Did you really just compare forced labor with the threat of harm and/or death to voluntary employment?
There's a difference in degree only, not semantics. When people live in a region so poor and uneducated that all jobs and communication with the external world are provided by a single landowner, there isn't much difference between being a free peasant or a slave. This advice coming from someone living in a country which was governed by that model for several centuries.
I have a true question - exactly WHERE do you recharge while on a road trip?
Unless Canada has a very large network of fast dedicated charge stations compatible with your car model, or you travel only to places where there is always such a station within range, how do you manage to move through the country without fear to run out of batteries? I've never found a place that explains how to do this in detail.
Alan Cooper would never advocate the type of UI in question.
What kind of UI? The kind where designers watch users having problems with some parts of the design, and fix those parts based on empiric evidence? I think Cooper would advocate that.
That may be because you have only seen UX used for products aimed at a widespread general public, which benefit greatly from feature reduction - as they must support very different workflows, with people who use the product with little training.
UX is the science that got us input forms (it was called ergonomics back then), standard widgets, WYSIWYG and direct manipulation. It has also created the new layout in MS Office (which is successful in its goal to make visible a larger set of the available features), so it's not true that it only supports feature reduction. I work in a company that a very complex software suit, and UX approaches are greatly enhancing the user workflows from its previous, engineer-designed interface, without removing a single feature.
Unfortunately, I bet the UIs ARE thought up by experts. This seems to me like a classic disconnect between pie in the sky designers and everyday users.
Experts UI designers are those who test the interface with everyday users.
Therefore, when an interface has been designed by an expert in UI design (NOT visual design, but real interaction design), there is no such disconnect.
It doesn't matter. AI works best when there's a human in the loop, piloting the controls anyway.
What matters to a company is that 1 person + bots can now make the job that previously required hundreds of white collar workers, for much less salary. What happens to the other workers should not be a concern of the company managers, according to the modern religious creed - apparently some magical market hand takes care to solve that problem automatically.
Were those people able to get hired elsewhere? The answer in general was almost certainly yes.
Oh, oh, I know this one! "New jobs being created in the past don't guarantee that new jobs will be created in the future". This is the standard groupthink answer for waiving any responsibility after advice given about the future, right?
Yeah, nothing to object to your accurate summary of how things go on at "the sun of all knowledge".
The thing that keeps me going in and participating (besides the desire to restore some unjustly removed content, and the obvious addictive nature as a social game AND a massive multiplayer game) is a long term vision, which is shared by few people.
Think that 20 or 40 years from now, the current vandals and trolls that own any particular article will be gone (there will likely be new ones, but there's hope that they will camp at some ''other'' article); and, since every edit gets logged and distributed under a classic share-alike license, a future editor really interested in that specific topic will be able to trace back the full history of changes and old versions, probably assisted by some AI machine learning tool that will detect the edit wars and fact-check which side seems more likely to be right.
Assuming that deletionists or some other totalitarian state don't get to lock and burn the whole thing down, the project is the first wide-scale, distributed attempt to create a universal compilation of general knowledge since the times of the first encyclopedia; and this one is self documenting every turn of the way. Even its many failures will allow future researchers to study how not to set up a collaborative project and how early neticens behaved when the internet was young.
I agree with you that being a part of it doesn't necessarily feel nice, though.
My point is that, if you say "this is vandalism" at the talk page, someone else may find it without having to review the full history of article edits.
There's no requirement that you have the lengthy discussion yourself. Wikipedia is a collaborative project after all, and surely there will be someone else willing to spend the time fighting the vandal.
I've read a paper where they found that the most edited articles are almost always the most controversial, not necessarily the most popular. The most obvious themes are politics, religion, and naming of geographical and historic figures, as well as Wikipedia's own rule pages; but large time-spanning edit wars may occur for any obscure topic. They even keep an archive of the lamest edit wars.
Talk pages are your friend in these cases. If you post a rationale for your correction there, some experienced editor might be able to intervene and set things straight, or at least start a resolution procedure to gather opinions from more people.
If you're editing as an IP without a user account, this will also make less likely that the spambot will revert your anonymous contribution (although in the case you describe, it might have been an asshole editor instead; the only solution for it is to ask for a third opinion or other conflict resolution procedure).
I've always thought that temporary, transient measures make a lot of sense to alleviate the problems faced by workers in a transitioning industry, to be financed either by mayor players in it or by the government (financed by taxes to the mayor players in the industry), and consisting of early retirements, training in new procedures, or temporal subsidies to the dying industries so that they can adapt. The really bad companies would disappear anyway, but many others could find a way to survive in a new niche, without their workers having to file for bankruptcy.
