Normally I have to say I'm against most software patents (really any overly broad patent) but I know Dr. Yodaiken and if anybody can be trusted to do right by the community with this it's him. He's not only one of the coolest professors I've known he's one of the coolest people I've ever met. I wasn't his best friend or anything so I may very well be wrong but I have to think that he won't be somebody we need to flame over his patent portfolio.
Everyone talks about how the filters that are out now are terrible and that an open filter would be the solution but I've never seen anyone actually attempt an open source filter. Would you work on an open source filter if you knew it would be accepted by the library community? Would a filter that obtained it's lists off a publicly accessable (and alterable) list on the web be better? Maybe a list with moderation where people could rate a site up or down based on it's content and the library could choose to filter out content that had a +2 rating or whatever. I think we need to realize that content filters are not going to go away and we need to work on better ones, not just bash the current ones and hope that nobody uses them.
There are a lot of really cool DOOM projects out there. People have really taken the source and run with it in recent times. The GLDoom project was really neat until the maintainer had a serious accident that killed all the source (which was, IMHO, the reason Carmack decided to GPL the Doom source, so something like that wouldn't happen again).
You should really check out some of the projects (ZDoom is my current favorite). It's amazing how well the original gameplay has held up. There's still nothing as scary as the Cyberdemon coming after you.:)
Esther Dyson isn't the most popular person among a lot groups on the net but she does have a lot to say on this topic. Her big idea about privacy on the net is to turn it into a commodity, something that has value to you and to corporations. The only way I see that we can keep our information private is to make it more valuable to a company not to sell our data that to sell it. Companies that are responsible with our data should be rewarded for it, those that flagrantly sell us out to other companies should be punished by fines ( government intervention!) or by losing sales. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, corporations don't have any agenda when collecting our data than making money. If they can make money by customizing our "experience," they'll do it. If they can make money by selling our data, they'll do that too. The only thing that will stop the collection/selling of data we don't want them to have is to make it financially bad for them to do so.
I haven't seen any companies willing to publish what they do with our data, perhaps that should be the law? Any ideas?
Maybe this college is trying something different and attempting to give their students a more well rounded experience? You're not going to deal exclusively with people who did well in school once you leave college and knowing that different people have different skills in life that are aren't all learned in university studies is very important.
The article clearly states that only 14% of the people in the program were "American ethnic minorites." This is for people who teachers/counselors/whoever know are smart enough to contribute but don't do well on tests. I for one would welcome a lot more people in college who are not as "book smart" but have leadership capabilities or think at right angles to other people (to steal a phrase from a former teacher). Just because somebody doesn't do well on the SATs doesn't mean they should be dropped from society or unable to continue their education. This test recognizes that there is more to being intelligent than just being able to fill in bubbles correctly on a scantron sheet.
Sorry, but rouge is the makeup women put on their cheeks and when I think of Rouge Spear I get all kinds of strange GI Joe in drag images flashing around in my head.:)
If you've ever seen a button on your computer marked only with the cryptic symbol
( | ) or ( ' )
you've seen the Worst Interface In The History Of The World. This is some geek's idea of what the interface for a Power button should look like. You might have also seen it's precursor, the power switch marked with 1 for on and 0 for off (which is binary for those of you who don't know). The ( | ) is meant to be a 1 and a 0 combined. This is the perfect example of why geeks cannot be trusted with interface design. (Ask yourself if any manager or marketroid would come up with using binary on the front of a home device, I think not) While you and I might recognize that in binary 1 is on and 0 is off, who the hell else would know that? Why did someone think that any user would know what that meant? All we can hope for is that they eventually figure out that the little ( | ) turns the computer on and off. If all we're shooting for is that the user eventually figure out the meaning of the button exclusive of the symbol, why not just make all buttons random sized white squares, eventually they'll figure it out. This is my specific example of why programmers/geeks should not be allowed to design interfaces, because we come up with ideas like the ( | ) button.
This is a small (and some have argued dumb) example but in my opinion, if we can't even come up with a good interface for something as fundemental as the power button, how are normal users supposed to figure out what we're doing with our other interfaces?
He's not talking about how cool the interface is or how you can customize your right-click window to include X and Y programs. He's talking about how you help users do things. It doesn't matter how simple it is to bring up a popup window if it takes 5 minutes worth of clicking to get something done. What needs to be done is to watch users using your product and see how they do things. The main point is that to you and me editing a conf file is a perfectly good way of doing things and bringup up printtool is just as easy as clicking on the Printer Setup button but for most people that just isn't the case. We need to look at how people use our stuff and how the things users need can be done more easily.
