Heh. Oookay. So now you're stalking me so you can call me a twit? Heh. What country are you from anyway? I've never been somewhere where the word 'Twit' could be used offensively.
"How would this differ from HTTP/1.1, which can also connect once and then download everything through the same connection?"
Because even with HTTP 1.1, you'll download one page from a site, and when you go to the next one you have to reconnect and have the new data come down. With Flash, it is possible to encapsulate the entire site into one Flash file and fire it down. There may be javascript tricks you could do with HTML too, now that I think about it.\
"Why would I need Flash for this? I can also scale HTML text."
No, you can make the fonts bigger and smaller, you can't scale them.
If you're an Opera User, then you do have that ability. They have a zoom tool where you can put in a percentage and it'll scale the site, images and all. The downside, though, is that they don't do any image processing to make the effect smoother. FLash can.:P
It'd also be cool if the map were more radial so certain types of pages are in one corner, and different ones on the other... that way you could pick a compass direction to scan in.
I don't think it'd take much longer than it takes to get a result from Google. I mean the flash is already loaded, now it just needs to grab the data down from Google. It should do it just as fast as your browser, without having to download the images. The analysis should be quicker than humans can detect, and the graphics should come up reasonably fast.
I have no idea what's wrong with KartOO. There are two possiblities: 1.) they're using a crappy hack to get the data from the search engine (which could be the case if Flash doesn't have a way of getting HTTP data down...) or 2.) Slashdot kicked it's butt.
Yeah I see what you mean. I think part of the problem stems from some idiot that said that 'the easier it is to use, the stupier the people who use it will be'. I've gotten a lot of flack from people on Slashdot because I said Windows does a job (from the User's point of view) of installing and removing drivers than Linux does. Heh.
The flaw in that comment is that when you make something easier to use, you're improving productivity. If you are the type of person who has a habit of visiting a site and then coming back to slashdot, then there's no reason for them not to accomodate your taste. Hell, I have a damn good reason they should follow your suggestion: Posts change! If you hit back and the page reloads, you'll find yourself looking at a different post.
I know this won't sway your feelings for Flash, but I've had ideas I wanted to pursue with it that I thought would make for a better user experience.
I'll give you a really simple example: One of my biggest annoyances with the web is that every single page has to take a few seconds to connect, once it does the info comes down quickly. I'd prefer if I could download all the data from the site (connect once and then burst it down...) and then view it rapidly.
Flash allows you to do this. You have one download, and then you set up flash to click through the relevant information. No need for fancy graphics (though you could if you wish...), and you can make the page smoothly scale to whatever resolution you want. I'd really like to be able take Slashdot, for example, and scale it up a bit so I can read the text better.
Anyhoo.. I know I won't change your mind about it, I just wanted to offer a potential for Flash that would be incredibly useful if anybody used it properly.:)
Mr. Senator, why are the rights of the corporations (who aren't really people, btw...) being considered before the rights of the voting public? The DMCA and the CBPTBPABPA (I hate that damn acronym!) were designed to take our rights away to protect the 'oh so valuable corporate property', but no legislation was placed to protect our individual rights.
Right now, it feels like the laws are specifically being passed so that we, the consumers (and tax payers) are legally inclined to pay the MPAA and the RIAA money for absurd reasons. For example, if a DVD I bought gets scratched, I am forced to buy a new one or not watch the movie, all thanks to the DMCA. There isn't a provision that declares that I, as an individual, have the right to take necessary steps to back up the products I invested in. Instead, the big corps were given the right to lock up their precious content and force me to pay again for content I already paid once for.
Why isn't the government looking to preserve our individual rights before passing laws to help out corporations? Please tell me it's not because we're not paying the gov't enough money. 30% of my yearly income goes straight to the federal government.
"I asked if Slashdot could add an option that allowed links within posts to open in a new browser. I was called a twit and told to buy a new mouse. "
I think the reason they don't is that they dump the raw post onto the screen without parsing it. If Slashdot worked like sites using VBulletin or UBB, then it'd parse the post and look for 'http://' and automatically draw the link for us.
At that point, it'd be trivial to have each user set a flag that defines whether or not a new window opens.
I'd love it if Slashdot were to do this, but I can see it being a bit of a pain for both the authors and the users. How many of us are used to typing 'a href ='....?
Yah, damn Macromedia for giving us a graphical alternative to HTML! Damn them all!
:P
In all seriousness, I understand the complaints about flash, heck it annoys me too. But I don't blame Flash or Macromedia, just the crappy use of it. This is the second time I've seen a practical use of it. The first time was when a friend of mine created a statistic site using Flash to do the fancy graphic work.
