With survey responses from more than 10,470 companies across 20 countries, it was revealed that approximately 48 percent of SMBs (with up to 1,000 computers) admit to having been infected by some type of malware over the last year. As further proof, 27 percent confirmed that the source of the infection was a USB device connected to a computer.
Horsesh*t. I do PM / UX at a website whose users are SMBs. Most of my life is spent talking to SMB owners: interviewing them, usability testing with them, dealing with customer support issues, etc. While these people are, in general, certainly not dumb, most of them (1) have a limited idea of how to use their computers (they're too busy and they often outsource IT functions, even if only to the Geek Squad) (2) have a limited understanding of what 'malware' is (3) would have no way of knowing that the malware came from a USB device and were probably just making that up (4) were probably using sketchy cheap malware-infested software they downloaded from the internet rather than paying for a reliable package since they tend to be very cost-conscious and (5) were probably trying to explain why there's all that pr0n stashed on their hard drives.
In other words, self-reporting by "SMBs" (owners? IT people? who?) about malware incidents in the past year is likely a complete line of bull poo concocted by a PR firm trying to be a "thought leader" and getting people to their blog post / website (our firm does this, although we at least make them be reasonably methodologically rigorous).
My company has also conducted surveys of SMBs, both for UX / Product reasons and PR "thought leader" reasons. You can buy a DB / mailing list of vetted business owner / mananger / C-level email addresses for conducting research like this. That list can in fact include owners / managers / IT people at what you think of when someone says "SMB" i.e. a small business with a few employees up to I think 1,000 employees. That list could also include a whole bunch of sole proprietors of companies like "Angela's Passion Parties" or "JayBob's Babysitting and Handywork". We don't know anything about who responded to this survey or whether they were actually the people who had to deal with the problem.
USB autoplay is hugely helpful for a great many people. Don't be so credulous of this story and start attacking what has been a great advancement in personal computing that's saved a lot of normal people a lot of frustration with their peripherals.
A lot of this advice tells you to go out and basically create a radical lifestyle change all at once. That generally doesn't happen. Changing things like diet, exercise, spending habits, social habits, etc., tends to work best if you slowly make small changes.
Lots of people find that diet / exercise tracking software can help them meet goals. I have a few friends using MyFoodDiary.com, and I like it pretty well. It does a nice job of giving you warm fuzzies for doing the right thing (fiber, produce, low cholesterol, etc.).
Exercise is really really important. It tends to improve mood and focus. It improves your cholesterol profile. Current thinking is that being fit is more important to overall health than being at the proper weight. So your goal is to get more exercise into your daily life. From what I understand, you can do this in 6 minutes every few days; you can walk 10,000 paces (about 5 miles per day), or do something in between.
Personally (I'm in IT too) I find it really hard to regularly go to the gym, and I hate the rigid schedule of having to go to the gym for 1 hour 4x per week or whatever. I like the suggestions of you doing small bursts of exercise while you're at work. In addition to strength / resistance training, how about:
Get a stationary bicycle that you "park" in front of your desk
Get a small treadmill that you can stroll on, with monitor visible, so you can respond to incoming issues
Any of these would increase your overall activity level -- and then maybe you just have to do one strenuous exercise session on the weekend or something, like a vigorous bike ride plus weight training, or a 1x per week cycle to work.
Oh, you could also work with a trainer who could figure out a workout for you to do while at your desk.
I had been using Kayak a lot, and I have a preference for American Airlines. I got this message from them the other day:
American Airlines Fares No Longer Displayed On Kayak Or Sidestep
Dear {name},
As a valued customer who has booked an American Airlines ticket through Kayak.com or Sidestep.com over the past year, we would like to inform you that American Airlines fares are no longer being displayed on these sites. You may still find our content through many other meta-search engines for purchase through our award-winning web site, AA.com. Tickets already purchased remain valid for customers traveling on American.
At American Airlines, we are committed to saving you time and money by making AA.com your one-stop shop for finding the best fares. In addition to our Lowest Fare Guarantee, you have the ability to search for the lowest available price for three days before and three days after your original departure and return dates. So, when booking your next trip, be sure to visit AA.com.
Thanks for choosing American Airlines. We look forward to seeing you on board soon.
I wrote them a complaint. (I think we all understand why even if you prefer one airline you'd still generally want to get information about fares from all carriers.)
this was the reply I received from a customer service rep:
August 6, 2008
Dear {my name}:
Thank you for your message to American Airlines and for expressing your opinion. Please know that we pay close attention to comments like yours so that we may better gauge trends in the industry and meet the needs of our customers.
