Perhaps even doing an impromptu photoshop with their faces and a "before and after" shot, with directions to the nearest makeup counter? Well, he might need some coverup then... To hide his suddenly very flushed appearance.
I was thinking "perhaps they should ask the viewer whether they want to see a mock-up photoshop of them using the advertised product?" There is a computer driving the system, after all. And you know what? This Samsung gimmic + project natal == epic marketing win
Imagine the system asking you, "Hey! how would you like to see yourself on this hot Levi's? Nod or give a thumbs up for yes, shake your head or thumbs down for no". A lot of immature people would give it the finger or make some other rude gestures, which the machine will simple interpret as "no" and move on. But that is a surefire way to capture audience. "Whant to see a related product?" thumbs up. You place this things in well policed places like malls, transport stations, etc. Remember, nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. That's how street performers stay in business. Now excuse me while I go out and patent this
Not that I really have a dog in this hunt but I think the comparison of colloquial English and computer communication protocols is an extremely poor one. Perhaps legal English would make for a better but still imperfect comparison... and that certainly has a long history of regulation, negotiation, contractual agreement.
Actually while he could have said HTTP/S, (X/H)TML, IP, TCP, ATM.... the great vast majority of what needs to happen for us to communicate here (including English, si yo comienzo por ejemplo a hablar en español ou français vous ne jamais m'entendrais bien n'est pas?) are in fact standards. Some of them are de facto, some de jure, all standards.
No, I don't care to elaborate. I think its high time you broaden your horizons on your own time.
(...)
The point here is that unwillingness to answer a question to the satisfaction of some self appointed third party does not indicate an inability to do so.
So you self-appointed yourself as a judge of the breadth of some one else's horizons?
That you can't see this, and are so mired in your own world view, suggests strongly that attempts at education are pointless.
I think that such an attitude will be a barrier for us to communicate so I won't bother. Perhaps in the alluded cultures I'm not old/fit/worthy/whatever enough to be answered my original question either.
They may be idiots in your opinion, but that hardly means that they are UNABLE to answer the question.
Please also consider that there are those that do not subscribe to your method of child rearing.
Care to elaborate? I'm having a hard time coming up with a valid reason why a parent wouldn't want to answer that question from their children. There could be explanations like, for instance, the parents had an unwanted pregnancy, or a scarring sexual experience. But that is not a reason. So I can't see why a parent wouldn't want to give an answer tailored for the child's age yet still true.
old-school business mentality coming head to head with something too revolutionary
You mean head to head with something too insane. What is the slashdot-supported model that he's too stupid to believe in? Would that be throwing billions of dollars overboard as youtube sinks to the bottom of profitability trying to stay free? Would that be Twitter, which currently sells no products, no paid services, and generally has no source of income at all?
Welcome to the World Wide Web. It was designed to be this way: free. Its hard to monetize it because it as not made to make money, it was made to freely distribute content as fast and as widespread as possible. The people that made it had the outspoken, specific, explicit goal of making it easy to share stuff (knowledge mainly) in this way.
Sometimes I wish the buzzword for it was "computer mediated reality" instead of "augmented reality." Will your reality really be that much better because of these tools?
Yes.
For instance, in Sydney street labeling blows. I tried negotiating my way in some parts with a paper map and unless you start at a well-known landmark it was useless because there wasn't any bloody tag. Try that with google maps and its like magic. This is an application that is here literally today. Now imagine you use the similar tech to the one that lets Google maps approximate your location without GPS to locate WiFi hotspots and have them show in your map. Or the nearest Gloria Jean's (Starbucks always burns my coffee).
It "aguments" and makes reality better in the sense that it provides more information about it than its immediately evident
I've thought of that, but it's a lot more complicated. To make that work you'd have to have some sort of huge database of what things (for a fairly nebulous definition of "things") are, and hardware and software to interface between the glasses and the database.
It depends more on what your goal is at any given moment. Have you used Google Earth? Tick enough boxes and the map becomes unwatchable, or worse, completely obscured by the olverlayed info. I constantly find my self selecting/unselecting options depending on what I want, i.e. see people's photos of the place with Panoramio, find a business, just see the street lables, watch the 3D models, etc..
