Just read any typical Slashdot story or comment. You'll find a lot of very common "engineerese" errors, the top ones probably being...
- Unable to group thoughts into coherent sentences and paragraphs. - Passive voice. - Not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's". - Not knowing the difference between "loose" and "lose" and/or "lead" and "led". - Not knowing the difference between there/their/they're, your/you're, etc. - Not knowing or caring how to spell. - Not knowing or caring how to type uppercase letters in appropriate places.
For some reason, I've found passive voice vs. active voice one of the hardest things to teach engineers and have it "take". Not only is passive voice ingrained in their brains as the "professional" way to write, they seem to have a hard time learning to "refactor" sentences into a simpler, more active form.
But then, I guess that's part of why I have a job as a technical writer...
Most of the streams contain 5-15 minutes of nothing happening at the beginning, followed by presentation set-up difficulties. It seems like the video camera was activated and deactivated at pre-programmed times that had nothing to do with the actual talks.
The Owen Taylor video in particular has 1-1/2 HOURS of footage of an empty room at the end.
People on dial-up: avoid these until edited version appear!
You can create a protocol handler for arbitrary URL protocols in Mac OS X. There's nothing stopping anybody, not just Apple, from implementing these features.
My guess as to why it hasn't happened yet is that Mac users/developers have better things to do. Really, these are pretty geeky features. I'd rather use an interface than formulate URLs.
Maybe. If there's a ton of money to make that way, sure. But I think Apple's corporate culture goes against your vision for their future.
Apple has a very idealistic corporate vision. Apple is about people being creative. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD are all about people CREATING things. The Apple way of thinking does not value sheep who merely consume whatever is put in front of them.
Jobs has spoken more than once about how (I'm paraphrasing) Music distribution is cool, because listening to music isn't the whole point; you can do other things (hopefully creative and interesting things) while listening to music. But TV is uncool/uninteresting, because there's nothing creative or interactive or useful about it. It's just pure consumption. That's why Apple will probably never ever make a TiVo.
Put another way, everybody else wants their customers to just surf the Web. Apple wants their customers to create their own web sites.
It's definitely true that there are more sheep than creative people in the world (to me that's a huge reason for Apple's market share), and so they could make more money selling video streams to passive sheep. But to do so would require a massive change in the traditional Apple culture.
Sadly, they forgot the first rule of robotics: try not to build your "humanoid" robots so they look like vampires. (RTFA to see what I'm talking about.)
Microsoft is definitely replicating existing technology here, but it's not the UNIX shells, which are in no way object oriented, standardized, or language-neutral. They're duplicating Apple's open scripting environment, which allows any language (well, OK, AppleScript, JavaScript, or Frontier... but conveivably any language) to script the system , GUI applications, and BSD.
Here's another page where somebody did this with a ThinkPad. (This one's not so involved; the guy just flipped the keyboard back behind the screen).
Make sure you only try this on a computer you don't care about losing!!! I killed a NEC laptop messing around with this. Those ribbon connectors between the LCD and the motherboard are FRAGILE!!!:-(
1. "Open source software is great because it's designed *by* engineers *for* engineers to itch a scratch. So it's free of the corrupting influence of all the idiots you have to deal with in corporate programming: marketing types pandering to users, graphic designers adding useless frills, usability people trying to dumb it down, and technical writers getting things wrong."
2. "Why are there no open source fonts? Where can I get free icons? This online help is useless! Why don't non-programmers like Linux?"
I know I'm wildly over-generalizing. But read Slashdot comments sometime with an eye toward how "creatives" are regarded by the open source community.
Re:The death of the zoom tool
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 1
Like Mac OS X?;)
Um, no. A huge percentage of OS X is drawn with fixed size bitmaps. Some things, if you're lucky, are drawn with very large bitmaps scaled down (so they could conceivably be made bigger), but most of it is fixed-size and small.
Amazingly, OS X is actually LESS scalable than Windows (at least prior to XP), which allows font scaling and draws the window glyphs with TrueType fonts.
