> Want to come over for a nice brisk hand of INWO?
It's been a long time. Thanks for the memories. That'll give me something to do while waiting for... wait a sec...
/me removes gold pin with red eye, swaps it for a green pin with red eye
Ah, much better. That'll be a great way to pass the time waiting for the next bit of Paranoia XP, and between turns of Paranoia Live. (I'm happy! Are you happy?)
> When will I see the first voip provider which sends a Java client applet to my phone (not a PC) with the call?
Why, as soon as the VOIP provider embeds CALEA support in the client applet that it sends to your phone, sir!
> It's not architecturally necessary, but I'd like that kind of encapsulated/authenticated voip client. End-to-end encryption of every call.
What you propose isn't architecturally necessary. But neither is it architecturally sufficient.
Unless you're proposing to...
a) write your own Java client or use an open-source client from a source you trust, b) install such a trustworthy client in read-only media on your phone (so that your phone's firmware won't ignore it and use a default built-in untrustworthy client), c) block that exploit by writing/downloading/compiling your phone's firmware from a source you trust, d) using a compiler you trust, compiled from source you trust, itself compiled on a system you trust, so that you don't get pwn3d by people who think like Ken Thompson , as per "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Communications of the ACM, August 1984 e) install your compiled firmware on a phone in read-only fashion (oops, no flash ROM allowed!), so that the network can't tell your phone (either by exploit or by a design in the protocol) to "auto-upgrade" its firmware, overwriting your custom firmware with firmware from a source you don't trust, e) find a VOIP provider that will transmit packets from a phone meeting requirements (a-d) inclusive, while not f) having its doors bashed in on the rather sensible grounds that any provider that'll let you make a call from a device meeting (a-e) into the PSTN is by definition not in compliance with CALEA.
If your adversary is merely the who owns the phone system (for a dose of irony, they're the third cousin five-takeovers removed from the people who brought us "Bell Labs"), you're just being paranoid.
And if your adversary is the one who pwns the phone system (for a double dose of irony, they're the third cousin five-administrations removed from the people who brought us "1984"), you're not being paranoid enough.
Serve the Computer. The Computer is your Friend.
"Yes, but", and "Yes, and"
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
> Is it really better working for a company that cares about your satisfaction? Are there any companies like that and (more importantly) are they hiring?
Yes, but:
Yes, but - a company that cares about your satisfaction is necessary, but not sufficient. You're partially responsible for your own satisfaction. The company can only provide you an environment in which your work is meaningful, and with bosses who aren't asshats. Some companies fail to suck, but if you keep that "I show up, I hide for 8 hours a day, I get nothing done, and they still pay me" mentality, you're not going to enjoy it any more (or any less) than working at your last job.
Yes, and:
Yes, and - they do exist. And they're often hiring. They're everywhere, but they're usually small companies, and you wouldn't know about them unless you knew people already working there.
So, what to do:
Network. In other words, do the same thing you ought to be doing every night, Pinky. Ask your friends who's worth signing up with as part of your plan to try to take over the world.
A Meier MMORPG?
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
> Today we're asking for questions about design and philosophy to pass on to Mr. Meier.
You've got a consistent track record of making some of the most interesting single-player turn-based strategy games ever to grace our screens. Civ and its descendants also make great turn-based multiplayer strategy games.
On the other end of the scale, we have MMORPGs - which to date, have been the direct opposite of single-player turn-based strategy games: repetitive skill grinds, no story arc, etc. The problem tends to run down to the fact that not everyone wants to run an empire - but by the same token, not everyone is content to PVP or grind all day.
It seems that many of the concepts that make a TBS great (IMHO the list includes, but is not limited to, a largish number of factions, shifting alliances between those factions, territorial control, resource management games requiring player allocation of resources between the generation of infrastructure and expendable units, a God's-eye view of history, and a story arc that emerges out of the economic, social, and political interactions between the factions) could be translated to the MMORPG genre - at least, given a suitably inspired design team and suitably-large time/dollar budget.
To what extent (if any) can TBS aspects be translated to a genre as radically different as a MMORPG, and to that extent, what advice would you have for a MMORPG designer?
> With all the recent discoveries and developments in fusion research, my question for Slashdotters - are we on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be'?"
"Why, yes, we are on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be', and we always will be!"