You might be interested in the following that has been posted in several news articles concerning this decision: "... Kayak tends to show AA flights through its partnership with Orbitz instead of directly from American. That means American has to pay a double tax, once to Kayak and once to Orbitz." The discontinuance of paying double referral fees now especially with fuel prices going sky-high was difficult but necessary.
{myname} we appreciate hearing from you about this issue. Your viewpoint has been documented and will be used as we assess all our products and services.
Sincerely,
{name}
Customer Relations
American Airlines
Slight tangent: NPR did a story this morning about airlines' business models. For various reasons (e.g. oil prices) airlines are losing a lot of money right now. Industry wide, carriers are operating at a loss (except Southwest b/c of hedges it made against fuel prices -- but that's kind of a technicality, i.e. their prices are subsidized by an investment decision; ticket prices would not actually cover operations).
Carriers are all in the same boat: no one wants to be the first to raise prices. On the aggregator sites, if you are even a dollar more than your competitor, you quite possibly get pushed off the page of search results.
I work for A Really Big Search Engine Company, so we deal with this sort of issue all the time; we refer to the solution as "host crowding". The idea is that if you get a bunch of good results from one provider (website) that are all pretty similar, you bundle them up into one or two results with something to indicate to the user that there are more results from that provider.
Analogously, I wonder if the airlines wouldn't be so pissed at the multi-search sites if those sites were better at host crowding. True, as a customer you want to see the variations in schedule. I don't know how much people care about carrier when they search for flights; I'm sure it's different for different people at different times, so it's not clear that it's a dick-the-user move to group results by carrier in order of lowest fare per carrier.
"and shall, when purchasing internet advertising using keywords, adwords or the like, require the activation of the term 'Orion' as negative keywords or negative adwords in any internet advertising purchased or used".
the judge specifically said "internet advertising". and s/he used the phrase "keywords, adwords, or the like". to suggest that the ruling applies only to google adwords is flagrant trolling. i don't know how anyone could possibly interpret the statement in the ruling as being constrained to google.
sheesh. how this got modded "interesting" is beyond me.
Homeskillet, you didn't cite any references. Why should we believe you? The OP asked for "medical" references, by which I'm sure s/he was hoping for actual journal articles or other peer-reviewed information.
Clearly delineated layouts are ***ALMOST*** as important as the color scheme.
It sounded like the OP was talking more about the effects of color & contrast on legibility. Which is not exactly the same as asking about color scheme (with its branding implications). I inferred that the poster was asking about colors for his own system, although I guess it's not specified and s/he could have been trying to design a legible system.
A clearly delineated layout may be more important than color for parsing a page with a lot of different types of content (like your typical webpage). But if the system at hand is used for reading lots of text, or perhaps a programming IDE, you could plausibly argue that the color scheme (insofar as it affects legibility) is more important for overall system usability.
Remember the old timers' rule of thumb. If a novice computer user who knows nothing of the business background for the application can easily explain to you what the application is for and how to use it, then, and only then, it's a good interface.
Fiddlesticks. Although it's probably the case that most programmers are better off believing this statement than not believing it, that's a very limited understanding of usability. It's the equivalent of "never begin a sentence with a conjunction nor end one with a preposition."
There are many definitions of "good interface", and the best definition is more like "measured effectiveness for the task at hand by the frequent users of the system." You've given one definition of "good interface", but to say it's the only standard for quality is bullshit. My grandmother doesn't have to be able to walk up and use, say, the copyright violation content review tool that I've been working on lately. And if she did, the UI elements I'd have to use to explain it to her would make the system *absolutely insuffrable* for the expert paralegals who use the system for 6-8 hours per day.
One of the eternal balancing acts in creating a useful and usable system is between learnability (where a novice can take a look at a system and "get it") and expert efficiency (in which an expert who uses the system 8 or 10 hours a day can interact at the speed of thought). The gold standard is a system that is basically comprehensible on first perusal and doesn't violate users' mental model of the world -- which means that they won't have to perform unnecessary cognitive translations and mappings every operation. This tends to make the system more learnable. And over time, it affects experts' efficiency to not have to do all of these extra mappings.
One of my profs in [HCI] school used to say "make the easy things easy, make the hard things possible". which was his way of saying: make the primary functions really easy, walk-up-and-use easy. but make the stuff that experts want (like customizations, keyboard shortcuts, what have you) available for people who are incented by their heavy use of the system to seek those things out.