When Aqua was first shown in public a few optimistic types believed the system was actually drawing those pretty buttons from scratch, and that therefore they could be scaled, but it's simply not the case.
(I wish Aqua really DID draw them... then you could change the color! Aqua's almost sick reliance on bitmaps is the major reason you can't choose a custom interface color (they actually store two sets of bitmaps for blue and graphite. Unbelievable!))
The death of the zoom tool
on
IBM's Deep View
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
IBM brought one of these screens by Alias|Wavefront to show. The image detail is unbelievable.
In fact, you don't need a zoom tool on your paint program anymore,.. you just need a real magnifying glass sitting next to the monitor (IBM brought one), because it's showing much more detail than you can really see!
One thing it shows, though, is the need for vector-bases scalable interfaces... the default Windows UI was so tiny on that screen it was really hard to use!
Some of the posters seem to assume the people in the hotel want to see each other on the network. That's probably the absolute *last* thing you want (if suits are expecting to move their laptop from the office to the hotel without any configuration, it probably means the laptop is wide open to hacks). What you want is a hardware set-up that makes each node think it's got a direct connection to the internet, not that it's on a LAN.
It should make the "what if somebody's configured with an IP address I've already assigned" easier-- if the nodes can't see each other you can translate IPs and not worry about conflicts. Assuming you can come up with a hardware configuration that allows that, of course...
I think it does an OK job for a computer, but nobody's going to accuse those summaries of being overly coherent (or well-typed).
Occasionally, the summary will juxtapose two sentences (it's just ripping examplar sentences from different stories), that when put together create screw up the meaning:
"Now that David Letterman is staying at CBS, ABC s corporate bosses took steps to mend fences with"Nightline"host Ted Koppel on Tuesday. And that ' s appealing to beer companies..."
Doh!
I think a more fruitful avenue of research is new methods of presenting information so that humans can decide what to read. Instead of using tricks to simulate a computer understanding the meaning of an article, this uses the same tricks to simply assist reading the article.
Apple's research group did some interesting work in that area in the 90's.
The way it benefits News Corp is supposedly by putting ITV out of business, ie it's plain old anti-competitive behavior. Once ITV stops broadcasting, their cracked smartcards become irrelevant.
I'm used to the megacorps (especially News Corp!) acting evilly and immorally, but usually they do so under cover of bought-and-paid-for politicians and laws. If true, these actions are pretty shocking.
A cold night, New York, 1923. A giant trained gorilla renowned for its barrel tossing act escapes from the Barham & Bailey circus, climbing to the top of an unfinished wrought iron building. In the confusion, the girlfriend of a recently immigrated Italian plumber is taken hostage. And thus a legend is born.
It's not specifically about a small footprint. It's about improving the usability of the hardware.
Apple improves usability by making it "just work" out of the box for 90% of computer users. But obviously Slashdot power-users are in the other 10%;) So how can we improve hardware usability for people who work inside and expand their systems.
DeviceBay was a spec for hard drives and other components that would slide in and out of the chassis, and connect using FireWire or USB (so you could swap things on-the-fly). It was mostly for rack-mounter server farms, but would have made everyone's life easier. Unfortunately, it never went anywhere.
Back in the early 90s Apple and a few design firms were playing with ideas for a computer that looked like a rail, or a backplane. Components, cards, drives, were hung on the rail or slotted into the backplane.
Manufacturers (besides Apple) don't really seem to care about the usability of the box, though. If they did they would have ripped off the PowerMac G4's side door well and pronto (Dell's attempt at it can most charitably be described as "half-assed").
Slashdot Mirror
With the exception that it's less functional. No wifi, USB 1.1, no multi-touch.
Just read any typical Slashdot story or comment. You'll find a lot of very common "engineerese" errors, the top ones probably being...
- Unable to group thoughts into coherent sentences and paragraphs.
- Passive voice.
- Not knowing the difference between "its" and "it's".
- Not knowing the difference between "loose" and "lose" and/or "lead" and "led".