> Whoa. I need to know what base64 is in order to email someone? Bounce messages? Headers? Where messages are stored? That's what email administrators should know in the same way that a passenger on a commercial jet doesn't (and shouldn't) need to know much more than boarding procedures and the fact that a beer costs $5. As an email user, I should simply know how to click "send" and that new mail "appears" in those folder thingies.
Yes, you should, if you want to make sure that every time you click "send", your new mail really will "appear" in your friend's folder thingie.
> If I shouldn't send a large attachment (individually or in aggregate) my client software should tell me so, and prevent me from doing it, in the same way that an airline will stop me from bringing on a 3 kiloton suitcase rather than letting it get put on board and crash the plane.
If you don't know that "weight" is a property of matter under the force of a gravitational field, and why it's important to pilots, you're going to be frustrated when you exceed it.
Dialogue 1:
Airline: I'm sorry, we can't take the four of you, at 350 pounds apiece, plus your 200 pounds of luggage, in this Cessna.
Moron: Do you know who we are? We paid for our tickets. How dare you discriminate against us? You put us and our golfing equipment on that plane or I'll personally sue your airline into the ground!
Airplane: *crash*
(Granted, any pilot that lets such passengers board his aircraft deserves to crash with 'em. But the point is that an educated customer isn't going to be a moron, because they're going to be willing to listen to the error message "you weigh too much", and they're going to be capable of understanding it, and they're going to be able to take corrective action, by either taking two flights, by chartering a bigger aircraft, or by leaving some of their luggage behind.)
Similarly, if you don't know that "size" is a property of "files", and why it's important to sysadmins, you're going to be frustrated when you try to send big ones.
Dialogue 2:
Client: I'm sorry, I can't send that attachment to everyone in the company. It's way the hell too big.
Moron: This software sucks. Hey, sysadmin! I want to use a better mail software, the one you use! We make the sales this company relies on, and you answer to us! Either I get to email this DVD to my golfing buddy right now or your ass is fired!
Server: *crash*
Same problem. (And same comments about an admin who lets himself get browbeaten into blowing up his own server:)
There's a happy medium to be struck - but ultimately, it can't be solved only through clever UI design. Some user education is going to be required.
Computers have existed in the office for only 20 years, and have changed pretty radically over those 20 years. They're complex devices, and you have to understand at least some of what's going on under the hood to know what's common between a TRS-80, a Sun workstation, and an AMD64 running XP.
We had the same problem with automobiles in their first 20-30 years. The electrical starter, automatic choke, and the automatic transmission are about the only "new" UI developments for automobiles in the past 50 years. (The difference between EFI and carbureted engines didn't affect the car's UI.)
Ironically, we're seeing the usability problem more often in automobiles today than we did 20 years ago - it's not about being able to change your own oil, it's about knowing that oil needs to be changed, regardless of whether your engine was designed for oil changes every 3000 miles or 10000 miles. 50000 miles later, having never had an oil change, the car dies, and the user blames the auto manufacturer for the sludged engine.
Re:I'd like to nominate
on
Name That Worm
·
· Score: 4, Funny
> I'd like to nominate > The use of the name "FruitFucker 2000".
Sure thing, but we'll have to wait until my OS X box gets hit.
> Why do you expect me (a hypothetical customer) to read your manual? I'll look at it when I install your program and again when I need to troubleshoot it, but I just don't have the time to sit there and read it cover-to-cover no matter how much I'll learn from it. I'm too damn busy doing my own work. If I'm forced to read the manual to learn something about how your program functions, that means your interface designer needs to be fired.
Why do you expect me (a hypothetical pilot in training) to read your owner's manual? I'll look at it when I can't figure out how to start the engine and again when the engine stalls at 5000 feet, but I just don't have the time to sit there and read it cover-to-cover no matter how much I'll learn from it. I'm too damn busy doing my own work. If I'm forced to read the manual to learn something about how your aircraft functions, that means your aircraft engineer needs to be fired.
If you've never flown a plane before, and you get hired as a commercial pilot, "your own work" is flying a plane. Sorry, but that involves knowing lots of unnecessary crap like what an engine is, what RPMs mean, why oil pressure is important, and so on.
If you're an office worker who's never emailed someone before, and your co-workers use email to communicate with each other, learning what "email" is (bits, bytes, file sizes, file formats, base64/MIME, addresses, domain names, bounce messages, headers, and where messages are stored on the server and client side... is part of your job.
The intuitiveness of the UI is orthogonal to the real problem -- the less the end user reads, the more likely it the end user is going to lack the theoretical foundations that are essential to "doing their own work" in a way that doesn't result in spectacular failure.
