and I have to wonder what compensation the reviewers get for doing that. I do hear of the top reviewers getting free stuff sometimes...
The few times I've gotten freebies, they've been directly from a manufacturer, not from the site. (No -- wait, now I think of it, I think Amazon might have sent me a complementary DVD. It wasn't really something I'd have liked much, either. I figured they were sitting in a too-tall pile in the warehouse.)
What'll happen is, when Penguin has a new book about X, they look for people who've submitted reviews on that subject. They don't seem to limit their choices to the shills, either. A couple of the free advance books I've gotten have been the result of a scathing review I submitted in that general area. (Dog breed books and "Intelligent Design," if you're curious.)
To my mind the whole deal's very much like with professional reviewers in the local paper. I've lived a few different places, and aside from Consumer Reports (which has its own issues, but which is at least truly independent) the car reviewers have always been shills everywhere. Book reviewers less so.
(I like Martin Gardner's tongue-in-cheek explanation of the fossil record: It was created on the 7th day, complete with clues to a non-existent far distant past, to test our faith).
It'd make much better satire if I hadn't had my childhood friend turned fundie try that one out with me once.
Later he recanted that position. He'd gone back to his preacher, who explained that the idea God would try to fool us was deprecated. Oops. My friend avoided a schism with his church by accepting the party line.
It was almost scary, how he thought of a (granted, sophistic and silly) position to take all by himself. Happily he backed off of that oh-so-radical practice. Groan.
not only must those kinds of fundamentalist Christians try to force their beliefs on the nation, but also that they must resort to attacking their fellow believers in public forums in order to further their cause. This, to me, is inherently non-Christian behavior
"Fundamentalism," as a religious position, asserts a literalist interpretation of the Bible. To do so, it needs to assert that the Bible is the direct word of God. That's an authoritarian position -- claiming to speak with God's words -- and authoritarian religious views are simply made to breed schisms. Human beings squabble over who's got the right to speak with or for that divine authority.
Any bestselling item will never have an average review of less than 4.0/5.0 stars.
There is a much higher standard for poor reviews than good ones; and even excellent reviews of a product may disappear if they are unfavorable.
I doubt Amazon is really able to pull off that sort of thing consciously, but we'd have to know more about how their process works to say for sure. From my limited experience -- okay, mod me an embarrassed loser, but over several years I've posted a bunch of Amazon reviews -- things seem much less calculated than that.
I've never had a review disappear entirely, and really most of the "editorial" changes to my reviews have seemed like arbitrary, almost nonsensical elisions made by rigid formula. Two easy examples I can think of:
I compared the (godawfully calculating and soulless chick flick) movie "Love Actually" to a well-produced episode of "The Love Boat." The Amazon editors removed the name of the series, but left in the names of the characters - Julie, Doc, Gopher, and Captain Steubing.
For one history book I said something about how people wanted "bastardized" history. They removed the bad word and stuck in a "..." for it. That's happened a few times, in places where my use of the language was not at all offensive.
So, okay, I can see a simple filter catching the bad words, but when did "The Love Boat" become a bad word? Did they think it was a copyright problem? Or what?
Most of my negative reviews are left as-is, but you know, I tend not to post "This SUX."
The overall effect might be to push products, in sort of the same sense that the overall effect of our court system can be racist. I don't think individual decisions within either system are rational enough to amount to a conspiracy, though. You'd have to look at how the process works to figure out why that happens.
If Apple wants to gain market share based on differentiating itself from the competition's draconian DRM measures, it'd be a good idea to put some english on this "spin" right quick. Letting the world speculate based on anonymous sources and not-for-production developer seed systems is not such a good idea -- assuming they think this is a good talking point for them, and given the iTunes store's emphasis on liveable DRM, they seem to.
What we need here is some of Steve Jobs's patented straight talk routine. Stand up and tell us that the DRM will work solely to limit the OS to Apple-branded systems, or whatever... but tell us something, rather than having rumors turn themselves over on slashdot.
(Not that there's any way to get 'hold of/. rumors for good. But you want to shape them a little.)
Yeah, without decent screenplays everything on your list turns to crap. I mean,
3D stereoscopic
It's SCTV 3-D theater: Eugene Levy and John Candy lunge toward you, Eugene Levy and John Candy move away.
dolby Digital 14.2
The next cinematic release of Battlestar Galactica sure will have clear rumbling sounds when the battlestar goes past. Hoo boy. Just like "sensaround" sound for the first cinematic release of Battlestar Galactica...
environmental simulation, smell replicators
Speaking of sensaround -- it's smellaround, back from the dead! Take out your scratch-n-sniff cards, people.
The signs are not all bad. Amazingly, Charlie Kaufman has become a sort of golden boy in today's Hollywood by cranking out pretty good, pretty accessible, interesting little stories: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich. A screenwriter is one of the industry's biggest stars! Christopher Nolan made his director's rep with Memento, and he's done two pop movies since without completely losing any sense of a decent story. The studios actually seem to "get" using the indie movie world as a way to identify talent. It's like a Miracle on Sunset Boulevard. Where's Santa?
