As is the case with so many things like this that appear to be governments colluding with the private sector to further commercial vested interest etc. etc., it is in fact just a result of the kind of people that work in the public sector in Britain.
Basically, most civil servants are marshmallow-soft, compliant yes-men who spend most of their time finding the line of least resistance for various reasons. Sometimes it's over work, sometimes it's lack of knowledge or confidence in the issues they are being asked to deal with, sometimes it's plain and simple childish naivetee. I don't know what was the reason here, but I don't think it was a conspiracy: it's just some poor public employee trying to do what they think is "right" and getting it hopelessly wrong. The same is the case with things like government and the music industry: the provider sector pays lobbyists to bombard, charm, bully (sometimes very aggressively), and otherwise apply very persuasive techniques against civil servants who basically know little else but the dreaming spires of Oxford and the poetry of Milton. Not surprisingly, the industry usually gets its way.
I don't know what we can do about this short of fighting fire with fire and privatizing the civil service, but I highly doubt this is conspiracy.
Oh really? I'd like to see you hold out against the 101st Airborne, or even a single M1 Abrams with half its crew on leave in Jamaica.
Really - the whole "right to bear arms" thing is just a symbolic myth. If the authorities *really* want to get rid of you, there is no difference between the US, UK, Latin America or anywhere. They just have to be a bit more careful about how to do it in some places.
Acrobat utterly takes the biscuit when it comes to being the most execrably awful, arrogant, bloated, buggy, piece of software ever made, ever. And that's in a world where Microsoft exists as well.
I see you never used Visual SourceSafe.
But yes, Acrobat sucks.
Au contraire! Indeed I have used VSS - rather a lot. It's very shit indeed, but at least it doesn't bug me to update it every few weeks WHILE I'm working, with a update notice window that steals focus, and refuses to take "cancel" for an answer, and then takes 20mins to do the deed, THEN tells me to re-start my machine.
I know lots of people are going to say "Well duh, why would I pay for stuff I can get for free elsewhere?" but the fact is that most "news" is shit so why would any intelligent person really WANT to pay for it if they didn't have to?
News has, to a great degree, been reduced to the level of a trivial hobby for most people. Yes, you read the paper, but only out of habit and some vague hope that it's "informing" you in some quasi-educational way. It's become the mental equivalent of chewing gum. Look at a "quality" newspaper and roughly 60%-80% of it will be about people - what Barak had for breakfast, what Michael did in Beverly Hills, etc. etc. Very little is of any consequence that might reasonably be said to educate you about your life or what's really happening around you.
The main reason for this is that it's written by poorly-paid, over-worked journalists bullied by their editors to provide a "story" with an "angle" which basically means they are semi-forced to lie and report the facts highly selectively. Either that or just focus on telling stories about what Obama did in his garden, or what the Hoff did when he went to LA. It's then syndicated by one of a handful of "news organisations" after being "edited" (for which read "vetted to see if they can sell it"), then edited and sub-edited some more before it gets slapped out in front of the readers.
If you think I'm being cynical, I challenge anyone who has ever had first-hand knowledge of an event that was reported by the main stream new media to say that it reported it fairly and in a way that represents the way the event took place. It's incredibly rare that such fairness occurs (at least first time). Most "news" is barely the truth, and most events happening around the world are ignored because the gatekeepers of news media don't think it's "newsworthy" - ie they can't sell it, or it might piss off their advertisers or other stakeholders like their board members or shareholders.
Hell, you get more reality on/. than you do in the New York times, and that's saying something.
Acrobat utterly takes the biscuit when it comes to being the most execrably awful, arrogant, bloated, buggy, piece of software ever made, ever. And that's in a world where Microsoft exists as well.
But as if that isn't bad enough, it ALSO ranks as the most tragic irony in *all* *computing* *history* that such a screamingly, revoltingly, tear-out-your-hair-and-become-a-monk awful software is essentially based on an open standard. I'll say that again: PDF is an *open* ISO standard. HOW did Adobe rape and strangle it to death like they did? If anyone wants an example of how unspeakably evil marketing and sharp practices can be, they need look no further than Adobe Acrobat.