Never mind the fancy HUDs, I sooo want this thing, too bad there is no version for WMV yet ='(
Besides, people are already used to seeing somebody waving their mobile left right and centre whereas me gesturing frantically at something only I can see (and worse, wearing some odd gizmo in the face)... Just think of the dirty looks that some people give to those that yapp away on their bluetooth borgphones
Word of mouth only goes so far, and advertising is expensive.
In the days of people having 100s (if not1000s) of "friends" on sites like Facebook, "word of mouth" is a hell of a lot more effective than it ever was before - and that's likely to remain true going forward.
I actually tend to think the opposite. I have so many friends on facebook that aren't my real friends that invites over fb tend to mean less to me then a phone call, or even an email. Plus you know that everyone invites their entire friends list so you don't get the feeling that the person really wants you to be there.
You and I must be on different age brackets. I have roughly 120 friends on FB, and 2/3 of them are more accurately counted as "acquaintances" and "workmates", and I take the time to classify and assign them permissions accordingly. The invites I get are from people that do appreciate my presence and those I send are on the same basis.
I do have friends my age that accept any and all invitations and add every app under the sun lest people think they are unfriendly, but IMNSHO they are on a much earlier "mental age bracket" so to speak. As people matures —matures, not ages— they tend to weigh their decisions a bit more.
Being Canadian I usually call it a 'bank machine' rather than an ATM. That is the common term here, very few people call it an ATM. The funny thing is, when I lived in the U.S. I would have to remember to use the term ATM instead of bank machine.
My girlfriend is Brithish and she refers to ATMs as "Cash Points". I always give her grief about it mostly to annoy her, but it does seem a bit more wasteful as a fast reference (albeit a more descriptive one I guess).
I thought the tendency in English was towards "rounding down" the language:P
Or maybe I'm just irrationaly irritated by shorthands, diminutives and TLAs
And when will people realize that just because something is "natural" doesn't make it the ideal solution. Using technology to extend human lifespan past 30 has resulted in a cataclysm of course?
Of sorts, yes. Six Thousand and Five Hundred Million people (and counting) have spread over most of the face of the Earth, and our activities have created great harm to delicately balanced and fragile ecosystems, and they seem to be now harming more rugged and stable ecosystems. No agenda, just a statement of fact. Longevity has allowed us to grow ever larger in numbers and we haven't been "in balance with nature" as the rest of the animal kingdom is for a while. How many species are going extinct a day because of deforestation, overexploitation, overfishing, pollution, etc, etc...?
It is simple:
1. Use Firefox (fewer 0-day exploits)
2. Don't browse porn/warez
3. Don't use P2P at all (no malware)
4. Run a web virus scan every couple of months just to be safe.
The users, and the insistence on admin privileges are the problem. At least MS is slowly working on the latter. The former is unfixable. OS X is NO better on many counts.
Um, yeah, "Don't use a computer, don't get pc viruses". There are far more productive and fun ways to not get infected, such as don't run everything as admin, use sand boxes and / or virtual machines. The end user doesn't have to even have a clue what this means, they are transparent solutions.
Correct the data for laterality (right hand preference in majority of the population), then maybe the results will be interesting. Even then, the explanation is bull. Unlike sight, the auditory system doesn't work cross-hemispherically. Sound from the right side is carried by the auditory nerve into the right portion of the temporal lobe.
What if it doesn't have to do with which ear is connected to what side of the brain but it is instead a visual cue (which is brain-sided) being picked up upon? If I stando to your right to talk to you, I might be having a psychological impact rather than a mechanical one.
What irritates me about so many of these types of research is that they seem to assume as a given that only because they concentrate in one part of a system this narrow focus automagically translates into isolation of the subject. How can you account for any other influences? Even if the subject is blind-folded, if the examiner is close enough the subject could still perceive the body heat. What if they wear ear phones with the balance tilted to the right or left, how do you account for the psychological factor of hearing on your preferred side over a purely mechanical explanation?