A smooth transition will benefit society as a whole much more than the recession produced by the economic crash of the failing companies. Had luddites have a safety net, they wouldn't have done the machine-being that have them a bad name.
That's a category error. Money can only measure the value of transactions; unless you're trading people as vendibles, applying a money count to human lifes is meaningless.
Sure you can count the price of medical care and sanitation, but that's not the value of life any more than the price of food and water is, even if you'd die without then.
No, by that logic the golden age of the new medium won't happen in the same decade that the first viable commercial products are sold.
It didn't happen for Hollywood or the TV, either. It takes time for creatives to explore the possibilities, and find out how to make good use of them to create something that was not possible in the previous media. "Being fully immersive" is not enough on its own.
VR is more than a screen-in-a-headset, and it doesn't just disconnect you from the world; it immerses you in another.
But this is something that good storytelling already does. Heck, you can be immersed in a different world with words written on a sheet of paper.
You don't need the fancy new tech to achieve the same effect, so it doesn't really change anything essential; the possibilities are mostly the same, at least until they develop a language specific to the new medium, which is still decades in the future.
Sure, for the Wow factor there's noting like it, but that lasts about 10 seconds; the overall experience is not radically different to playing with a Wii or Kinect, except that you move around with your head instead of your thumb.
Once you put your VR glasses on, you're disconnected from the world and immersed in a virtual application. That's all it has. It's a glorified 360Â screen; the things you can do are mostly the same as in a flat screen, only more nauseating and from a closer perspective.
AR on the other hand, overlays a virtual world on top of the real one, using information from the context where you are placed. It's Google Maps on steroids. Remember those old promotional "alternate reality" games for Halo 2 or Lost? New gaming could take that shape, only working in real time. Now that people have learned about Pokemon Go, which is not even proper AR, the concept can be marketed to the masses.
Oh, and it has social implications too. Read the "Vision Machine" comic if you haven't already. It's a classic, one of those Sci-fi stories that are a thinly veiled description of our current world.
Yes, because it uses less memory than other browsers, it syncs my bookmarks and other data between desktop and mobile, and I can use ad-blockers and other extensions on the mobile version.
As far as I know, that's not true of any other browser.
I switched over to Pale Moon, and I have found that it uses less resources than Firefox. And it's a lot faster on my older machine.
There is no way that Free Software was going to become mainstream except by becoming just another flavor of Open Source.
See, people used to say the same thing about Wikipedia. Yet the Free Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit is licensed under the GPL-like GDDL and the share-alike version of Creative Commons.
And I can write software under the Apache license and everybody can use it, Free Software and Open Source alike! Yay!
...provided you don't step on any patent landmine, and that a big player doesn't try to shut down your competing start-up. What good is free software if you can only make small projects with it, and can't use it to compete with the entrenched industry?
Have you heard of the UNIX wars? People using UNIX systems in the 70's felt the same way, and then large companies started to try closing free reuse of the platform and collecting royalties, as well as closing the source of essential drivers and modules, so the "free system" with "source available to all" became a clusterfuck of competing systems with unclear legal status.
Given the current state of things, the same is bound to happen sooner than later; in fact, it already happened in the case of Java. The Oracle/Google case is a recent example of how you can't really use open source software if there aren't strong guarantees, and Google had to pay for it.
In the old days before the OSI, a project like Android would have been shunned by the FLOSS community; Google would have been forced to open-source the full stack, or build their own proprietary from scratch.
As Google needed at the time to come up with a mobile operative system, the second option would have been too slow. If the community have made a strong stance, they would have had a chance to make it happen, and all our cells could have been running a nearly-open stack, instead of a nearly-closed one; and projects like Meego and LiMo might have had a chance (there were very BIG players behind them). Don't subestimate the power of politics.
Unfortunately, as the above linked article explains, the focus shifted from guaranteeing strong freedom to all industrial parties (which is what FLOSS was about, not merely allowing users to get the software for free), to guaranteeing fluidity of development for small teams; the possibility to grow big without interference from the main players was lost in the process.
Tim O'Reilly was heavily influential in switching momentum from what was known as "free software" to "open source" (see The Meme Hustler.)
The "community" aspect of the first was centered around empowering users, making sure that the four freedoms described by the FSF were defended to the end. The shift to "open source" meant that project efficiency was valued over user freedom.
This brought us to the current status, where young developers share their code on github without ever worrying to stamp a license on it, and permissive licenses are preferred to protective ones. We'll never know whether free software would have become the default, or dissappeared almost entirely, had this shift never occurred.
It would have been easier to convert the output to RGB than to convert it to composite, and you would have way better clarity on today's televisions.