Whether that failure is 500 copies of a 24-megabyte.BMP file sitting on a mail server ("well, I just had to click 'send to everyone' when I saw that cute picture of that kitten!") or a smoking crater ("My job is to fly the plane, I don't put gas in it, and besides, it's not my fault that some stupid mountain was sitting under those fluffy white clouds!"), the root cause is the same.
> In other news people have trouble understanding lawyer speak, medical terms, names of car components, how to build a house to proper code, publishing industry slang etc... > >
I guess that means people just have to learn eh?
And that's the fundamental problem. Most people these days not only don't think they have to learn, they don't think they should have to learn. (And why, indeed, should they? Since the 1970s and 1980s, their teachers pretty much gave up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem. If self-esteem is something everybody has - that is, if it's not something earned through performance, then everybody can feel great about themselves even though they're a bunch of ignorant fuckspittles who'll be first under the water when the revolving hurricane comes.)
Every time you hear someone say "I shouldn't have to read the manual to figure out how to use it!", you're seeing another example of the problem.
> The most recent expansion for Sims 2 is "Nightlife". This
> out-and-about addition incorporates much of the "Hot Date"
> material from the original game, with a generous helping of extras.
Let's just not go there with the oot-and-aboot stuff. The last thing I need is to imagine a bunch of flappy-headed Canadian Sims, and the notions of "hot date", or worse, "hot coffee", all conflated in something that sounds like Greater Toronto Area: Sim City.
But as long as it's too late for my mind to escape the pain, I may as well share it with you.
> > expensive, cool, and/or more painful ways to kill people
> > I think that "expensive, cool, and/or more efficient ways to kill people" would be more correct.
Expensive, cool, and/or more painful. (-1, Redundant)
Expensive, cool, and/or more efficient. (-1, Self-contradictory)
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to take this 20-gallon bottle of ditritium monoxide, freeze it into the shape of a dildo, and hand it to Britney Spears. Three outa four ain't bad.
> Crazy. And people compare Microsoft to the Borg. What's next, GoogleLaundromat? GoogleBeer? (beer Googles?)
(...and here's the version of the post I clicked "submit" on, not the one I clicked "preview" on. Pretty sure it was my finger slip, not a CSS bug. Now to outwait the timer.)
> > When your own company has a problem, it's a "challenge," usually one that gives you an "opportunity" to continue to "innovate" or be creative.
> >
Hey, they're workin' hard! It's hard work!
> Next Week's Headline: Blogger Kill 38 Then Self >
Week After Next's Headline: Blogging linked to Homicidal Tendencies >
Week After Week After Next's Headline: Slashback: Man Kill 38 Then Self >
Week After Week After Week.......oh you get the point.
Yeah, but if the 'blogger in question was Roland Piquepaille, and some of the victims were the posters of duplicate articles, would it really be so bad?
Week after Week after Week after Week: Jon Katz returns to Slashdot
> The challenges are many, but it has been a viable option since carbon nanotubes, structures so strong that one the width of a human hair could lift a car, were invented.
No, it hasn't.
The space elevator will become viable when someone creates a strand of carbon nanotube and lifts a car with it.
If you want to make me believe that a carbon nanotube space elevator is a viable proposition, demostrate that you can build a carbon nanotube suspension bridge first.
Doesn't have to be a replacement for the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate. A footpath over a creek at your local engineering college will do.
Until then, you're as likely to go into orbit on a space elevator's as you are on a matter/antimatter drive: as in "not at all".
> > strange blue light coming from the center of the Andromeda galaxy.
> >It's the resurgence of K-Mart!
I'm thinking more like blue as in Vedrans, powered by the rapid rotation of Gene Roddenberry's corpse, and all centered around a 140-million solar-mass abyss of suck.
"That's no resurgence of K-Mart. It's the restoration of the K-ommonwealth!" (You GNOME types, stay out of this!)
> NASA briefed senior White House officials Wednesday on its plan to spend $100 billion and the next 12 years building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to put humans back on the Moon by 2018.
Read between the lines.
Not "to get to the moon". Not "to put humans back on the moon". But "building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to".
In 2018, NASA will have spent $100B (or about $8-10B a year, probably around half to 3/4 of its bugdet). At the end of that timeframe, NASA will have contracted out the design and production of a new spacecraft, and some new rockets.
That's it. There's no lunar mission in there. There probably isn't even the planning for a lunar mission in there.