I think sites that use Flash are generally pretty annoying, but as I said, the technology isn't the problem. It's the people who think they need to create a teaser for their site who are creating the problem.
Hey dudes, I've been playing around with the HTML version of the search engine (not sure what's wrong with Flash...) and got some interesting results.
A lot of people have been complaining about the slow response compared to google, and so on. Well let's not worry about that right now, let's look at what it does do interesting.
Google is used for very specific searches, and Kartoo doesn't really change that. Instead, I used Kartoo to do a general search. I typed in "Robocop'. Here is the link:
Notice it shows a few sites, and even a few words giving you hints about what the site is about. I think this is where some people had some trouble, though. This page is full of javascripts and style sheets, so I can imagine anybody not running IE 5 is going to have trouble. (Sorry!)
It's pretty cool that at a glance I know what that site is going to show me before I actually read it's description when I move my mouse over it. Right away, without having to read much at all, I knew that I could find pictures of Robocop, information about the movies, and even a hint that there was a series to Robocop.
This is where the speed comes. Google is fast and all, but I've never found info this fast on a general topic such as "Robocop".
Go try it out! You'll see what I mean. I don't know if this particular site will become popular, but I do think that it proves that the graphical search enging concept is viable and interesting. I'd still use Google for very specific questions I have, but if I wanted to know about general topics, this would be a very handy place to look
Heh, yeah being impressed with higher resolution and superior sound is very much akin to liking things at are shiny. It's weird how people can appreciate greater visual and aureal acuity.
You're right about watching movies at home, thouhg.I so love having to squint in order to read the occasional subtitle. I NEVER get tired of being interrupted by commercials or reading the 'FOX' logo in the lower right part of my screen over and over again because it never goes away. Let's not forget how much fun it is to hit the 'rewind' button when the movie is over so I can watch it again later.
And friends! Let's talk about friends! It's so much fun to have all my friends over so I can feed them and listen to them talk during the movie. And that pause feature is extra handy to use when people go to the bathroom. Damn, I should stop going to the theater immediately!
I'm not sure they intended this to replace Google. I think this is meant to be a different tool, not a replacement tool. I think it's more useful as a "How proliferated is this info on the web?" request rather than a "What exactly is a zif-socket?" request.
For example, I searched for my nickname and found the results kind of interesting. Not really anything to write home about, but I got to go down a lot of different paths. The map was the same time every time I entered my nick, so if I were to come back to it tomorrow, I'd remember which area of the map I was on and try a different one.
If you're looking for a few fan sites on the Transformers, for example, I can see the visual metaphor being quite useful compared to Google's "we'll list them in order." technique.
Not sure if that makes a whole lot of sense or not, but I'm starting to get the idea how a visual cue like this could be quite constructive in hunting down hard-to-find info.
It seems like it wouldn't be very hard to make a Graphical UI for Google in much the same way that Kart00 does. It's really only a matter of sending a URL request to Google.com and parsing the HTML it sends down to you. Then you can write your own prog that categorizes the data.
That'd be a fun project!
*wishes he had a star-map-like File Explorer for Windows*
"Just what everyone needs: a flash-based UI for a search engine."
Did it ever occur to you that Flash isn't the cause of your annoyance, it's the people who make the flash movies? Attack of the Clones sucked, but don't blame Digital Film for it.
"I think the interface is horrible (a bit too many mouseovers), although the presentation in itself isn't too bad. "
I've been aching for a search engine that works kind of like this. I'm not sure of KartOO quite works the way I'm hoping it will (hard to tell when it's Slashdotted...), but it's a good start.
I really hope that somebody'll develop a file browser for Windows kind of like this. I think I'd work a hell of a lot faster if my hard drive looked like a star-map instead of climbing a tree.
Yeah, you're right. The large screen, high resolution, digital sound, no phone, no commerical, no interruption service has 0 value at all because you pick the worst times and places to see a movie.
Slashdot Mirror
"You've apparently never sucked dick for coke before, either."
Nope, I haven't. Not sure I want you telling me your experiences with that either.
I honestly don't understand what you're saying...
Explain please?
Heh. Oookay. So now you're stalking me so you can call me a twit? Heh. What country are you from anyway? I've never been somewhere where the word 'Twit' could be used offensively.
"Apparently it's easy to be a twit when you're "NanoGator"."
Wow, I've never met a graduate from the Bob Saget School of Comedy before.
I'm a twit because I didn't notice that? It's easy to be brave when you're an AC.