If I never used Acrobat ever again it would be too soon.
FYI I use I2PSnark - it's not fast (roughly half the speed of normal Bittorrent) but it's anonymous enough until my ISP starts *really* cracking my packets. The beauty of I2P is that the more people use it, the faster it gets!
The verdict explicitly addresses this point and states that due to TPB running the tracker and thus being intimately involved in the sharing of copyrighted material any comparison with Google is false. They were not convicted because TPB is hosting a bunch of torrent files, they were convicted because they were running a tracker.
Moreover, while TPB site itself contains the Torrent files, Google only has links to such files.
The nature of the torrent files is surely academic. Torrent files essentially point people to the content to be downloaded. The difference you cite is like the difference between me saying you have a DVD in your hand ready to give to me so I can put it into my DVD player, and you having the telephone number of a guy who will give it to me. It's irrelevant. Either way I get the content. Either way you're facilitating me getting that content, and either way you have the intent to do so.
Sorry, should have made myself clear: I meant something a normal person in their right mind would want to do with Windows 7. Normal people don't wake up in the morning wanting to sandbox IE or an improved AutoRun admin interface.
So - take II: what can somebody want to DO with Win7/Vista that they cannot DO with XP?
Indeed. Apart from boring old "security updates" - I invite anyone to name a single thing that a normal person in their right mind would want to do with Windows 7 that they cannot already do with Vista. In fact, I would say the same for Vista and WinXP. Hell - name FIVE things a normal sane person would want to do with Vista that they cannot do with XP.
Hell again - come to think of it, what can you do with XP that you you could not do with Win2K? Win95 didn't have something that WinME didn't have, I'm sure, but, er, what was it?
When the carrot (advertising and shill PR) won't work use the stick. Any company behaving like this does not deserve any customers, and will eventually bring that to pass by it's own actions.
Except that Microsoft is effectively a monopoly, so this logic does not apply.
Rule Number One when talking/thinking about Microsoft is to remember that they are a monopoly (and a convicted one at that). You cannot apply normal rules of the market, consumer preference, rational choice or any other that normally govern commercial discussions - because they don't apply!
It surprised me that the Dalai Lama even used computers.
Dude - the Dali Llama is on Twitter. He's also one of the most wired religious leaders in the world, and appears to have a Blackberry (if his Twitter updates and anecdotal reports of emails are to be believed).
You don't need to be an alchemist to to proclaim the absurdity of turning lead to gold.
And your point is what, exactly? Until you can prove that lead cannot be turned into gold, it doesn't matter if you're an alchemist, a chemist, or a bowl of soup.
"even primate peoples who have been shown the device could operate it"
MODERATORS: How can a statement be "informative" if there is no indication of any kind that what is being said can be verified?
Ignoring the bizarre idea of "primate peoples" (WTF??), we need to have a special tag on/. for when this happens:
*** CITATION NEEDED ***
I don't know what's more annoying: making a bald statement without any reference to a source, or you getting modded up to "5 informative" for doing so.
It's somewhat philosophical, but I've often wondered why people really care about whether an interlocutor is a machine or not. I mean, when you go down the to local corner shop to buy some milk, you're not bothered if the person who serves you doesn't know who wrote Paradise Lost, or who won the game last night. Sure, you could ask them, but what does it matter if they don't know?
The role of context and intelligence is hardly ever given much consideration, but it seems hugely important.
After Obama reversed himself on FISA I wrote his campaign demanding a refund of all monies I had donated to them. When I received said refund I donated every single penny (>$500) to the EFF.
OT, but I find that pretty depressing. US politics has lost all pretence that money is unconnected to policy: we'll do what you pay for, or your money back!
"This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected.'
IE doesn't have any plugins, does it? At least, if it does, they're nagware garbage compared to the truly myriad plugins for Firefox. Really, if it wasn't for FF add-ons, I doubt it would have even a half percent share.
