Back at uni, it got to the point where I couldn't read my handwritten notes, so I decided to change my writing. I experimented a lot to see what made it most readable -- and, interestingly enough, I came to pretty much the same conclusions as in this story!
I found that while long ascenders and descenders (the tails on 'f's and 'g's, and the strokes on 'h's and 'p's) were fun to write and looked stylish, they actually added very little to the legibility, while taking up a lot of space. I also found that making the centre parts of letters bigger did help a lot -- even if it meant leaving smaller gaps between letters (to the point of collision in some cases).
One other discovery was that printing (writing each letter separately) was practically as fast as writing joined-up, and again, much more readable, especially at speed. (I really don't understand why joined-up writing is seen as more desirable or mature -- it's even a requirement for some school exams -- when it seems to have no practical benefit...)
Ever since then, my writing has been like that: printed, with large rounded centres to the letters and very minimal ascenders and descenders. I find it's just as fast as before, vastly more readable, and degrades much better when I'm in a hurry. And I still get compliments on my clear and distinctive writing.
you do just everything without needing to move your hands from the keyboard, and without needing to watch the screen.
Personally, I prefer an editor where I don't need to move my hands over the keyboard, and where I don't need to watch the keyboard.
It's a long while since I used Emacs, but the other poster's comments about continually having to jump to and from the Meta and Ctrl keys rings some uncomfortable bells. And the ability to code whilst looking at the screen, without needing to glance down to see where your fingers are, is a real time-saver.
Agreed. Part of the problem is that people don't decide on quality, they decide on features. They have a ticklist (physical or mental) of features they'd like, and they look for the cheapest model which is claimed to have those features -- regardless whether it implements them well, or even whether they're actually worthwhile.
We see this in the popularity of x86 chips with higher clock speeds, despite the dubious improvement in actual performance. We see it in the use of league tables and newspaper rankings for deciding schools for our children. We even saw it in Microsoft's rush to 'implement' the POSIX standard in Windows. (I gather that the implementation is pretty unusable, that performance is dire and that no-one would actually use it. However, it's a tick in a box that makes Windows available to certain government departments.)
Sony in particular seem to base most of their electronics on this, designing their products simply to hit certain feature points. If people really took into account quality, durability, reliability, ease of use, etc., then I suspect Sony Electronics wouldn't be as powerful as it is today.
(However, if I may sidetrack for a moment, lemming suicide is fiction, originating in a faked 1958 Disney documentary.)
I've never understood why percentages have become so popular, when plain simple ordinary fractions (rational or decimal) are much more powerful, precise, and don't have all these opportunities for confusion.
Only if he was referring to an ancient wheat-like grain...
(Yes, yes, I know that 'spelt' is also a valid past participle of the verb 'spell', but 'spelled' is equally valid, more regular, less ambiguous, and therefore much preferable.)
In both cases, you're releasing a different recording of an existing piece of music. So although you wouldn't come up against the copyright in the recording, distribution would contravene the copyright inherent in the music itself. So unless you have permission from the publishers (or the music is out of copyright), you're leaving yourself open to All Sorts Of Trouble.
To be honest I wouldn't care about DRM if there was a universal standard for everything. [...] Saying you want new music to always be backwards compatible [...]
It's not just about being backwards compatible; it's also about being forwards compatible. Here's a comment I posted in Another Place explaining why:
One of the common rationales for some forms of DRM is that they're 'reasonable': they let you do most of the things you'd want to. But IMO that's just an illusion: no form of DRM is reasonable, and no form can ever be completely reasonable.
And yes, I do have a rational reason for thinking that, even though at present it seems to be an extreme position: the 'default' access to any copy-protected material will always be to prevent copying. And ultimately, it's that 'default' access which matters.
