password management is a major reason.
IE 6:
Tools | Internet Options | Security.
Tools | Internet Options | Privacy.
Honestly, these two features are worth their weight in gold, and are nearly idiot proof. Your claims of Mozilla's superiority in this area are pure ignorance. Mozilla's only real advantage here is the ability to easily view the content of cookies. How often do you use this feature, other than to satisfy personal curiosity?
As for password management, IE has autocomplete (useful if you're the only one using your machine), and "My Profile", which I've never used. Again, these features are located under
Tools | Internet Options | Content
(please note how 'options' is conveniently placed under the 'Tools' menu. While not semantically correct -- 'options' are not a 'tool' -- at least this is consistent throughout MS applications)
The fact that it has a better email and usenet client (than OE) is a major reason.
I claim ignorance here. I've never liked Netscape's mail/news reader, nor do I like OE.
The fact that you can block pop up advertising is a major reason.
Many of the major websites you rely upon rely upon users who have browsers who will display all the advertisements they serve. Sad fact is, pop up and pop under ads usually pay better than their more inert, static counterparts.
More so than advertising companies, websites who depend on ad revenues would scream bloody murder if IE/Netscape shipped with an easy to use pop-up blocker. They would see a vast decrease in revenue, as everybody and their grandmother would begin to block their ads.
Mozilla can get away with this, because more than anything else, it's a hobbyist project. It's quite easy to write a custom browser based upon MS's HTML rendering engine (albeit, without Wine, it'd be windows-only) which features built-in popup blocking. But a commercial entity (MS, AOL/Time Warner/Netscape) would have hell to pay if they tried to release a product with a similar feature. To its credit, IE -can- block all popups -- just turn off javascript in the "Internet" zone. Any sites that you can trust enough to run scripting you can then add to "Trusted Sites".
Until you pay rates on the Kilobyte, the providers have every right whatsoever, both legally and morally, to prevent you from sharing your connection.
Right now, most services in the US allow subscribers to buy an unlimited amount of transmission at a fixed rate. For example, you might pay $50 a month for a 768k downstream connection.
Compare this to the electric company, which charges you variable rates -- you use more electricity, you pay more cash. The electrical companies probably don't care if you run a line to your poor neighbor's shack -- other than the risk associated with you frying yourself and knocking out the power grid, the only thing they have to concern themselves with is collecting additional revenues for the added kWh.
ISPs are the exact opposite. They let you transfer as much data as you want, but they limit how quickly you can send and receive it. With unlimited transmission rates, they get the same amount of money from you if you transfer 1M or 10T in a single month. They make loads of money on the 1M, and stand to lose quite a bit on the 10T. ISP's assume you won't have 768K of traffic 24/7 for an entire billing cycle -- and this is how they make money.
Simple logic: if more people use your connection, more data is transferred. The ISP begins to lose lots of money. Eventually, even at the fixed bandwidth rate you're paying for, the ISP loses. If you're paying per K, M, or G, suddenly, the ISPs won't care HOW many people you share your connection with -- they'll receive money proportional to the amount of data you and your leeches transmit.
This isn't a big deal, and I'm surprised that it's taken the ISPs this long to jump on the issue.
Back when I went to school (Melbourne High, FWIW), we had to take a sport activity. One activity briefly offered was Phasor Strike, i.e., laser-tag. Students would run around in a darkened room with backpacks shooting infrared beams at each other.
This was canned after a year or so after protests from parents. (The fact that a former student of the school made news by going postal and massacring some 7 people may have had something to do with it; OTOH, the mass murderer attended the school before Phasor Strike, and was a product of the culture of militarism in its cadet corps, which nothing was done about. *shrug*)
And yet, wouldn't the military love this; as well as the kids themselves? Most kids and teenagers who matured while living a sedentary lifestyle (myself included, sadly) didn't do so just out of spite for anything physical -- they did so because the 'traditional' sports offered (basketball, baseball, football, soccer, etc.) were boring.
