When will someone come out with a Tablet that is a tablet.... you know, something I can jot down notes on, check a few references with and get a signature on a form when it's needed.
I don't want a subnotebook with a touch sensitive screen, integrated keyboard, 5 different input ports, Bose quality speakers and a DVD player.... it's a tablet, if I wanted all that I would get a subnotebook.
Give me a good touch sensitive screen, about 9 x 12 with a handle and a stylus and no more than 1/4 in. 'frame' so the whole thing should be 12 x 12. Let the orientation be switchable, from landscape to portrait and 180 degrees for lefties....
Provide a virtual keyboard for when I do need to type something.... use it in the portrait oriantation with the keyboard at bottom. Most of all though, give me good handwriting recognition and I'll use that instead.... cause I shouldn't be doing any real typing on a TABLET.
I should be taking notes about what I will type when I get back to my office where there's a desk, large screen and full size keyboard waiting for me!
So give me some speech to text ability as well, since that would make even more sense than writing notes... with a bluetooth headphone/mic.
Anyways, all of these multi-purpose all in one PCs that happen to be in a Tablet form factor just plain suck, mostly because they aren't really filling a niche... there almost filling the same niche as a laptop but failing to do so.. and they are integrating the same problematic limitations while they fail to provide any additional usefulness or convenience.
Just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean it is wise to do so.
Next time you feel the need to create a Frankenstein document, think about alternatives to MS Word.... think about an actual workflow process that won't crash every other machine that uses it (we don't know how your system is able to process such insanity but none of the other PCs in the office will run this damn piece of crap MS Word version of an application that should have been written as a real executable by our IT staff, thanks Bob in Management...), and for God's sake, THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!!!!
Just say no to MS Word Macros....
Brought to you by the Council on Macro Abuse Syndrome
Just put it down as a hobby deduction.... perfectly acceptable and doesn't require a business license, though I'm not sure what if any cap there is on revenue to qualify... just know that if you make potter for fun and someone buys a few for a couple hundred bucks, you can write off that amount of your materials as a deduction. So you could conceivably make a profit, break even but could never take a loss, which is to prevent people from writing off a boat for instance when they only got paid $200 for a day trip on the lake.
I'll go one further... within 5 years, large offices will have moved to terminals again maybe running an OS like WinCE or maybe Linux but they won't be running Vista or it's progeny.
Small offices on the other hand may end up running Macs as well, since an Intel Mac Mini is going to come down in price and the cost of upgrading to Vista is going to be too much while the cost of not changing from their current systems is still going to be too much in terms of security/lost productivity.
Interesting that they are saying PC not Windows;-p Apple may be bold but apparently not willing to spell it out. OTOH most consumers associate PC with Windows, so it still gets the message across... but unfortunately is also maligning the rest of the former X86 club (former since now Apple is part of it too...).
Yeah, I'm just assuming that they figure people who know the difference will 'know the difference' and read between the lines.
I foresee some petty flame wars happening in tech rags though..
Depends... I'd imagine there are a lot of college kids who think picking "Dead Or Alive Trailer Real Hi" is pretty damn funny, well after they've taken their morning bong hit that is....;-p
As a part time graphics guy, this feature would make life much better.... I periodically have to save very large files after having made the smallest of changes... a typo for example... and yet saving the document takes as long as if I had made a full copy of the file.
I would love for the FS to do snapshot saves with incrementals and checkpoints and rollback, instead of having each application do it. This provides unlimited undos potential with actual stored versions... a true 'history' of the file, available for review.
Implementing this functionality at a FS level will make it practical whereas now you have to rely on a program like Photoshop to create a 'scratch disk' that takes up huge amounts of RAM and physical space, making for an overall unwieldy document memory footprint the application has to traverse and manipulate as you make changes.
If they do this and can provide Application level hooks that are easy to implement, it will put OS X back on top for large file manipulation application developers like Adobe... simply because the performance benefits will showcase their applications so much better than the alternatives.
Re:I've personally been attacked by a rabid bat..
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Blaming The Bats
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· Score: 1
Please, you flipped it off and it didn't come at you tooth and wing-claw... either it wasn't rabid or you have a really sissy looking middle finger pose... I mean if I was rabid and you flipped me off I'd totally just get more pissed off. Having to deal with rabies is bad enough but getting grief for it from random people walking by is sooooo degrading.
You'd never flip off someone cause they had cancer, hypocrite.