(Somehow though, we still have the specter of "the Bruckheimer production of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly" -- OH. MY. GAWD. HOW. HIDEOUSLY BAD. DOES. THAT. SOUND?? I can't wait to see the Matrix-style revolving cameras turning around the big dance at Mr. Bingley's...)
If precedent means anything you're half right
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Xbox 360 for $300
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· Score: 1
Nintendo's consistently tried to set the price of their consoles $50 lower -- and then made up for it with game costs that are higher. Right? At least since the N64 lost its only-64-bit shine, that seems right. So what does that mean, $70 game disks?
The Rev's probably the way I'll go, anyway, for my kids -- if we get anything at all. (Which is an open question. Their birthday's Friday, and darned if they aren't at a loss to ask for anything this year. Two 11-year-olds, and they can't think of anything to put on their lists. It's a parenting dilemma how to deal with this.)
I'm one of the few people it seems that feels there is more information to be learned from our own vastly uncharted seas than far reaches of space.
Is that you, Timothy Dalton? Are you still reading from the narrative script for "Deep Blue"?
Don't fret too much. The military's been lavishing huge money (example: Glomar Explorer) on the ocean for the entirety of the cold war. Now that we've won that war (and are fighting its non-oceanic dregs and ghosts in the form of OBL, Saddam H. and so on) the potential civilian and scientific uses of all that technology are getting tried out in a big way. Robert Ballard's Mediterranean shipwreck dives were done with the little Navy submersibles, for one example among a whole lot of them. The Russian mini subs are available for hire, and so on.
This is a sort of golden age for shipwrecks and deep sea exploration. It's happening, and there's a lot of cross-benefits between space and the ocean. To wit: this story, or the MBARI cabled submersibles that Bruce Robison uses, juxtaposed with the Mars rovers. Benthic exploratino faces some of the same choices space exploration does. (Do we need to send people down to the Challenger Deep, or remote vehicles?)
Talk about knowing how to time and ride a wave. One really has to wonder what would happen if Steve Jobs was to run for elected office. Not that his tastes would run that way, mind you, given how accustomed he is to a somewhat more authoritarian, corporate model. But the guy knows how to manage "spin."
This is an okay-looking little mouse with a couple of little design touches. The only real novelties are the "360 degree" scrolling method, the body covering the buttons idea, and the fact that it's Apple and they've conceded that they're going to provide a multi-button peripheral. The latter of which, to trolls who've been living under a rock, is apparently irresistable.
Here's guessing that Apple will spend the next year or so springing little designs like this on the market, in the hope that it'll help them bridge the time until the Intel chips come in. A whole lot of Airport Express type products, with relatively low-key upgrades to the G4 and G5 lineups taking a back seat. Some new iPod flavors.
It's very simple and intuitive. The menu tree has every action you can take, the context menu has the subset of actions that can be performed on the selected item.
Er, sorry, that's not how things are working for me across Excel, Word, VSS, QVCS, IE, Tera Term Pro, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks, just to name the programs I had open just now. Even at the level of cut and paste commands, whether those'll be on the contextual menu from one object to the next is an open question. When I do use "copy" in Fireworks, the object in my clipboard changes according to which "mode" (bitmap, vector) I'm in. In my telnet session, right-clicking always clones a copy of whatever I've selected at the insert point. It took me a while to realize that, back in the ancient day.
I seriously can't figure out how to use a Mac, becuase I figure out how the UI for a new tool works by right-clicking on things to see what the tool can do with each thing. Select a noun and rightclick for the verbs.
You know an arbitrarily small fraction of the set of commands for any given object, if that's how you're learning things. Seriously. You're never sure if you've got the right thing under the cursor, either. To wit: right-click in html text in IE, and then in the white space around a text graphic. Or how about all the "add-ons" other programs patch in there? I get an enabled "Edit with Altnova XML Spy" option when I'm clicking on a graphic, which won't do anything for me and sure isn't a handy feature.
Toolbars are mostly an annoyance, though they're handy for selection lists (e.g., select some text and change the font) because a selection list doesn't work in a menu.
Toolbars are mostly redundant, I agree, and in the case of Office are a huge thrashing mess. Pretty similar to the world of contextual menus in my book. (But what an odd thing to say about fonts. Font menus were, like, the very first striking thing about Macs in 1984. Because they were so simple to use, you know?)
Its always apeared that its the apple apologists, not Apple, who make the excuse that grandma can use one button more easily.
I think the real reason is design and style. Apple has focused more on how the computer looks than on how easy it is to use.