I grew up playing Baseball, Basketball, and Football -- yet quit each by the time I reached high school. My friends still would, and it wasn't that I was bad at those sports (because I was, and I'll be the first to admit that); it's because they weren't fun to me. In fact, they were downright boring. The only so-called 'real' sport I find myself engrossed in is football; and this is half for the "oomph"-factor and half for the strategy required by the coaching team. All other sports are like watching grass grow: man gets ball. Man moves ball to someone else. Someone else moves ball to someone else. Uh oh, man loses control of ball. Other team repeats this process.
It really is no wonder why so much alcohol is consumed at sporting events -- would a good majority of them be tolerable to watch, game after game, in person, while completely sober?
But I digress. As for so-called 'alternative' sports -- when I was younger, if you were to hand me a laser tag rifle, or a paintball gun, and you would have had me out participating in such events for hours on end. Unfortunately, when I was growing up, paintball was just getting started, and nobody ever took laser tag seriously (and likely never will).
Of course, America is deeply routed in traditions; so it's no surprise that a radical departure from traditional gym activities, like Laser Tag, would meet quick protest from parents. And yet if we stressed these activities as wide, we'd make great strides in wiping out the obesity epidemic that we seem to concern ourselves with so greatly.
And in other news, an Pakistani foreign national was detained in New York City today for what officials are calling "a suspected case of viral bioterrorism". The man, Rumollea Abdula Jabala, 30, was reported to be "coughing and sneezing", and "blowing his nose" by onlookers, who promptly called officials to report the situation.
Jabala, who came to America on a work Visa, denies official reports that he deliberately caught the flu to infect persons in the USA whom he would come in contact with.
Jabala is currently being held in a city hospital, under armed guard, until officials can verify any terrorist links.
After researching the trend (called "Odd-Even Pricing"), you're right on the money -- it's not only consumer trickery, but an antiquated measure to keep the cash register drawers open.
What I really don't get is why stores just don't calculate in taxes with prices, and have the result as a whole number -- for every customer who pays in cash, counting out and verifying the correct amount of change (watch the clerks do this sometime) is an extra second or two per customer. Just as anybody who builds programs for efficiency, those one or two extra seconds will really add up over time.
Pocket change is a monumental inconvenience to any modernized society which thrives on efficiency.
IIRC, items costing $x.99 isn't for tax purposes (if that were so, stores would adjust prices so the cost of the item + tax = a nice rounded figure) -- it's for consumer trickery.
The one market I've seen doing away with this line of thought is movie theaters -- almost all items sold on the quarter or on the dollar. They even have in fine print the actual cost of the item.
Until retailers realize that only a microscopic percentage of the population isn't able to equate $199.99 or $199.95 with $200.00+, you'll continue to see this idiotic price scheme.
Slashdot Mirror
Every one of the people who has to use their poorly made software hates the people responsible for it.
It's just that Gates happens to be responsible for a poorly-made piece of software that everyone uses.
Therefore, everyone hates Bill Gates?
So rather than put the burden of proof on humans to prove they're not a machine, put the burden of proof on the machines to prove they're a human?
Take your average HTML form:
Rather than have 1 textbox for a field value, have 10. UserName1, UserName2, UserName3, etc.
Use javascript to randomly assign one of them as visible. The rest are hidden from the user.
On the server, watch to see which textbox is filled. Presumably, with decent enough javascript skills, and stupid enough bots, your humans will fill out what they see, which is the correct combination. The bots won't.
Granted, this method can be defeated if the bot checks for field level visibility after the page finishes loading, but even then, with decent enough javascript, you can continue to provide unobtrusive checks to ensure that your user is real -- e.g., unless the bot is running a macro through a web browser itself, your onblur events probably won't be tripped. And so on.
This puts a burden on the developers to come up with clever ways of defeating the bots, but in reality, that's where the battle is -- html application devs. vs spambot devs. Users shouldn't have to be dragged into the middle.
They can ship me 100 backups for all I care. If I buy something it's mine and I will still do whatever I want with it. Like installing modchips and making backups.
The disk they sell you most definitely is yours.
The software contained on that disk is legally owned property of the company that sold it to you.