And yes, you're right about the parsing, I hadn't noticed that. Too bad you had to hide like a coward.
"How would this differ from HTTP/1.1, which can also connect once and then download everything through the same connection?"
:P
Because even with HTTP 1.1, you'll download one page from a site, and when you go to the next one you have to reconnect and have the new data come down. With Flash, it is possible to encapsulate the entire site into one Flash file and fire it down. There may be javascript tricks you could do with HTML too, now that I think about it.\
"Why would I need Flash for this? I can also scale HTML text."
No, you can make the fonts bigger and smaller, you can't scale them.
If you're an Opera User, then you do have that ability. They have a zoom tool where you can put in a percentage and it'll scale the site, images and all. The downside, though, is that they don't do any image processing to make the effect smoother. FLash can.
What's a YHL hand? And did I win?
Agreed.
It'd also be cool if the map were more radial so certain types of pages are in one corner, and different ones on the other... that way you could pick a compass direction to scan in.
Wouldnt that be cool?
I don't think it'd take much longer than it takes to get a result from Google. I mean the flash is already loaded, now it just needs to grab the data down from Google. It should do it just as fast as your browser, without having to download the images. The analysis should be quicker than humans can detect, and the graphics should come up reasonably fast.
I have no idea what's wrong with KartOO. There are two possiblities: 1.) they're using a crappy hack to get the data from the search engine (which could be the case if Flash doesn't have a way of getting HTTP data down...) or 2.) Slashdot kicked it's butt.
Yeah I see what you mean. I think part of the problem stems from some idiot that said that 'the easier it is to use, the stupier the people who use it will be'. I've gotten a lot of flack from people on Slashdot because I said Windows does a job (from the User's point of view) of installing and removing drivers than Linux does. Heh.
The flaw in that comment is that when you make something easier to use, you're improving productivity. If you are the type of person who has a habit of visiting a site and then coming back to slashdot, then there's no reason for them not to accomodate your taste. Hell, I have a damn good reason they should follow your suggestion: Posts change! If you hit back and the page reloads, you'll find yourself looking at a different post.
Nice, eh? Heh.
Needless to say, I agree with you.
I know this won't sway your feelings for Flash, but I've had ideas I wanted to pursue with it that I thought would make for a better user experience.
:)
I'll give you a really simple example: One of my biggest annoyances with the web is that every single page has to take a few seconds to connect, once it does the info comes down quickly. I'd prefer if I could download all the data from the site (connect once and then burst it down...) and then view it rapidly.
Flash allows you to do this. You have one download, and then you set up flash to click through the relevant information. No need for fancy graphics (though you could if you wish...), and you can make the page smoothly scale to whatever resolution you want. I'd really like to be able take Slashdot, for example, and scale it up a bit so I can read the text better.
Anyhoo.. I know I won't change your mind about it, I just wanted to offer a potential for Flash that would be incredibly useful if anybody used it properly.
Yeah.. that's why I mentioned the bit about my using IE 5. Sorry man.
Mr. Senator, why are the rights of the corporations (who aren't really people, btw...) being considered before the rights of the voting public? The DMCA and the CBPTBPABPA (I hate that damn acronym!) were designed to take our rights away to protect the 'oh so valuable corporate property', but no legislation was placed to protect our individual rights.
Right now, it feels like the laws are specifically being passed so that we, the consumers (and tax payers) are legally inclined to pay the MPAA and the RIAA money for absurd reasons. For example, if a DVD I bought gets scratched, I am forced to buy a new one or not watch the movie, all thanks to the DMCA. There isn't a provision that declares that I, as an individual, have the right to take necessary steps to back up the products I invested in. Instead, the big corps were given the right to lock up their precious content and force me to pay again for content I already paid once for.
Why isn't the government looking to preserve our individual rights before passing laws to help out corporations? Please tell me it's not because we're not paying the gov't enough money. 30% of my yearly income goes straight to the federal government.
"I asked if Slashdot could add an option that allowed links within posts to open in a new browser. I was called a twit and told to buy a new mouse. "
I think the reason they don't is that they dump the raw post onto the screen without parsing it. If Slashdot worked like sites using VBulletin or UBB, then it'd parse the post and look for 'http://' and automatically draw the link for us.
At that point, it'd be trivial to have each user set a flag that defines whether or not a new window opens.
I'd love it if Slashdot were to do this, but I can see it being a bit of a pain for both the authors and the users. How many of us are used to typing 'a href ='....?
Yah, damn Macromedia for giving us a graphical alternative to HTML! Damn them all!