In a series of experiments, proofreading performance was consistently better with positive polarity (dark text on light background) than with negative polarity displays (light text on dark background). This positive polarity advantage was independent of ambient lighting (darkness vs. typical office illumination) and of chromaticity (black and white vs. blue and yellow). A final experiment showed that colour contrast (red text on green background) could not compensate for a lack of luminance contrast. Physiological measures of effort and strain (breathing rate, heart rate, heart rate variability and skin conductance level) and self-reported mood, fatigue, arousal, eyestrain, headache, muscle strain and back pain did not vary as a function of any of the independent variables, suggesting that participants worked equally hard in all experimental conditions, so that the interpretation of the primary performance measure was unlikely to be contaminated by a performance-effort trade-off.
The purpose of the experiment was to investigate the effects of chromaticity combination on reading speeds and subjective preference ratings for small Chinese characters. The experiment was 7 (text chromaticity) x 7 (background chromaticity) split-plot design. Analysis of variance showed that the text chromaticity was not significant, but background chromaticity was. The findings suggested that achromatic color was the most effective background chromaticity with lower reading time and had a higher preference rating; however, the highly saturated short-wavelength blue was least effective.
I wish that there were a middle ground between total lockdown and free-for-all on my home network. Generally, I'd love to let other people use my internet connection. We've all been in situations where you're not at home and need a tiny bit of connection to do a quick lookup -- check a map, your email, do a quick fiscal transaction. You're surrounded by wireless networks that are all locked, even though you know that most of the owners wouldn't notice or begrudge you a couple MBs of data transfer. But finding the owners and asking for permission and getting authorized is prohibitively difficult.
I'd love to leave my network open. The problem is that when I do, other people start using it heavily and it impacts my own use by hogging bandwidth. I want my router software to recognize my MAC addresses, and when one of them comes online, it restricts everyone else's bandwidth to something like 10% of the available throughput. (I admit that I don't know much about how bandwidth is shared or if this model is possible...)
I suspect that this proposed law is attempting to address the case of people who don't realize they can password-protect their router and have other people snitching their bandwidth. Sadly, this law would also affect people who willingly share their bandwidth. That's a problem, and it's why this is a bad law.
I think the problem could be solved with better router software. Router software needs to be productized and abstracted: someone at Apple and Linksys need to productize their admin software to provide a much better user experience than the current nuts-and-bolts technical configuration sheets that both systems currently offer.
You want to enable people who own the router to (1) easily tell who is using the router (2) tell their router to differentiate between computers (3) easily kick off / ban other computers. Routers should have a user-friendly handshake procedure: when a new machine asks to join the network, the router automatically remembers it (by MAC and with a prettyname and contact information). The router's owner can periodically review usage requests and make permanent authorization decisions if necessary.
This also adds a personalization and community aspect to router sharing:
New user [to router]: I'd like to use your network.
Router: Okay, I have your MAC address. I have a policy that you have to provide your email address and a comment to my owner about what you want to use the network for.
New user: Okay. My email address is blah@meh.com. I'm a friend of someone in the building and I wanted basic internet access while i'm here.
Router: Okay I will log that information. I have to warn you that if my owner gets on the network, you'll be kicked off, because my owner encrypts all her traffic and wants all of her bandwitdth.
Obviously there are corner cases where this becomes undesirable, but I think in a lot of cases, better software would enable behaviors that better reflect actual human desires.
I think that any programmer or administrator who has access to {some level} of personal information about other people should be required to be licensed and accredited. In other words, I'd like to see an official standards and accreditation board for the various flavors of software engineers, the way that lawyers, doctors, architects, contractors, etc. have to have. If you sufficiently abuse your position or malign your clients, not only do you face legal penalties, but you also lose your ability to have a (credible) job in the future. Obviously there are a lot of kinks in this process that'd have to be worked out, but if it works for the medical profession it seems like it'd have some effect in software too.
When you have power over systems that can seriously eff up people's lives, you should have to be vetted.
A telephone name and reverse lookup type system would be nice. yahoo has one of those I think, but it sucks. I'm sure if google were to provide one it would be fairly straightforward. It'd be nice if google also provided babelfish.altavista.com type services.
They're not replacing the Usenet archive. They're replacing the current service, which is solely a Usenet archive, with the new version, which is both Usenet archive and make-your-own-group.
#2) The data was collected using random-digit dialing. Obviously, the people who don't have phones are more likely to not have internet access too. I wouldn't discount this factor.
True. However, random-digit telephone surveys are one of the most widely-used and accurate survey / sampling methodologies available. The proportion of american households with telephones is around 95%. Not perfect, but it is known, and thus is accounted for. There are huge bodies of statistical theory built up around correcting for the deficiencies and biases that are implicit in this sort of survey. For example, here's a detailed description of the methodology used for the Pew Internet & American Life survey, which was also a random-digit dial survey. That doesn't ensure that N/N used similar methodological rigor, but just provides an example that people are aware of these problems, and some of them try to correct for them.