- Not knowing the difference between there/their/they're, your/you're, etc.
- Not knowing or caring how to spell.
- Not knowing or caring how to type uppercase letters in appropriate places.
For some reason, I've found passive voice vs. active voice one of the hardest things
to teach engineers and have it "take". Not only is passive voice ingrained in their
brains as the "professional" way to write, they seem to have a hard time learning
to "refactor" sentences into a simpler, more active form.
But then, I guess that's part of why I have a job as a technical writer...
How about instead of KB and GB, which means nothing to normal people, you have apps report things in grams instead of bytes?
"Hmmm, maybe I shouldn't send this by email... should I really send a 2 ton file through this little wire?"
Have you never heard of Entertainment Weekly? It must be full of negative quantum information, because reading it definitely make you dumber.
Most of the streams contain 5-15 minutes of nothing happening at the beginning, followed by presentation set-up difficulties. It seems like the video camera was activated and deactivated at pre-programmed times that had nothing to do with the actual talks.
The Owen Taylor video in particular has 1-1/2 HOURS of footage of an empty room at the end.
People on dial-up: avoid these until edited version appear!
"GTA: Mississagua"
Oh great, I just sprayed milk all over my nice keyboard!
You mean skript kiddie.
Try "in a lengthy process".
If you don't know how to use big words, please don't bother trying.
You can create a protocol handler for arbitrary URL protocols in Mac OS X. There's nothing stopping anybody, not just Apple, from implementing these features.
My guess as to why it hasn't happened yet is that Mac users/developers have better things to do. Really, these are pretty geeky features. I'd rather use an interface than formulate URLs.
Maybe. If there's a ton of money to make that way, sure. But I think Apple's corporate culture goes against your vision for their future.
Apple has a very idealistic corporate vision. Apple is about people being creative. iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD are all about people CREATING things. The Apple way of thinking does not value sheep who merely consume whatever is put in front of them.
Jobs has spoken more than once about how (I'm paraphrasing) Music distribution is cool, because listening to music isn't the whole point; you can do other things (hopefully creative and interesting things) while listening to music. But TV is uncool/uninteresting, because there's nothing creative or interactive or useful about it. It's just pure consumption. That's why Apple will probably never ever make a TiVo.
Put another way, everybody else wants their customers to just surf the Web. Apple wants their customers to create their own web sites.
It's definitely true that there are more sheep than creative people in the world (to me that's a huge reason for Apple's market share), and so they could make more money selling video streams to passive sheep. But to do so would require a massive change in the traditional Apple culture.
Sadly, they forgot the first rule of robotics: try not to build your "humanoid" robots so they look like vampires. (RTFA to see what I'm talking about.)
Microsoft is definitely replicating existing technology here, but it's not the UNIX shells, which are in no way object oriented, standardized, or language-neutral. They're duplicating Apple's open scripting environment, which allows any language (well, OK, AppleScript, JavaScript, or Frontier... but conveivably any language) to script the system , GUI applications, and BSD.
Here's another page where somebody did this with a ThinkPad. (This one's not so involved; the guy just flipped the keyboard back behind the screen).
:-(
Make sure you only try this on a computer you don't care about losing!!! I killed a NEC laptop messing around with this. Those ribbon connectors between the LCD and the motherboard are FRAGILE!!!
1. "Open source software is great because it's designed *by* engineers *for* engineers to itch a scratch. So it's free of the corrupting influence of all the idiots you have to deal with in corporate programming: marketing types pandering to users, graphic designers adding useless frills, usability people trying to dumb it down, and technical writers getting things wrong."
2. "Why are there no open source fonts? Where can I get free icons? This online help is useless! Why don't non-programmers like Linux?"
I know I'm wildly over-generalizing. But read Slashdot comments sometime with an eye toward how "creatives" are regarded by the open source community.
Um, no. A huge percentage of OS X is drawn with fixed size bitmaps. Some things, if you're lucky, are drawn with very large bitmaps scaled down (so they could conceivably be made bigger), but most of it is fixed-size and small.