There are lots of ways you could try to access DRM-protected material: you could present it in a variety of applications on your desktop computer (media players, book readers, or whatever depending on the type of material); you could copy it to another machine; you could copy it to a handheld machine and try to present it there; you could convert it to a different format; and so on. And these access methods will always increase: people will always be coming up with new applications, devices, formats, ways of accessing the material. Therefore, any DRM scheme must not only address the current access methods, but also future ones too. So there are basically two possible types of DRM: those which allow access in specific ways and prevent everything else (the no-access default), and those which prevent access in specific ways and allow everything else (the full-access default).
Now, that second type is in practice unworkable, because it would then be possible to come up with a new access method, and use that to convert the material into another DRM-free form, effectively removing the DRM and rendering it useless. So, any practical DRM scheme must prevent all access other than that it specifically allows.
And that's what makes DRM so harmful. It's future-unproofed, blocking any cool new technologies which come along. It's inaccessible, blocking many (or all) existing technologies used by people with disabilities. It relies upon the company providing the right software and/or access codes. It's non-portable, blocking most other hardware platforms, operating systems, or devices. And it always will be so, because that's the nature of DRM: to block 'everything else'.
Take, for example, a form of DRM that's actually fairly reasonable and non-restrictive: Apple's FairPlay system, which is used for tracks bought from the iTunes Music Store. It lets you authorise up to 5 computers to play those tracks, along with all iPods synced to them. You can even burn copies to CD. Sounds pretty fair.
But it still has a no-access default (while it's working as designed, anyway). You can't use any other software to edit the tags. You can't split or join tracks. You can't play them on any other MP3 (or AAC) player. You can't convert them to lower-bitrate versions. You can't convert them to whatever cool new format comes along and offers the same sound quality at a fraction of the filesize. You can't do anything other than the few things they specifically allow, even though those other things might be completely legal and moral for you to do, or might become so at some point in the future!
This is why I think there can never be a completely 'reasonable' form of DRM. There will always be new forms of access that the creators didn't think of. And DRM will always block them. And we will all suffer. Sooner or later, people will learn this. I hope it's sooner.
Not sure about that. Sounds a bit like wishful thinking to me. For example:
What if the people who wouldn't have bought OS X make it easy to pirate even for the people who would?
What if Apple are counting on this protection method for different things in future? (DRM protection of music is an obvious example, but there could be many others which seem silly now but could become very important in future.)
What if Apple turning a blind eye to some forms of piracy now opens them up to legal problems if they try to protect themselves against other forms in future? (Or even if they suspect that's possible.)
In short, you can't assume that lack of direct monetary loss will cause them to ignore piracy. DRM is never about money alone; it's always about control.
Just like the design of 32nd, 16th, 8th, 1/4, 1/2, and whole notes... makes sense to musicians.
Not to this one, it doesn't. Maybe that's coz I'm not from the US, though. I'd've understood if you'd said 'demisemiquavers, semiquavers, quavers, crotchets, minims, and semibreves', though; would that have made sense to you?
It's not that people can't learn new stuff, it's that they don't see the need to.
If enough people felt a real need to move away from Windows, they would; but time and again I hear from people who don't know of any major benefits to switch, and so don't bother. That's not laziness; that's intelligent use of time.
Give people a compelling WHY on switching, and the HOW will take care of itself. (Over time.) But while Windows is 'good enough', that won't happen.
No no no, you misunderstand; it couldn't get any worse. We started off at violeticulous, then as it got sillier it passed blueiculous and reached greeniculous; but it didn't stop there, and got more and more stupid, going through yellowiculous and orangeiculous and reaching the final red-hot state of ultimate absurdity.
Press the Snooze button once, you get the usual delay of 10 minutes. Press it again, and the delay goes up to 20 minutes. And so on. No extra buttons, doesn't break any existing UI, and the extra logic should be pretty trivial. If you want to be flash, have it wrap around after an hour or whatever.
After all, 10 minutes isn't a snooze -- 10 minutes gives you just enough time to fall asleep before jolting you awake again! A snooze is half an hour or so.