Perhaps you should actually pay attention to what both Apple and the "Apple apologists" have said all along, which is that right-clicking is essentially a kludge to the simplicity of the API and UI a user is dealing with. If you can quickly tell me what should go in a right-click, across any type of program, and the answer isn't "Whatever we didn't make accessible enough in the menus, hot keys, or toolbar items," then you may win this argument. But you can't. Because right-clicks are essentially for "the stuff we didn't make easy enough to do any other way." Which makes them, ta-da, a big pain to predict, and totally inconsistent across programs. Will cut and paste be in that menu? I can't tell from minute to minute even within a given program. This is called shoddy UI. It requires the user to re-learn what a very basic feature will do, for every dang program and situation within a program.
Your other points just repeat the mantra: it's about the looks, not the function. You repeat the usual examples:
the infamous iMac gimee-carpal-tunnel-hockey-puck that stylisticaly was a good match for the iMac but, this was definitely not designed for human hands
I have children who were quite young when I got my first (freebie) iMac. They preferred the hockey puck to my Intellimouse and a later two-button trackball I had. Go figure.
Apple's site says "Single buttons looks, multi-button charm". This suggests that the one button thing has more to do with *looks* and design, than functionality.
Way to quote the marketing people for this new product to put words in the mouths of all those designers over all those years.
"Why [are you] contributing to any forum about the mac mouse, that will always sink to flaming hell"? Because you're trolling. Your post is the great great grandson of all the Mac mouse trolls ever. It even includes the world "flaming," for goodness sakes.
you could tell the intelligence of a computer's users by how many mouse buttons they had
Quick, what are the rules for what goes in the right-click as opposed to a (tiny, indecipherable) toolbar icon or the drop-down menus? As a user, what can I expect in those three spots?
Apple's point with the mouse buttons has always been that they convolute UI, giving sloppy developers an excuse to drop loads of "the menus we didn't make easy enough to reach" in that contextual menu. In terms of consistent API and UI -- the "programs behave consistently across my computer" part of "it just works" -- two and three buttons are a mess. That's why all those clueless Windows users have trouble using right-click. The (arrogant) mistake there belongs to the programmers, not the users.
That said, once Apple had grudgingly allowed the Control-Click thing, all its systems accepted multi-button mice without any adjustment at all. Apple gave up the point, but continued to include one-button mice just to be contrary. Er, I mean "Different." And they fed the trolls. And this thing is one rejoinder to those trolls.
Unix users have to screw with xorg.conf to set the mouse protocol to get their scroll-wheels to work... does that strike you as being more intelligent?
Let's put it this way: Intelligence might correlate with a willingness to do that, but I'm pretty sure wisdom would not.;-)
This from the people who camped in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater a month-plus before the latest film's release -- and who continued to stand there after they learned the movie wouldn't even be playing inside, saying they were doing so as an act of protest?
That they show a lack of perspective and proportion should not surprise us overmuch. You think?
After 30-odd years, the Trekkies have figured out what a piece of Klingon head makeup is worth, relative to the blue makeup the alien wore in a middling episode of TOS. Apparently the Star Wars set hasn't quite worked out how to figure that economy. Yet. (Maybe it's because Lucas pimped the market so severely?)
Nice example of just how profoundly you take on the responsibilities inherent in our constitution. "Pretty well protected" -- good enough for me! (And then you troll for a grab bag of garbled, sophistic "talking points.")
Yours is the laziness that is impatient with any argument critical of those in power. That's not conservatism, it's... well, you've just given my a new sig.
Evolution of the user's response to poor design
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd do the 3-finger salute... I'd do it again. Eventually this devolved into a pattern...
What a sterling silver, perfect, museum-quality example of what bad UI does to a user. You learned to manually kill processes, constantly. If I designed a car and drivers trained themselves to kill the engine in drive every time, that would be some shoddy design on my part.
(MS can't possibly outdo the dialog boxes from Excel when you try to save to a different format, though. For teaching the user to ignore what's being said and impatiently click "Yes" -- dang it! -- those are without equal. Particularly in conjunction with the way they include a second "Save Changes" dialog if you try to close the document you've just saved to the other format. Every user trains herself to ignore those after the first time or two.)
If this were really the case and not another deluded fanboy rant, I suspect that the PS1 wouldn't have out-sold the N64 by the vast margin that it did.
Ironically, Ocarina of Time gets consistently ranked at #1 or thereabouts precisely because it wasn't a "generic 3D world" experience of the sort you're bemoaning. That game's not graphically amazing, and wasn't when it was released. It's just got years worth of deep, rich gameplay, period. The thing is chock-a-block full of quality experience. My daughter bought an Ocarina based on the one in the game, and learned countless songs using a songbook and by ear. When she plays one of the themes from the game somewhere, inevitably a teenager significantly older than she is (11) will come over and they'll have something in common to talk about. That is not another generic 3D world game.
Meanwhile, again ironically, you appear to be arguing both a) that the games that sell today are popular because they're worthless clones; and b) that the PS1 became incredibly popular and sold well because it had better games than Nintendo's. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance involved in holding these two positions is contributing to your dismissive attitude?
There's at least one baby in that bathwater, friend. I loved Windwaker, personally; it's the only one I've actually played with the kids. Given your tastes, I really think you should try Ocarina again.