Somewhere in between is the realization that we ought not only to rethink our one-size-fits-all perspective on technology, but that we should also keep in mind the way new technologies affect the meaning of interaction.
Agreed. So perhaps the problem here is indeed simply one of MIT academics' egos and career enhancement. Pushing "Next Generation In Human-Computer Interfaces" rather than simply saying "Hey look - here's an idea kids might like!"
There is a simple reason for that, it requires learning.
I've given this some thought, and there are several basic problems that need to be overcome with the current computer/human interface:
I have no real problem with the idea that emulating real-world conditions in order to make things easier to use, but the fact is that once a system has been learnt, most people have the capacity to do a hell of a lot more with it that real world emulations cannot handle because computing is, by its nature, not "natural" in that respect. We have not evolved the physical means to cope with large and highly variant data sets. While you might instinctively arrange a bunch of blocks on a table by size (if size represented some quality of the data each block represented), if you were presented with 120,000 blocks on that table that also needed to be so arranged, what would you do? You'd need another metaphor or technique (voice control perhaps?) until that too started to break down, and so on.
The way forward in UI design is not to pursue the emulation of the real world, or look for physical metaphors - at least not beyond a certain point. The way forward is to design efficient abstractions and to take advantage of our physiological and neurological limitations. So far, in the WIMP interface we have a reasonably good set of abstractions to handle a lot of what we need to do. Far better to refine that with things like command line UIs, better information visualisation, zooming technologies etc. than to veer off into narrow real-world analogues.
There is also another factor here: the inertia of popular use. Even ignoring the Microsoft monopolies, computer operating systems UI hasn't materially changed in 20 years. The QWERTY keyboard will still be the most common method of text input by the year 2040, and may also be so in the year 2100, because learning something different is just too much trouble given the return on invested effort. My son is 8 years old, and he can type most of his Google queries for himself already, so that's his generation hooked. But really - what more do you want?
Disclaimer: I am a UI designer, and it's been the way I've earned my living for the past eight years.
All the "revolutionary" UIs that we've seen like Siftables and perceptive pixels appear to make a major assumption that I don't accept: that dispensing with the virtualisation of data and our interaction with it is automatically good.
Bringing data and its manipulation "into our world" (as the Siftables guy puts it) seems to me to be a completely retrograde step. One of the reasons why we have computers in the first place is because our world and our physiology is in fact VERY BAD at manipulating large numbers of objects, or pouring paint from one place to another to create the right colour. Keyboards and mice, command lines and pipes, even folders and sub-folders (maybe), are several orders of magnitude better and more flexible at controlling the entropy that we need to control in order to get stuff done. We spent the last 10,000 years working that out - why the hell are we trying to re-discover our inefficiencies?
I suspect the reason for this is because designing improvements to current UI is in fact very, very hard indeed. Of course, there is another reason: self-promotion by academics hoping to be given jobs heading up large corporate R&D departments for ten times their MIT salaries. But I'll let that pass.
Basically, anyone who things humans have a future in significant problem-solving through the manipulation of real-world objects either doesn't understand the past, or is so used to the efficiencies that current human-computer UI models bring that they have ceased to understand them. The key to this understanding is an extreme abstraction of the real world, not its re-creation.
I take a shower every day. I've never had a problem with lint in my belly button.
I shower once every three days and tend to pull ball of 5mm of lint from my belly button between those times. Why do you think the lint is a "problem"? All the girls I know think it's funny.
Slashdot Mirror
As is the case with so many things like this that appear to be governments colluding with the private sector to further commercial vested interest etc. etc., it is in fact just a result of the kind of people that work in the public sector in Britain.
Basically, most civil servants are marshmallow-soft, compliant yes-men who spend most of their time finding the line of least resistance for various reasons. Sometimes it's over work, sometimes it's lack of knowledge or confidence in the issues they are being asked to deal with, sometimes it's plain and simple childish naivetee. I don't know what was the reason here, but I don't think it was a conspiracy: it's just some poor public employee trying to do what they think is "right" and getting it hopelessly wrong. The same is the case with things like government and the music industry: the provider sector pays lobbyists to bombard, charm, bully (sometimes very aggressively), and otherwise apply very persuasive techniques against civil servants who basically know little else but the dreaming spires of Oxford and the poetry of Milton. Not surprisingly, the industry usually gets its way.