I heard somebody (an English professor I believe) give an interesting take on this subject. He talked about how when he was young his mother had a couple of maids/servants to help her out with running the household so she could devote a lot of her time to doing social activities, participating in charitible organizations, etc. His point was that the rise of the easy kitchen and things that you talked about being related to the electric motor made the servants seem unneeded so his mother had to take over everything involved in running the house and was unable to do the outside things she enjoyed. This was something I really hadn't considered before and seeing your post I thought I'd share. I'm not advocating the use of servants instead of machines or anything of the like but this man's idea was just one I thought had relevance to what you're talking about. Nice suggestion by the way, most people just leap to big things like TV or airplanes and don't consider the "little" things that also make big changes.
Oh lord, we mustn't question the corporations! They only have our best interests at heart after all. Companies wouldn't skimp on manufacturing to save money!
If it's so easy to get a +1, why are you posting anonymously? Why not get an account and rock our world?
You make a good point. I guess I haven't seen enough crap ported to Linux to think about that. Like you say, I'm sure it'll happen (or is happening, I don't buy that many games).
I'm not saying that the variances in a monitor plant would be enough to make the monitor explode or anything of that sort. What I'm saying is that at the kind of micron tolerances they're talking about, this chemical can't really be trusted to be accurate, IMO. It doesn't really matter if your computer's plastic case is 1% different as the next guy's. It does matter if I pay for X time with this disc and because of a 1% variation I only get 1/3 of what I paid for. Intel dumps huge amounts of expensive chips in the garbage because they are 1% off from the norm so my idea isn't that far-fetched. Whether manufacturers of these discs have the same standards as Intel remains to be seen.
I may be paranoid or not have much faith in big companies to keep my best interests at heart but if nobody raises the point, nobody will think about it until consumers start getting ripped off. It's happened before and it'll happen again.
And nobody moderated me up, I have the +1 added automatically because others have thought I made more than a few good points in my long posting life on Slashdot.
The article says that the amount of the coating they put on the disc determines how long the disc will last. How are we supposed to trust that the manufacturer put 3 days worth of coating on the disc instead of 3 hours worth. oops. Even if they intend to put 3 days worth on, anybody who has ever seen a mass manufacturing plant knows that no batch of anything mass produced is ever completely the same. With the minute amount of material (200microns I believe it said) one batch could vary anywhere from 3 days to 1 day to a week and there's no way to tell until you watch it.
That's exactly what I thought about Divx when it came out. I never saw any news stories even mentioning that angle in the piles of other things wrong with that format (and this one it looks like).
Consumers being inconvienienced, that's a story. Planned environmental pollution, not a story.
Yes indeed we jump at every time a company ports to Linux. That's what we should be doing. Companies who are short sighted enough to only write for Windows (with Linux and mac platforms gaining ground every day to differing degrees) will soon learn their lesson or they won't be around much longer. Companies should be applauded for porting to Linux and when we buy their Linux games it sends a message to the stupider companies to get their acts together. I kind of liked Shogo on the PC and I know I'll buy it if they sell it for Linux, not just because it's a cool game but I want to support their efforts.
I think the Myst people pretty much ported their stuff to the PC because AFAIK they do all their dev on macs. I could be wrong though.
Well, I was going to buy a Handspring Visor (running PalmOS) but I guess I'm waiting for one of the Crusoe processor based systems now.:) Handheld Quake. Three words: Cool as hell.
I spoke to John for awhile about being interviewed for this book. He was going to fly out and put me in there but it never happened. I think he wanted to focus more on geeks whose lives were saved by their "geekiness" or something. I'm just a "normal" geek I guess, never had to program to feed my family and wasn't really bullied in school (the fact that I'm 6'1" and have the physique of an offensive lineman probably helped that) so I never knew how interesting I would have been anyway. Oh well, now I'll just have to get famous on my accomplishments instead of just because I'm a geek.:)
Companies usually wait to fix things until others complain because it costs them money. Even if @Home actually follows through on their pledge to help fix whatever "misconfigured proxies" exist, that will cost them money that didn't have to spend for the 2 years prior to this when they were letting it happen. Corporations are, in general, pretty simple entities, whatever costs them money without making them money is bad. Being a good net citizen is bad for them because it costs them money and unless they were threatened with losing more money due to loss of customers (believe me, I know lots of folks who would quit an ISP if they couldn't post to USENET for more than 6 hours) they have no reason to fix things.
