This is why we have DVD-region encoding, folks-- price-discrimination, "As Seen On Your Economics 101 Exam". You of course know that next logical step is to move music CD's, or rather their DVD audio successors, over to regions too. Of course it will be too bad for all those people who go to India to buy music DVD's they can't buy in the US, since they will not be able to play their Indian music on their North American region 1 boombox when they get back home. "Not to worry," says Jack Valenti. "If you buy a sitar and strum it while playing Britney Spears, you'll swear it sounds like it Indian music."
And then you'll understand why nobody is really interested in porting it. There's millions upon millions of lines of messy undocumented code (Okay, there are *some* comments. Did I mention that they are all in german?) and according to a KDE developer quoted in an Linux and Main article the OpenOffice Word filter "is full of black magic values and voodoo programming that even [the OpenOffice developers] don't understand." Download the tarball, unzip, and then you will understand all.
On OsNews, I found a link to this really great weblog entry written by someone who does some usability stuff for Mozilla. He does a very good job of describing the current usability situation of the Free Software, and why this current situation sucks currently sucks.
Use IE to fight terrorism
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e-Denounce
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We could modify the F button to be a T button, and it could be used to alert the FBI about possible terrorists. I just know the old lady next door is a terrorist, and it would be really cool if I could rat on her while I'm surfing for porn.
It's about fixing blame. If you have a vendor to blame, and some people who you can call to make it look like the problem is getting resolved, you can have the blame (whether it is your fault or not is really not the point) shifted away from yourself in your point-headed bosses eyes.
Of course, the problem with this scheme, which is really what the last 10-15 years of IT has been all about, is that it's been blame that's been fixed, not problems. Eventually businesses decided that building IT infrastructures and doing stuff besides e-mail and web was so problematic and expensive that it is simply easiest to keep it to e-mail and websurfing and leave it at that. When businesses and consumers en-mass stop buying computers because they are so disgusted with the way their computers don't work, you have the economic mess we have today. Some people point out that the dot-com speculation is really what caused this problem; I agree--you can't make a profit selling dogfood over the internet to people who are digusted with the way their computers work.
I've really gone off on a tanget. Mod down to off-topic at will.
GeekPAC is such a lame name...
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GeekPAC
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I think "NerdPAC" sounds a lot cooler!
Internet Business Toolbox, as seen on TV
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I've seen advertisements for that thing late at night. You know, the ones with that guy from "Home Improvement". You can use it to bring the power of the internet to your business. How cool is that?
Like it or not, war advances technology.
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When Looks Can Kill
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Suspending for a second the value judgement about whether war is bad, you cannot deny that war has been one of the primary advancers of human technology. Over the last 50 years, many of the high tech inventions we use today have some basis in something designed for war. IC's had their first real usage in missles; the wonderfully decentralized internet began as a communication system that could route around nuclear blasts; Nylon fabric was invented in WWII for parachutes (the Japanese seemed to have some weird problem giving us silk back then); I would not be surprised if many of the optical storage technologies have had serious contributions from technologies developed from the Star Wars program. War technology is therefore extremely relevant to any discussion of emergent technologies.
That being said, I must admit I am equally horrified by the possibility of helmets that aim weapon systems by the act of looking at something--the carnage of a nude beach near a naval airstation would be unthinkable.
The inventor of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, didn't design the hardware and then the system software and then say "now that I'm done with everything else, I'll come up with a way the user should interact with the device". He started the palm project by fashioning a block of wood in a rough Palm-shape and carrying it around with him and thinking about how the user would interact with it in the real world. Only after he came up with the interaction model did they really proceed to design the Palm hardware and the Palm UI.
Any real UI designer is going to tell you that you must always design the interface and work out the user interaction before a single line of code is ever written. The same goes with a PDA, and then you have to add "before you ever design the hardware" to that provision.