I don't know what we can do about this short of fighting fire with fire and privatizing the civil service, but I highly doubt this is conspiracy.
Pretty well, actually.
Oh really? I'd like to see you hold out against the 101st Airborne, or even a single M1 Abrams with half its crew on leave in Jamaica.
Really - the whole "right to bear arms" thing is just a symbolic myth. If the authorities *really* want to get rid of you, there is no difference between the US, UK, Latin America or anywhere. They just have to be a bit more careful about how to do it in some places.
Acrobat utterly takes the biscuit when it comes to being the most execrably awful, arrogant, bloated, buggy, piece of software ever made, ever. And that's in a world where Microsoft exists as well.
I see you never used Visual SourceSafe.
But yes, Acrobat sucks.
Au contraire! Indeed I have used VSS - rather a lot. It's very shit indeed, but at least it doesn't bug me to update it every few weeks WHILE I'm working, with a update notice window that steals focus, and refuses to take "cancel" for an answer, and then takes 20mins to do the deed, THEN tells me to re-start my machine.
That, my friend is The Acrobat Experience (tm).
I know lots of people are going to say "Well duh, why would I pay for stuff I can get for free elsewhere?" but the fact is that most "news" is shit so why would any intelligent person really WANT to pay for it if they didn't have to?
News has, to a great degree, been reduced to the level of a trivial hobby for most people. Yes, you read the paper, but only out of habit and some vague hope that it's "informing" you in some quasi-educational way. It's become the mental equivalent of chewing gum. Look at a "quality" newspaper and roughly 60%-80% of it will be about people - what Barak had for breakfast, what Michael did in Beverly Hills, etc. etc. Very little is of any consequence that might reasonably be said to educate you about your life or what's really happening around you.
The main reason for this is that it's written by poorly-paid, over-worked journalists bullied by their editors to provide a "story" with an "angle" which basically means they are semi-forced to lie and report the facts highly selectively. Either that or just focus on telling stories about what Obama did in his garden, or what the Hoff did when he went to LA. It's then syndicated by one of a handful of "news organisations" after being "edited" (for which read "vetted to see if they can sell it"), then edited and sub-edited some more before it gets slapped out in front of the readers.
If you think I'm being cynical, I challenge anyone who has ever had first-hand knowledge of an event that was reported by the main stream new media to say that it reported it fairly and in a way that represents the way the event took place. It's incredibly rare that such fairness occurs (at least first time). Most "news" is barely the truth, and most events happening around the world are ignored because the gatekeepers of news media don't think it's "newsworthy" - ie they can't sell it, or it might piss off their advertisers or other stakeholders like their board members or shareholders.
Hell, you get more reality on /. than you do in the New York times, and that's saying something.
Acrobat utterly takes the biscuit when it comes to being the most execrably awful, arrogant, bloated, buggy, piece of software ever made, ever. And that's in a world where Microsoft exists as well.
But as if that isn't bad enough, it ALSO ranks as the most tragic irony in *all* *computing* *history* that such a screamingly, revoltingly, tear-out-your-hair-and-become-a-monk awful software is essentially based on an open standard. I'll say that again: PDF is an *open* ISO standard. HOW did Adobe rape and strangle it to death like they did? If anyone wants an example of how unspeakably evil marketing and sharp practices can be, they need look no further than Adobe Acrobat.
If I never used Acrobat ever again it would be too soon.
FYI I use I2PSnark - it's not fast (roughly half the speed of normal Bittorrent) but it's anonymous enough until my ISP starts *really* cracking my packets. The beauty of I2P is that the more people use it, the faster it gets!
Google does not provide well-seeded .torrent files. TPB does/did.
Depends what you mean by "not providing" though, doesn't it?