But how do US libraries handle paper titles such as Playboy, Big Jugs Monthly, and Thrusting Organs International at the moment?
This is exactly what I tell people. I'm in no way in favor of governmental regulation of what goes around on the net but you have to have a little common sense. No library I've ever been to carries even Playboy, which is a little kid's reader compared to some of the stuff on the net. Libraries make these kinds of choices on what to carry all the time and I see no reason why they should be forced to carry porn just because it's on the net.
There should be some filters in place for library computers that are accessable to kids but I agree that whatever filter is chosen needs to be open and whoever administers it needs to keep track of what it's filtering out. It would be an even worse travesty for some filter to block a site on Anne Sexton (if I might overuse this example a little more) in a library if some kid were doing a report on poetry for school.
What reasons do the censorware people give for encrypting the lists from even the parents? It seems like a good market to get into, a censorware program with full control over the filter lists. Of course, you have to be the kind of parent who A) cares enough to actually use the filter lists for their intended use or B) wishes to abdicate all responsibility for their children to a computer program and just block everything they don't like.
The point of AICN is to post rumors. Nobody ever said anything different. He might not post his list of sources for stories to your liking but he does get a lot of scoops that turn out to be true because he has "inside sources." I think Harry (the guy who runs AICN for those who don't know) would probably be the first to tell you that he doesn't pretend to be a news source, he's a fanboy like the rest of us and posts stories that fanboys in higher places send him.
The main problem that I see with "traditional" news media is the continous trumpeting of the old chestnuts "We're completely impartial" and "We just report the news" when in fact it's impossible for any institution to be impartial. Admitting your biases upfront is the only to report the news, IMO. Do you expect that Time Warner news agencies will report about possible AOL misdeeds completely truthfully? Disney execs have said they don't want ABC reporting about the parent company. Is it right, no. Does it happen, yes. (if in doubt investigate the 60Minutes-tobacco industry story that The Insider was based on) If you know the biases upfront, it makes you a better news consumer.
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Normally I have to say I'm against most software patents (really any overly broad patent) but I know Dr. Yodaiken and if anybody can be trusted to do right by the community with this it's him. He's not only one of the coolest professors I've known he's one of the coolest people I've ever met. I wasn't his best friend or anything so I may very well be wrong but I have to think that he won't be somebody we need to flame over his patent portfolio.
Everyone talks about how the filters that are out now are terrible and that an open filter would be the solution but I've never seen anyone actually attempt an open source filter. Would you work on an open source filter if you knew it would be accepted by the library community? Would a filter that obtained it's lists off a publicly accessable (and alterable) list on the web be better? Maybe a list with moderation where people could rate a site up or down based on it's content and the library could choose to filter out content that had a +2 rating or whatever. I think we need to realize that content filters are not going to go away and we need to work on better ones, not just bash the current ones and hope that nobody uses them.
There are a lot of really cool DOOM projects out there. People have really taken the source and run with it in recent times. The GLDoom project was really neat until the maintainer had a serious accident that killed all the source (which was, IMHO, the reason Carmack decided to GPL the Doom source, so something like that wouldn't happen again).
:)
You should really check out some of the projects (ZDoom is my current favorite). It's amazing how well the original gameplay has held up. There's still nothing as scary as the Cyberdemon coming after you.
Esther Dyson isn't the most popular person among a lot groups on the net but she does have a lot to say on this topic. Her big idea about privacy on the net is to turn it into a commodity, something that has value to you and to corporations. The only way I see that we can keep our information private is to make it more valuable to a company not to sell our data that to sell it. Companies that are responsible with our data should be rewarded for it, those that flagrantly sell us out to other companies should be punished by fines ( government intervention!) or by losing sales. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, corporations don't have any agenda when collecting our data than making money. If they can make money by customizing our "experience," they'll do it. If they can make money by selling our data, they'll do that too. The only thing that will stop the collection/selling of data we don't want them to have is to make it financially bad for them to do so.
I haven't seen any companies willing to publish what they do with our data, perhaps that should be the law? Any ideas?
Maybe this college is trying something different and attempting to give their students a more well rounded experience? You're not going to deal exclusively with people who did well in school once you leave college and knowing that different people have different skills in life that are aren't all learned in university studies is very important.