Most likely, the new spacecraft and rockets will either continue to fly into low earth orbit to service the white elephant known as ISS.
To blue-sky for a minute - the timeframe from 2018 to 2024 will be used for planning a lunar mission.
The mission will be funded for the timeframe from 2018-2030. By which time, the spacecraft and rockets developed around 2015 will be obsolete scrap.
We're going to divert a lot of funds that could be used for science (which might be OK if we were going somewhere), but the fact of the matter is - just like 30 years ago, unless you count the contracts that'll get farmed out to every Congressional district, we're not going anywhere.
> I completely agree with the issue of the search box being at the bottom of the screen. I work on a 21" monitor, and it drives me nuts looking down, then on the page, back and forth.
I'll go one step further - first, the search box doesn't belong on the bottom, but secondly - find-as-you-type itself should be a user-disablable option.
In the meantime, I use Retrofind as my solution to the problem.
Retrofind is a Firefox extension that replaces FAYT with the old-school semi-modal dialog box.
If I'm 37 PgDn keypresses into a long SlashFark thread, and I see that someone's replying to user "foobar", and I want to find the original comment, I do not want to see the browser window jump up to 32-PgDns (landing on "foo", "fool" or "foosball") when I type "foo", only to land on the 28-PgDn level of "foobar"'s post.
Why not? Because it's bloody hard to remember that I'm 37 PgDn keypresses (or 37% of the way through the scrollbar, etc) into the thread when I just wanted to "Find 'foobar'". If "foobar" doesn't exist (maybe it was a typo, maybe it was beneath my moderation threshold), but "foo", "fool", or "foosball" does, I've now completely lost track of where I was in the thread. I want to navigate if, and only if, the string exists - and I want to do it when, and only when, my eyeballs and brain are expecting it.
Those are the most egregious examples, but the more I tried to use find-as-you-type, the more I decided it wasn't for me.
In comparison to the old find-in-page dialog, FAYT felt the web browsing equivalent of auto-focus-stealing, auto-raising windows on the desktop. FAYT is not a bug, but at least for me, it's a misfeature.
> In exchange for x% of your computer cycles, x% of your HDD space, a predetermined number of pop-up ads, etc., the group would guard your computer against others attempting to compromise it for its own use. The group would connect to your system from the internet, install their rootkits, and regularly scour your system looking for intruders, which they would zealously remove > > And once you let someone compromise your system, you'll never be able to fully trust it again. It's about the stupidest idea yet in computer security. The only reason it wasn't on that list of "top six stupid things" the other day is because it's not an adopted practice, and isn't taken seriously.
Is that not the functional specification for Windows Update? (
Ha ha, only serious.)
For that matter, is that not the functional spec for every automatically self-updating piece of software?
Your machine is as trustworthy as those you permit to administer it. To the extent that you install auto-updating software, your machine is only as trustworthy as the authors of that software.
I'm highly confident that when my cron job asks apt-get to phone home, the maintainers of $MY_PET_DISTRO won't take advantage of the opportunity to place anything nasty on my machine.
I'm somewhat confident that Microsoft isn't going to auto-disable even pirated Windows installations, nor to install a RIAA/MPAA sniffing trojan as part of its updates - at least, not without providing a few weeks of warning.
I had so little confidence (as a matter of personal opinion) that the auto-updating and installation of DRM/software subscription services from www.steampowered.com, that I never purchased Valve's Half-Life 2. (If you trust Valve, hey, go for it -- but Steam is, IMO, fundamentally no different than having companies like EA and Adobe decide to outsource the management of "licencing component services" to organizations like Macrovision and the BSA. Would you like to get your "security components" from DRM providers?
And finally, I'd have no confidence whatsoever in any machine that was required, as part of the Homeland Cybersecurity Act of 2012, to download security updates from updatefarm.cybersec2012.gov.
On that scale, I'd place the original "cracker group" (perhaps affiliated with the Russian mafia) installing its own rootkits as somewhere between "less trustworthy than Steam, but more trustworthy than bsa.org".
But there's fundamentally no difference between any of these options.
> Yes, but will it make Vanilla Ice...?
Rollin', in my 5.0 with the top left back so my hair can blow...
I dunno. Let's find out.
Rollin'... in my 5.0,
With my rag top down so my hair can blow,
The voltage is on standby, costs of icin' too high,
(Did you stop?) No, I just froze, by
Freon - pursuin' temp'rature drop,
Compressor's dead, yo, so I continued to,
George J. Ranque, Hilsch-Ranque vortex tube!
