When you thought of CSS, did you have in mind something like the Zen Garden? What's your opinion of it, does it explore all of the possibilities of CSS?
The idea of a world where things like money are obsolete? A simply amazing thing.
Haven't you been paying attention lately? We might already be at that world. Economists are speaking of the Economy of Attention (1, 2, 3) as the natural economic laws of Internet. As online human attention is a scarce resource, it may actually be more valuable than, say, a bunch of metal discs (or paper rectangles) with a face on them.
Of course, that can also mean that we will place the value of 15 min. of fame above the hunger of our neighbors. But it can also be a change on the way things are done nowadays. Gossip magazines point to the first, GPL to the second.
Yes, they work so fine you need admin privileges to run many of them!...and most users run with admin privileges, so they work fine.
Like it or not Microsoft wrote Windows. Believe or not they made it so the vast majority of software could easily run without admin privileges IF the developers would take the time to learn how to write their software correctly. That's the whole point! They also made it easy to develop software without first learning how to write it properly. Microsoft decided to release very good development tools for non-experts. This was a conscious decision that greatly benefited the early adoption of their OS, but now it's showing its bad consequences in the long term.
Are they Microsoft Applications or third party apps? Everyone is quick to blame MS for this but in reality it's usually the fault of the application developers that can't follow Microsoft's guidelines for writing software
Third party developers don't follow MS guidelines because their apps work fine without following them.
If they survived, then they are not unfit. It's just that we changed the environment, so that those traits are not negative. But natural selection's still working
I suppose you won't get back to read this, but anyway...
So what the fuck is wrong with (a) having the game designer produce sane defaults that will be perfect for most players, and (b) giving the minority of players who don't like the defaults the power to change them to a system that works better for them?
There's a now classic article from a KDE usability developer pointing exactly what's wrong with that approach. If you come back I can look it up for you. Two main problems I recall are 1) the user who want to change the preferences must learn how to tailor the interface (which could be really difficult), 2) the user who doesn't want to change them is forced to ponder whether they have a need for it, and make a decission, 3) the system now has big, greater complexity, wich is bad from a bug-introducing perspective.
Not meaning to be trollish here OK there, I'm not english native speaker.
"argue against the point you can beat, not the point your opponent made" Wasn't your point "Allow users to select what & how much information (if any) the HUD shows."? Selecting what & how much information is needed *is* the job of an information architect. It's true that the objective of a game is to have fun - not to be efficient, but also that for a game to be fun it needs a delicate balance within difficulty and rewards. Tweaking the interface without knowing what you're doing could give a sub-optimal experience, maybe without the user even knowing how to fix it again.
Oh! and read my post again - I never argued for "taking all configurability away from the user", but against the configurations that affect the ammount and places of the information shown. Sure you could tweak the used keys, skins, fonts... but just not the very bits of information intermingled with the whole gameplay.
Yes, that's the classic "turn the user into an information architect" typical/. answer to any UI problem. Not mean to be trollish here, but your "no-brainer" have lots of problems on their own, and is usually considered a bad design solution among professional Interaction practitioners.
The solution expressed in the article, namely having the game designer decide where should every bit of information go (instead of throwing that burden on the player), looks much more better to me.
I find great promise in OpenLazslo. It's a technology quite similar to Flex, and it's actually Open Source. I think it currently doesn't have such a good IDE, though.
Because computes are a tool and ALL tools require a certain amount of training.
True. But for training to be effective, the tool use has to make sense. This is something which just doesn't happen with computers.
Users where promised that the computer could be used by just "pointing 'n' clicking" with a device on some documents: windows, documents and folders.
But then and after they begin to really use the computer for anything useful, they're told by their techie friends that they have to configure some driver thingies to make their printers print, setup their network environment with those oh-so-easy IP addresses and LAN properties. Oh, and then happens that this Internet thing is a separate world of its own which doesn't work at all like that desktop folders region, and it's really difficult to move and/or connect objects from one world to the other. And don't even start telling them of the faboulous universe of viruses, trojans, phisings and spam mail.