Finally: yes, according to these stats, women ages 35 - 54 have the highest rate of penetration (spare me any forthcoming penis jokes, thank you) at 81.7%. But the penetration rate for men of the same age group is only SLIGHTLY less -- 80.2%. I can't find the margin of error, but unless N/N is insanely rigorous and sampled 5,000+ people, the difference between men and women is probably within the margin of error (generally 2 - 4%).
Some scientists are even beginning to look at a link between DDT levels and breast cancer, as DDT and several other pesticides, which are absorbed and stored long-term in fat, also are capable of causing hormonal changes by acting much like estrogen.
do you happen to have any research citations about the effects of pseudo- and synthetic hormones on the human body? some friends and i have recently been debating this issue -- more in regards to organic food -- and there's a dearth of info. found some stuff coming out of the EU's ban on hormones in meat & from cal poly univ., but it seems like the jury's still out.
This blog article was written in response to a discussion some coworkers and I were having:
My proposal is to do sender authentication at the SMTP level, with a compatible extension to the implementation.
1) SMTP server receives delivery request
2) SMTP server looks at envelope sender
3) SMTP server contacts "mailkey.senderhostmx.com" to get mailkey
4) If mailkey host exists, SMTP server validates message signature with mailkey and accepts or rejects message. If mailkey host does not exist, SMTP decides what to do based on its own policy.
5) Any time a server sends a bounce message (spam, unknown user, etc) to the envelope sender, it should include a note about how to prevent others from forging their addresses by setting up mailkey.
This proposal is simple because it does not change the SMTP protocol, or mail clients at all. This proposal is incremental, because it does not disturb existing mailflow. Most of all this proposal has viral incentive, because it is within each domain's power to stop others from forging their domain. The additional requirement that bounces to spam messages be sent to the envelope sender assures that an authenticated sender has responsibility for handling the spam they originate, and it assures an unauthenticated sender has incentive and information about how to become authenticated.
Another reason OSS / "free" software is a threat to Microsoft is because it reduces software companies' ability to monetize on code. The better OSS meets people's needs, the less money they need to spend on proprietary software, and the total economy of software -- which MS owns 99.9% of -- gets much smaller.
What would mean that Linux wins? If MS starts to support & distribute it in its products?
...was recently featured in this article about US security policy, and primarily on the dangers of relying too much on technolgoy. the article is great -- not super-techy, but a great explanation of technology and security policy; it makes an intimidating topic accessible to the intelligent non-tech.
a couple of good points from the article:
"[the leading / best face recognition] software has a success rate of 99.32 percent--that is, when the software matches a passenger's face with a face on a list of terrorists, it is mistaken only 0.68 percent of the time. Assume for the moment that this claim is credible; assume, too, that good pictures of suspected terrorists are readily available. About 25 million passengers used Boston's Logan Airport in 2001. Had face-recognition software been used on 25 million faces, it would have wrongly picked out just 0.68 percent of them--but that would have been enough, given the large number of passengers, to flag as many as 170,000 innocent people as terrorists. With almost 500 false alarms a day, the face-recognition system would quickly become something to ignore."
"The most important element of any security measure, Schneier argues, is people, not technology--and the people need to be at the scene. Recall the German journalists who fooled the fingerprint readers and iris scanners. None of their tricks would have worked if a reasonably attentive guard had been watching. Conversely, legitimate employees with bandaged fingers or scratched corneas will never make it through security unless a guard at the scene is authorized to overrule the machinery. "
i recently started playing neverwinter nights. it's a great game. i've never played any sort of structured roleplaying game before -- either live or computerized.
frankly, all of the points / character levels / blah blah blah are stupid.
i see what they're getting at -- a fictitous character develops gradually and along chosen axes, the way a real-life person does.
but there is no real-life skill associated with becoming a more experienced character. i have as much fun with a souped-up "unnaturally" powerful character as i do with a weak one.
i don't see anything inherently fun about having to die and re-spawn 15 times versus 2 against a particular Big Baddy. IT doesn't make me a better person and it doesn't make my gameplay more enjoyable. trust me -- i hit a bug in NWN that gave me about 5 extra levels of points. the fun part of the game for me was solving puzzles and running around in the world as the story unfolded around me, not having to compare my combat points plus shield points minus encumbrance points blah blah blah BARF against the bad guy waiting around the corner for me. i just want to whack him out of my way and find the next clue.
y'all have been playing so long that you can't think outside of the box. i'm not saying RPGs suck -- just that the overly-deliberate rules were functions of insufficient technology, and there's no reason to hold on to that unnatural deliberation when we have computers, services, etc. to deal with it for us. Let people have their souped up characters -- the fun is the storytelling and the interaction, not the number of times you have to die in order to kill the bad guy at hand.
i've been using a Duo-Aria (slightly different model) for over a year, and it makes me scream with agony. the usability is hellish and the product has never worked quite right. the accompanying software is a joke.