So, you can do anything you want with the disk. You can paint it, tie a string through the center, and wear it as a necklace for all they care. But the software contanied on that disk isn't in any way shape or form yours. You are simply granted rights to use that software in the way the company wants you to.
But feel free to play DVD frisbee.
You may not give a crap, but you're far from a typical user (just posting at Slashdot in a GTK+ discussion tells me this), and it's completely foolish to believe your users think the same way you do.
A lack of consistency and not following native conventions is a HUGE hinderance to user acceptance. As long as there's a choice between similar/identical software packages with similar/identical functionality, your users almost always pick the one that feels more comfortable to them, sometimes (much to our chagrin), at the expense of using the *better* program. In computer UIs, a good amount of comfort comes from familiarity. An example: If you use Gnome, you're probably reluctant to run QT applications when a GTK+ alternative is available, and vice-versa. Providing a familiar look and feel really helps with acceptance amongst non-power users. Your users may not know *what* they can do in your application, but at least the decor looks familiar so they're more apt to explore, and they can recover more gracefully from usability mistakes (and continue to use your application) because they've done so before in familiar looking interfaces.
Some UIs have completely shucked conventions (most of Metacreations' software comes to mind), and have still been very usable; but if you're going to build an application for a particular environment, unless you have a few Ph.Ds dictating your interface, you should make it look and behave like other programs in the environment as much as possible.
The window manager I use, ratpoison, is a good example of open source innovation. Granted, it is a product for a small group of people (keyboard driven WM with fullscreen of every program and gnu/screen like keyboard shortcuts) but something like that simply would not exist without open source.
That dosen't sound THAT innovative. It sounds quite like screen.
In fact, this is the first line of the website:
"Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence. It is largely modelled after GNU Screen which has done wonders in the virtual terminal market."
I'd be hard pressed to call that innovation.
Oh hey that's some nice consolidation you did for XM's offerings
http://www.xmradio.com/cars/
http://www.sirius.com/Partners/Vehicle
Get your fucking facts straight.
First of all, Clear Channel is in no way a controlling interest in XM. In fact, they sold off most of their shares, and aren't even on the radar as far as major investors go
Second, XM has a music library of about 2 million songs, Sirius has a music library of about 600,000 songs. XM's programming is based around PD/DJ choice; Sirius's programming is based around genre research. As a result, you will hear more of that crap you hear on terrestrial radio on Sirius. Sirius believes that people want to hear frequent "hits", and that in programming an effective station, you'll have a mixture of familiar and the unfamiliar.
Hell -- if you did do any research whatsoever, you'd find that people actually complain that XM's playlists are too deep: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&c
For the question that asks you to find the picture that's the same as the mirror image, just cross or blur your eyes to create a stereogram of any two images.
Look for the spot in the two images makes your eyes hurt, and that's what's different about that image.
Repeat until you can match up each of those differences to the main image, and there's your solution.
Unfortunately, this tecnique has the slight side effect of leaving you unable to focus on anything on your monitor, so I cannot be held respponsible if this message has any typos.
Oh and I was able to load the PDF in my browser, not saving it to disk first. They should give me extra points for that!
I used to ridicule the "menu bar at the top" GUI
Hopefully you don't anymore -- hell, I used to myself. If you do, take a look at Fitts' Law, from which can be concluded that such a design is actually best for users.
If you want to see this in action, try moving your mouse to any point on the center of your screen as quickly as possible, and see how much you overshoot or undershoot. Also, count the number of corrections you have to make -- using the mouse normally, I overshoot targets at least two or three times. If I'm really slow and deliberate, I can get there on the first try.
What does this mean then? Apple's "menu at the top" allows you to select commands without worrying about Fitts' law. It's impossible to overshoot a target at the edge of a screen; despite how far you use your mouse, your pointer shouldn't extend beyond the top boundry of the screen. Which means it's quite easier to hit the menus in an Apple environment than it is in a menu-under-the-application-title-bar environment such as MS Windows (as well as KDE and Gnome).
The company who puts a cookie on your computer that doesn't expire until 2038, has the ability to see lots of personal information about you, and who is interested in storing and indexing all of your email correspondance until the end of time, now wants to index my hard drive for me?