I think the phenomenon is interesting and worth studying, but the conclusion seems pretty suspect IMHO.
Hmm, I've never even used Google news. I don't carry my computer to lunch with me to read news while eating. I don't carry my computer into the restroom with me either. (...) If my newspaper goes away, nothing will replace it, certainly not the web or some silly gadget.
So don't replace it with something silly. I love my wm6.1 smartphone, i had a wm6 before it. My dataplan includes a news package with breaking/top news from the major newspapers in the city and the device is just great to use it. I do read it on the commute (and some times in the same situations you mention) and because it's my mobile it's always with me, always has the latest news, and its much more convenient to handle. I personally hate wrestling with the wide format papers and doing origami just to go to the next page. I can adjust the backligh, font size, etc so its comfortable to read, and if a news item interests me I can usually jump to the paper's site (or a competitor's) and follow the news trail there.
I realize this style might not suit your taste and that is valid, but my point is, there is more than one way to skin a cat or read an electronic newspaper
This just shows that when more Windows users (or convenience-first users) move to linux, the added security wont help. Users will continue to do everything the way that is most convenient to them, and that is gonna bring more attack vectors aswell.
So called "power users" without a clue might, but average users will continue to use whatever is available out of the box. Try talking to your average non-computer-geek user and it will be a rare item to find one that knows what a process is. Some people that are of reasonable intelligence but have no computer inclinations know very little about how computers work. They know that to do what they want they double click on this or that icon and get on with it.
The out-of-the-box Windows setup encourages poor security because up until XP it placed ease of use over security. With Vista and W7 they have achieved a better model. Users are now required to authorize potentially harmful operations, such as running or installing a given type of file. In other words, they now have to sudo.
Just like the GP "dumbed down" the security on his machine by running FF as root, it is equally possible to "smarten up" XP doing the opposite. I always run firefox in an unprivileged mode via a batch on my XP box while still logged in as admin. The knowledge to do this is out of scope for your average user and possibly for more than a 4th of the power users. The same goes for "dumbing down" a default linux setup, not everybody will know how, or even know that it is possible at all.
I accidentally dialed 000 (the emergency number in Australia) once on an old phone of mine because the phone allowed emergency numbers to be called without unlocking the keypad. I thought that was a really stupid feature, because it increases the chances of dialiing it accidentally and when it does happen, it just wastes the time of the emergency response staff who could be dealing with real emergencies instead.
The reason phones allow you to do this is because the very nature of the concept of "emergency" prevents you from covering all possible scenarios. What if the only available phone in an emergency isn't yours, and it's locked? What if whatever happened is so shocking that you can't think properly beyond "omfg i MUST dial 000 now now now!"
Being able to dial now can be the difference between life and death, and there are so bloody many different models and makes that it is unreasonable to think that your average person will know whether the model at hand is locked and how to unlock it. Some of us might not be such cool-headed cats when faced with blood or guns or twisted and burning metal or...
When you drive your hands are not in the air, the rest on the wheel.
This product is incredibly stupid, and like Surface it will never exist in real life.
I disagree. I have both Mario Kart and the Speed Racer game (hey, it IS fun!) on Wii, and my fiancee and I play them with the wheel attachment. That makes it weigh more than our arms by themselves, and more than just holding the controller. Guess what? we love it, and we don't get tired of holding the thing. In fact you don't steer with your arms outstretched, you just bend them at the elbows, in a similar* way that most people drive cars.
What's more, the biggest problem with the controller is thumb sore from accelerating, and white knuckles from gripping the wheel with a lot of force from excitement (we get very into the races). Also, there are always hundreds of people to race against in the worldwide Kart competition, so I can confidently say that a lot of people don't find it stupid. I don't thing either Natal or this style of gaming are analogue to Surface.
* Similar != same. I know in a real car your arms can rest on the wheel. This is a game, not a real car, so it resembles it but differs [/dispell_nitpick]
I guess you could flip the flamebait around and ask do PS3 and XBOX360 provide watered-down game experiences for offering games that depend on pretty graphics and not enjoyable gameplay.