The article clearly states that only 14% of the people in the program were "American ethnic minorites." This is for people who teachers/counselors/whoever know are smart enough to contribute but don't do well on tests. I for one would welcome a lot more people in college who are not as "book smart" but have leadership capabilities or think at right angles to other people (to steal a phrase from a former teacher). Just because somebody doesn't do well on the SATs doesn't mean they should be dropped from society or unable to continue their education. This test recognizes that there is more to being intelligent than just being able to fill in bubbles correctly on a scantron sheet.
Sorry, but rouge is the makeup women put on their cheeks and when I think of Rouge Spear I get all kinds of strange GI Joe in drag images flashing around in my head. :)
If you've ever seen a button on your computer marked only with the cryptic symbol
( | ) or ( ' )
you've seen the Worst Interface In The History Of The World. This is some geek's idea of what the interface for a Power button should look like. You might have also seen it's precursor, the power switch marked with 1 for on and 0 for off (which is binary for those of you who don't know). The ( | ) is meant to be a 1 and a 0 combined. This is the perfect example of why geeks cannot be trusted with interface design. (Ask yourself if any manager or marketroid would come up with using binary on the front of a home device, I think not) While you and I might recognize that in binary 1 is on and 0 is off, who the hell else would know that? Why did someone think that any user would know what that meant? All we can hope for is that they eventually figure out that the little ( | ) turns the computer on and off. If all we're shooting for is that the user eventually figure out the meaning of the button exclusive of the symbol, why not just make all buttons random sized white squares, eventually they'll figure it out. This is my specific example of why programmers/geeks should not be allowed to design interfaces, because we come up with ideas like the ( | ) button.
This is a small (and some have argued dumb) example but in my opinion, if we can't even come up with a good interface for something as fundemental as the power button, how are normal users supposed to figure out what we're doing with our other interfaces?
He's not talking about how cool the interface is or how you can customize your right-click window to include X and Y programs. He's talking about how you help users do things. It doesn't matter how simple it is to bring up a popup window if it takes 5 minutes worth of clicking to get something done. What needs to be done is to watch users using your product and see how they do things. The main point is that to you and me editing a conf file is a perfectly good way of doing things and bringup up printtool is just as easy as clicking on the Printer Setup button but for most people that just isn't the case. We need to look at how people use our stuff and how the things users need can be done more easily.
I heard somebody (an English professor I believe) give an interesting take on this subject. He talked about how when he was young his mother had a couple of maids/servants to help her out with running the household so she could devote a lot of her time to doing social activities, participating in charitible organizations, etc. His point was that the rise of the easy kitchen and things that you talked about being related to the electric motor made the servants seem unneeded so his mother had to take over everything involved in running the house and was unable to do the outside things she enjoyed.
This was something I really hadn't considered before and seeing your post I thought I'd share. I'm not advocating the use of servants instead of machines or anything of the like but this man's idea was just one I thought had relevance to what you're talking about.
Nice suggestion by the way, most people just leap to big things like TV or airplanes and don't consider the "little" things that also make big changes.
Oh lord, we mustn't question the corporations! They only have our best interests at heart after all. Companies wouldn't skimp on manufacturing to save money!
If it's so easy to get a +1, why are you posting anonymously? Why not get an account and rock our world?
You make a good point. I guess I haven't seen enough crap ported to Linux to think about that. Like you say, I'm sure it'll happen (or is happening, I don't buy that many games).
I'm not saying that the variances in a monitor plant would be enough to make the monitor explode or anything of that sort. What I'm saying is that at the kind of micron tolerances they're talking about, this chemical can't really be trusted to be accurate, IMO. It doesn't really matter if your computer's plastic case is 1% different as the next guy's. It does matter if I pay for X time with this disc and because of a 1% variation I only get 1/3 of what I paid for. Intel dumps huge amounts of expensive chips in the garbage because they are 1% off from the norm so my idea isn't that far-fetched. Whether manufacturers of these discs have the same standards as Intel remains to be seen.
I may be paranoid or not have much faith in big companies to keep my best interests at heart but if nobody raises the point, nobody will think about it until consumers start getting ripped off. It's happened before and it'll happen again.
And nobody moderated me up, I have the +1 added automatically because others have thought I made more than a few good points in my long posting life on Slashdot.
The article says that the amount of the coating they put on the disc determines how long the disc will last. How are we supposed to trust that the manufacturer put 3 days worth of coating on the disc instead of 3 hours worth. oops. Even if they intend to put 3 days worth on, anybody who has ever seen a mass manufacturing plant knows that no batch of anything mass produced is ever completely the same. With the minute amount of material (200microns I believe it said) one batch could vary anywhere from 3 days to 1 day to a week and there's no way to tell until you watch it.