The iBook is a dead horse. OK, it's not horrible for $1000.00 but they could do better.
In fact their entire (oh! all six?) portable line is stale and going nowhere fast.
Big reason for the intel switch, yes? Remember the whole "per watt" part of the keynote? Remember how Jobs specifically said the first intel chips would be in Mini-level consumer boxes and portables?
Personally I'm maybe going to consider an iBook as an interim measure and utility box to carry around. They aren't meant to be workhorse professional machines; they're consumer laptops, tons of kids have them for school. Argue the price point, okay, but people who're wanting wide screen models and so on just don't "get" the market niche. It's a computer for the counter space in your chem lab, and for handy digital media collections.
The trick Apple faces here is that when they bump iBooks up at all, the have to stay clear of the PowerBooks. The PB line isn't going to be seeing that big G5 moment now.
So you're right about the stale quality. It's all pretty reminiscent of the debacle back in the early 90s, when Apple lost what was a dominant position in laptops. They left the whole line to languish for a couple of years, and when they finally came out with a PPC portable it was the execrable, shoddy PB5300. It'd amaze me if Jobs didn't have that disaster in the front of his mind right now.
Predictions are only valuable when they are unlikely or surprising. Tabulating obvious patterns and predicting their continuation may be highly accurate yet low in value.
This is a different way of getting data one could theoretically get from human observation. The difference is just a method of data collection -- and the extent to which data collection is passive rather than active.
If someone took this approach with our Unix server guys, the surprise from the POV of upper management would be the share of their working hours in which they were likely to be outside for a smoke. Maybe all of us worker bees know it, but I don't think their bosses' boss's boss would think of that as an obvious pattern. It would be a surprise. If someone was using a method like this to plan large projects, and the projections always involved big delays in the Unix team... that'd be a bad surprise for them.
(Personally I might be interested in the weight thing, incidentally. I don't weigh myself often, certainly didn't at all for years. Lately at the health club I've been attending actual classes, which is more intense and tends to be longer in duration. [I get bored on the machines now.] Without actively having weighed myself all the time, I don't know whether previous weight gains or losses tend to happen when I'm following one regimen or another. If there's an obvious "you lose/gain weight when you combine these three behaviors" going on, I'm missing it. Maybe it would be obvious to a personal trainer or something, but not to me.)
And the guy's pose, in silhouette, could not more profoundly communicate the question: "Where the heck is it?!?
A few years ago, "Vista" was actually one of the proposed new titles for a corporate intranet site I was working on. It came from a committee of middle managers. We shot it down because it didn't mean much, didn't communicate anything about the site it would've been attached to, and wasn't easily "branded" into variations on the theme. (Tiny symbols to remind people of the "vista" didn't come to mind for the end of articles, for one example. No space-efficient "Vista" logo elements.) The idea of providing a way to see the overall "landscape" of the company was the idea, but that struck us as so generic to Web sites generally that we thought it wasn't useful.
(But then, really, "Panther" and "Tiger" are just cool names according to Steve J's 12-year-old self... Easier to brand, with fur coat patterns and so on, but no more meaningful.)
when in fact they are doing exactly that according to their safety protocols, which have been generally tightened post-Columbia.
Skimming that, I substituted "Challenger" for Columbia. I'm not sure which "second round" you're referring to, but there've been lots of shuttle launches. All your points made perfect sense before Columbia's breakup.
Really they'll apply to any NASA launch. Throw in Apollo 11. The same basic pressures applied.
(Challenger was a real watershed -- the way it went had such a huge effect, much more than the Apollo fire. If we're counting "rounds" that would at least count as one previous round.)
...which is far more than they could say under the Old Regime.
Beg your pardon, was our goal to be slightly less arbitrarily violent than Saddam Hussein? High standards you've set, there.
We've heard this one about Abu Graib, too -- as if noting that Saddam's torturers were worse absolved us of the moral responsibility for our leaders' loosened torture policies and their seemingly inevitable results. That argument clearly didn't reach any sort of tipping point for the Iraqi population, didn't deprive the terrorists of their ability to move and strike. It seems to have done just tons to reassure uneasy Iowans, or anyway that's who it was intended for, but in Iraq it was a non-starter.
The parent's point is that the ability of the U.S. military to fire off these "ray guns" with relative impunity would, if anything, undercut the struggle for Iraqi "hearts and minds." Your argument is just one more example of how clueless the authors of this policy really are with respect to that fight. Our leaders understand how to address you -- but me, or a moderate Iraqi intellectual? They have no ability to think that far away from their "base." Which base, in turn, has its head so far up its own ideological colon that it's unable to even ask whether things are working or not...
MS spokespeople and **AA flaks are reminding me more and more of certain public officials these days. George Orwell could easily have written these people up.
The odd thing is that they so often choose to lay into their opponents for their own most conspicuous weaknesses. It's a spin thing, sort of an innoculation, meant for at the ignorant audience they think they're addressing -- but to an informed listener it's like they're living in a house of carnival mirrors, and railing at the scary stuff they see there.