One must also consider that PDA's and desktops PC's have an entirely different set of design constraints for their interfaces. One constraint is size: A type of widget that is perfectly clickable with a mouse at its 40x40 pixel desktop PC size is a target that is nearly impossible to hit at a 5x5 with a stylus and should not be used on a handheld just because it is familiar to someone who has used a desktop pc. Another PDA design constraint is time: people using PC's accept badly designed interfaces because they plan half a day around kludging their way through their task. People accept that computers are awkward and slow to use, and are able to plan they way around it. People using PDA's often don't have the luxury to plan when they're going to use their technology. They might have 20 seconds and not any more to get down an important phone number. My point is that the laws of physics for desktop machines and for PDA's are entirely different. Anyone who is too much of a clueless newbie (like many of the failed linux PDA developers) to understand this is really nothing more than marketplace cannon-fodder.
I will admit I haven't used a Sharp Zaurus, but from just looking at the layout of the buttons and looking at how the TrollTech embedded interface is designed (i.e. mirroring a full-size desktop interface) I can pretty much say that Sharp/Trolltech is guilty of the same thing that killed the Agenda Vr3: "We'll design the hardware and the basic user interface first and worry about creating the interface later." What Sharp and Trolltech really need to make the Zaurus succeed is a good block of wood.
People call the reviewer clueless. They say "he doesn't take the time to learn thing x or adapt himself to thing y". The real clueless newbies who don't want to learn are linux programmers who refuse to learn how to design usable interfaces for PDA's. Any attempt to deny the truth of this point will only further prove the truth of this post.
If this technology is successful, towns, counties, and other such municipalities could block playback of naughty material they deem "obscene".
And then one day we'll read a newspaper article about some poor bastard getting arrested for transporting a DVD across state lines for purposes of indencency with himself.
GUI's can allow end users to make better and more informed choices iff the person designing the GUI knows what the hell they are doing, which for most linux desktop developers is a pretty damned big "if". There seems to be an attitude of "If we simply make it into a GUI, it'll instantly be easy". If a set of GUI widgets are laid out in way that makes the relationship between the actions they perform extremely ambiguous, the GUI'ized interface will not be any better than the current command-line crap that proceeded it. In fact, it can be worse and mislead the user into making a very destructive choice that they thought that wouldn't be making. One of the biggest problems the linux interface design world is currently facing, as you pointed out, is the idea that "pretty == usable". All the anti-aliased text in the world won't ameliorate a menu selection with the caption "Save" that deletes everything on your hard drive.
I once talked to someone who designed a linux installer for a major linux distribution. This installer had many widgets laid out in a confusing and ambiguous manner, and in same cases widgets that are really meant for conveying one type of information were used to convey a totally different and wrong kind type information (for the widgets that were being used).
I mentioned some of these problems, and he didn't see what was the big deal. "You don't think it's pretty enough?" he asked me.
"How should state/federal governments, you know, the guys with all those billions of dollars of purchasing power who probably make up 60% of microsoft's entire user base, punish microsoft? There must be some way that these people, with billions upon billions of dollars and a public obligation to go with the lowest bidder, reduce Windows' dominance, but oh whatever can it be?"
Here's some dialogue they cut from the guy who played Elrod (who also was Agent Smith in the Matrix)
"Mr baggins, you are a man leading two lives."
"In one life are Frodo Baggins, resident of Bag End. You are a respectable hobbit of the shire. You never go on adventures of any sort, never cause any rucus, and you help your landlady take out her garbage. In the other life, you go by the travelling alias 'Mr. Underhill'. You are guilty of pissing of Sauron in virtually every single way we can think of."
"We're willing to wipe the slate clean, Mr. Baggins, if you go to Mount doom and bring a known evil of Middle earth to an end. My colleagues in the Council of Elrond think I am wasting my time with you, but I know you want to do the right thing."
Slashdot Mirror
No wonder I've had a strange urge to a rip an MP3 of "Highway to Hell" on my iMac.
"Yes, we have no Banias. We have no Banias today".
The Oracle of Bacon says that Linus Torvalds has a bacon number of 3. Not bad.