The name of the game actually STOPPED me from figuring it out: I was getting all bound up in Fibonacci numbers (which govern the number of petals you get round flowers and similar features, e.g. the number of spirals on pineapples and the seed in sunflowers). I couldn't work out how on earth you'd get multiples of two out of it.
Then, when I saw hints that the name was important, I started measuring the petals on the picture of a rose on the site, and then tried using the numbers to count out the letters in the name...
I've spent nearly an hour going through umpteen possibilities, looking at sums and products, permutations, cycles, even comparing the colour and orientation of the die images... Eventually I gave up and read this thread. Can I just express my frustration with having WASTED NEARLY AN HOUR OF MY LIFE ON THIS STUPID *$£%@# PUZZLE!!! Thank you. I feel better now.
Which I guess shows that us smart folk do indeed have more trouble with it...
> Second, the background is the darker colour, which reduces the total amount of light your eyes have to deal with, which, over the course of a few hours, significantly reduces eyestrain. <
I find the reverse (ha!) is true for me. I've spend a long time looking at white/yellow/amber/etc. text on a black background, and I always find that harder on my eyes. Maybe it's because your eyes focus on the background, and black is hard to focus on, or the darkness causes your iris to dilate too far to focus properly, or something. Whatever the reason, I find dark text on a light background easier; black on white is fine, as long as the brightness isn't turned up too far. People seem perfectly happy to read stuff on paper using black on white, after all, so it ought to work reasonably well on screen too.
But then, my preferences are often a bit unusual. I actually prefer anti-aliased text; I find sans-serif fonts easier to read, even (especially) for body text; and I prefer proportional fonts even for source code. All of these seem to go against the grain around here, but none are on principle or being awkward -- I do find text easier to read that way.
I guess the lesson here is that People Are Different. There's too much of the I-am-the-world argument used in amateur UI design (and elsewhere).
Still, I fully agree with your final point that too much visual excitement is painful. Subtlety and elegance are the things to aim for!
Music is fairly international these days; everyone gets quite a lot of US music, you get quite a lot of UK music, and we all get bits and pieces from elsewhere. And yet it still took over a year for the iTunes Music Store to make it over here.
TV is much more national. For example, I haven't even heard of most of the programmes that are being offered on the iPod, let alone have any desire to see them. (The last US programme I watched at all regularly was, erm, ST:TNG...)
Any ideas how long it'll be before we'll be able to see UK TV programmes featured?
Is it me, or is the political system in the US basically a form of legalised corruption?
Political adverts all over TV, billboards, etc; corporations buying their own politicians; elections being won by the PR machines; legislation going to the highest bidder... I'm not saying the system here in the UK is wonderful, but at least those things aren't big problems here.
Slashdot Mirror
I found that while long ascenders and descenders (the tails on 'f's and 'g's, and the strokes on 'h's and 'p's) were fun to write and looked stylish, they actually added very little to the legibility, while taking up a lot of space. I also found that making the centre parts of letters bigger did help a lot -- even if it meant leaving smaller gaps between letters (to the point of collision in some cases).
One other discovery was that printing (writing each letter separately) was practically as fast as writing joined-up, and again, much more readable, especially at speed. (I really don't understand why joined-up writing is seen as more desirable or mature -- it's even a requirement for some school exams -- when it seems to have no practical benefit...)
Ever since then, my writing has been like that: printed, with large rounded centres to the letters and very minimal ascenders and descenders. I find it's just as fast as before, vastly more readable, and degrades much better when I'm in a hurry. And I still get compliments on my clear and distinctive writing.
Personally, I prefer an editor where I don't need to move my hands over the keyboard, and where I don't need to watch the keyboard.
It's a long while since I used Emacs, but the other poster's comments about continually having to jump to and from the Meta and Ctrl keys rings some uncomfortable bells. And the ability to code whilst looking at the screen, without needing to glance down to see where your fingers are, is a real time-saver.