Peltier's hot, like electrical bikinis,
And I got no voltage from the Lamborghinis,
Warmin' - cause I'm out thawin' mine,
Got my compressor gauge, readin' PSI "9"
Vaccuum - for the mods on the wall,
Mods are actin' ill because they had their 8 LOLs
Hissin' - through the compressor shell,
I clamped the hose, but it was shot to hell,
Ozone - burnin' up like real fast,
Registration link at time-mag suckin' goat ass
Readin' the Wiki, the 'pedia's packed,
Thermodynamics 'bout how the fridge is jacked.
Third law on the scene - you know what I mean,
A million RPM? Efficiency is unseen,
If it's a solution, this don't solve it
Pump out the heat while the Hilsch-Ranque revolves it
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, eDonkey throws in the towel while testifying in front of eLephant congress.
Users of both products disgusted; form eMule party, nominate Hari Seldon as Presidential candidate, running on a platform that victory is inevitable.
It's been a long time. Thanks for the memories. That'll give me something to do while waiting for... wait a sec...
Ah, much better. That'll be a great way to pass the time waiting for the next bit of Paranoia XP, and between turns of Paranoia Live. (I'm happy! Are you happy?)
Why, as soon as the VOIP provider embeds CALEA support in the client applet that it sends to your phone, sir!
> It's not architecturally necessary, but I'd like that kind of encapsulated/authenticated voip client. End-to-end encryption of every call.
What you propose isn't architecturally necessary. But neither is it architecturally sufficient.
Unless you're proposing to...
a) write your own Java client or use an open-source client from a source you trust,
b) install such a trustworthy client in read-only media on your phone (so that your phone's firmware won't ignore it and use a default built-in untrustworthy client),
c) block that exploit by writing/downloading/compiling your phone's firmware from a source you trust,
d) using a compiler you trust, compiled from source you trust, itself compiled on a system you trust, so that you don't get pwn3d by people who think like Ken Thompson
, as per "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Communications of the ACM, August 1984
e) install your compiled firmware on a phone in read-only fashion (oops, no flash ROM allowed!), so that the network can't tell your phone (either by exploit or by a design in the protocol) to "auto-upgrade" its firmware, overwriting your custom firmware with firmware from a source you don't trust,
e) find a VOIP provider that will transmit packets from a phone meeting requirements (a-d) inclusive, while not
f) having its doors bashed in on the rather sensible grounds that any provider that'll let you make a call from a device meeting (a-e) into the PSTN is by definition not in compliance with CALEA.
If your adversary is merely the who owns the phone system (for a dose of irony, they're the third cousin five-takeovers removed from the people who brought us "Bell Labs"), you're just being paranoid.
And if your adversary is the one who pwns the phone system (for a double dose of irony, they're the third cousin five-administrations removed from the people who brought us "1984"), you're not being paranoid enough.
Serve the Computer. The Computer is your Friend.
Yes, but:
Yes, but - a company that cares about your satisfaction is necessary, but not sufficient. You're partially responsible for your own satisfaction. The company can only provide you an environment in which your work is meaningful, and with bosses who aren't asshats. Some companies fail to suck, but if you keep that "I show up, I hide for 8 hours a day, I get nothing done, and they still pay me" mentality, you're not going to enjoy it any more (or any less) than working at your last job.
Yes, and:
Yes, and - they do exist. And they're often hiring. They're everywhere, but they're usually small companies, and you wouldn't know about them unless you knew people already working there.
So, what to do:
Network. In other words, do the same thing you ought to be doing every night, Pinky. Ask your friends who's worth signing up with as part of your plan to try to take over the world.
You've got a consistent track record of making some of the most interesting single-player turn-based strategy games ever to grace our screens. Civ and its descendants also make great turn-based multiplayer strategy games.
On the other end of the scale, we have MMORPGs - which to date, have been the direct opposite of single-player turn-based strategy games: repetitive skill grinds, no story arc, etc. The problem tends to run down to the fact that not everyone wants to run an empire - but by the same token, not everyone is content to PVP or grind all day.
It seems that many of the concepts that make a TBS great (IMHO the list includes, but is not limited to, a largish number of factions, shifting alliances between those factions, territorial control, resource management games requiring player allocation of resources between the generation of infrastructure and expendable units, a God's-eye view of history, and a story arc that emerges out of the economic, social, and political interactions between the factions) could be translated to the MMORPG genre - at least, given a suitably inspired design team and suitably-large time/dollar budget.