...my frequent visits to coding sites (ie codeproject) have often increased my productivity... Without the web, and the resources it provides... I would waste much more time when I get stumped...
No doubt. Alas, the term "leverage" has past its expiration date among the likely business types who could have recognized that this is a good example of what they supposedly meant by it. (They're off thinking inside the outside-the-box jargon box now.)
Web access is good for the company and the employee, both -- but pinning it to the bottom line in specific ways is hard, and in an employer's economy like this one it's easy for companies to feel tempted to "crack down." When they can tighten screws, there's an impulse to do it, even at their own long-term expense.
People would sometimes almost rather you waste the time, in ways they can quantify and label as clearly job-related. Especially true in larger corporate worlds where the amount of time you spend(/waste) can be a territorial edge for the managerial sorts in defending their fiefdoms. From three levels up, the time on a spreadsheet that says "Web access" doesn't look good, even when it was.
For your "shock and awe" to be a decent analog to the real thing, it'd need to be a failed attempt to convince something like daemons (military commanders subordinate to Saddam) to turn to the other side / allow root access to an outside process. 'Cause by all indications, the cruise missile shock and awe thing just plain didn't work on an strategic level at all. Didn't bring the Iraqi army over, which was a huge part of the idea.
It would also need to be overhyped far in advance in a way that undercut its effectiveness, and it would need to be fabulously expensive, and it would have to play largely to the insecurities of the people who deployed it rather than the people it was theoretically aimed against. ("Shock and Awe" really applied better to the effects of 9/11 on the US population, didn't it?)
Sounds like you're wanting a patent on vaporware that's largely an irrational threat to the OS market. MS surely has prior art.
My father worked at an aerial survey company, and they had some nice Mars maps around that I pored over for a while once.
Whichever federal agency produced them had included a generic boilerplate stamp near the legend, to the effect that the maps weren't to be relied on for navigation purposes.
Slashdot Mirror
The few times I've gotten freebies, they've been directly from a manufacturer, not from the site. (No -- wait, now I think of it, I think Amazon might have sent me a complementary DVD. It wasn't really something I'd have liked much, either. I figured they were sitting in a too-tall pile in the warehouse.)
What'll happen is, when Penguin has a new book about X, they look for people who've submitted reviews on that subject. They don't seem to limit their choices to the shills, either. A couple of the free advance books I've gotten have been the result of a scathing review I submitted in that general area. (Dog breed books and "Intelligent Design," if you're curious.)
To my mind the whole deal's very much like with professional reviewers in the local paper. I've lived a few different places, and aside from Consumer Reports (which has its own issues, but which is at least truly independent) the car reviewers have always been shills everywhere. Book reviewers less so.
It'd make much better satire if I hadn't had my childhood friend turned fundie try that one out with me once.
Later he recanted that position. He'd gone back to his preacher, who explained that the idea God would try to fool us was deprecated. Oops. My friend avoided a schism with his church by accepting the party line.
It was almost scary, how he thought of a (granted, sophistic and silly) position to take all by himself. Happily he backed off of that oh-so-radical practice. Groan.
"Fundamentalism," as a religious position, asserts a literalist interpretation of the Bible. To do so, it needs to assert that the Bible is the direct word of God. That's an authoritarian position -- claiming to speak with God's words -- and authoritarian religious views are simply made to breed schisms. Human beings squabble over who's got the right to speak with or for that divine authority.
Welcome to History of Christianity 101.
There is a much higher standard for poor reviews than good ones; and even excellent reviews of a product may disappear if they are unfavorable.
I doubt Amazon is really able to pull off that sort of thing consciously, but we'd have to know more about how their process works to say for sure. From my limited experience -- okay, mod me an embarrassed loser, but over several years I've posted a bunch of Amazon reviews -- things seem much less calculated than that.
I've never had a review disappear entirely, and really most of the "editorial" changes to my reviews have seemed like arbitrary, almost nonsensical elisions made by rigid formula. Two easy examples I can think of:
So, okay, I can see a simple filter catching the bad words, but when did "The Love Boat" become a bad word? Did they think it was a copyright problem? Or what?
Most of my negative reviews are left as-is, but you know, I tend not to post "This SUX."
The overall effect might be to push products, in sort of the same sense that the overall effect of our court system can be racist. I don't think individual decisions within either system are rational enough to amount to a conspiracy, though. You'd have to look at how the process works to figure out why that happens.
What we need here is some of Steve Jobs's patented straight talk routine. Stand up and tell us that the DRM will work solely to limit the OS to Apple-branded systems, or whatever... but tell us something, rather than having rumors turn themselves over on slashdot.
(Not that there's any way to get 'hold of /. rumors for good. But you want to shape them a little.)