I for one would love to see a sample of transcripts from the phone calls being intercepted... change the names to protect the naturally innocent until proven guilty but leave in the rest.
Would be very interesting to see what sort of communication between US citizens/residents and foreign correspondent merits the attention of the US government.
Is it merely the topics of conversation? "So did you watch Fox News on Satellite yesterday, when they talked about Moussaoui's case.... what did you think?"
or would there have to be actionable statements in there somewhere? "So what are you doing over there to make the US case against Moussaoui look as weak and prejudice as possible?"
or just a name... "Is cousin Zacarias out of the hospital yet... can't believe people in the US would throw rocks at him just cause he's got the name of that idiot, Moussaoui."
hmmmm this sounds like a simplistic version of what would actually have to happen.... meaning that there have been no reports of a man in the middle phishing website that could replicate this functionality with the picture.... it would have to scrape the page for the image, defeating any session security they have in place to avoid this type of thing without alerting the user.... not saying it can't be done, just seems like you haven't described a plausible version that would work... just a generalized statement that implies it would work.
Surely man-in-the-middle is the standard for phishing that works as opposed to a non-functional site that just tries to capture your data before you realize you're on some hacked together two layer deep scam site.
If I were the bank I'd only be allowing a login/password combo to authenticate during one session at a time with a session salted by the IP address that started it, thereby removing the illusion of continuity and revealing to the user that they'd been phished. This wouldn't solve the problem but they would at least be aware of the problem and then do something about it, like change their password or retire their current CC number for a new one.
As for the phone... are you saying they'd set up an audio recorder grabber on both ends and patch them together, while sending the correct tones to emulate button pushing and simply keep the recorded info for later use?
A simple solution for this would be for the banks to require that you call from your listed home phone number or from a list of authenticated phone numbers you have provided. They already do this for activating credit cards.... not a big stretch, especially in this day of cell phones where almost no one has to use a pay phone or hotel phone to do a quick bank call.
hmmm sounds similar to the solution for the web problem, except better because your info is never exposed to begin with, you'd just get a recording that says, "Sorry this service is only available from your preferred list of phone numbers, please perss 0 to get an operator" who would be trained to look at the incoming number and then verify it with the caller, who'd say WHAT???? that's not my number... at which point a big investigation would begin.
Use a previously scammed credit card to set up a free to call in phone system, which you can get through several service companies to create surveys, etc. this would clear you of any connection with the number itself and stop any backtracking investigation....
Use a cash prepaid temporary cellphone to call in to retrieve said info, probably by having it email the data to an anonymous hotmail account or some such... use a zombie PC to download/access said account, store on USB drive.... voila.
Completely anonymous collection process, with the only backtrack leading to a victim's credit card account and a IP trail leading to a throw away Zombie PC located in another country altogether.
Re:For this level of effort...
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Phishers Get Phoney
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· Score: 2, Interesting
hmmm well they can spend a couple grand setting it up, spend some time on it to get it right, then wait for a few good hits to come in... jackpot, several grand per hit... 3-30 times their investment or more, much better return than investing or gainful employment, plus they're probably doing this on multiple platforms/scams so multiply the return and you've got some pretty nice salaries coming in, all tax-free. Add to this that they are most likely living somewhere where cost of living is relatively low while quality of life is high... Caymans, Virgin Islands, or the like, hell could be living in Senegal or some other nice to wealthy people African nation, where you can live a high life for a few grand a month (which is like spending 10 or 12 grand a month in the US easily)...
Sounds like the banks need to add a security filter to their automated phone systems similarly to what they've begun doing on their websites... like Bank of America for instance now has a picture display above the password input, a picture that you pick out from a selection of pictures, which is pulled from a database and has a unique id. If the pic shown on the password input page is not the one you've selected, then you know you're on a phishing site.
For automated phone systems, there could be a word or phrase that you pick from a selection of phrases... when you use the system and put in your account number, it will ask you to confirm the following phrase is the one you selected, will repeat the phrase, you press a button to confirm, then if confirmed you put in your pin number.
Oh you can be sure that ID cards will end up being used online.... much like SS numbers in the US and even more to the point, they will end up being your login credentials for many services... ie: your ID number as unique ID, and a PIN or password, maybe with a captcha or picture pick for added security and robot filter....
SO yes, this is a YRO article, though it may not be applicable everywhere all at once.