To what extent (if any) can TBS aspects be translated to a genre as radically different as a MMORPG, and to that extent, what advice would you have for a MMORPG designer?
"Why, yes, we are on the verge of something big that will make fusion a practical reality in a much shorter time frame than the often quoted '30 years away, and always will be', and we always will be!"
Yes, you should, if you want to make sure that every time you click "send", your new mail really will "appear" in your friend's folder thingie.
> If I shouldn't send a large attachment (individually or in aggregate) my client software should tell me so, and prevent me from doing it, in the same way that an airline will stop me from bringing on a 3 kiloton suitcase rather than letting it get put on board and crash the plane.
If you don't know that "weight" is a property of matter under the force of a gravitational field, and why it's important to pilots, you're going to be frustrated when you exceed it.
Dialogue 1:
Airline: I'm sorry, we can't take the four of you, at 350 pounds apiece, plus your 200 pounds of luggage, in this Cessna.
Moron: Do you know who we are? We paid for our tickets. How dare you discriminate against us? You put us and our golfing equipment on that plane or I'll personally sue your airline into the ground!
Airplane: *crash*
(Granted, any pilot that lets such passengers board his aircraft deserves to crash with 'em. But the point is that an educated customer isn't going to be a moron, because they're going to be willing to listen to the error message "you weigh too much", and they're going to be capable of understanding it, and they're going to be able to take corrective action, by either taking two flights, by chartering a bigger aircraft, or by leaving some of their luggage behind.)
Similarly, if you don't know that "size" is a property of "files", and why it's important to sysadmins, you're going to be frustrated when you try to send big ones.
Dialogue 2:
Client: I'm sorry, I can't send that attachment to everyone in the company. It's way the hell too big.
Moron: This software sucks. Hey, sysadmin! I want to use a better mail software, the one you use! We make the sales this company relies on, and you answer to us! Either I get to email this DVD to my golfing buddy right now or your ass is fired!
Server: *crash*
Same problem. (And same comments about an admin who lets himself get browbeaten into blowing up his own server :)
There's a happy medium to be struck - but ultimately, it can't be solved only through clever UI design. Some user education is going to be required.
Computers have existed in the office for only 20 years, and have changed pretty radically over those 20 years. They're complex devices, and you have to understand at least some of what's going on under the hood to know what's common between a TRS-80, a Sun workstation, and an AMD64 running XP.
We had the same problem with automobiles in their first 20-30 years. The electrical starter, automatic choke, and the automatic transmission are about the only "new" UI developments for automobiles in the past 50 years. (The difference between EFI and carbureted engines didn't affect the car's UI.)
Ironically, we're seeing the usability problem more often in automobiles today than we did 20 years ago - it's not about being able to change your own oil, it's about knowing that oil needs to be changed, regardless of whether your engine was designed for oil changes every 3000 miles or 10000 miles. 50000 miles later, having never had an oil change, the car dies, and the user blames the auto manufacturer for the sludged engine.
> The use of the name "FruitFucker 2000".
Sure thing, but we'll have to wait until my OS X box gets hit.
Why do you expect me (a hypothetical pilot in training) to read your owner's manual? I'll look at it when I can't figure out how to start the engine and again when the engine stalls at 5000 feet, but I just don't have the time to sit there and read it cover-to-cover no matter how much I'll learn from it. I'm too damn busy doing my own work. If I'm forced to read the manual to learn something about how your aircraft functions, that means your aircraft engineer needs to be fired.
If you've never flown a plane before, and you get hired as a commercial pilot, "your own work" is flying a plane. Sorry, but that involves knowing lots of unnecessary crap like what an engine is, what RPMs mean, why oil pressure is important, and so on.
If you're an office worker who's never emailed someone before, and your co-workers use email to communicate with each other, learning what "email" is (bits, bytes, file sizes, file formats, base64/MIME, addresses, domain names, bounce messages, headers, and where messages are stored on the server and client side... is part of your job.
The intuitiveness of the UI is orthogonal to the real problem -- the less the end user reads, the more likely it the end user is going to lack the theoretical foundations that are essential to "doing their own work" in a way that doesn't result in spectacular failure.
Whether that failure is 500 copies of a 24-megabyte .BMP file sitting on a mail server ("well, I just had to click 'send to everyone' when I saw that cute picture of that kitten!") or a smoking crater ("My job is to fly the plane, I don't put gas in it, and besides, it's not my fault that some stupid mountain was sitting under those fluffy white clouds!"), the root cause is the same.