(when i fight it into submission, though, it and audible.com make my hour-long commute much less painful.)
if you can ignore the terrible dialogue and total lack of any reason at all being demonstrated for Anakin or Padme for having any kind of feelings for each other outside of their obligation to fulfil what we already know will happen. Oh you killed all those innocent people, how sad, now get over here and make love to me you bastard. Where did this deep undying love come from?
Anakin: Babe, I'll love you forever and ever and ever. I've been fantasizing about you since i was separated from my mother, who looks remarkably like you, 10 years ago. Also, I now have raging adolescent hormones to fuel my undying passion for you.
Padme: Oh Ani, you know it can never be. I would not want to cause you to swerve from your path as a Dawson's Creek transplant who wants to take over the world. Please ponder this while watching the firelight cast a flickering glow on my bosom as it heaves over the top of my black leather corset. My goodness, I do so love wearing leather corsets while I am in hiding and isolated from everyone but the maid and my horny teenaged bodyguard. Thank goodness the bodyguard knows that our love is forbidden and thus is completely immune to having the breasts of the most attractive woman in the universe constantly peeping up at him.
what ever happened to "if i catch you bringing that game into this house or playing it anywhere else, i'll smash the game and confiscate your PlayStation?"
and as much as i enjoy video games, a good many kids would be much better off if, instead of wringing their hands about how violent video games are, their parents shipped the youngsters outside to play, interact with their peers, burn off some energy, and get some exercise.
Without exception, it is *not the tool* that commits the crime.
maybe this is the marketing angle we need to take in order to drum up anti-DMCA / **AA support in places that tend to be more conservative and have fewer people in high technology -- the south and midwest. parallel "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument: "computers don't steal music, people steal music. don't turn us into criminals!"
obviously this is a gross oversimplification... but for people who are already inclined to believe the argument in the context of guns, this parallel could help them quickly understand the issue and get fired up enough to answer "no!" when pollsters ask if they believe encryption-breaking software should be illegal.
Also note that 1999 was a record year for just about everyone, RIAA included. betwteen 1998 and 1999, the largest category increase in consumer spending was in entertainment, an 8.3% difference (PDF) according to the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average US citizen spent $1,891 on entertainment in 1999. In 2000 (most recent year for which stats (PDF) are available), there was a -1.5% change from the previous year -- avg. total of $1,863.
Gee. People spend less on entertainment -- because of a bad economy or because of file trading? Your guess is as good as mine, but file trading sure as hell was around in 1999 -- a record year for the RIAA.
Slashdot Mirror
Horsesh*t. I do PM / UX at a website whose users are SMBs. Most of my life is spent talking to SMB owners: interviewing them, usability testing with them, dealing with customer support issues, etc. While these people are, in general, certainly not dumb, most of them (1) have a limited idea of how to use their computers (they're too busy and they often outsource IT functions, even if only to the Geek Squad) (2) have a limited understanding of what 'malware' is (3) would have no way of knowing that the malware came from a USB device and were probably just making that up (4) were probably using sketchy cheap malware-infested software they downloaded from the internet rather than paying for a reliable package since they tend to be very cost-conscious and (5) were probably trying to explain why there's all that pr0n stashed on their hard drives.
In other words, self-reporting by "SMBs" (owners? IT people? who?) about malware incidents in the past year is likely a complete line of bull poo concocted by a PR firm trying to be a "thought leader" and getting people to their blog post / website (our firm does this, although we at least make them be reasonably methodologically rigorous).
My company has also conducted surveys of SMBs, both for UX / Product reasons and PR "thought leader" reasons. You can buy a DB / mailing list of vetted business owner / mananger / C-level email addresses for conducting research like this. That list can in fact include owners / managers / IT people at what you think of when someone says "SMB" i.e. a small business with a few employees up to I think 1,000 employees. That list could also include a whole bunch of sole proprietors of companies like "Angela's Passion Parties" or "JayBob's Babysitting and Handywork". We don't know anything about who responded to this survey or whether they were actually the people who had to deal with the problem.
USB autoplay is hugely helpful for a great many people. Don't be so credulous of this story and start attacking what has been a great advancement in personal computing that's saved a lot of normal people a lot of frustration with their peripherals.