I always think about solar power while on the freeway... here in CA it's the 405 and the 5 freeways that do it for me... 12 car lanes of completely open space traveling hundreds of miles up and down the state, with a lot of already built infrastructure, ie: wiring, conduits, maintenance terminals, etc.
Covering over the freeways with a half tube grid of cheap material... put up solar cells in grid cells where they make the most sense, let light, air and weather filter through the rest... feed it into the local grid, voila.... a huge huge solar cell array, located in the one place where it can't do anything but improve the aesthetics.
Use the cheapest stuff you can get and upgrade as those become more efficient over time...
Huh, that would include every nation I've ever heard of....
I'm just listing the most grievous examples:
Brittain - India Belgium - The Congo Portugal - Brazil Spain - Mexico/Central America Russia - well Russia China - Tibet Greece - Turkey Turkey - Greece Egypt - Israel Israel - Egypt Italy - well Italy
the list goes on and on and on.... there are no innocent peoples in the world, just more recently heinous ones
The post I made was in context to the Article which talks about allowing images to be defined as scalable with the text.
Many comments were denouncing this capability as something that should be left up to the browser to do or the OS to do.
Yet without some way to specify images which can be scaled, in a way that doesn't degrade their quality, ie: SVG or PNGs with multiple resolutions, or simply a CSS declaration that provides for two or more images with differing quality... then the user experience is going to degrade as well... like when a person prints a web page to a high resolution printer... you get 72 dpi images, grainy, chunky, jpeg artifacts all over, etc.
What the article is saying and what I am inferring, is that with this new facility both problems can be solved.. that of providing a user with larger text and maintaining the proportions of the design by additionally scaling the images, without losing fidelity.
Companies have more than just the direct consumer to address... they have investors, site reviewers, partners, etc. whom will not accept a lower level of design and probably will never even use the site themselves.... they care about image and brand awareness.
Often a commerce store will take 85% of it's orders over the phone regardless of the usability of it's online store.... simply because people want to ask a question about a product that is not available online or even on product packaging in a offline store... customer service. They won't make that phone call if it looks like the company doesn't care, ie they've put up a site which looks thrown together even if it is very usable.
In any case, this type of web innovation can only benefit everyone.... would you really prefer that we web designers/developers go back to html 3, using CGI and perl for everything? That a store front be a list of products with prices and a buy button? Hmmm maybe you would, good luck with that... why not simply order from a price list over the phone.
If the photograph next to the text could scale as well, in proportion to the text... that is the idea... you know, so the person who needs to scale the text can also see the detail in the photo, or read the text labels in the illustration that simply isn't possible to do in html.... that is the idea.
I didn't say that a fixed proportion/size design was the ideal end result did I?
If that's what you read then read it again. I said that fixed proportions are often essential for communicating a message which combines graphic and textual elements and that designers will prefer using pixel sizes on the web until an alternative method is adopted.. one which allows both graphic and textual elements to scale proportionally together. The current alternative is to make the text part of the graphic... which is an option at times but not one that is preferred over using real text if at all possible.
Ask someone who is forced to read a website at 200% type size while the rest of the layout stays the same.... certainly they appreciate the fact that they can at least read the text but they will tell you that it would be better if they could also make out the details in the photograph or illustration which accompanies the text and is referenced by the text. Additionally they would prefer to have an experience which closely resembles that which other people get, not some compromise of usability versus design.
Websites aren't meant to be compatible with a small screen.... instead I would use an RSS feed or completely different set of content more suitable and more useful to that viewer segment.
I certainly don't have to cater to every whim of the end-user.... you want to look at Flickr on Lynx... sorry, that's just dumb, so I wouldn't provide a facility that would give you a bad experience and would rather tell you to use an appropriate device for viewing the content. Likewise if you'd like to drive your car into a lake and expect it to float, your car manufacturer will tell you to buy a boat instead.. your experience will be much better even though driving into the lake is 'supported' by your vehicle.
Actually I am a very good web designer. I design web sites which pass XHTML Strict DTD specs while accomplishing business goals for commerce, marketing, brand awareness and communication - both narrative as well as visual. I design with multiple stylesheets to provide optimal layouts for screen media, small-screen media, print, voice (screen readers) as well as alternate stylesheets within screen media.
I use flash where rich interactive media will do the best job and utilize best practices to provide alternate content for those who prefer not to view flash content...