A car (= steering-wheel + accelerator + brakes + gear + gas) complicated? Try again. And in order to use a sledgehammer, if you want to knock in nails you only have to be trained in knocking, not in sledgehammer self-defense.
While in order to use a computer properly, one really should forget about the desktop metaphor and take a course in discrete mathematics (because computer science *is* a mathematical discipline). End-users will only learn to use computers when we finally find a computing model that is suitable for them, not while we try to imbed our archane symbol-manipulating techniques in their heads.
This post explains why things doesn't work that way, and the company investing the money does benefit the most.
Actually, your assumption that Company C, which has the same requirements as Company A... is what breaks the logic in your argument. There are no two companies with the same needs.
If typing http:/// [http] is too much to ask of idiotic users, perhaps we should just have a big green button users press and it takes them to a random site on the internet where they can just "shuffle" to where they need to go
You could even label it "I'm feeling lucky"...
In a browser session, the protocol is an implementation detail, and implementation details should not be exposed to end users (unless you're browsing with lynx). Even if you want them exposed, they should be mapped to some kind of "channel" metaphor - and definitely the name of the protocol should NOT be typed every time, that's a waste of time.
Far from truth, there are lots of possible basic improvements for web browsers, especially about bookmarks and the task of recovering previously seen information. del.icio.us success was mainly due to the big need that it solved to this respect, but it isn't enough - much more could be done.
Those findings about bookmarks (in the linked article) have been scientifically validated, but browser developers apparently aren't geekish enough to follow that advice and implement those features.
"there *has* to be a meeting between him and the team leads ot keep him up to speed"
But those could optimaly be handled in a series of two or three person meetings.
You've never played the broken phone game, do you? In human2human communication, the quality of the signal degrades squarely with the number of jumps.
That's why you, as a programmer, need to be in the meeting even if you don't happen to make decisions: you must hear the rationales behind the tasks that your manager will delegate on you; otherwise these rationales would come to you distorted.
Of course you could solve the problem by having everything written down, but then you'd have that additional work of typing everything that was said in the meeting. And then reviewing it later.
And unlike the corporate-run project, it won't be readily apparent exactly what the objectives are because you can't easily see where the profit is going (or coming from, for that matter).
Uh? How do you see where the money is coming from in a corporation? Care to share your source? Do you have millionare friends?
Thanks for the link, it seems a good summary on the subject.
The cause of unemployment is much more to do with how society is organised than it is to do with technology. I know that. In turn, my point was that those simple arguments always assume that the-fired-one-will-find-another-job, while the only economic truth is that the level of production might rise in the long term. But it have little use for the unemployed that in 100 years there will be more work for people with his job.
Also the arguments from liberalism that I've read say that a free market optimizes the economy and makes the best deal for everyone involved, but then fail to address those needs of the individuals - only measuring the aggregate economy of the system as a whole.
As I understand that, it is now consistent with the GPL to add a clause to the license, even to derivatives of code licensed under the base GPL, barring individuals from using software if they're pursuing a completely unrelated patent lawsuit. Am I missing something?
Maybe the rest of the section?:
The conditions must limit retaliation to a subset of these two cases: 1. Lawsuits that lack the justification of retaliating against other software patent lawsuits that lack such justification. 2. Lawsuits that target part of this work, or other code that was elsewhere released together with the parts you added, the whole being under the terms used here for those parts.
I don't understand what all this means, so I'm not sure if these two cases answer your question.
Slashdot Mirror
When you thought of CSS, did you have in mind something like the Zen Garden? What's your opinion of it, does it explore all of the possibilities of CSS?
The idea of a world where things like money are obsolete? A simply amazing thing.
Haven't you been paying attention lately? We might already be at that world. Economists are speaking of the Economy of Attention (1, 2, 3) as the natural economic laws of Internet. As online human attention is a scarce resource, it may actually be more valuable than, say, a bunch of metal discs (or paper rectangles) with a face on them.