Why would you want better clarity? The art in those games was designed to be shown in blurry screens. Showing them with increased clarity distorts the original game looks, as if they were processed by a sharpen filter.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference in degree only, not semantics. When people live in a region so poor and uneducated that all jobs and communication with the external world are provided by a single landowner, there isn't much difference between being a free peasant or a slave. This advice coming from someone living in a country which was governed by that model for several centuries.
I have a true question - exactly WHERE do you recharge while on a road trip?
Unless Canada has a very large network of fast dedicated charge stations compatible with your car model, or you travel only to places where there is always such a station within range, how do you manage to move through the country without fear to run out of batteries? I've never found a place that explains how to do this in detail.
What kind of UI? The kind where designers watch users having problems with some parts of the design, and fix those parts based on empiric evidence? I think Cooper would advocate that.
That may be because you have only seen UX used for products aimed at a widespread general public, which benefit greatly from feature reduction - as they must support very different workflows, with people who use the product with little training.
UX is the science that got us input forms (it was called ergonomics back then), standard widgets, WYSIWYG and direct manipulation. It has also created the new layout in MS Office (which is successful in its goal to make visible a larger set of the available features), so it's not true that it only supports feature reduction. I work in a company that a very complex software suit, and UX approaches are greatly enhancing the user workflows from its previous, engineer-designed interface, without removing a single feature.
UI designers have already read those. (I also like Rocket Surgery Made Easy, the sequel to Don't Make Me Think).
The problem is that user interfaces and web applications are largely being designed by developers who are not UI designers.
Experts UI designers are those who test the interface with everyday users.
Therefore, when an interface has been designed by an expert in UI design (NOT visual design, but real interaction design), there is no such disconnect.
It doesn't matter. AI works best when there's a human in the loop, piloting the controls anyway.
What matters to a company is that 1 person + bots can now make the job that previously required hundreds of white collar workers, for much less salary. What happens to the other workers should not be a concern of the company managers, according to the modern religious creed - apparently some magical market hand takes care to solve that problem automatically.
Oh, oh, I know this one! "New jobs being created in the past don't guarantee that new jobs will be created in the future". This is the standard groupthink answer for waiving any responsibility after advice given about the future, right?
Yeah, nothing to object to your accurate summary of how things go on at "the sun of all knowledge".
The thing that keeps me going in and participating (besides the desire to restore some unjustly removed content, and the obvious addictive nature as a social game AND a massive multiplayer game) is a long term vision, which is shared by few people.
Think that 20 or 40 years from now, the current vandals and trolls that own any particular article will be gone (there will likely be new ones, but there's hope that they will camp at some ''other'' article); and, since every edit gets logged and distributed under a classic share-alike license, a future editor really interested in that specific topic will be able to trace back the full history of changes and old versions, probably assisted by some AI machine learning tool that will detect the edit wars and fact-check which side seems more likely to be right.
Assuming that deletionists or some other totalitarian state don't get to lock and burn the whole thing down, the project is the first wide-scale, distributed attempt to create a universal compilation of general knowledge since the times of the first encyclopedia; and this one is self documenting every turn of the way. Even its many failures will allow future researchers to study how not to set up a collaborative project and how early neticens behaved when the internet was young.
I agree with you that being a part of it doesn't necessarily feel nice, though.
My point is that, if you say "this is vandalism" at the talk page, someone else may find it without having to review the full history of article edits.
There's no requirement that you have the lengthy discussion yourself. Wikipedia is a collaborative project after all, and surely there will be someone else willing to spend the time fighting the vandal.
I've read a paper where they found that the most edited articles are almost always the most controversial, not necessarily the most popular. The most obvious themes are politics, religion, and naming of geographical and historic figures, as well as Wikipedia's own rule pages; but large time-spanning edit wars may occur for any obscure topic. They even keep an archive of the lamest edit wars.
Talk pages are your friend in these cases. If you post a rationale for your correction there, some experienced editor might be able to intervene and set things straight, or at least start a resolution procedure to gather opinions from more people.
If you're editing as an IP without a user account, this will also make less likely that the spambot will revert your anonymous contribution (although in the case you describe, it might have been an asshole editor instead; the only solution for it is to ask for a third opinion or other conflict resolution procedure).
I've always thought that temporary, transient measures make a lot of sense to alleviate the problems faced by workers in a transitioning industry, to be financed either by mayor players in it or by the government (financed by taxes to the mayor players in the industry), and consisting of early retirements, training in new procedures, or temporal subsidies to the dying industries so that they can adapt. The really bad companies would disappear anyway, but many others could find a way to survive in a new niche, without their workers having to file for bankruptcy.