We see this in the popularity of x86 chips with higher clock speeds, despite the dubious improvement in actual performance. We see it in the use of league tables and newspaper rankings for deciding schools for our children. We even saw it in Microsoft's rush to 'implement' the POSIX standard in Windows. (I gather that the implementation is pretty unusable, that performance is dire and that no-one would actually use it. However, it's a tick in a box that makes Windows available to certain government departments.)
Sony in particular seem to base most of their electronics on this, designing their products simply to hit certain feature points. If people really took into account quality, durability, reliability, ease of use, etc., then I suspect Sony Electronics wouldn't be as powerful as it is today.
(However, if I may sidetrack for a moment, lemming suicide is fiction, originating in a faked 1958 Disney documentary.)
That's why you call the red end of your compass needle the north-seeking end. It's a magnetic south pole, and seeks the earth's magnetic north pole.
(Yes, yes, I know that 'spelt' is also a valid past participle of the verb 'spell', but 'spelled' is equally valid, more regular, less ambiguous, and therefore much preferable.)
In my case, it's been OmniWeb, Safari, and Firefox, but all have pop-up blocking, and apparently it's been working!
In both cases, you're releasing a different recording of an existing piece of music. So although you wouldn't come up against the copyright in the recording, distribution would contravene the copyright inherent in the music itself. So unless you have permission from the publishers (or the music is out of copyright), you're leaving yourself open to All Sorts Of Trouble.
Just like any other cover version.
It's not just about being backwards compatible; it's also about being forwards compatible. Here's a comment I posted in Another Place explaining why:
One of the common rationales for some forms of DRM is that they're 'reasonable': they let you do most of the things you'd want to. But IMO that's just an illusion: no form of DRM is reasonable, and no form can ever be completely reasonable.
And yes, I do have a rational reason for thinking that, even though at present it seems to be an extreme position: the 'default' access to any copy-protected material will always be to prevent copying. And ultimately, it's that 'default' access which matters.
There are lots of ways you could try to access DRM-protected material: you could present it in a variety of applications on your desktop computer (media players, book readers, or whatever depending on the type of material); you could copy it to another machine; you could copy it to a handheld machine and try to present it there; you could convert it to a different format; and so on. And these access methods will always increase: people will always be coming up with new applications, devices, formats, ways of accessing the material. Therefore, any DRM scheme must not only address the current access methods, but also future ones too. So there are basically two possible types of DRM: those which allow access in specific ways and prevent everything else (the no-access default), and those which prevent access in specific ways and allow everything else (the full-access default).
Now, that second type is in practice unworkable, because it would then be possible to come up with a new access method, and use that to convert the material into another DRM-free form, effectively removing the DRM and rendering it useless. So, any practical DRM scheme must prevent all access other than that it specifically allows.
And that's what makes DRM so harmful. It's future-unproofed, blocking any cool new technologies which come along. It's inaccessible, blocking many (or all) existing technologies used by people with disabilities. It relies upon the company providing the right software and/or access codes. It's non-portable, blocking most other hardware platforms, operating systems, or devices. And it always will be so, because that's the nature of DRM: to block 'everything else'.
Take, for example, a form of DRM that's actually fairly reasonable and non-restrictive: Apple's FairPlay system, which is used for tracks bought from the iTunes Music Store. It lets you authorise up to 5 computers to play those tracks, along with all iPods synced to them. You can even burn copies to CD. Sounds pretty fair.
But it still has a no-access default (while it's working as designed, anyway). You can't use any other software to edit the tags. You can't split or join tracks. You can't play them on any other MP3 (or AAC) player. You can't convert them to lower-bitrate versions. You can't convert them to whatever cool new format comes along and offers the same sound quality at a fraction of the filesize. You can't do anything other than the few things they specifically allow, even though those other things might be completely legal and moral for you to do, or might become so at some point in the future!