Or you could look at the ratings for the games on all three consoles and realize the Wii's are the lowest.
Worst graphics and worst lineup? Who could resist?
Then those ratings are out of touch with reality and are based on the wrong premises because the Wii has the most profitable numbers. So, if people keep on buying it, it is not perceived to be the worse, regardless of "ratings".
It might be the same thing that happens to Wolfram-Alpha, for example. The morons at Wired keep saying that despite its updates it is still not a good search engine and that it will never match Google blah blah. Never mind the fact that this has never been the stated goal, and that they are not even marketing it as a search engine but as a computational engine that calculates answers based on the knowledge it has inbuilt.
(...)
But you seem really content with 6-8gigs of memory on an SD card. That doesn't seem like enough to me.
(...)
Like it or not, digital distribution is probably the future. How many games can be held on an SD card? I don't think enough. So that's one thing that holds the wii back. Then again, that can be something Nintendo can address in a new console.
Or you could take a radically visionary approach and, you know, buy another SD card? For the mind boogglingly high price of $20? [/snark].
Everybody will focus on different things, to me, the SD was a stroke of genius.
The problem isn't the Wii, it's the damn publishers. The Wii's more powerful than the most powerful gaming machines a few years ago and there were a lot of good games back then (unreal tournament 2004, Doom 3, etc). There's enough power in the console, but the creators of the game apparently can't adapt to lesser hardware
.
To back your point, the publisher of Silent Hill came with a custom-tailored version for the Wii that while might not have the mind-blowing graphics of The Last Guardian incorporates most of the characteristics that set the console apart into the game. You can use the wiimote as a flashlight, and the radio sounds come out of it now. Insted of finding ammo boxes lying around like so many discarded newspapers, now you can use the wiimote-nunchuck combo to fight off the enemies. It gets more personal that way, and that will only heighten immersion for hard-core gamers.
So, yeah, this guys are just throwing a hissy-fit because they are basing their strategies in eye-candy and hardware-muscle leveraged stuff rather than story/gameplay experience.
There really does need to be a "sunset law" for all laws, a "fourth body", or even one committee in congress that focuses on repealing or revising outdated laws in national, state, and local governing bodies.
What I would love to see is something like the Chinese were supposed to be doing, setting up a database that could be used to decide on a case. Since the first time I worked with Oracle and had to pay taxes I thought it would be extremely cool (and useful) to have a law database with integrity constraints. Once you finished the mammoth task of making it consistent, creating new laws that don't conflict with existing ones would be so much easier. Mind you, morons will still make moronic laws, but with such a system at least they would have to be creative morons...
Not only that, but people's search habits are not at all easy to change.
I don't think that's so much the case. I remember when Altavista was where Google is now, and I even remember being one of those that was saying the same thing as you about the newfangled goog. That lasted less than a year, which while long in computer-time it's neglectable in human-scale time.
I think it just happens that Google has been "the" search engine for quite a while, just like Altavista and Yahoo were. And it will be displaced and forgotten just as easily if a better tool comes along precisely because its a tool. And a free one at that, so most people's investment on it is psychological. Yes, that counts, but it isn't an insurmountable barrier. The good thing is that Google is still aware of that fact, so they haven't slept on their laurels yet.
You know? it's interesting that you can say that in English and it doesn't necessarily imply that you are one of those "us". But if you say that on a Romance language, you have to explicitly include or exclude yourself in the conjugation of "to have". (Algunos de nosotros tenemos - Algunos de nosotros tienen | certains de de nous nous avons certains de de nous ils ont | etc)
This concludes our random rumination of the day. Back to our scheduled topic
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps even doing an impromptu photoshop with their faces and a "before and after" shot, with directions to the nearest makeup counter? Well, he might need some coverup then... To hide his suddenly very flushed appearance.