Yeah, without decent screenplays everything on your list turns to crap. I mean,
3D stereoscopic
It's SCTV 3-D theater: Eugene Levy and John Candy lunge toward you, Eugene Levy and John Candy move away.
dolby Digital 14.2
The next cinematic release of Battlestar Galactica sure will have clear rumbling sounds when the battlestar goes past. Hoo boy. Just like "sensaround" sound for the first cinematic release of Battlestar Galactica...
environmental simulation, smell replicators
Speaking of sensaround -- it's smellaround, back from the dead! Take out your scratch-n-sniff cards, people.
The signs are not all bad. Amazingly, Charlie Kaufman has become a sort of golden boy in today's Hollywood by cranking out pretty good, pretty accessible, interesting little stories: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich. A screenwriter is one of the industry's biggest stars! Christopher Nolan made his director's rep with Memento, and he's done two pop movies since without completely losing any sense of a decent story. The studios actually seem to "get" using the indie movie world as a way to identify talent. It's like a Miracle on Sunset Boulevard. Where's Santa?
(Somehow though, we still have the specter of "the Bruckheimer production of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightly" -- OH. MY. GAWD. HOW. HIDEOUSLY BAD. DOES. THAT. SOUND?? I can't wait to see the Matrix-style revolving cameras turning around the big dance at Mr. Bingley's...)
The Rev's probably the way I'll go, anyway, for my kids -- if we get anything at all. (Which is an open question. Their birthday's Friday, and darned if they aren't at a loss to ask for anything this year. Two 11-year-olds, and they can't think of anything to put on their lists. It's a parenting dilemma how to deal with this.)
Is that you, Timothy Dalton? Are you still reading from the narrative script for "Deep Blue"?
Don't fret too much. The military's been lavishing huge money (example: Glomar Explorer) on the ocean for the entirety of the cold war. Now that we've won that war (and are fighting its non-oceanic dregs and ghosts in the form of OBL, Saddam H. and so on) the potential civilian and scientific uses of all that technology are getting tried out in a big way. Robert Ballard's Mediterranean shipwreck dives were done with the little Navy submersibles, for one example among a whole lot of them. The Russian mini subs are available for hire, and so on.
This is a sort of golden age for shipwrecks and deep sea exploration. It's happening, and there's a lot of cross-benefits between space and the ocean. To wit: this story, or the MBARI cabled submersibles that Bruce Robison uses, juxtaposed with the Mars rovers. Benthic exploratino faces some of the same choices space exploration does. (Do we need to send people down to the Challenger Deep, or remote vehicles?)
These aren't mutually exclusive options at all.
This is an okay-looking little mouse with a couple of little design touches. The only real novelties are the "360 degree" scrolling method, the body covering the buttons idea, and the fact that it's Apple and they've conceded that they're going to provide a multi-button peripheral. The latter of which, to trolls who've been living under a rock, is apparently irresistable.
Here's guessing that Apple will spend the next year or so springing little designs like this on the market, in the hope that it'll help them bridge the time until the Intel chips come in. A whole lot of Airport Express type products, with relatively low-key upgrades to the G4 and G5 lineups taking a back seat. Some new iPod flavors.
Er, sorry, that's not how things are working for me across Excel, Word, VSS, QVCS, IE, Tera Term Pro, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks, just to name the programs I had open just now. Even at the level of cut and paste commands, whether those'll be on the contextual menu from one object to the next is an open question. When I do use "copy" in Fireworks, the object in my clipboard changes according to which "mode" (bitmap, vector) I'm in. In my telnet session, right-clicking always clones a copy of whatever I've selected at the insert point. It took me a while to realize that, back in the ancient day.
I seriously can't figure out how to use a Mac, becuase I figure out how the UI for a new tool works by right-clicking on things to see what the tool can do with each thing. Select a noun and rightclick for the verbs.
You know an arbitrarily small fraction of the set of commands for any given object, if that's how you're learning things. Seriously. You're never sure if you've got the right thing under the cursor, either. To wit: right-click in html text in IE, and then in the white space around a text graphic. Or how about all the "add-ons" other programs patch in there? I get an enabled "Edit with Altnova XML Spy" option when I'm clicking on a graphic, which won't do anything for me and sure isn't a handy feature.
Toolbars are mostly an annoyance, though they're handy for selection lists (e.g., select some text and change the font) because a selection list doesn't work in a menu.
Toolbars are mostly redundant, I agree, and in the case of Office are a huge thrashing mess. Pretty similar to the world of contextual menus in my book. (But what an odd thing to say about fonts. Font menus were, like, the very first striking thing about Macs in 1984. Because they were so simple to use, you know?)
Its always apeared that its the apple apologists, not Apple, who make the excuse that grandma can use one button more easily. I think the real reason is design and style. Apple has focused more on how the computer looks than on how easy it is to use.