Amazingly, OS X is actually LESS scalable than Windows (at least prior to XP), which allows font scaling and draws the window glyphs with TrueType fonts.
When Aqua was first shown in public a few optimistic types believed the system was actually drawing those pretty buttons from scratch, and that therefore they could be scaled, but it's simply not the case.
(I wish Aqua really DID draw them... then you could change the color! Aqua's almost sick reliance on bitmaps is the major reason you can't choose a custom interface color (they actually store two sets of bitmaps for blue and graphite. Unbelievable!))
IBM brought one of these screens by Alias|Wavefront to show. The image detail is unbelievable.
In fact, you don't need a zoom tool on your paint program anymore,.. you just need a real magnifying glass sitting next to the monitor (IBM brought one), because it's showing much more detail than you can really see!
One thing it shows, though, is the need for vector-bases scalable interfaces... the default Windows UI was so tiny on that screen it was really hard to use!
Somebody mod this back down. Maya Complete is less than $2000. This guy is either misinformed or a troll (or just a LW employee).
Some of the posters seem to assume the people in the hotel want to see each other on the network. That's probably the absolute *last* thing you want (if suits are expecting to move their laptop from the office to the hotel without any configuration, it probably means the laptop is wide open to hacks). What you want is a hardware set-up that makes each node think it's got a direct connection to the internet, not that it's on a LAN.
It should make the "what if somebody's configured with an IP address I've already assigned" easier-- if the nodes can't see each other you can translate IPs and not worry about conflicts. Assuming you can come up with a hardware configuration that allows that, of course...
"The pixter focuses mostly on educative games"
Um... nope, it's just too easy.
Since answer is a synonym for response, dumbass.
...is nowhere near as good as Neon Genesis Evangelion or Serial Experiment Lain. The dubbing totally sucked!
I think it does an OK job for a computer, but nobody's going to accuse those summaries of being overly coherent (or well-typed).
Occasionally, the summary will juxtapose two sentences (it's just ripping examplar sentences from different stories), that when put together create screw up the meaning:
"Now that David Letterman is staying at CBS, ABC s corporate bosses took steps to mend fences with"Nightline"host Ted Koppel on Tuesday. And that ' s appealing to beer companies..."
Doh!
I think a more fruitful avenue of research is new methods of presenting information so that humans can decide what to read. Instead of using tricks to simulate a computer understanding the meaning of an article, this uses the same tricks to simply assist reading the article.
Apple's research group did some interesting work in that area in the 90's.
The way it benefits News Corp is supposedly by putting ITV out of business, ie it's plain old anti-competitive behavior. Once ITV stops broadcasting, their cracked smartcards become irrelevant.
I'm used to the megacorps (especially News Corp!) acting evilly and immorally, but usually they do so under cover of bought-and-paid-for politicians and laws. If true, these actions are pretty shocking.
A cold night, New York, 1923. A giant trained gorilla renowned for its barrel tossing act escapes from the Barham & Bailey circus, climbing to the top of an unfinished wrought iron building. In the confusion, the girlfriend of a recently immigrated Italian plumber is taken hostage. And thus a legend is born.
It's not specifically about a small footprint. It's about improving the usability of the hardware.
;) So how can we improve hardware usability for people who work inside and expand their systems.
Apple improves usability by making it "just work" out of the box for 90% of computer users. But obviously Slashdot power-users are in the other 10%
DeviceBay was a spec for hard drives and other components that would slide in and out of the chassis, and connect using FireWire or USB (so you could swap things on-the-fly). It was mostly for rack-mounter server farms, but would have made everyone's life easier. Unfortunately, it never went anywhere.
Back in the early 90s Apple and a few design firms were playing with ideas for a computer that looked like a rail, or a backplane. Components, cards, drives, were hung on the rail or slotted into the backplane.
Manufacturers (besides Apple) don't really seem to care about the usability of the box, though. If they did they would have ripped off the PowerMac G4's side door well and pronto (Dell's attempt at it can most charitably be described as "half-assed").