I was thinking "perhaps they should ask the viewer whether they want to see a mock-up photoshop of them using the advertised product?" There is a computer driving the system, after all. And you know what? This Samsung gimmic + project natal == epic marketing win
Imagine the system asking you, "Hey! how would you like to see yourself on this hot Levi's? Nod or give a thumbs up for yes, shake your head or thumbs down for no". A lot of immature people would give it the finger or make some other rude gestures, which the machine will simple interpret as "no" and move on. But that is a surefire way to capture audience. "Whant to see a related product?" thumbs up. You place this things in well policed places like malls, transport stations, etc. Remember, nothing draws a crowd like a crowd. That's how street performers stay in business. Now excuse me while I go out and patent this
Not that I really have a dog in this hunt but I think the comparison of colloquial English and computer communication protocols is an extremely poor one. Perhaps legal English would make for a better but still imperfect comparison... and that certainly has a long history of regulation, negotiation, contractual agreement.
Actually while he could have said HTTP/S, (X/H)TML, IP, TCP, ATM.... the great vast majority of what needs to happen for us to communicate here (including English, si yo comienzo por ejemplo a hablar en español ou français vous ne jamais m'entendrais bien n'est pas?) are in fact standards. Some of them are de facto, some de jure, all standards.
No, I don't care to elaborate. I think its high time you broaden your horizons on your own time.
(...)
The point here is that unwillingness to answer a question to the satisfaction of some self appointed third party does not indicate an inability to do so.
So you self-appointed yourself as a judge of the breadth of some one else's horizons?
That you can't see this, and are so mired in your own world view, suggests strongly that attempts at education are pointless.
I think that such an attitude will be a barrier for us to communicate so I won't bother. Perhaps in the alluded cultures I'm not old/fit/worthy/whatever enough to be answered my original question either.
They may be idiots in your opinion, but that hardly means that they are UNABLE to answer the question.
Please also consider that there are those that do not subscribe to your method of child rearing.
Care to elaborate? I'm having a hard time coming up with a valid reason why a parent wouldn't want to answer that question from their children. There could be explanations like, for instance, the parents had an unwanted pregnancy, or a scarring sexual experience. But that is not a reason. So I can't see why a parent wouldn't want to give an answer tailored for the child's age yet still true.
You mean head to head with something too insane. What is the slashdot-supported model that he's too stupid to believe in? Would that be throwing billions of dollars overboard as youtube sinks to the bottom of profitability trying to stay free? Would that be Twitter, which currently sells no products, no paid services, and generally has no source of income at all?
Welcome to the World Wide Web. It was designed to be this way: free. Its hard to monetize it because it as not made to make money, it was made to freely distribute content as fast and as widespread as possible. The people that made it had the outspoken, specific, explicit goal of making it easy to share stuff (knowledge mainly) in this way.
What you are thinking of is subscription cable tv
Sometimes I wish the buzzword for it was "computer mediated reality" instead of "augmented reality." Will your reality really be that much better because of these tools?
Yes.
For instance, in Sydney street labeling blows. I tried negotiating my way in some parts with a paper map and unless you start at a well-known landmark it was useless because there wasn't any bloody tag. Try that with google maps and its like magic. This is an application that is here literally today. Now imagine you use the similar tech to the one that lets Google maps approximate your location without GPS to locate WiFi hotspots and have them show in your map. Or the nearest Gloria Jean's (Starbucks always burns my coffee).
It "aguments" and makes reality better in the sense that it provides more information about it than its immediately evident
I've thought of that, but it's a lot more complicated. To make that work you'd have to have some sort of huge database of what things (for a fairly nebulous definition of "things") are, and hardware and software to interface between the glasses and the database.
It depends more on what your goal is at any given moment. Have you used Google Earth? Tick enough boxes and the map becomes unwatchable, or worse, completely obscured by the olverlayed info. I constantly find my self selecting/unselecting options depending on what I want, i.e. see people's photos of the place with Panoramio, find a business, just see the street lables, watch the 3D models, etc..