Of course, that can also mean that we will place the value of 15 min. of fame above the hunger of our neighbors. But it can also be a change on the way things are done nowadays. Gossip magazines point to the first, GPL to the second.
Yes, they work so fine you need admin privileges to run many of them! ...and most users run with admin privileges, so they work fine.
Like it or not Microsoft wrote Windows. Believe or not they made it so the vast majority of software could easily run without admin privileges IF the developers would take the time to learn how to write their software correctly.
That's the whole point! They also made it easy to develop software without first learning how to write it properly. Microsoft decided to release very good development tools for non-experts. This was a conscious decision that greatly benefited the early adoption of their OS, but now it's showing its bad consequences in the long term.
Are they Microsoft Applications or third party apps? Everyone is quick to blame MS for this but in reality it's usually the fault of the application developers that can't follow Microsoft's guidelines for writing software
Third party developers don't follow MS guidelines because their apps work fine without following them.
If they survived, then they are not unfit. It's just that we changed the environment, so that those traits are not negative. But natural selection's still working
Or it'll interpret general controller gestures into predetermined saber motion animations.
Actully it should act in predetermined saber motions. At least when the Force is with you. Who said being a Jedi was funny?
ROTFL!!! three days later.
Almost anybody who is given a free portable player with access to free content.
So you've left out all the potential users who don't know SQL? Not a good way to build a community.
Exactly, and that's where the GP post is right.
Science cannot prove itself right (as Gödel somewhat demonstrated).
I suppose you won't get back to read this, but anyway...
... but just not the very bits of information intermingled with the whole gameplay.
So what the fuck is wrong with
(a) having the game designer produce sane defaults that will be perfect for most players, and
(b) giving the minority of players who don't like the defaults the power to change them to a system that works better for them?
There's a now classic article from a KDE usability developer pointing exactly what's wrong with that approach. If you come back I can look it up for you. Two main problems I recall are 1) the user who want to change the preferences must learn how to tailor the interface (which could be really difficult), 2) the user who doesn't want to change them is forced to ponder whether they have a need for it, and make a decission, 3) the system now has big, greater complexity, wich is bad from a bug-introducing perspective.
Not meaning to be trollish here
OK there, I'm not english native speaker.
"argue against the point you can beat, not the point your opponent made"
Wasn't your point "Allow users to select what & how much information (if any) the HUD shows."? Selecting what & how much information is needed *is* the job of an information architect. It's true that the objective of a game is to have fun - not to be efficient, but also that for a game to be fun it needs a delicate balance within difficulty and rewards. Tweaking the interface without knowing what you're doing could give a sub-optimal experience, maybe without the user even knowing how to fix it again.
Oh! and read my post again - I never argued for "taking all configurability away from the user", but against the configurations that affect the ammount and places of the information shown. Sure you could tweak the used keys, skins, fonts
This one is a no-brainer.
/. answer to any UI problem. Not mean to be trollish here, but your "no-brainer" have lots of problems on their own, and is usually considered a bad design solution among professional Interaction practitioners.
Yes, that's the classic "turn the user into an information architect" typical
The solution expressed in the article, namely having the game designer decide where should every bit of information go (instead of throwing that burden on the player), looks much more better to me.
I find great promise in OpenLazslo. It's a technology quite similar to Flex, and it's actually Open Source. I think it currently doesn't have such a good IDE, though.
Because computes are a tool and ALL tools require a certain amount of training.
True. But for training to be effective, the tool use has to make sense. This is something which just doesn't happen with computers.
Users where promised that the computer could be used by just "pointing 'n' clicking" with a device on some documents: windows, documents and folders.
But then and after they begin to really use the computer for anything useful, they're told by their techie friends that they have to configure some driver thingies to make their printers print, setup their network environment with those oh-so-easy IP addresses and LAN properties. Oh, and then happens that this Internet thing is a separate world of its own which doesn't work at all like that desktop folders region, and it's really difficult to move and/or connect objects from one world to the other. And don't even start telling them of the faboulous universe of viruses, trojans, phisings and spam mail.