Call me paranoid, and mod me down because I'm sharing a negative opinion of Google, but I don't think I'm going to be giving this same company the ability to sift through my entire hard drive.
The real problem, IMO, is that there seems to be a couple of guys in any given CS class who seriously cannot handle women, and who one way or the other make life hell for the women in the class [...] Then there are the usual stalker types who get their jollies sending out creepy emails and eyeballing girls in the class [...] What can we do to fix it? I just don't know.
I do.
These students who misogynistically harass, eyeball, or even stalk the girls in CS have serious social defecits. Therein is the problem -- CS has long been a career path which emphasizes a lifestyle for the lone, antisocial type. This isn't anywhere near the romantic view of loners, portrayed by such legendary jobs like cowboys; this is cold, hard reality: many men in CS don't know how to handle themselves in a social environment. Especially one which includes members of the opposite sex.
The solution, thus, is simple. We need to stop emphasizing the IT industry as one for antisocial individuals. In any IS course, you'll hear again and again how computers are merely the tool, the instrument, and the most important part of any system is the user(s). As such, someone in the field needs to be able to work with people as well as they're able to work with computers. End the tendencies for antisocial types to pursue careers in IT, and you'll end the discriminatory behavior.
It doesn't bother Joe Consumer what his browser does, whether it supports ActiveX et al. As long as he can double-click on "The Internet" he'll be happy.
Damn straight!
I want my Internet the same way I want my women...
The idea of all this P2P crap is that you can find the content you want from many providers, and new files quickly get spread all over the network.
Yep, and tagging a particular user or server as 'good' or 'bad' would cause downloaders to flock towards the 'good' users/servers, and stay away from the neutral or bad ones.
You wouldn't really be looking at a P2P system anymore -- the idea of everybody being a 'peer' would go out the window if users had some type of status through such moderation.
Unfortunately, that would lead to bias from potential downloaders of music, as well as for manipulation of ratings by an individual or a group of individuals. Ultimately, this would only serve to flesh out targets by would-be P2P 'hunters', i.e. RIAA agents.
If I see a list of servers, and a rating, I'm instinctively going to select one of the top rated servers. Most people's ratings of such servers would be a function of two distinct factors:
- Does the server have what I'm looking for?
- How quickly can I get this file from this server?
If both factors are very favorable to me, I'm going give this server a good rating. If I can't connect, or the server doesn't have what I'm looking for, I'm going give the server a poor rating.
If a server wants to become highly rated in this type of a system, the operators must provide
- Lots of bandwidth
- Lots of files
Not many people can afford to do both. As a result, a 'cartel' of sorts would be formed, where the top few servers serve to a majority of the users, and the rest of the servers, of which there may be 20 times or more of, all serve to the minority.
If the 'hunter' wants to kill this group, what does he do? He wouldn't want to poison each one systematically -- he'd want to go after the big targets that everyone feeds from. This rating system would only help him expedite this process.
That's right. The biggest thing holding me back from using "Ogg" is the name.
I despise the name "Ogg Vorbis" and its shortened form, "Ogg". I don't care what books or video games of unparalleled nerddom conceived this name, it's still completely idiotic. I do not instinctively think "music" when I see "Ogg".
You know what I do think of? I think "Eggs". Eggs -- those little round bundles of fetid fetii sitting in my refrigerator. There's nothing about "Ogg" that makes me think right away 'ooh! Music!'.
Even though I've been trained to know what "Ogg" is, it still requires some amount of unconscious effort to process the idea that when I click on this "Ogg" file, I'm going to hear music.
This is, of course, because historically, common file extensions were named in conjunction with what the file actually did.
Even the more cryptic extensions of generic filetypes, especially in the A/V world, are still fairly easy to decode.
Even though some of the above filetypes lead to unintentional mappings, at least those mappings are far more obvious than "Ogg".
In short, I do not want to use Ogg because at some unconscious level, my mind will never fully equate such a common file type with such a cryptic extension. If you think this is unreasonable, then imagine all your text files being renamed to *.poi, or all your images being renamed to *.q1t.