Never mind the fancy HUDs, I sooo want this thing, too bad there is no version for WMV yet ='(
Besides, people are already used to seeing somebody waving their mobile left right and centre whereas me gesturing frantically at something only I can see (and worse, wearing some odd gizmo in the face)... Just think of the dirty looks that some people give to those that yapp away on their bluetooth borgphones
Word of mouth only goes so far, and advertising is expensive.
In the days of people having 100s (if not1000s) of "friends" on sites like Facebook, "word of mouth" is a hell of a lot more effective than it ever was before - and that's likely to remain true going forward.
I actually tend to think the opposite. I have so many friends on facebook that aren't my real friends that invites over fb tend to mean less to me then a phone call, or even an email. Plus you know that everyone invites their entire friends list so you don't get the feeling that the person really wants you to be there.
You and I must be on different age brackets. I have roughly 120 friends on FB, and 2/3 of them are more accurately counted as "acquaintances" and "workmates", and I take the time to classify and assign them permissions accordingly. The invites I get are from people that do appreciate my presence and those I send are on the same basis.
I do have friends my age that accept any and all invitations and add every app under the sun lest people think they are unfriendly, but IMNSHO they are on a much earlier "mental age bracket" so to speak. As people matures —matures, not ages— they tend to weigh their decisions a bit more.
Being Canadian I usually call it a 'bank machine' rather than an ATM. That is the common term here, very few people call it an ATM. The funny thing is, when I lived in the U.S. I would have to remember to use the term ATM instead of bank machine.
My girlfriend is Brithish and she refers to ATMs as "Cash Points". I always give her grief about it mostly to annoy her, but it does seem a bit more wasteful as a fast reference (albeit a more descriptive one I guess).
I thought the tendency in English was towards "rounding down" the language :P
Or maybe I'm just irrationaly irritated by shorthands, diminutives and TLAs
Lex Luther ?? what, he went "I have a dream..."? :P
And when will people realize that just because something is "natural" doesn't make it the ideal solution. Using technology to extend human lifespan past 30 has resulted in a cataclysm of course?
Of sorts, yes. Six Thousand and Five Hundred Million people (and counting) have spread over most of the face of the Earth, and our activities have created great harm to delicately balanced and fragile ecosystems, and they seem to be now harming more rugged and stable ecosystems. No agenda, just a statement of fact. Longevity has allowed us to grow ever larger in numbers and we haven't been "in balance with nature" as the rest of the animal kingdom is for a while. How many species are going extinct a day because of deforestation, overexploitation, overfishing, pollution, etc, etc...?
Odd, I got along for years without using it.
It is simple: 1. Use Firefox (fewer 0-day exploits) 2. Don't browse porn/warez 3. Don't use P2P at all (no malware) 4. Run a web virus scan every couple of months just to be safe.
The users, and the insistence on admin privileges are the problem. At least MS is slowly working on the latter. The former is unfixable. OS X is NO better on many counts.
Um, yeah, "Don't use a computer, don't get pc viruses". There are far more productive and fun ways to not get infected, such as don't run everything as admin, use sand boxes and / or virtual machines. The end user doesn't have to even have a clue what this means, they are transparent solutions.
Correct the data for laterality (right hand preference in majority of the population), then maybe the results will be interesting. Even then, the explanation is bull. Unlike sight, the auditory system doesn't work cross-hemispherically. Sound from the right side is carried by the auditory nerve into the right portion of the temporal lobe.
What if it doesn't have to do with which ear is connected to what side of the brain but it is instead a visual cue (which is brain-sided) being picked up upon? If I stando to your right to talk to you, I might be having a psychological impact rather than a mechanical one.
What irritates me about so many of these types of research is that they seem to assume as a given that only because they concentrate in one part of a system this narrow focus automagically translates into isolation of the subject. How can you account for any other influences? Even if the subject is blind-folded, if the examiner is close enough the subject could still perceive the body heat. What if they wear ear phones with the balance tilted to the right or left, how do you account for the psychological factor of hearing on your preferred side over a purely mechanical explanation?
I think the phenomenon is interesting and worth studying, but the conclusion seems pretty suspect IMHO.