Perhaps you should actually pay attention to what both Apple and the "Apple apologists" have said all along, which is that right-clicking is essentially a kludge to the simplicity of the API and UI a user is dealing with. If you can quickly tell me what should go in a right-click, across any type of program, and the answer isn't "Whatever we didn't make accessible enough in the menus, hot keys, or toolbar items," then you may win this argument. But you can't. Because right-clicks are essentially for "the stuff we didn't make easy enough to do any other way." Which makes them, ta-da, a big pain to predict, and totally inconsistent across programs. Will cut and paste be in that menu? I can't tell from minute to minute even within a given program. This is called shoddy UI. It requires the user to re-learn what a very basic feature will do, for every dang program and situation within a program.
Your other points just repeat the mantra: it's about the looks, not the function. You repeat the usual examples:
I have children who were quite young when I got my first (freebie) iMac. They preferred the hockey puck to my Intellimouse and a later two-button trackball I had. Go figure.
Way to quote the marketing people for this new product to put words in the mouths of all those designers over all those years.
"Why [are you] contributing to any forum about the mac mouse, that will always sink to flaming hell"? Because you're trolling. Your post is the great great grandson of all the Mac mouse trolls ever. It even includes the world "flaming," for goodness sakes.
Quick, what are the rules for what goes in the right-click as opposed to a (tiny, indecipherable) toolbar icon or the drop-down menus? As a user, what can I expect in those three spots?
Apple's point with the mouse buttons has always been that they convolute UI, giving sloppy developers an excuse to drop loads of "the menus we didn't make easy enough to reach" in that contextual menu. In terms of consistent API and UI -- the "programs behave consistently across my computer" part of "it just works" -- two and three buttons are a mess. That's why all those clueless Windows users have trouble using right-click. The (arrogant) mistake there belongs to the programmers, not the users.
That said, once Apple had grudgingly allowed the Control-Click thing, all its systems accepted multi-button mice without any adjustment at all. Apple gave up the point, but continued to include one-button mice just to be contrary. Er, I mean "Different." And they fed the trolls. And this thing is one rejoinder to those trolls.
Let's put it this way: Intelligence might correlate with a willingness to do that, but I'm pretty sure wisdom would not. ;-)
That they show a lack of perspective and proportion should not surprise us overmuch. You think?
After 30-odd years, the Trekkies have figured out what a piece of Klingon head makeup is worth, relative to the blue makeup the alien wore in a middling episode of TOS. Apparently the Star Wars set hasn't quite worked out how to figure that economy. Yet. (Maybe it's because Lucas pimped the market so severely?)
Nice example of just how profoundly you take on the responsibilities inherent in our constitution. "Pretty well protected" -- good enough for me! (And then you troll for a grab bag of garbled, sophistic "talking points.")
Yours is the laziness that is impatient with any argument critical of those in power. That's not conservatism, it's... well, you've just given my a new sig.
What a sterling silver, perfect, museum-quality example of what bad UI does to a user. You learned to manually kill processes, constantly. If I designed a car and drivers trained themselves to kill the engine in drive every time, that would be some shoddy design on my part.
(MS can't possibly outdo the dialog boxes from Excel when you try to save to a different format, though. For teaching the user to ignore what's being said and impatiently click "Yes" -- dang it! -- those are without equal. Particularly in conjunction with the way they include a second "Save Changes" dialog if you try to close the document you've just saved to the other format. Every user trains herself to ignore those after the first time or two.)
Ironically, Ocarina of Time gets consistently ranked at #1 or thereabouts precisely because it wasn't a "generic 3D world" experience of the sort you're bemoaning. That game's not graphically amazing, and wasn't when it was released. It's just got years worth of deep, rich gameplay, period. The thing is chock-a-block full of quality experience. My daughter bought an Ocarina based on the one in the game, and learned countless songs using a songbook and by ear. When she plays one of the themes from the game somewhere, inevitably a teenager significantly older than she is (11) will come over and they'll have something in common to talk about. That is not another generic 3D world game.
Meanwhile, again ironically, you appear to be arguing both a) that the games that sell today are popular because they're worthless clones; and b) that the PS1 became incredibly popular and sold well because it had better games than Nintendo's. Perhaps the cognitive dissonance involved in holding these two positions is contributing to your dismissive attitude?
There's at least one baby in that bathwater, friend. I loved Windwaker, personally; it's the only one I've actually played with the kids. Given your tastes, I really think you should try Ocarina again.
In fact their entire (oh! all six?) portable line is stale and going nowhere fast.
Big reason for the intel switch, yes? Remember the whole "per watt" part of the keynote? Remember how Jobs specifically said the first intel chips would be in Mini-level consumer boxes and portables?
Personally I'm maybe going to consider an iBook as an interim measure and utility box to carry around. They aren't meant to be workhorse professional machines; they're consumer laptops, tons of kids have them for school. Argue the price point, okay, but people who're wanting wide screen models and so on just don't "get" the market niche. It's a computer for the counter space in your chem lab, and for handy digital media collections.
The trick Apple faces here is that when they bump iBooks up at all, the have to stay clear of the PowerBooks. The PB line isn't going to be seeing that big G5 moment now.