I use javascript and ajax type dhtml where a benefit to the end-user can be had with asychronous feedback and implement server side versions of the same tools for those who choose not to allow javascript or whose browser is not supported.
I design sites using an information architecture both to improve maintainability of the codebase as well as to enforce a consistent user experience throughout the website.
What I don't do is allow the limitations of the technology to box me into to designing web sites which don't achieve the goals of my clients.
A lot of/. seems to look at this issue as a technology or even a web technology issue.... but from a designer's POV it's always been a communication arts issue having to do with compositional layout, not html layout.
What this means is that we designers are very concerned about proportions and the size/scale relationship between type on the page and graphics on the page.
Given this statement, the existing option of using relative sized type that will scale relative to other type on the page and maintain that relationship... is only half of the equation.... the compositional layout still ends up broken, ie: the important graphic on the page no longer has the hierarchical and visual importance it was supposed to have in the design because all the text on the page is suddenly 2X bigger and the visual combination of text and graphic no longer communicates the message effectively and has become a cramped, chunky, messy version of what it was intended to be.
This explanation is why a designer may choose to use pixel sizes for a particular layout instead of using relative sizes.
Additionally, a designer would modify a compositional layout of the same content, given the option, if there are two or more set dimensional targets... simply because each dimensional size may have a optimal layout to best communicate the message, ie: a landscape design compared to a portrait design or better yet a letter page sized design compared to a magazine page design.... and this is due to the fact that there is more space available and a different balance of space and content is required, which means different margins, different graphic sizes, etc, etc... but not simply a scaled up version.
An analogy for the uber geek would be to think in terms of physics and nature.... the bumblebee, we all know that the bumblebee at any other scale would not be able to fly with it's current proportions of wing/body/mass... basically a given design won't always continue to work if you simply scale it up proportionally.
To sum up, any tools that will allow us to more effectively do our job of communicating will get our support. This doesn't mean the tools won't be abused by some, in fact some designers will take it as a challenge to abuse the tool to the extreme and will simply call this 'cutting edge' design, even though the more experienced designers will look at it and call it 'cutting room floor' design.
So flame on about standards and liquid designs, just know that until the standards and technology accomodate good visual design practice and methodology (which has been around a lot longer and has a much more mature heritage, more research done and more results in real use) then designers will continue to ignore them when they get in the way.
It's true.... in the real world we can rotate around an object by twisting our body... with a great number of axes... our ankles, knees, hips, waist, neck and eyes... in addition we can adjust our position relative to the object AND move our arms/hands asynchronously to manipulate objects while we twist and adjust.
This sort of relationship to virtual objects just isn't possible with a single input device... even multiple input devices would have difficulty, though a better experience would be had through a game controller which is designed for just such interactivity, just as you suggest.
So... the best we can probably do is to replace our mouse with a two handed game controller that has toggle sticks for our thumbs and action buttons for our fingers... then add in a keyboard somewhere....
A description of such a device.. one of those ergonomic keyboards where the hands are positioned at a 60 degree angle to the surface of your desk.... then instead of a space bar for the thumbs, have two trackballs or joysticks placed in the middle as a mouse replacement... but talk about gamers thumb...
To compensate for this an eye movement tracking camera could come in really handy in a 3D interface.... to move the pointer to whatever object your looking at and highlight it, you can then press a button to select it at which point the camera would re-center on the new object, whether it was right in front of you or off in the distant landscape to the left somewhere. This would replace the mouse almost completely... leaving the joysticks for direct manipulation of an object rather than as a selecting tool.
Just some thoughts on input methods that would be better than a keyboard + mouse/trackpad for 3D interfaces on a 2D screen.
Why do hard drives only have one read/write head per platter? Is it an interference problem, since they are magnetic? Is it a synchronization issue? Materials? Manufacturing?
Why can't a drive have say 4 heads.... positioned equidistant around the platter, each reading a writing to all sectors asynchronously...
or how about having a bridge of multiple heads (10?) positioned across one full radius of the platter, ie: from outermost edge to the center... where each head can read a selection of sectors, either via positional adjustment laterally or directional adjustment via pitch to focus on a sector
in any case, why is it that hard drive design has never really changed in the last 20 years? Sure materials have improved and sensitivity and accuracy of movement... but no new methodology for reading/writing more efficiently?
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When will someone come out with a Tablet that is a tablet.... you know, something I can jot down notes on, check a few references with and get a signature on a form when it's needed.