A car (= steering-wheel + accelerator + brakes + gear + gas) complicated? Try again. And in order to use a sledgehammer, if you want to knock in nails you only have to be trained in knocking, not in sledgehammer self-defense.
While in order to use a computer properly, one really should forget about the desktop metaphor and take a course in discrete mathematics (because computer science *is* a mathematical discipline). End-users will only learn to use computers when we finally find a computing model that is suitable for them, not while we try to imbed our archane symbol-manipulating techniques in their heads.
What in the world will the poor people do with all the cellphone and $100 computers.
How about learning to build their own medical equipment, building schools and homes?
"Give a man a fish..." yadah yadah.
it is naturally wrong
In nature there is no right or wrong. You should know that, if you're going to post to Slashdot.
OTOH, if it happened to be "naturally wrong", how is it that natural selection hasn't get rid of it?
This post explains why things doesn't work that way, and the company investing the money does benefit the most.
Actually, your assumption that Company C, which has the same requirements as Company A... is what breaks the logic in your argument. There are no two companies with the same needs.
If typing http:/// [http] is too much to ask of idiotic users, perhaps we should just have a big green button users press and it takes them to a random site on the internet where they can just "shuffle" to where they need to go
You could even label it "I'm feeling lucky"...
In a browser session, the protocol is an implementation detail, and implementation details should not be exposed to end users (unless you're browsing with lynx). Even if you want them exposed, they should be mapped to some kind of "channel" metaphor - and definitely the name of the protocol should NOT be typed every time, that's a waste of time.
Far from truth, there are lots of possible basic improvements for web browsers, especially about bookmarks and the task of recovering previously seen information. del.icio.us success was mainly due to the big need that it solved to this respect, but it isn't enough - much more could be done.
Those findings about bookmarks (in the linked article) have been scientifically validated, but browser developers apparently aren't geekish enough to follow that advice and implement those features.
Isn't that illegal under the GFDL, then? They must cite the authors, and in Wiki articles the Wikipedia community as a whole is the author.
I'm sometimes frustrated by the difficulty of finding non-Wikipedia content with Google.
How about including "-wikipedia" in your query terms?
"there *has* to be a meeting between him and the team leads ot keep him up to speed"
But those could optimaly be handled in a series of two or three person meetings.
You've never played the broken phone game, do you? In human2human communication, the quality of the signal degrades squarely with the number of jumps.
That's why you, as a programmer, need to be in the meeting even if you don't happen to make decisions: you must hear the rationales behind the tasks that your manager will delegate on you; otherwise these rationales would come to you distorted.
Of course you could solve the problem by having everything written down, but then you'd have that additional work of typing everything that was said in the meeting. And then reviewing it later.
And unlike the corporate-run project, it won't be readily apparent exactly what the objectives are because you can't easily see where the profit is going (or coming from, for that matter).
Uh? How do you see where the money is coming from in a corporation? Care to share your source? Do you have millionare friends?
Thanks for the link, it seems a good summary on the subject.
The cause of unemployment is much more to do with how society is organised than it is to do with technology.
I know that. In turn, my point was that those simple arguments always assume that the-fired-one-will-find-another-job, while the only economic truth is that the level of production might rise in the long term. But it have little use for the unemployed that in 100 years there will be more work for people with his job.
Also the arguments from liberalism that I've read say that a free market optimizes the economy and makes the best deal for everyone involved, but then fail to address those needs of the individuals - only measuring the aggregate economy of the system as a whole.
As I understand that, it is now consistent with the GPL to add a clause to the license, even to derivatives of code licensed under the base GPL, barring individuals from using software if they're pursuing a completely unrelated patent lawsuit. Am I missing something?
Maybe the rest of the section?:
The conditions must limit retaliation to a subset of these two cases: 1. Lawsuits that lack the justification of retaliating against other software patent lawsuits that lack such justification. 2. Lawsuits that target part of this work, or other code that was elsewhere released together with the parts you added, the whole being under the terms used here for those parts.
I don't understand what all this means, so I'm not sure if these two cases answer your question.