And BTW of the time of writing TPB is most definitely to be referred to in the present tense.
1. TPB exists primarily to facilitate copyright violation. Google is a common carrier.
2. TPB hosts the BitTorrent tracker files. Google does not.
Point 1 is very relevant. However, please explain what point 2 has got to do with anything at all here.
The verdict explicitly addresses this point and states that due to TPB running the tracker and thus being intimately involved in the sharing of copyrighted material any comparison with Google is false. They were not convicted because TPB is hosting a bunch of torrent files, they were convicted because they were running a tracker.
Moreover, while TPB site itself contains the Torrent files, Google only has links to such files.
The nature of the torrent files is surely academic. Torrent files essentially point people to the content to be downloaded. The difference you cite is like the difference between me saying you have a DVD in your hand ready to give to me so I can put it into my DVD player, and you having the telephone number of a guy who will give it to me. It's irrelevant. Either way I get the content. Either way you're facilitating me getting that content, and either way you have the intent to do so.
Yes - try searching for x-men wolverine origins torrent.
Of if you want to make Google almost *exactly* like the Pirate Bay - try it this way.
There, fixed that for you.
OK, now I'm really, really pissed off!!!
But the real question is: what can I do? What can *we* do?
For now, you can do your bit by using I2P
I'm not sure if I2P will be immune from DPI, and it won't be immune from usage capping, but it's a noble cause.
Sorry, should have made myself clear: I meant something a normal person in their right mind would want to do with Windows 7. Normal people don't wake up in the morning wanting to sandbox IE or an improved AutoRun admin interface.
So - take II: what can somebody want to DO with Win7/Vista that they cannot DO with XP?
Indeed. Apart from boring old "security updates" - I invite anyone to name a single thing that a normal person in their right mind would want to do with Windows 7 that they cannot already do with Vista. In fact, I would say the same for Vista and WinXP. Hell - name FIVE things a normal sane person would want to do with Vista that they cannot do with XP.
Hell again - come to think of it, what can you do with XP that you you could not do with Win2K? Win95 didn't have something that WinME didn't have, I'm sure, but, er, what was it?
When the carrot (advertising and shill PR) won't work use the stick. Any company behaving like this does not deserve any customers, and will eventually bring that to pass by it's own actions.
Except that Microsoft is effectively a monopoly, so this logic does not apply.
Rule Number One when talking/thinking about Microsoft is to remember that they are a monopoly (and a convicted one at that). You cannot apply normal rules of the market, consumer preference, rational choice or any other that normally govern commercial discussions - because they don't apply!
So if the CAPTCHA is doomed, what is the next approach? Letting spam bots go rampant over a site is not an acceptable alternative.
Better get the form ready...!
It surprised me that the Dalai Lama even used computers.
Dude - the Dali Llama is on Twitter. He's also one of the most wired religious leaders in the world, and appears to have a Blackberry (if his Twitter updates and anecdotal reports of emails are to be believed).
You don't need to be an alchemist to to proclaim the absurdity of turning lead to gold.
And your point is what, exactly? Until you can prove that lead cannot be turned into gold, it doesn't matter if you're an alchemist, a chemist, or a bowl of soup.
"even primate peoples who have been shown the device could operate it"
MODERATORS: How can a statement be "informative" if there is no indication of any kind that what is being said can be verified?
Ignoring the bizarre idea of "primate peoples" (WTF??), we need to have a special tag on /. for when this happens:
*** CITATION NEEDED ***
I don't know what's more annoying: making a bald statement without any reference to a source, or you getting modded up to "5 informative" for doing so.
It's somewhat philosophical, but I've often wondered why people really care about whether an interlocutor is a machine or not. I mean, when you go down the to local corner shop to buy some milk, you're not bothered if the person who serves you doesn't know who wrote Paradise Lost, or who won the game last night. Sure, you could ask them, but what does it matter if they don't know?
The role of context and intelligence is hardly ever given much consideration, but it seems hugely important.