I don't want a subnotebook with a touch sensitive screen, integrated keyboard, 5 different input ports, Bose quality speakers and a DVD player.... it's a tablet, if I wanted all that I would get a subnotebook.
Give me a good touch sensitive screen, about 9 x 12 with a handle and a stylus and no more than 1/4 in. 'frame' so the whole thing should be 12 x 12. Let the orientation be switchable, from landscape to portrait and 180 degrees for lefties....
Provide a virtual keyboard for when I do need to type something.... use it in the portrait oriantation with the keyboard at bottom. Most of all though, give me good handwriting recognition and I'll use that instead.... cause I shouldn't be doing any real typing on a TABLET.
I should be taking notes about what I will type when I get back to my office where there's a desk, large screen and full size keyboard waiting for me!
So give me some speech to text ability as well, since that would make even more sense than writing notes... with a bluetooth headphone/mic.
Anyways, all of these multi-purpose all in one PCs that happen to be in a Tablet form factor just plain suck, mostly because they aren't really filling a niche... there almost filling the same niche as a laptop but failing to do so.. and they are integrating the same problematic limitations while they fail to provide any additional usefulness or convenience.
Just because you *can* do something, doesn't mean it is wise to do so.
Next time you feel the need to create a Frankenstein document, think about alternatives to MS Word.... think about an actual workflow process that won't crash every other machine that uses it (we don't know how your system is able to process such insanity but none of the other PCs in the office will run this damn piece of crap MS Word version of an application that should have been written as a real executable by our IT staff, thanks Bob in Management...), and for God's sake, THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN!!!!
Just say no to MS Word Macros....
Brought to you by the Council on Macro Abuse Syndrome
Just put it down as a hobby deduction.... perfectly acceptable and doesn't require a business license, though I'm not sure what if any cap there is on revenue to qualify... just know that if you make potter for fun and someone buys a few for a couple hundred bucks, you can write off that amount of your materials as a deduction. So you could conceivably make a profit, break even but could never take a loss, which is to prevent people from writing off a boat for instance when they only got paid $200 for a day trip on the lake.
I'll second that prediction.
I'll go one further... within 5 years, large offices will have moved to terminals again maybe running an OS like WinCE or maybe Linux but they won't be running Vista or it's progeny.
Small offices on the other hand may end up running Macs as well, since an Intel Mac Mini is going to come down in price and the cost of upgrading to Vista is going to be too much while the cost of not changing from their current systems is still going to be too much in terms of security/lost productivity.
Interesting that they are saying PC not Windows ;-p Apple may be bold but apparently not willing to spell it out. OTOH most consumers associate PC with Windows, so it still gets the message across... but unfortunately is also maligning the rest of the former X86 club (former since now Apple is part of it too...).
Yeah, I'm just assuming that they figure people who know the difference will 'know the difference' and read between the lines.
I foresee some petty flame wars happening in tech rags though..
Depends... I'd imagine there are a lot of college kids who think picking "Dead Or Alive Trailer Real Hi" is pretty damn funny, well after they've taken their morning bong hit that is.... ;-p
As a part time graphics guy, this feature would make life much better.... I periodically have to save very large files after having made the smallest of changes... a typo for example... and yet saving the document takes as long as if I had made a full copy of the file.
I would love for the FS to do snapshot saves with incrementals and checkpoints and rollback, instead of having each application do it. This provides unlimited undos potential with actual stored versions... a true 'history' of the file, available for review.
Implementing this functionality at a FS level will make it practical whereas now you have to rely on a program like Photoshop to create a 'scratch disk' that takes up huge amounts of RAM and physical space, making for an overall unwieldy document memory footprint the application has to traverse and manipulate as you make changes.
If they do this and can provide Application level hooks that are easy to implement, it will put OS X back on top for large file manipulation application developers like Adobe... simply because the performance benefits will showcase their applications so much better than the alternatives.
Please, you flipped it off and it didn't come at you tooth and wing-claw... either it wasn't rabid or you have a really sissy looking middle finger pose... I mean if I was rabid and you flipped me off I'd totally just get more pissed off. Having to deal with rabies is bad enough but getting grief for it from random people walking by is sooooo degrading.
You'd never flip off someone cause they had cancer, hypocrite.
I for one would love to see a sample of transcripts from the phone calls being intercepted... change the names to protect the naturally innocent until proven guilty but leave in the rest.