Of what, the 3.5 megabyte "setup.msi" file, or the Macromedia Flash plugin? :-)
>
> I guess that means people just have to learn eh?
And that's the fundamental problem. Most people these days not only don't think they have to learn, they don't think they should have to learn. (And why, indeed, should they? Since the 1970s and 1980s, their teachers pretty much gave up teaching in the name of boosting self-esteem. If self-esteem is something everybody has - that is, if it's not something earned through performance, then everybody can feel great about themselves even though they're a bunch of ignorant fuckspittles who'll be first under the water when the revolving hurricane comes.)
Every time you hear someone say "I shouldn't have to read the manual to figure out how to use it!", you're seeing another example of the problem.
> out-and-about addition incorporates much of the "Hot Date"
> material from the original game, with a generous helping of extras.
Let's just not go there with the oot-and-aboot stuff. The last thing I need is to imagine a bunch of flappy-headed Canadian Sims, and the notions of "hot date", or worse, "hot coffee", all conflated in something that sounds like Greater Toronto Area: Sim City.
But as long as it's too late for my mind to escape the pain, I may as well share it with you.
>
> I think that "expensive, cool, and/or more efficient ways to kill people" would be more correct.
Expensive, cool, and/or more painful. (-1, Redundant)
Expensive, cool, and/or more efficient. (-1, Self-contradictory)
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to take this 20-gallon bottle of ditritium monoxide, freeze it into the shape of a dildo, and hand it to Britney Spears. Three outa four ain't bad.
(...and here's the version of the post I clicked "submit" on, not the one I clicked "preview" on. Pretty sure it was my finger slip, not a CSS bug. Now to outwait the timer.)
Well, Ballmer did promise to fucking kill Google, did he not?
Careful who you throw that chair at, Monkeyboy. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Goothulhu Menlo Park wgah'nagl fhtagn!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Goothulhu Menlo Park wgah'nagl fhtagn!
>
> Hey, they're workin' hard! It's hard work!
Obviously you don't work in the PR department.
They're working smarter! It's challenging work!
> Week After Next's Headline: Blogging linked to Homicidal Tendencies
> Week After Week After Next's Headline: Slashback: Man Kill 38 Then Self
> Week After Week After Week.......oh you get the point.
Yeah, but if the 'blogger in question was Roland Piquepaille, and some of the victims were the posters of duplicate articles, would it really be so bad?
Week after Week after Week after Week: Jon Katz returns to Slashdot
Then again, maybe it would.
No, it hasn't.
The space elevator will become viable when someone creates a strand of carbon nanotube and lifts a car with it.
If you want to make me believe that a carbon nanotube space elevator is a viable proposition, demostrate that you can build a carbon nanotube suspension bridge first.
Doesn't have to be a replacement for the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate. A footpath over a creek at your local engineering college will do.
Until then, you're as likely to go into orbit on a space elevator's as you are on a matter/antimatter drive: as in "not at all".
>think of hamsters?
Yeah, but then I realized this is a hamster ball designed to help you roll up your own ass, not Richard Gere's!
>
>It's the resurgence of K-Mart!
I'm thinking more like blue as in Vedrans, powered by the rapid rotation of Gene Roddenberry's corpse, and all centered around a 140-million solar-mass abyss of suck.
"That's no resurgence of K-Mart. It's the restoration of the K-ommonwealth!" (You GNOME types, stay out of this!)
Read between the lines.
Not "to get to the moon". Not "to put humans back on the moon". But "building the spacecraft and rockets it needs to".
In 2018, NASA will have spent $100B (or about $8-10B a year, probably around half to 3/4 of its bugdet). At the end of that timeframe, NASA will have contracted out the design and production of a new spacecraft, and some new rockets.
That's it. There's no lunar mission in there. There probably isn't even the planning for a lunar mission in there.
Most likely, the new spacecraft and rockets will either continue to fly into low earth orbit to service the white elephant known as ISS.
To blue-sky for a minute - the timeframe from 2018 to 2024 will be used for planning a lunar mission. The mission will be funded for the timeframe from 2018-2030. By which time, the spacecraft and rockets developed around 2015 will be obsolete scrap.
We're going to divert a lot of funds that could be used for science (which might be OK if we were going somewhere), but the fact of the matter is - just like 30 years ago, unless you count the contracts that'll get farmed out to every Congressional district, we're not going anywhere.