Just because something is "cool" to you doesn't mean it's a good idea to use it.
That sounds like the tagline of every Jerry Bruckheimer movie I've ever seen
Yet the product itself is crap. You haven't the slightest idea about what makes a good end product, but damn if you're not good at putting together & maintaining the guts of it.
So what do you do?
You seek out similar projects, and model your end result after theirs.
So what's wrong with this picture?
Absolutely nothing, if you're content to lead a life of mediocracy. You don't take the wheel and turn it into a hoverboard. You just find new (and occasionally, innovative) ways of polishing the wheel, improving it's traction, and longevity. You leave the real innovation to the people in the large corporations. Your number one and two excuses: time and money. You don't have alot of each, so you don't even bother.
Sound familiar?
I don't really give two flying fucks about Linux on the desktop. BUT, if Miguel Iglecias & the KDE team want to really make an impact, they should start doing what these big companies do: through UI design and analysis. This means:
There's no reason any GUI/WM team has to go chase the big companies who have already done all this, and more. It simply turns them into "me too's", and does little to really advance their cause. Sure, each iteration will look slightly prettier than the last, but they'll all look like something else -- and that's not innovation... that's just tinkering.
Tools | Internet Options | Security.
Tools | Internet Options | Privacy.
Honestly, these two features are worth their weight in gold, and are nearly idiot proof. Your claims of Mozilla's superiority in this area are pure ignorance. Mozilla's only real advantage here is the ability to easily view the content of cookies. How often do you use this feature, other than to satisfy personal curiosity?
As for password management, IE has autocomplete (useful if you're the only one using your machine), and "My Profile", which I've never used. Again, these features are located under
Tools | Internet Options | Content
(please note how 'options' is conveniently placed under the 'Tools' menu. While not semantically correct -- 'options' are not a 'tool' -- at least this is consistent throughout MS applications) I claim ignorance here. I've never liked Netscape's mail/news reader, nor do I like OE. Many of the major websites you rely upon rely upon users who have browsers who will display all the advertisements they serve. Sad fact is, pop up and pop under ads usually pay better than their more inert, static counterparts.
More so than advertising companies, websites who depend on ad revenues would scream bloody murder if IE/Netscape shipped with an easy to use pop-up blocker. They would see a vast decrease in revenue, as everybody and their grandmother would begin to block their ads.
Mozilla can get away with this, because more than anything else, it's a hobbyist project. It's quite easy to write a custom browser based upon MS's HTML rendering engine (albeit, without Wine, it'd be windows-only) which features built-in popup blocking. But a commercial entity (MS, AOL/Time Warner/Netscape) would have hell to pay if they tried to release a product with a similar feature. To its credit, IE -can- block all popups -- just turn off javascript in the "Internet" zone. Any sites that you can trust enough to run scripting you can then add to "Trusted Sites".
..changes.
Until you pay rates on the Kilobyte, the providers have every right whatsoever, both legally and morally, to prevent you from sharing your connection.
Right now, most services in the US allow subscribers to buy an unlimited amount of transmission at a fixed rate. For example, you might pay $50 a month for a 768k downstream connection.
Compare this to the electric company, which charges you variable rates -- you use more electricity, you pay more cash. The electrical companies probably don't care if you run a line to your poor neighbor's shack -- other than the risk associated with you frying yourself and knocking out the power grid, the only thing they have to concern themselves with is collecting additional revenues for the added kWh.
ISPs are the exact opposite. They let you transfer as much data as you want, but they limit how quickly you can send and receive it. With unlimited transmission rates, they get the same amount of money from you if you transfer 1M or 10T in a single month. They make loads of money on the 1M, and stand to lose quite a bit on the 10T. ISP's assume you won't have 768K of traffic 24/7 for an entire billing cycle -- and this is how they make money.
Simple logic: if more people use your connection, more data is transferred. The ISP begins to lose lots of money. Eventually, even at the fixed bandwidth rate you're paying for, the ISP loses. If you're paying per K, M, or G, suddenly, the ISPs won't care HOW many people you share your connection with -- they'll receive money proportional to the amount of data you and your leeches transmit.