I don't know about Basel but I'm certain these guys know they would face serious legal/criminal action if they didn't know for sure it was safe.
They just need to know to the best of their ability that it is safe, maybe they are just an incompetent lot.
I guess in that case they would be guilty of criminal negligence or something similar. I for one welcome our ground breaking overlords :)
Then come up with an alternative. (...)
You raise an excellent point, which only begs a very interesting question, what should we call it then? What's your idea?
How about "in person"? or just "physically"?
Hmm, I've never even used Google news. I don't carry my computer to lunch with me to read news while eating. I don't carry my computer into the restroom with me either. (...) If my newspaper goes away, nothing will replace it, certainly not the web or some silly gadget.
So don't replace it with something silly. I love my wm6.1 smartphone, i had a wm6 before it. My dataplan includes a news package with breaking/top news from the major newspapers in the city and the device is just great to use it. I do read it on the commute (and some times in the same situations you mention) and because it's my mobile it's always with me, always has the latest news, and its much more convenient to handle. I personally hate wrestling with the wide format papers and doing origami just to go to the next page. I can adjust the backligh, font size, etc so its comfortable to read, and if a news item interests me I can usually jump to the paper's site (or a competitor's) and follow the news trail there.
I realize this style might not suit your taste and that is valid, but my point is, there is more than one way to skin a cat or read an electronic newspaper
This just shows that when more Windows users (or convenience-first users) move to linux, the added security wont help. Users will continue to do everything the way that is most convenient to them, and that is gonna bring more attack vectors aswell.
So called "power users" without a clue might, but average users will continue to use whatever is available out of the box. Try talking to your average non-computer-geek user and it will be a rare item to find one that knows what a process is. Some people that are of reasonable intelligence but have no computer inclinations know very little about how computers work. They know that to do what they want they double click on this or that icon and get on with it.
The out-of-the-box Windows setup encourages poor security because up until XP it placed ease of use over security. With Vista and W7 they have achieved a better model. Users are now required to authorize potentially harmful operations, such as running or installing a given type of file. In other words, they now have to sudo.
Just like the GP "dumbed down" the security on his machine by running FF as root, it is equally possible to "smarten up" XP doing the opposite. I always run firefox in an unprivileged mode via a batch on my XP box while still logged in as admin. The knowledge to do this is out of scope for your average user and possibly for more than a 4th of the power users. The same goes for "dumbing down" a default linux setup, not everybody will know how, or even know that it is possible at all.
I accidentally dialed 000 (the emergency number in Australia) once on an old phone of mine because the phone allowed emergency numbers to be called without unlocking the keypad. I thought that was a really stupid feature, because it increases the chances of dialiing it accidentally and when it does happen, it just wastes the time of the emergency response staff who could be dealing with real emergencies instead.
The reason phones allow you to do this is because the very nature of the concept of "emergency" prevents you from covering all possible scenarios. What if the only available phone in an emergency isn't yours, and it's locked? What if whatever happened is so shocking that you can't think properly beyond "omfg i MUST dial 000 now now now!"
Being able to dial now can be the difference between life and death, and there are so bloody many different models and makes that it is unreasonable to think that your average person will know whether the model at hand is locked and how to unlock it. Some of us might not be such cool-headed cats when faced with blood or guns or twisted and burning metal or...
When you drive your hands are not in the air, the rest on the wheel. This product is incredibly stupid, and like Surface it will never exist in real life.
I disagree. I have both Mario Kart and the Speed Racer game (hey, it IS fun!) on Wii, and my fiancee and I play them with the wheel attachment. That makes it weigh more than our arms by themselves, and more than just holding the controller. Guess what? we love it, and we don't get tired of holding the thing. In fact you don't steer with your arms outstretched, you just bend them at the elbows, in a similar* way that most people drive cars.
What's more, the biggest problem with the controller is thumb sore from accelerating, and white knuckles from gripping the wheel with a lot of force from excitement (we get very into the races). Also, there are always hundreds of people to race against in the worldwide Kart competition, so I can confidently say that a lot of people don't find it stupid. I don't thing either Natal or this style of gaming are analogue to Surface.