:P
In all seriousness, I understand the complaints about flash, heck it annoys me too. But I don't blame Flash or Macromedia, just the crappy use of it. This is the second time I've seen a practical use of it. The first time was when a friend of mine created a statistic site using Flash to do the fancy graphic work.
I think sites that use Flash are generally pretty annoying, but as I said, the technology isn't the problem. It's the people who think they need to create a teaser for their site who are creating the problem.
Hey dudes, I've been playing around with the HTML version of the search engine (not sure what's wrong with Flash...) and got some interesting results.
& l=1&s=0&lp=1
A lot of people have been complaining about the slow response compared to google, and so on. Well let's not worry about that right now, let's look at what it does do interesting.
Google is used for very specific searches, and Kartoo doesn't really change that. Instead, I used Kartoo to do a general search. I typed in "Robocop'. Here is the link:
http://www.kartoo.com/kartoo2/servlet/H?q=robocop
Notice it shows a few sites, and even a few words giving you hints about what the site is about. I think this is where some people had some trouble, though. This page is full of javascripts and style sheets, so I can imagine anybody not running IE 5 is going to have trouble. (Sorry!)
It's pretty cool that at a glance I know what that site is going to show me before I actually read it's description when I move my mouse over it. Right away, without having to read much at all, I knew that I could find pictures of Robocop, information about the movies, and even a hint that there was a series to Robocop.
This is where the speed comes. Google is fast and all, but I've never found info this fast on a general topic such as "Robocop".
Go try it out! You'll see what I mean. I don't know if this particular site will become popular, but I do think that it proves that the graphical search enging concept is viable and interesting. I'd still use Google for very specific questions I have, but if I wanted to know about general topics, this would be a very handy place to look
Heh, yeah being impressed with higher resolution and superior sound is very much akin to liking things at are shiny. It's weird how people can appreciate greater visual and aureal acuity.
You're right about watching movies at home, thouhg.I so love having to squint in order to read the occasional subtitle. I NEVER get tired of being interrupted by commercials or reading the 'FOX' logo in the lower right part of my screen over and over again because it never goes away. Let's not forget how much fun it is to hit the 'rewind' button when the movie is over so I can watch it again later.
And friends! Let's talk about friends! It's so much fun to have all my friends over so I can feed them and listen to them talk during the movie. And that pause feature is extra handy to use when people go to the bathroom. Damn, I should stop going to the theater immediately!
I'm not sure they intended this to replace Google. I think this is meant to be a different tool, not a replacement tool. I think it's more useful as a "How proliferated is this info on the web?" request rather than a "What exactly is a zif-socket?" request.
For example, I searched for my nickname and found the results kind of interesting. Not really anything to write home about, but I got to go down a lot of different paths. The map was the same time every time I entered my nick, so if I were to come back to it tomorrow, I'd remember which area of the map I was on and try a different one.
If you're looking for a few fan sites on the Transformers, for example, I can see the visual metaphor being quite useful compared to Google's "we'll list them in order." technique.
Not sure if that makes a whole lot of sense or not, but I'm starting to get the idea how a visual cue like this could be quite constructive in hunting down hard-to-find info.
It seems like it wouldn't be very hard to make a Graphical UI for Google in much the same way that Kart00 does. It's really only a matter of sending a URL request to Google.com and parsing the HTML it sends down to you. Then you can write your own prog that categorizes the data.
That'd be a fun project!
*wishes he had a star-map-like File Explorer for Windows*
"Just what everyone needs: a flash-based UI for a search engine."
Did it ever occur to you that Flash isn't the cause of your annoyance, it's the people who make the flash movies? Attack of the Clones sucked, but don't blame Digital Film for it.
"I think the interface is horrible (a bit too many mouseovers), although the presentation in itself isn't too bad. "
I've been aching for a search engine that works kind of like this. I'm not sure of KartOO quite works the way I'm hoping it will (hard to tell when it's Slashdotted...), but it's a good start.
I really hope that somebody'll develop a file browser for Windows kind of like this. I think I'd work a hell of a lot faster if my hard drive looked like a star-map instead of climbing a tree.
"this looks pretty stupid"
Did this post leave anybody else aching for a more sophisticated opinion?
Really? Right away I had a midget wearing cherries as earrings pop right up.
Yeah, you're right. The large screen, high resolution, digital sound, no phone, no commerical, no interruption service has 0 value at all because you pick the worst times and places to see a movie.
Yeah I know, just looked it up. I've been mispelling that word for years.
:)
And no, I'm not on crack, I just have more confidence in my ability to spell than I really deserve.