A smooth transition will benefit society as a whole much more than the recession produced by the economic crash of the failing companies. Had luddites have a safety net, they wouldn't have done the machine-being that have them a bad name.
That's a category error. Money can only measure the value of transactions; unless you're trading people as vendibles, applying a money count to human lifes is meaningless.
Sure you can count the price of medical care and sanitation, but that's not the value of life any more than the price of food and water is, even if you'd die without then.
No, by that logic the golden age of the new medium won't happen in the same decade that the first viable commercial products are sold.
It didn't happen for Hollywood or the TV, either. It takes time for creatives to explore the possibilities, and find out how to make good use of them to create something that was not possible in the previous media. "Being fully immersive" is not enough on its own.
So, you think moving the scene with your head is the basis for a golden age in gaming?
But this is something that good storytelling already does. Heck, you can be immersed in a different world with words written on a sheet of paper.
You don't need the fancy new tech to achieve the same effect, so it doesn't really change anything essential; the possibilities are mostly the same, at least until they develop a language specific to the new medium, which is still decades in the future.
Sure, for the Wow factor there's noting like it, but that lasts about 10 seconds; the overall experience is not radically different to playing with a Wii or Kinect, except that you move around with your head instead of your thumb.
They're working on it.
According to Forbes, they're already building the factory lines. Also at Wired, MIT tech review,
Wearable.com, Techcrunch and The Verge.
Once you put your VR glasses on, you're disconnected from the world and immersed in a virtual application. That's all it has. It's a glorified 360Â screen; the things you can do are mostly the same as in a flat screen, only more nauseating and from a closer perspective.
AR on the other hand, overlays a virtual world on top of the real one, using information from the context where you are placed. It's Google Maps on steroids. Remember those old promotional "alternate reality" games for Halo 2 or Lost? New gaming could take that shape, only working in real time. Now that people have learned about Pokemon Go, which is not even proper AR, the concept can be marketed to the masses.
Oh, and it has social implications too. Read the "Vision Machine" comic if you haven't already. It's a classic, one of those Sci-fi stories that are a thinly veiled description of our current world.
http://www.visionmachine.net/
Years ago, this headline would be published on April 1st, and we would have had a good laugh. The times, they have a-changed.
Yes, because it uses less memory than other browsers, it syncs my bookmarks and other data between desktop and mobile, and I can use ad-blockers and other extensions on the mobile version.
As far as I know, that's not true of any other browser.
I switched over to Pale Moon, and I have found that it uses less resources than Firefox. And it's a lot faster on my older machine.
And how well does it work on mobile?
See, people used to say the same thing about Wikipedia. Yet the Free Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit is licensed under the GPL-like GDDL and the share-alike version of Creative Commons.
Have you heard of the UNIX wars? People using UNIX systems in the 70's felt the same way, and then large companies started to try closing free reuse of the platform and collecting royalties, as well as closing the source of essential drivers and modules, so the "free system" with "source available to all" became a clusterfuck of competing systems with unclear legal status.
Given the current state of things, the same is bound to happen sooner than later; in fact, it already happened in the case of Java. The Oracle/Google case is a recent example of how you can't really use open source software if there aren't strong guarantees, and Google had to pay for it.
In the old days before the OSI, a project like Android would have been shunned by the FLOSS community; Google would have been forced to open-source the full stack, or build their own proprietary from scratch.
As Google needed at the time to come up with a mobile operative system, the second option would have been too slow. If the community have made a strong stance, they would have had a chance to make it happen, and all our cells could have been running a nearly-open stack, instead of a nearly-closed one; and projects like Meego and LiMo might have had a chance (there were very BIG players behind them). Don't subestimate the power of politics.
Unfortunately, as the above linked article explains, the focus shifted from guaranteeing strong freedom to all industrial parties (which is what FLOSS was about, not merely allowing users to get the software for free), to guaranteeing fluidity of development for small teams; the possibility to grow big without interference from the main players was lost in the process.
Tim O'Reilly was heavily influential in switching momentum from what was known as "free software" to "open source" (see The Meme Hustler.)
The "community" aspect of the first was centered around empowering users, making sure that the four freedoms described by the FSF were defended to the end. The shift to "open source" meant that project efficiency was valued over user freedom.
This brought us to the current status, where young developers share their code on github without ever worrying to stamp a license on it, and permissive licenses are preferred to protective ones. We'll never know whether free software would have become the default, or dissappeared almost entirely, had this shift never occurred.
Pdf doesn't avoid tampering after submission. Haven't you heard of pdf editors? Adobe certainly would be glad to sell you theirs.
Why would you want better clarity? The art in those games was designed to be shown in blurry screens. Showing them with increased clarity distorts the original game looks, as if they were processed by a sharpen filter.