Would be very interesting to see what sort of communication between US citizens/residents and foreign correspondent merits the attention of the US government.
Is it merely the topics of conversation? "So did you watch Fox News on Satellite yesterday, when they talked about Moussaoui's case.... what did you think?"
or would there have to be actionable statements in there somewhere? "So what are you doing over there to make the US case against Moussaoui look as weak and prejudice as possible?"
or just a name... "Is cousin Zacarias out of the hospital yet... can't believe people in the US would throw rocks at him just cause he's got the name of that idiot, Moussaoui."
hmmmm this sounds like a simplistic version of what would actually have to happen.... meaning that there have been no reports of a man in the middle phishing website that could replicate this functionality with the picture.... it would have to scrape the page for the image, defeating any session security they have in place to avoid this type of thing without alerting the user.... not saying it can't be done, just seems like you haven't described a plausible version that would work... just a generalized statement that implies it would work.
Surely man-in-the-middle is the standard for phishing that works as opposed to a non-functional site that just tries to capture your data before you realize you're on some hacked together two layer deep scam site.
If I were the bank I'd only be allowing a login/password combo to authenticate during one session at a time with a session salted by the IP address that started it, thereby removing the illusion of continuity and revealing to the user that they'd been phished. This wouldn't solve the problem but they would at least be aware of the problem and then do something about it, like change their password or retire their current CC number for a new one.
As for the phone... are you saying they'd set up an audio recorder grabber on both ends and patch them together, while sending the correct tones to emulate button pushing and simply keep the recorded info for later use?
A simple solution for this would be for the banks to require that you call from your listed home phone number or from a list of authenticated phone numbers you have provided. They already do this for activating credit cards.... not a big stretch, especially in this day of cell phones where almost no one has to use a pay phone or hotel phone to do a quick bank call.
hmmm sounds similar to the solution for the web problem, except better because your info is never exposed to begin with, you'd just get a recording that says, "Sorry this service is only available from your preferred list of phone numbers, please perss 0 to get an operator" who would be trained to look at the incoming number and then verify it with the caller, who'd say WHAT???? that's not my number... at which point a big investigation would begin.
Just thinking that a likely situation is this...
Use a previously scammed credit card to set up a free to call in phone system, which you can get through several service companies to create surveys, etc. this would clear you of any connection with the number itself and stop any backtracking investigation....
Use a cash prepaid temporary cellphone to call in to retrieve said info, probably by having it email the data to an anonymous hotmail account or some such... use a zombie PC to download/access said account, store on USB drive.... voila.
Completely anonymous collection process, with the only backtrack leading to a victim's credit card account and a IP trail leading to a throw away Zombie PC located in another country altogether.
hmmm well they can spend a couple grand setting it up, spend some time on it to get it right, then wait for a few good hits to come in... jackpot, several grand per hit... 3-30 times their investment or more, much better return than investing or gainful employment, plus they're probably doing this on multiple platforms/scams so multiply the return and you've got some pretty nice salaries coming in, all tax-free. Add to this that they are most likely living somewhere where cost of living is relatively low while quality of life is high... Caymans, Virgin Islands, or the like, hell could be living in Senegal or some other nice to wealthy people African nation, where you can live a high life for a few grand a month (which is like spending 10 or 12 grand a month in the US easily)...
Sounds like the banks need to add a security filter to their automated phone systems similarly to what they've begun doing on their websites... like Bank of America for instance now has a picture display above the password input, a picture that you pick out from a selection of pictures, which is pulled from a database and has a unique id. If the pic shown on the password input page is not the one you've selected, then you know you're on a phishing site.
For automated phone systems, there could be a word or phrase that you pick from a selection of phrases... when you use the system and put in your account number, it will ask you to confirm the following phrase is the one you selected, will repeat the phrase, you press a button to confirm, then if confirmed you put in your pin number.
No more phoney phishing
Oh you can be sure that ID cards will end up being used online.... much like SS numbers in the US and even more to the point, they will end up being your login credentials for many services... ie: your ID number as unique ID, and a PIN or password, maybe with a captcha or picture pick for added security and robot filter....
SO yes, this is a YRO article, though it may not be applicable everywhere all at once.
I always think about solar power while on the freeway... here in CA it's the 405 and the 5 freeways that do it for me... 12 car lanes of completely open space traveling hundreds of miles up and down the state, with a lot of already built infrastructure, ie: wiring, conduits, maintenance terminals, etc.