This isn't a big deal, and I'm surprised that it's taken the ISPs this long to jump on the issue.
Agreed -- I'd like to meet (and subsequently steal the lungs of) the man who wouldn't get winded playing Afronova SSR.
Newsflash: Kids learn easier if they enjoy the subject material or presenting medium.
The educational comptuer game industry isn't a multimillion dollar industry by some fluke of nature, is it?
(And no, having your oxen drown while attempting to ford a river does not classify as a fluke of nature.)
Back when I went to school (Melbourne High, FWIW), we had to take a sport activity. One activity briefly offered was Phasor Strike, i.e., laser-tag. Students would run around in a darkened room with backpacks shooting infrared beams at each other.
This was canned after a year or so after protests from parents. (The fact that a former student of the school made news by going postal and massacring some 7 people may have had something to do with it; OTOH, the mass murderer attended the school before Phasor Strike, and was a product of the culture of militarism in its cadet corps, which nothing was done about. *shrug*)
And yet, wouldn't the military love this; as well as the kids themselves? Most kids and teenagers who matured while living a sedentary lifestyle (myself included, sadly) didn't do so just out of spite for anything physical -- they did so because the 'traditional' sports offered (basketball, baseball, football, soccer, etc.) were boring.
I grew up playing Baseball, Basketball, and Football -- yet quit each by the time I reached high school. My friends still would, and it wasn't that I was bad at those sports (because I was, and I'll be the first to admit that); it's because they weren't fun to me. In fact, they were downright boring. The only so-called 'real' sport I find myself engrossed in is football; and this is half for the "oomph"-factor and half for the strategy required by the coaching team. All other sports are like watching grass grow: man gets ball. Man moves ball to someone else. Someone else moves ball to someone else. Uh oh, man loses control of ball. Other team repeats this process.
It really is no wonder why so much alcohol is consumed at sporting events -- would a good majority of them be tolerable to watch, game after game, in person, while completely sober?
But I digress. As for so-called 'alternative' sports -- when I was younger, if you were to hand me a laser tag rifle, or a paintball gun, and you would have had me out participating in such events for hours on end. Unfortunately, when I was growing up, paintball was just getting started, and nobody ever took laser tag seriously (and likely never will).
Of course, America is deeply routed in traditions; so it's no surprise that a radical departure from traditional gym activities, like Laser Tag, would meet quick protest from parents. And yet if we stressed these activities as wide, we'd make great strides in wiping out the obesity epidemic that we seem to concern ourselves with so greatly.
And in other news, an Pakistani foreign national was detained in New York City today for what officials are calling "a suspected case of viral bioterrorism". The man, Rumollea Abdula Jabala, 30, was reported to be "coughing and sneezing", and "blowing his nose" by onlookers, who promptly called officials to report the situation.
Jabala, who came to America on a work Visa, denies official reports that he deliberately caught the flu to infect persons in the USA whom he would come in contact with.
Jabala is currently being held in a city hospital, under armed guard, until officials can verify any terrorist links.
After researching the trend (called "Odd-Even Pricing"), you're right on the money -- it's not only consumer trickery, but an antiquated measure to keep the cash register drawers open.
What I really don't get is why stores just don't calculate in taxes with prices, and have the result as a whole number -- for every customer who pays in cash, counting out and verifying the correct amount of change (watch the clerks do this sometime) is an extra second or two per customer. Just as anybody who builds programs for efficiency, those one or two extra seconds will really add up over time.
Pocket change is a monumental inconvenience to any modernized society which thrives on efficiency.
IIRC, items costing $x.99 isn't for tax purposes (if that were so, stores would adjust prices so the cost of the item + tax = a nice rounded figure) -- it's for consumer trickery.
The one market I've seen doing away with this line of thought is movie theaters -- almost all items sold on the quarter or on the dollar. They even have in fine print the actual cost of the item.
Until retailers realize that only a microscopic percentage of the population isn't able to equate $199.99 or $199.95 with $200.00+, you'll continue to see this idiotic price scheme.