This is why we have DVD-region encoding, folks-- price-discrimination, "As Seen On Your Economics 101 Exam". You of course know that next logical step is to move music CD's, or rather their DVD audio successors, over to regions too. Of course it will be too bad for all those people who go to India to buy music DVD's they can't buy in the US, since they will not be able to play their Indian music on their North American region 1 boombox when they get back home. "Not to worry," says Jack Valenti. "If you buy a sitar and strum it while playing Britney Spears, you'll swear it sounds like it Indian music."
but given how they are now so cheap with the economy in a downturn, buying a couple turned out to be a better deal.
== hard cider. Mmmmmmmmm.....cider...
And then you'll understand why nobody is really interested in porting it. There's millions upon millions of lines of messy undocumented code (Okay, there are *some* comments. Did I mention that they are all in german?) and according to a KDE developer quoted in an Linux and Main article the OpenOffice Word filter "is full of black magic values and voodoo programming that even [the OpenOffice developers] don't understand." Download the tarball, unzip, and then you will understand all.
On OsNews, I found a link to this really great weblog entry written by someone who does some usability stuff for Mozilla. He does a very good job of describing the current usability situation of the Free Software, and why this current situation sucks currently sucks.
We could modify the F button to be a T button, and it could be used to alert the FBI about possible terrorists. I just know the old lady next door is a terrorist, and it would be really cool if I could rat on her while I'm surfing for porn.
My viewpoint on the issue.
They tell contractors how to build houses instead of building it properly themselves.
I've always wondered why we don't just switch the internet over to IPv6 and give each human on the planet their own address.
Hailstorm fails to put dent in market.
It's about fixing blame. If you have a vendor to blame, and some people who you can call to make it look like the problem is getting resolved, you can have the blame (whether it is your fault or not is really not the point) shifted away from yourself in your point-headed bosses eyes.
Of course, the problem with this scheme, which is really what the last 10-15 years of IT has been all about, is that it's been blame that's been fixed, not problems. Eventually businesses decided that building IT infrastructures and doing stuff besides e-mail and web was so problematic and expensive that it is simply easiest to keep it to e-mail and websurfing and leave it at that. When businesses and consumers en-mass stop buying computers because they are so disgusted with the way their computers don't work, you have the economic mess we have today. Some people point out that the dot-com speculation is really what caused this problem; I agree--you can't make a profit selling dogfood over the internet to people who are digusted with the way their computers work.
I've really gone off on a tanget. Mod down to off-topic at will.
I think "NerdPAC" sounds a lot cooler!
I've seen advertisements for that thing late at night. You know, the ones with that guy from "Home Improvement". You can use it to bring the power of the internet to your business. How cool is that?
Suspending for a second the value judgement about whether war is bad, you cannot deny that war has been one of the primary advancers of human technology. Over the last 50 years, many of the high tech inventions we use today have some basis in something designed for war. IC's had their first real usage in missles; the wonderfully decentralized internet began as a communication system that could route around nuclear blasts; Nylon fabric was invented in WWII for parachutes (the Japanese seemed to have some weird problem giving us silk back then); I would not be surprised if many of the optical storage technologies have had serious contributions from technologies developed from the Star Wars program. War technology is therefore extremely relevant to any discussion of emergent technologies.
That being said, I must admit I am equally horrified by the possibility of helmets that aim weapon systems by the act of looking at something--the carnage of a nude beach near a naval airstation would be unthinkable.
The inventor of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, didn't design the hardware and then the system software and then say "now that I'm done with everything else, I'll come up with a way the user should interact with the device". He started the palm project by fashioning a block of wood in a rough Palm-shape and carrying it around with him and thinking about how the user would interact with it in the real world. Only after he came up with the interaction model did they really proceed to design the Palm hardware and the Palm UI.
Any real UI designer is going to tell you that you must always design the interface and work out the user interaction before a single line of code is ever written. The same goes with a PDA, and then you have to add "before you ever design the hardware" to that provision.