Covering over the freeways with a half tube grid of cheap material... put up solar cells in grid cells where they make the most sense, let light, air and weather filter through the rest... feed it into the local grid, voila.... a huge huge solar cell array, located in the one place where it can't do anything but improve the aesthetics.
Use the cheapest stuff you can get and upgrade as those become more efficient over time...
Huh, that would include every nation I've ever heard of....
I'm just listing the most grievous examples:
Brittain - India
Belgium - The Congo
Portugal - Brazil
Spain - Mexico/Central America
Russia - well Russia
China - Tibet
Greece - Turkey
Turkey - Greece
Egypt - Israel
Israel - Egypt
Italy - well Italy
the list goes on and on and on.... there are no innocent peoples in the world, just more recently heinous ones
uh which version of Safari are you using... mine doesn't render it as html... just plain text, I've got 2.0.3
If you like elf porn, you should really take a look at Bondage Fairies, one of my favorite humanoid bondage cartoon comedies....
The post I made was in context to the Article which talks about allowing images to be defined as scalable with the text.
Many comments were denouncing this capability as something that should be left up to the browser to do or the OS to do.
Yet without some way to specify images which can be scaled, in a way that doesn't degrade their quality, ie: SVG or PNGs with multiple resolutions, or simply a CSS declaration that provides for two or more images with differing quality... then the user experience is going to degrade as well... like when a person prints a web page to a high resolution printer... you get 72 dpi images, grainy, chunky, jpeg artifacts all over, etc.
What the article is saying and what I am inferring, is that with this new facility both problems can be solved.. that of providing a user with larger text and maintaining the proportions of the design by additionally scaling the images, without losing fidelity.
Companies have more than just the direct consumer to address... they have investors, site reviewers, partners, etc. whom will not accept a lower level of design and probably will never even use the site themselves.... they care about image and brand awareness.
Often a commerce store will take 85% of it's orders over the phone regardless of the usability of it's online store.... simply because people want to ask a question about a product that is not available online or even on product packaging in a offline store... customer service. They won't make that phone call if it looks like the company doesn't care, ie they've put up a site which looks thrown together even if it is very usable.
In any case, this type of web innovation can only benefit everyone.... would you really prefer that we web designers/developers go back to html 3, using CGI and perl for everything? That a store front be a list of products with prices and a buy button? Hmmm maybe you would, good luck with that... why not simply order from a price list over the phone.
If the photograph next to the text could scale as well, in proportion to the text... that is the idea... you know, so the person who needs to scale the text can also see the detail in the photo, or read the text labels in the illustration that simply isn't possible to do in html.... that is the idea.
I didn't say that a fixed proportion/size design was the ideal end result did I?
If that's what you read then read it again. I said that fixed proportions are often essential for communicating a message which combines graphic and textual elements and that designers will prefer using pixel sizes on the web until an alternative method is adopted.. one which allows both graphic and textual elements to scale proportionally together. The current alternative is to make the text part of the graphic... which is an option at times but not one that is preferred over using real text if at all possible.
Ask someone who is forced to read a website at 200% type size while the rest of the layout stays the same.... certainly they appreciate the fact that they can at least read the text but they will tell you that it would be better if they could also make out the details in the photograph or illustration which accompanies the text and is referenced by the text. Additionally they would prefer to have an experience which closely resembles that which other people get, not some compromise of usability versus design.
Websites aren't meant to be compatible with a small screen.... instead I would use an RSS feed or completely different set of content more suitable and more useful to that viewer segment.
I certainly don't have to cater to every whim of the end-user.... you want to look at Flickr on Lynx... sorry, that's just dumb, so I wouldn't provide a facility that would give you a bad experience and would rather tell you to use an appropriate device for viewing the content. Likewise if you'd like to drive your car into a lake and expect it to float, your car manufacturer will tell you to buy a boat instead.. your experience will be much better even though driving into the lake is 'supported' by your vehicle.
Actually I am a very good web designer. I design web sites which pass XHTML Strict DTD specs while accomplishing business goals for commerce, marketing, brand awareness and communication - both narrative as well as visual. I design with multiple stylesheets to provide optimal layouts for screen media, small-screen media, print, voice (screen readers) as well as alternate stylesheets within screen media.