* Similar != same. I know in a real car your arms can rest on the wheel. This is a game, not a real car, so it resembles it but differs [/dispell_nitpick]
I guess you could flip the flamebait around and ask do PS3 and XBOX360 provide watered-down game experiences for offering games that depend on pretty graphics and not enjoyable gameplay.
Or you could look at the ratings for the games on all three consoles and realize the Wii's are the lowest. Worst graphics and worst lineup? Who could resist?
Then those ratings are out of touch with reality and are based on the wrong premises because the Wii has the most profitable numbers. So, if people keep on buying it, it is not perceived to be the worse, regardless of "ratings".
It might be the same thing that happens to Wolfram-Alpha, for example. The morons at Wired keep saying that despite its updates it is still not a good search engine and that it will never match Google blah blah. Never mind the fact that this has never been the stated goal, and that they are not even marketing it as a search engine but as a computational engine that calculates answers based on the knowledge it has inbuilt.
(...) But you seem really content with 6-8gigs of memory on an SD card. That doesn't seem like enough to me. (...) Like it or not, digital distribution is probably the future. How many games can be held on an SD card? I don't think enough. So that's one thing that holds the wii back. Then again, that can be something Nintendo can address in a new console.
Or you could take a radically visionary approach and, you know, buy another SD card? For the mind boogglingly high price of $20? [/snark].
Everybody will focus on different things, to me, the SD was a stroke of genius.
The problem isn't the Wii, it's the damn publishers. The Wii's more powerful than the most powerful gaming machines a few years ago and there were a lot of good games back then (unreal tournament 2004, Doom 3, etc). There's enough power in the console, but the creators of the game apparently can't adapt to lesser hardware
.
To back your point, the publisher of Silent Hill came with a custom-tailored version for the Wii that while might not have the mind-blowing graphics of The Last Guardian incorporates most of the characteristics that set the console apart into the game. You can use the wiimote as a flashlight, and the radio sounds come out of it now. Insted of finding ammo boxes lying around like so many discarded newspapers, now you can use the wiimote-nunchuck combo to fight off the enemies. It gets more personal that way, and that will only heighten immersion for hard-core gamers.
So, yeah, this guys are just throwing a hissy-fit because they are basing their strategies in eye-candy and hardware-muscle leveraged stuff rather than story/gameplay experience.
There really does need to be a "sunset law" for all laws, a "fourth body", or even one committee in congress that focuses on repealing or revising outdated laws in national, state, and local governing bodies.
What I would love to see is something like the Chinese were supposed to be doing, setting up a database that could be used to decide on a case. Since the first time I worked with Oracle and had to pay taxes I thought it would be extremely cool (and useful) to have a law database with integrity constraints. Once you finished the mammoth task of making it consistent, creating new laws that don't conflict with existing ones would be so much easier. Mind you, morons will still make moronic laws, but with such a system at least they would have to be creative morons...
Not only that, but people's search habits are not at all easy to change.
I don't think that's so much the case. I remember when Altavista was where Google is now, and I even remember being one of those that was saying the same thing as you about the newfangled goog. That lasted less than a year, which while long in computer-time it's neglectable in human-scale time.
I think it just happens that Google has been "the" search engine for quite a while, just like Altavista and Yahoo were. And it will be displaced and forgotten just as easily if a better tool comes along precisely because its a tool. And a free one at that, so most people's investment on it is psychological. Yes, that counts, but it isn't an insurmountable barrier. The good thing is that Google is still aware of that fact, so they haven't slept on their laurels yet.
...and some of us have a wife AND a girlfriend.
You know? it's interesting that you can say that in English and it doesn't necessarily imply that you are one of those "us". But if you say that on a Romance language, you have to explicitly include or exclude yourself in the conjugation of "to have". (Algunos de nosotros tenemos - Algunos de nosotros tienen | certains de de nous nous avons certains de de nous ils ont | etc)
This concludes our random rumination of the day. Back to our scheduled topic