This is why I think there can never be a completely 'reasonable' form of DRM. There will always be new forms of access that the creators didn't think of. And DRM will always block them. And we will all suffer. Sooner or later, people will learn this. I hope it's sooner.
What if the people who wouldn't have bought OS X make it easy to pirate even for the people who would?
What if Apple are counting on this protection method for different things in future? (DRM protection of music is an obvious example, but there could be many others which seem silly now but could become very important in future.)
What if Apple turning a blind eye to some forms of piracy now opens them up to legal problems if they try to protect themselves against other forms in future? (Or even if they suspect that's possible.)
In short, you can't assume that lack of direct monetary loss will cause them to ignore piracy. DRM is never about money alone; it's always about control.
Not to this one, it doesn't. Maybe that's coz I'm not from the US, though. I'd've understood if you'd said 'demisemiquavers, semiquavers, quavers, crotchets, minims, and semibreves', though; would that have made sense to you?
If enough people felt a real need to move away from Windows, they would; but time and again I hear from people who don't know of any major benefits to switch, and so don't bother. That's not laziness; that's intelligent use of time.
Give people a compelling WHY on switching, and the HOW will take care of itself. (Over time.) But while Windows is 'good enough', that won't happen.
Press the Snooze button once, you get the usual delay of 10 minutes. Press it again, and the delay goes up to 20 minutes. And so on. No extra buttons, doesn't break any existing UI, and the extra logic should be pretty trivial. If you want to be flash, have it wrap around after an hour or whatever.
After all, 10 minutes isn't a snooze -- 10 minutes gives you just enough time to fall asleep before jolting you awake again! A snooze is half an hour or so.
Then, when I saw hints that the name was important, I started measuring the petals on the picture of a rose on the site, and then tried using the numbers to count out the letters in the name...
I've spent nearly an hour going through umpteen possibilities, looking at sums and products, permutations, cycles, even comparing the colour and orientation of the die images... Eventually I gave up and read this thread. Can I just express my frustration with having WASTED NEARLY AN HOUR OF MY LIFE ON THIS STUPID *$£%@# PUZZLE!!! Thank you. I feel better now.
Which I guess shows that us smart folk do indeed have more trouble with it...
7) Get posted on /. every other day.
8) Stir up lots of interest from folk who don't understand RDBMSs and don't realise how much better stuff like Postgres is.
9) Profit!
Seriously, we've had almost as many MySQL stories recently as Google stories...
I find the reverse (ha!) is true for me. I've spend a long time looking at white/yellow/amber/etc. text on a black background, and I always find that harder on my eyes. Maybe it's because your eyes focus on the background, and black is hard to focus on, or the darkness causes your iris to dilate too far to focus properly, or something. Whatever the reason, I find dark text on a light background easier; black on white is fine, as long as the brightness isn't turned up too far. People seem perfectly happy to read stuff on paper using black on white, after all, so it ought to work reasonably well on screen too.
But then, my preferences are often a bit unusual. I actually prefer anti-aliased text; I find sans-serif fonts easier to read, even (especially) for body text; and I prefer proportional fonts even for source code. All of these seem to go against the grain around here, but none are on principle or being awkward -- I do find text easier to read that way.
I guess the lesson here is that People Are Different. There's too much of the I-am-the-world argument used in amateur UI design (and elsewhere).
Still, I fully agree with your final point that too much visual excitement is painful. Subtlety and elegance are the things to aim for!
TV is much more national. For example, I haven't even heard of most of the programmes that are being offered on the iPod, let alone have any desire to see them. (The last US programme I watched at all regularly was, erm, ST:TNG...)
Any ideas how long it'll be before we'll be able to see UK TV programmes featured?
Political adverts all over TV, billboards, etc; corporations buying their own politicians; elections being won by the PR machines; legislation going to the highest bidder... I'm not saying the system here in the UK is wonderful, but at least those things aren't big problems here.
Why they should want to be associated with that, I'm not certain...