I use flash where rich interactive media will do the best job and utilize best practices to provide alternate content for those who prefer not to view flash content...
I use javascript and ajax type dhtml where a benefit to the end-user can be had with asychronous feedback and implement server side versions of the same tools for those who choose not to allow javascript or whose browser is not supported.
I design sites using an information architecture both to improve maintainability of the codebase as well as to enforce a consistent user experience throughout the website.
What I don't do is allow the limitations of the technology to box me into to designing web sites which don't achieve the goals of my clients.
A lot of /. seems to look at this issue as a technology or even a web technology issue.... but from a designer's POV it's always been a communication arts issue having to do with compositional layout, not html layout.
What this means is that we designers are very concerned about proportions and the size/scale relationship between type on the page and graphics on the page.
Given this statement, the existing option of using relative sized type that will scale relative to other type on the page and maintain that relationship... is only half of the equation.... the compositional layout still ends up broken, ie: the important graphic on the page no longer has the hierarchical and visual importance it was supposed to have in the design because all the text on the page is suddenly 2X bigger and the visual combination of text and graphic no longer communicates the message effectively and has become a cramped, chunky, messy version of what it was intended to be.
This explanation is why a designer may choose to use pixel sizes for a particular layout instead of using relative sizes.
Additionally, a designer would modify a compositional layout of the same content, given the option, if there are two or more set dimensional targets... simply because each dimensional size may have a optimal layout to best communicate the message, ie: a landscape design compared to a portrait design or better yet a letter page sized design compared to a magazine page design.... and this is due to the fact that there is more space available and a different balance of space and content is required, which means different margins, different graphic sizes, etc, etc... but not simply a scaled up version.
An analogy for the uber geek would be to think in terms of physics and nature.... the bumblebee, we all know that the bumblebee at any other scale would not be able to fly with it's current proportions of wing/body/mass... basically a given design won't always continue to work if you simply scale it up proportionally.
To sum up, any tools that will allow us to more effectively do our job of communicating will get our support. This doesn't mean the tools won't be abused by some, in fact some designers will take it as a challenge to abuse the tool to the extreme and will simply call this 'cutting edge' design, even though the more experienced designers will look at it and call it 'cutting room floor' design.
So flame on about standards and liquid designs, just know that until the standards and technology accomodate good visual design practice and methodology (which has been around a lot longer and has a much more mature heritage, more research done and more results in real use) then designers will continue to ignore them when they get in the way.
It's true.... in the real world we can rotate around an object by twisting our body... with a great number of axes... our ankles, knees, hips, waist, neck and eyes... in addition we can adjust our position relative to the object AND move our arms/hands asynchronously to manipulate objects while we twist and adjust.
This sort of relationship to virtual objects just isn't possible with a single input device... even multiple input devices would have difficulty, though a better experience would be had through a game controller which is designed for just such interactivity, just as you suggest.
So... the best we can probably do is to replace our mouse with a two handed game controller that has toggle sticks for our thumbs and action buttons for our fingers... then add in a keyboard somewhere....
A description of such a device.. one of those ergonomic keyboards where the hands are positioned at a 60 degree angle to the surface of your desk.... then instead of a space bar for the thumbs, have two trackballs or joysticks placed in the middle as a mouse replacement... but talk about gamers thumb...
To compensate for this an eye movement tracking camera could come in really handy in a 3D interface.... to move the pointer to whatever object your looking at and highlight it, you can then press a button to select it at which point the camera would re-center on the new object, whether it was right in front of you or off in the distant landscape to the left somewhere. This would replace the mouse almost completely... leaving the joysticks for direct manipulation of an object rather than as a selecting tool.
Just some thoughts on input methods that would be better than a keyboard + mouse/trackpad for 3D interfaces on a 2D screen.
you might know the answer to this:
Why do hard drives only have one read/write head per platter? Is it an interference problem, since they are magnetic? Is it a synchronization issue? Materials? Manufacturing?
Why can't a drive have say 4 heads.... positioned equidistant around the platter, each reading a writing to all sectors asynchronously...
or how about having a bridge of multiple heads (10?) positioned across one full radius of the platter, ie: from outermost edge to the center... where each head can read a selection of sectors, either via positional adjustment laterally or directional adjustment via pitch to focus on a sector
in any case, why is it that hard drive design has never really changed in the last 20 years? Sure materials have improved and sensitivity and accuracy of movement... but no new methodology for reading/writing more efficiently?