Move along, nothing to see here.
A lot of this advice tells you to go out and basically create a radical lifestyle change all at once. That generally doesn't happen. Changing things like diet, exercise, spending habits, social habits, etc., tends to work best if you slowly make small changes.
Lots of people find that diet / exercise tracking software can help them meet goals. I have a few friends using MyFoodDiary.com, and I like it pretty well. It does a nice job of giving you warm fuzzies for doing the right thing (fiber, produce, low cholesterol, etc.).
Exercise is really really important. It tends to improve mood and focus. It improves your cholesterol profile. Current thinking is that being fit is more important to overall health than being at the proper weight. So your goal is to get more exercise into your daily life. From what I understand, you can do this in 6 minutes every few days; you can walk 10,000 paces (about 5 miles per day), or do something in between.
Personally (I'm in IT too) I find it really hard to regularly go to the gym, and I hate the rigid schedule of having to go to the gym for 1 hour 4x per week or whatever. I like the suggestions of you doing small bursts of exercise while you're at work. In addition to strength / resistance training, how about:
Any of these would increase your overall activity level -- and then maybe you just have to do one strenuous exercise session on the weekend or something, like a vigorous bike ride plus weight training, or a 1x per week cycle to work.
Oh, you could also work with a trainer who could figure out a workout for you to do while at your desk.
I wrote them a complaint. (I think we all understand why even if you prefer one airline you'd still generally want to get information about fares from all carriers.)
this was the reply I received from a customer service rep:
Slight tangent: NPR did a story this morning about airlines' business models. For various reasons (e.g. oil prices) airlines are losing a lot of money right now. Industry wide, carriers are operating at a loss (except Southwest b/c of hedges it made against fuel prices -- but that's kind of a technicality, i.e. their prices are subsidized by an investment decision; ticket prices would not actually cover operations).
Carriers are all in the same boat: no one wants to be the first to raise prices. On the aggregator sites, if you are even a dollar more than your competitor, you quite possibly get pushed off the page of search results.
I work for A Really Big Search Engine Company, so we deal with this sort of issue all the time; we refer to the solution as "host crowding". The idea is that if you get a bunch of good results from one provider (website) that are all pretty similar, you bundle them up into one or two results with something to indicate to the user that there are more results from that provider.
Analogously, I wonder if the airlines wouldn't be so pissed at the multi-search sites if those sites were better at host crowding. True, as a customer you want to see the variations in schedule. I don't know how much people care about carrier when they search for flights; I'm sure it's different for different people at different times, so it's not clear that it's a dick-the-user move to group results by carrier in order of lowest fare per carrier.
the judge specifically said "internet advertising". and s/he used the phrase "keywords, adwords, or the like". to suggest that the ruling applies only to google adwords is flagrant trolling. i don't know how anyone could possibly interpret the statement in the ruling as being constrained to google.
sheesh. how this got modded "interesting" is beyond me.
It sounded like the OP was talking more about the effects of color & contrast on legibility. Which is not exactly the same as asking about color scheme (with its branding implications). I inferred that the poster was asking about colors for his own system, although I guess it's not specified and s/he could have been trying to design a legible system.
A clearly delineated layout may be more important than color for parsing a page with a lot of different types of content (like your typical webpage). But if the system at hand is used for reading lots of text, or perhaps a programming IDE, you could plausibly argue that the color scheme (insofar as it affects legibility) is more important for overall system usability.
Fiddlesticks. Although it's probably the case that most programmers are better off believing this statement than not believing it, that's a very limited understanding of usability. It's the equivalent of "never begin a sentence with a conjunction nor end one with a preposition."
There are many definitions of "good interface", and the best definition is more like "measured effectiveness for the task at hand by the frequent users of the system." You've given one definition of "good interface", but to say it's the only standard for quality is bullshit. My grandmother doesn't have to be able to walk up and use, say, the copyright violation content review tool that I've been working on lately. And if she did, the UI elements I'd have to use to explain it to her would make the system *absolutely insuffrable* for the expert paralegals who use the system for 6-8 hours per day.
One of the eternal balancing acts in creating a useful and usable system is between learnability (where a novice can take a look at a system and "get it") and expert efficiency (in which an expert who uses the system 8 or 10 hours a day can interact at the speed of thought). The gold standard is a system that is basically comprehensible on first perusal and doesn't violate users' mental model of the world -- which means that they won't have to perform unnecessary cognitive translations and mappings every operation. This tends to make the system more learnable. And over time, it affects experts' efficiency to not have to do all of these extra mappings.