So you're right about the stale quality. It's all pretty reminiscent of the debacle back in the early 90s, when Apple lost what was a dominant position in laptops. They left the whole line to languish for a couple of years, and when they finally came out with a PPC portable it was the execrable, shoddy PB5300. It'd amaze me if Jobs didn't have that disaster in the front of his mind right now.
This is a different way of getting data one could theoretically get from human observation. The difference is just a method of data collection -- and the extent to which data collection is passive rather than active.
If someone took this approach with our Unix server guys, the surprise from the POV of upper management would be the share of their working hours in which they were likely to be outside for a smoke. Maybe all of us worker bees know it, but I don't think their bosses' boss's boss would think of that as an obvious pattern. It would be a surprise. If someone was using a method like this to plan large projects, and the projections always involved big delays in the Unix team... that'd be a bad surprise for them.
(Personally I might be interested in the weight thing, incidentally. I don't weigh myself often, certainly didn't at all for years. Lately at the health club I've been attending actual classes, which is more intense and tends to be longer in duration. [I get bored on the machines now.] Without actively having weighed myself all the time, I don't know whether previous weight gains or losses tend to happen when I'm following one regimen or another. If there's an obvious "you lose/gain weight when you combine these three behaviors" going on, I'm missing it. Maybe it would be obvious to a personal trainer or something, but not to me.)
A few years ago, "Vista" was actually one of the proposed new titles for a corporate intranet site I was working on. It came from a committee of middle managers. We shot it down because it didn't mean much, didn't communicate anything about the site it would've been attached to, and wasn't easily "branded" into variations on the theme. (Tiny symbols to remind people of the "vista" didn't come to mind for the end of articles, for one example. No space-efficient "Vista" logo elements.) The idea of providing a way to see the overall "landscape" of the company was the idea, but that struck us as so generic to Web sites generally that we thought it wasn't useful.
(But then, really, "Panther" and "Tiger" are just cool names according to Steve J's 12-year-old self... Easier to brand, with fur coat patterns and so on, but no more meaningful.)
Skimming that, I substituted "Challenger" for Columbia. I'm not sure which "second round" you're referring to, but there've been lots of shuttle launches. All your points made perfect sense before Columbia's breakup.
Really they'll apply to any NASA launch. Throw in Apollo 11. The same basic pressures applied.
(Challenger was a real watershed -- the way it went had such a huge effect, much more than the Apollo fire. If we're counting "rounds" that would at least count as one previous round.)
Beg your pardon, was our goal to be slightly less arbitrarily violent than Saddam Hussein? High standards you've set, there.
We've heard this one about Abu Graib, too -- as if noting that Saddam's torturers were worse absolved us of the moral responsibility for our leaders' loosened torture policies and their seemingly inevitable results. That argument clearly didn't reach any sort of tipping point for the Iraqi population, didn't deprive the terrorists of their ability to move and strike. It seems to have done just tons to reassure uneasy Iowans, or anyway that's who it was intended for, but in Iraq it was a non-starter.
The parent's point is that the ability of the U.S. military to fire off these "ray guns" with relative impunity would, if anything, undercut the struggle for Iraqi "hearts and minds." Your argument is just one more example of how clueless the authors of this policy really are with respect to that fight. Our leaders understand how to address you -- but me, or a moderate Iraqi intellectual? They have no ability to think that far away from their "base." Which base, in turn, has its head so far up its own ideological colon that it's unable to even ask whether things are working or not...
The odd thing is that they so often choose to lay into their opponents for their own most conspicuous weaknesses. It's a spin thing, sort of an innoculation, meant for at the ignorant audience they think they're addressing -- but to an informed listener it's like they're living in a house of carnival mirrors, and railing at the scary stuff they see there.
No doubt. Alas, the term "leverage" has past its expiration date among the likely business types who could have recognized that this is a good example of what they supposedly meant by it. (They're off thinking inside the outside-the-box jargon box now.)
Web access is good for the company and the employee, both -- but pinning it to the bottom line in specific ways is hard, and in an employer's economy like this one it's easy for companies to feel tempted to "crack down." When they can tighten screws, there's an impulse to do it, even at their own long-term expense.
People would sometimes almost rather you waste the time, in ways they can quantify and label as clearly job-related. Especially true in larger corporate worlds where the amount of time you spend(/waste) can be a territorial edge for the managerial sorts in defending their fiefdoms. From three levels up, the time on a spreadsheet that says "Web access" doesn't look good, even when it was.
It would also need to be overhyped far in advance in a way that undercut its effectiveness, and it would need to be fabulously expensive, and it would have to play largely to the insecurities of the people who deployed it rather than the people it was theoretically aimed against. ("Shock and Awe" really applied better to the effects of 9/11 on the US population, didn't it?)
Sounds like you're wanting a patent on vaporware that's largely an irrational threat to the OS market. MS surely has prior art.
Whichever federal agency produced them had included a generic boilerplate stamp near the legend, to the effect that the maps weren't to be relied on for navigation purposes.