I'll go one step further - first, the search box doesn't belong on the bottom, but secondly - find-as-you-type itself should be a user-disablable option.
In the meantime, I use Retrofind as my solution to the problem. Retrofind is a Firefox extension that replaces FAYT with the old-school semi-modal dialog box.
If I'm 37 PgDn keypresses into a long SlashFark thread, and I see that someone's replying to user "foobar", and I want to find the original comment, I do not want to see the browser window jump up to 32-PgDns (landing on "foo", "fool" or "foosball") when I type "foo", only to land on the 28-PgDn level of "foobar"'s post.
Why not? Because it's bloody hard to remember that I'm 37 PgDn keypresses (or 37% of the way through the scrollbar, etc) into the thread when I just wanted to "Find 'foobar'". If "foobar" doesn't exist (maybe it was a typo, maybe it was beneath my moderation threshold), but "foo", "fool", or "foosball" does, I've now completely lost track of where I was in the thread. I want to navigate if, and only if, the string exists - and I want to do it when, and only when, my eyeballs and brain are expecting it.
Those are the most egregious examples, but the more I tried to use find-as-you-type, the more I decided it wasn't for me. In comparison to the old find-in-page dialog, FAYT felt the web browsing equivalent of auto-focus-stealing, auto-raising windows on the desktop. FAYT is not a bug, but at least for me, it's a misfeature.
I'm curious - am I alone in this opinion?
>
> And once you let someone compromise your system, you'll never be able to fully trust it again. It's about the stupidest idea yet in computer security. The only reason it wasn't on that list of "top six stupid things" the other day is because it's not an adopted practice, and isn't taken seriously.
Is that not the functional specification for Windows Update? ( Ha ha, only serious.)
For that matter, is that not the functional spec for every automatically self-updating piece of software?
Your machine is as trustworthy as those you permit to administer it. To the extent that you install auto-updating software, your machine is only as trustworthy as the authors of that software.
I'm highly confident that when my cron job asks apt-get to phone home, the maintainers of $MY_PET_DISTRO won't take advantage of the opportunity to place anything nasty on my machine.
I'm somewhat confident that Microsoft isn't going to auto-disable even pirated Windows installations, nor to install a RIAA/MPAA sniffing trojan as part of its updates - at least, not without providing a few weeks of warning.
I had so little confidence (as a matter of personal opinion) that the auto-updating and installation of DRM/software subscription services from www.steampowered.com, that I never purchased Valve's Half-Life 2. (If you trust Valve, hey, go for it -- but Steam is, IMO, fundamentally no different than having companies like EA and Adobe decide to outsource the management of "licencing component services" to organizations like Macrovision and the BSA. Would you like to get your "security components" from DRM providers?
And finally, I'd have no confidence whatsoever in any machine that was required, as part of the Homeland Cybersecurity Act of 2012, to download security updates from updatefarm.cybersec2012.gov.
On that scale, I'd place the original "cracker group" (perhaps affiliated with the Russian mafia) installing its own rootkits as somewhere between "less trustworthy than Steam, but more trustworthy than bsa.org".
But there's fundamentally no difference between any of these options.
Rollin', in my 5.0 with the top left back so my hair can blow...
I dunno. Let's find out.
Rollin'... in my 5.0,
With my rag top down so my hair can blow,
The voltage is on standby, costs of icin' too high,
(Did you stop?) No, I just froze, by
Freon - pursuin' temp'rature drop,
Compressor's dead, yo, so I continued to,
George J. Ranque, Hilsch-Ranque vortex tube!
Peltier's hot, like electrical bikinis,
And I got no voltage from the Lamborghinis,
Warmin' - cause I'm out thawin' mine,
Got my compressor gauge, readin' PSI "9"
Vaccuum - for the mods on the wall,
Mods are actin' ill because they had their 8 LOLs
Hissin' - through the compressor shell,
I clamped the hose, but it was shot to hell,
Ozone - burnin' up like real fast,
Registration link at time-mag suckin' goat ass
Readin' the Wiki, the 'pedia's packed,
Thermodynamics 'bout how the fridge is jacked.
Third law on the scene - you know what I mean,
A million RPM? Efficiency is unseen,
If it's a solution, this don't solve it
Pump out the heat while the Hilsch-Ranque revolves it
(Vanilla) Ice Ice Geeky, too cold...