One of my profs in [HCI] school used to say "make the easy things easy, make the hard things possible". which was his way of saying: make the primary functions really easy, walk-up-and-use easy. but make the stuff that experts want (like customizations, keyboard shortcuts, what have you) available for people who are incented by their heavy use of the system to seek those things out.
Even Jakob, that old codger, recognizes that you have to serve the spectrum of novices and experts:
http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html
I'm just saying -- get some nuance & don't be a prig.
Text - background polarity affects performance irrespective of ambient illumination and colour contrast.
and
A study of reading time and viewers' preferences for a variety of combinations of character-background chromaticity for small traditional Chinese characters.
but don't let me do all your clicking for you:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=legibility+of+color+combinations+on+screen&spell=1
I wish that there were a middle ground between total lockdown and free-for-all on my home network. Generally, I'd love to let other people use my internet connection. We've all been in situations where you're not at home and need a tiny bit of connection to do a quick lookup -- check a map, your email, do a quick fiscal transaction. You're surrounded by wireless networks that are all locked, even though you know that most of the owners wouldn't notice or begrudge you a couple MBs of data transfer. But finding the owners and asking for permission and getting authorized is prohibitively difficult.
I'd love to leave my network open. The problem is that when I do, other people start using it heavily and it impacts my own use by hogging bandwidth. I want my router software to recognize my MAC addresses, and when one of them comes online, it restricts everyone else's bandwidth to something like 10% of the available throughput. (I admit that I don't know much about how bandwidth is shared or if this model is possible...)
I suspect that this proposed law is attempting to address the case of people who don't realize they can password-protect their router and have other people snitching their bandwidth. Sadly, this law would also affect people who willingly share their bandwidth. That's a problem, and it's why this is a bad law.
I think the problem could be solved with better router software. Router software needs to be productized and abstracted: someone at Apple and Linksys need to productize their admin software to provide a much better user experience than the current nuts-and-bolts technical configuration sheets that both systems currently offer.
You want to enable people who own the router to (1) easily tell who is using the router (2) tell their router to differentiate between computers (3) easily kick off / ban other computers. Routers should have a user-friendly handshake procedure: when a new machine asks to join the network, the router automatically remembers it (by MAC and with a prettyname and contact information). The router's owner can periodically review usage requests and make permanent authorization decisions if necessary.
This also adds a personalization and community aspect to router sharing:
New user [to router]: I'd like to use your network.
Router: Okay, I have your MAC address. I have a policy that you have to provide your email address and a comment to my owner about what you want to use the network for.
New user: Okay. My email address is blah@meh.com. I'm a friend of someone in the building and I wanted basic internet access while i'm here.
Router: Okay I will log that information. I have to warn you that if my owner gets on the network, you'll be kicked off, because my owner encrypts all her traffic and wants all of her bandwitdth.
Obviously there are corner cases where this becomes undesirable, but I think in a lot of cases, better software would enable behaviors that better reflect actual human desires.
I think that any programmer or administrator who has access to {some level} of personal information about other people should be required to be licensed and accredited. In other words, I'd like to see an official standards and accreditation board for the various flavors of software engineers, the way that lawyers, doctors, architects, contractors, etc. have to have. If you sufficiently abuse your position or malign your clients, not only do you face legal penalties, but you also lose your ability to have a (credible) job in the future. Obviously there are a lot of kinks in this process that'd have to be worked out, but if it works for the medical profession it seems like it'd have some effect in software too.
When you have power over systems that can seriously eff up people's lives, you should have to be vetted.
Interesting. What do you find unintuitive, specifically?
you mean like this or like this?
or perhaps a translation tool?
try these too.
They're not replacing the Usenet archive. They're replacing the current service, which is solely a Usenet archive, with the new version, which is both Usenet archive and make-your-own-group.
#2) The data was collected using random-digit dialing. Obviously, the people who don't have phones are more likely to not have internet access too. I wouldn't discount this factor.
True. However, random-digit telephone surveys are one of the most widely-used and accurate survey / sampling methodologies available. The proportion of american households with telephones is around 95%. Not perfect, but it is known, and thus is accounted for. There are huge bodies of statistical theory built up around correcting for the deficiencies and biases that are implicit in this sort of survey. For example, here's a detailed description of the methodology used for the Pew Internet & American Life survey, which was also a random-digit dial survey. That doesn't ensure that N/N used similar methodological rigor, but just provides an example that people are aware of these problems, and some of them try to correct for them.