After Obama reversed himself on FISA I wrote his campaign demanding a refund of all monies I had donated to them. When I received said refund I donated every single penny (>$500) to the EFF.
OT, but I find that pretty depressing. US politics has lost all pretence that money is unconnected to policy: we'll do what you pay for, or your money back!
Sigh.
"This new engine will supposedly be more secure than Firefox or even Chrome, making copious use of sandboxing to keep its myriad plug-ins isolated and the overall browser process model protected.'
IE doesn't have any plugins, does it? At least, if it does, they're nagware garbage compared to the truly myriad plugins for Firefox. Really, if it wasn't for FF add-ons, I doubt it would have even a half percent share.
Somewhere in between is the realization that we ought not only to rethink our one-size-fits-all perspective on technology, but that we should also keep in mind the way new technologies affect the meaning of interaction.
Agreed. So perhaps the problem here is indeed simply one of MIT academics' egos and career enhancement. Pushing "Next Generation In Human-Computer Interfaces" rather than simply saying "Hey look - here's an idea kids might like!"
There is a simple reason for that, it requires learning.
I've given this some thought, and there are several basic problems that need to be overcome with the current computer/human interface:
I have no real problem with the idea that emulating real-world conditions in order to make things easier to use, but the fact is that once a system has been learnt, most people have the capacity to do a hell of a lot more with it that real world emulations cannot handle because computing is, by its nature, not "natural" in that respect. We have not evolved the physical means to cope with large and highly variant data sets. While you might instinctively arrange a bunch of blocks on a table by size (if size represented some quality of the data each block represented), if you were presented with 120,000 blocks on that table that also needed to be so arranged, what would you do? You'd need another metaphor or technique (voice control perhaps?) until that too started to break down, and so on.
The way forward in UI design is not to pursue the emulation of the real world, or look for physical metaphors - at least not beyond a certain point. The way forward is to design efficient abstractions and to take advantage of our physiological and neurological limitations. So far, in the WIMP interface we have a reasonably good set of abstractions to handle a lot of what we need to do. Far better to refine that with things like command line UIs, better information visualisation, zooming technologies etc. than to veer off into narrow real-world analogues.
There is also another factor here: the inertia of popular use. Even ignoring the Microsoft monopolies, computer operating systems UI hasn't materially changed in 20 years. The QWERTY keyboard will still be the most common method of text input by the year 2040, and may also be so in the year 2100, because learning something different is just too much trouble given the return on invested effort. My son is 8 years old, and he can type most of his Google queries for himself already, so that's his generation hooked. But really - what more do you want?
Disclaimer: I am a UI designer, and it's been the way I've earned my living for the past eight years.
All the "revolutionary" UIs that we've seen like Siftables and perceptive pixels appear to make a major assumption that I don't accept: that dispensing with the virtualisation of data and our interaction with it is automatically good.
Bringing data and its manipulation "into our world" (as the Siftables guy puts it) seems to me to be a completely retrograde step. One of the reasons why we have computers in the first place is because our world and our physiology is in fact VERY BAD at manipulating large numbers of objects, or pouring paint from one place to another to create the right colour. Keyboards and mice, command lines and pipes, even folders and sub-folders (maybe), are several orders of magnitude better and more flexible at controlling the entropy that we need to control in order to get stuff done. We spent the last 10,000 years working that out - why the hell are we trying to re-discover our inefficiencies?
I suspect the reason for this is because designing improvements to current UI is in fact very, very hard indeed. Of course, there is another reason: self-promotion by academics hoping to be given jobs heading up large corporate R&D departments for ten times their MIT salaries. But I'll let that pass.
Basically, anyone who things humans have a future in significant problem-solving through the manipulation of real-world objects either doesn't understand the past, or is so used to the efficiencies that current human-computer UI models bring that they have ceased to understand them. The key to this understanding is an extreme abstraction of the real world, not its re-creation.
I take a shower every day. I've never had a problem with lint in my belly button.
I shower once every three days and tend to pull ball of 5mm of lint from my belly button between those times. Why do you think the lint is a "problem"? All the girls I know think it's funny.