That's exactly what I thought about Divx when it came out. I never saw any news stories even mentioning that angle in the piles of other things wrong with that format (and this one it looks like).
Consumers being inconvienienced, that's a story.
Planned environmental pollution, not a story.
Yes indeed we jump at every time a company ports to Linux. That's what we should be doing. Companies who are short sighted enough to only write for Windows (with Linux and mac platforms gaining ground every day to differing degrees) will soon learn their lesson or they won't be around much longer. Companies should be applauded for porting to Linux and when we buy their Linux games it sends a message to the stupider companies to get their acts together. I kind of liked Shogo on the PC and I know I'll buy it if they sell it for Linux, not just because it's a cool game but I want to support their efforts.
I think the Myst people pretty much ported their stuff to the PC because AFAIK they do all their dev on macs. I could be wrong though.
Well, I was going to buy a Handspring Visor (running PalmOS) but I guess I'm waiting for one of the Crusoe processor based systems now. :)
Handheld Quake. Three words: Cool as hell.
I spoke to John for awhile about being interviewed for this book. He was going to fly out and put me in there but it never happened. I think he wanted to focus more on geeks whose lives were saved by their "geekiness" or something. I'm just a "normal" geek I guess, never had to program to feed my family and wasn't really bullied in school (the fact that I'm 6'1" and have the physique of an offensive lineman probably helped that) so I never knew how interesting I would have been anyway. Oh well, now I'll just have to get famous on my accomplishments instead of just because I'm a geek. :)
Companies usually wait to fix things until others complain because it costs them money. Even if @Home actually follows through on their pledge to help fix whatever "misconfigured proxies" exist, that will cost them money that didn't have to spend for the 2 years prior to this when they were letting it happen. Corporations are, in general, pretty simple entities, whatever costs them money without making them money is bad. Being a good net citizen is bad for them because it costs them money and unless they were threatened with losing more money due to loss of customers (believe me, I know lots of folks who would quit an ISP if they couldn't post to USENET for more than 6 hours) they have no reason to fix things.
But how do US libraries handle paper titles such as Playboy, Big Jugs Monthly, and Thrusting Organs International at the moment?
This is exactly what I tell people. I'm in no way in favor of governmental regulation of what goes around on the net but you have to have a little common sense. No library I've ever been to carries even Playboy, which is a little kid's reader compared to some of the stuff on the net. Libraries make these kinds of choices on what to carry all the time and I see no reason why they should be forced to carry porn just because it's on the net.
There should be some filters in place for library computers that are accessable to kids but I agree that whatever filter is chosen needs to be open and whoever administers it needs to keep track of what it's filtering out. It would be an even worse travesty for some filter to block a site on Anne Sexton (if I might overuse this example a little more) in a library if some kid were doing a report on poetry for school.
What reasons do the censorware people give for encrypting the lists from even the parents? It seems like a good market to get into, a censorware program with full control over the filter lists. Of course, you have to be the kind of parent who A) cares enough to actually use the filter lists for their intended use or B) wishes to abdicate all responsibility for their children to a computer program and just block everything they don't like.
The point of AICN is to post rumors. Nobody ever said anything different. He might not post his list of sources for stories to your liking but he does get a lot of scoops that turn out to be true because he has "inside sources." I think Harry (the guy who runs AICN for those who don't know) would probably be the first to tell you that he doesn't pretend to be a news source, he's a fanboy like the rest of us and posts stories that fanboys in higher places send him.
Sorry, the X Movie is already in shooting and it's not Glenn Danzig as Wolverine. Hugh Jackman (I've never heard of him either) is playing Logan.
We actually have X-Men movie posters in the movie theater by my house, I believe the big release date is July 16th 2000.
The main problem that I see with "traditional" news media is the continous trumpeting of the old chestnuts "We're completely impartial" and "We just report the news" when in fact it's impossible for any institution to be impartial. Admitting your biases upfront is the only to report the news, IMO. Do you expect that Time Warner news agencies will report about possible AOL misdeeds completely truthfully? Disney execs have said they don't want ABC reporting about the parent company. Is it right, no. Does it happen, yes. (if in doubt investigate the 60Minutes-tobacco industry story that The Insider was based on) If you know the biases upfront, it makes you a better news consumer.
Sorry, it's Friday and I'm almost off work.
I have one of these two, best keyboard I've ever owned for feel of the keys. Plus it has a lifetime warranty.
:)
Now I just need to paint my case (and monitor someday) black to match.