Finally: yes, according to these stats, women ages 35 - 54 have the highest rate of penetration (spare me any forthcoming penis jokes, thank you) at 81.7%. But the penetration rate for men of the same age group is only SLIGHTLY less -- 80.2%. I can't find the margin of error, but unless N/N is insanely rigorous and sampled 5,000+ people, the difference between men and women is probably within the margin of error (generally 2 - 4%).
do you happen to have any research citations about the effects of pseudo- and synthetic hormones on the human body? some friends and i have recently been debating this issue -- more in regards to organic food -- and there's a dearth of info. found some stuff coming out of the EU's ban on hormones in meat & from cal poly univ., but it seems like the jury's still out.
cheers!
Generic email address: sep@elections.state.md.us
other modes of contact are here.
This blog article was written in response to a discussion some coworkers and I were having:
So that's what they mean when they say "persuasive technology"...
(da book)
Another reason OSS / "free" software is a threat to Microsoft is because it reduces software companies' ability to monetize on code. The better OSS meets people's needs, the less money they need to spend on proprietary software, and the total economy of software -- which MS owns 99.9% of -- gets much smaller.
What would mean that Linux wins? If MS starts to support & distribute it in its products?
i recently started playing neverwinter nights. it's a great game. i've never played any sort of structured roleplaying game before -- either live or computerized.
frankly, all of the points / character levels / blah blah blah are stupid.
i see what they're getting at -- a fictitous character develops gradually and along chosen axes, the way a real-life person does.
but there is no real-life skill associated with becoming a more experienced character. i have as much fun with a souped-up "unnaturally" powerful character as i do with a weak one.
i don't see anything inherently fun about having to die and re-spawn 15 times versus 2 against a particular Big Baddy. IT doesn't make me a better person and it doesn't make my gameplay more enjoyable. trust me -- i hit a bug in NWN that gave me about 5 extra levels of points. the fun part of the game for me was solving puzzles and running around in the world as the story unfolded around me, not having to compare my combat points plus shield points minus encumbrance points blah blah blah BARF against the bad guy waiting around the corner for me. i just want to whack him out of my way and find the next clue.
y'all have been playing so long that you can't think outside of the box. i'm not saying RPGs suck -- just that the overly-deliberate rules were functions of insufficient technology, and there's no reason to hold on to that unnatural deliberation when we have computers, services, etc. to deal with it for us. Let people have their souped up characters -- the fun is the storytelling and the interaction, not the number of times you have to die in order to kill the bad guy at hand.
i've been using a Duo-Aria (slightly different model) for over a year, and it makes me scream with agony. the usability is hellish and the product has never worked quite right. the accompanying software is a joke.
(when i fight it into submission, though, it and audible.com make my hour-long commute much less painful.)
Anakin: Babe, I'll love you forever and ever and ever. I've been fantasizing about you since i was separated from my mother, who looks remarkably like you, 10 years ago. Also, I now have raging adolescent hormones to fuel my undying passion for you.
Padme: Oh Ani, you know it can never be. I would not want to cause you to swerve from your path as a Dawson's Creek transplant who wants to take over the world. Please ponder this while watching the firelight cast a flickering glow on my bosom as it heaves over the top of my black leather corset. My goodness, I do so love wearing leather corsets while I am in hiding and isolated from everyone but the maid and my horny teenaged bodyguard. Thank goodness the bodyguard knows that our love is forbidden and thus is completely immune to having the breasts of the most attractive woman in the universe constantly peeping up at him.
my early 20s, actually.
Dude....
what ever happened to "if i catch you bringing that game into this house or playing it anywhere else, i'll smash the game and confiscate your PlayStation?"
and as much as i enjoy video games, a good many kids would be much better off if, instead of wringing their hands about how violent video games are, their parents shipped the youngsters outside to play, interact with their peers, burn off some energy, and get some exercise.
maybe this is the marketing angle we need to take in order to drum up anti-DMCA / **AA support in places that tend to be more conservative and have fewer people in high technology -- the south and midwest. parallel "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument: "computers don't steal music, people steal music. don't turn us into criminals!"
obviously this is a gross oversimplification... but for people who are already inclined to believe the argument in the context of guns, this parallel could help them quickly understand the issue and get fired up enough to answer "no!" when pollsters ask if they believe encryption-breaking software should be illegal.
any marketing people out there?
Also note that 1999 was a record year for just about everyone, RIAA included. betwteen 1998 and 1999, the largest category increase in consumer spending was in entertainment, an 8.3% difference (PDF) according to the US Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average US citizen spent $1,891 on entertainment in 1999. In 2000 (most recent year for which stats (PDF) are available), there was a -1.5% change from the previous year -- avg. total of $1,863.
Gee. People spend less on entertainment -- because of a bad economy or because of file trading? Your guess is as good as mine, but file trading sure as hell was around in 1999 -- a record year for the RIAA.