One must also consider that PDA's and desktops PC's have an entirely different set of design constraints for their interfaces. One constraint is size: A type of widget that is perfectly clickable with a mouse at its 40x40 pixel desktop PC size is a target that is nearly impossible to hit at a 5x5 with a stylus and should not be used on a handheld just because it is familiar to someone who has used a desktop pc. Another PDA design constraint is time: people using PC's accept badly designed interfaces because they plan half a day around kludging their way through their task. People accept that computers are awkward and slow to use, and are able to plan they way around it. People using PDA's often don't have the luxury to plan when they're going to use their technology. They might have 20 seconds and not any more to get down an important phone number. My point is that the laws of physics for desktop machines and for PDA's are entirely different. Anyone who is too much of a clueless newbie (like many of the failed linux PDA developers) to understand this is really nothing more than marketplace cannon-fodder.
I will admit I haven't used a Sharp Zaurus, but from just looking at the layout of the buttons and looking at how the TrollTech embedded interface is designed (i.e. mirroring a full-size desktop interface) I can pretty much say that Sharp/Trolltech is guilty of the same thing that killed the Agenda Vr3: "We'll design the hardware and the basic user interface first and worry about creating the interface later." What Sharp and Trolltech really need to make the Zaurus succeed is a good block of wood.
People call the reviewer clueless. They say "he doesn't take the time to learn thing x or adapt himself to thing y". The real clueless newbies who don't want to learn are linux programmers who refuse to learn how to design usable interfaces for PDA's. Any attempt to deny the truth of this point will only further prove the truth of this post.
If this technology is successful, towns, counties, and other such municipalities could block playback of naughty material they deem "obscene".
And then one day we'll read a newspaper article about some poor bastard getting arrested for transporting a DVD across state lines for purposes of indencency with himself.
GUI's can allow end users to make better and more informed choices iff the person designing the GUI knows what the hell they are doing, which for most linux desktop developers is a pretty damned big "if". There seems to be an attitude of "If we simply make it into a GUI, it'll instantly be easy". If a set of GUI widgets are laid out in way that makes the relationship between the actions they perform extremely ambiguous, the GUI'ized interface will not be any better than the current command-line crap that proceeded it. In fact, it can be worse and mislead the user into making a very destructive choice that they thought that wouldn't be making. One of the biggest problems the linux interface design world is currently facing, as you pointed out, is the idea that "pretty == usable". All the anti-aliased text in the world won't ameliorate a menu selection with the caption "Save" that deletes everything on your hard drive.
I once talked to someone who designed a linux installer for a major linux distribution. This installer had many widgets laid out in a confusing and ambiguous manner, and in same cases widgets that are really meant for conveying one type of information were used to convey a totally different and wrong kind type information (for the widgets that were being used).
I mentioned some of these problems, and he didn't see what was the big deal. "You don't think it's pretty enough?" he asked me.
- (NSScaryThought *)Steve:(id)Jobs nakedAndPetrified:(BOOL)hotGritsFlag
"How should state/federal governments, you know, the guys with all those billions of dollars of purchasing power who probably make up 60% of microsoft's entire user base, punish microsoft? There must be some way that these people, with billions upon billions of dollars and a public obligation to go with the lowest bidder, reduce Windows' dominance, but oh whatever can it be?"
It's not a TronBook till it's running a purely black and white Aqua theme that's been cheesily colored in with magic marker.
Here's some dialogue they cut from the guy who played Elrod (who also was Agent Smith in the Matrix)
"Mr baggins, you are a man leading two lives."
"In one life are Frodo Baggins, resident of Bag End. You are a respectable hobbit of the shire. You never go on adventures of any sort, never cause any rucus, and you help your landlady take out her garbage. In the other life, you go by the travelling alias 'Mr. Underhill'. You are guilty of pissing of Sauron in virtually every single way we can think of."
"We're willing to wipe the slate clean, Mr. Baggins, if you go to Mount doom and bring a known evil of Middle earth to an end. My colleagues in the Council of Elrond think I am wasting my time with you, but I know you want to do the right thing."
You know that sooner or later, someone in the adult entertainment industry is going to come out with a spoof called "Lord of the Cock Rings".
Personally, I think Ron Jeremy would make a kickass Sauron. He was so darn evil in Orgasmo.