It's weird how hapless TV manufacturers are in figuring out what there's demand for and giving it to us at a decent price point. I'm all against government overriding demand for consumer trinkets like this, but on the other hand somebody should be prodding TV makers a little. You'd think the consolidated bullies of the cable industry would have that stick, but they're in their own world evidently.
I mean, look at recent TV design trends. Flat screens -- who cares if Jennifer Aniston's pregnant belly is somewhat more concave or not? You get used to it either way. Wide screens -- they seemingly can't make 'em nearly cheap enough, because everyone would want one if the price was at all acceptable. HDTV -- who can afford it 0 to watch Monday Night Football?
Meanwhile the sets only get more monstrous, wildly overpriced flat panels aside, and we have warrens of wire running from the TV to the sound system through the special additions we added to our houses for the home theater. The TV's supposed to fit our lives, not the other way around, right?
If you expect these people to have a clear sense of their own interests, even, that's pretty optimistic of you. They can't even come up with a set I want to buy.
Close captioning is a matter of access for hearing impaired folks. What oppressed minority is being aided through the inclusion of digital TV receivers? Not analogous.
Hey, I like the idea of digital TV. I bought a close-captioning television before they were required, too. But mandating it? When airbags aren't required in cars??
In related news, you will also now be required to purchase a TiVo with each new television.
When did we dispense with the whole free markey thing? Isn't demand supposed to have something to do with this? This from the government that won't require airbags in cars.
Imagine, though, how clear they'll all look on the new, digital C-Span. That'll be something.
The problem is Navigator and the add-ons. Navigator is certainly usable, and admittedly it does have some interesting bells and whistles, but its non-standard, inflexible interface drags its rating down to a 6.
"Inflexible" is the word they use, and it's not a bad choice. Mozilla isn't just a non-Windows API style, it's also a break whatever other OS you like. Sure, the authors may be in the dark about some of the customization options, but they're not just Windows ignoramuses (ignorami?:-]) who can't get used to anything else.
I'm with the people who're saying this is a common open source development theme -- both the problem and the dismissive response. UI is a crucial side of development, it requires more meaningful collaboration than "you slap on the interface for your part, and I'll slap it on for mine." Mozilla's above that level, and I personally like and use it, but I can definitely see where my father wouldn't switch from what he already knows without some reassuringly familiar looks and feels.
At the OS level, adoption of any OS as a desktop is affected by the elegance of UI across apps. Windows has enough problems with this kind of stuff just because of different teams within the MS mother ship. (The "styles" people and the "numbered outline" people working on Word seem to be warring camps, don't they? And how about those windows where there are three buttons -- Okay, Cancel, and the X button, all of which just close the window? Sloppy crap like that just pains you to see.)
Projects like Mozilla say there's even further to go for the open source world, though, and dismissing a considered review as ignorant is just not going to get you there.
(Why they start the review by saying it won't be just another 'should I switch from IE' review, and end it by saying you probably don't need to switch from IE... now that's another question.)
Minority Report was a mess of a movie, more like 5 premises jumbled together so they violated one another. The way it presented future technologies made me feel schizoid just watching, too.
The computer interfaces and the customized advertizing thing were the worst offenders. In the future, people will use computer interfaces so jerky and bewildering that nobody else can follow anything they're doing. They will then, inexplicably, display those interfaces on a really big screen so others can stand around wondering what the heck they're doing. Shopping in stores will become so intrusive that everyone will stagger from store to store, dodging the customized messages flung in their direction. Wouldn't it be more like "Choose your custom background music while you're shopping here"? The good folks at Muzak would be more imaginative with something like this than the "futurists" who consulted on the film. Or maybe you could get prices, or combination deals based on what you were looking at... you think?
Pop culture has some pretty backward ideas about how to design around new technologies. Maybe it's right, too; let me know when someone designs a decent alarm clock.
She must've really scared you fluorishing that card, because the things she said just seem like a benign, somewhat ditzy bookstore clerk trying to make conversation. She was bored. You were seriously over the top.
If you want to humiliate someone or win a great battle against indiscriminate or aggressive advertizing, try addressing yourself to the book company. The $8-an-hour clerk isn't responsible. Neither are the poor high school dropouts trying to sell you long distance service. Ask for a manager, and then explain to the manager that "suggestive selling" the membership was intrusive.
God, it's amazing how people fret about their mice. Pretty good example of people letting their computers train them instead of the other way around.
Macs come standard with a no-button mouse. The mouse is hinged, you press the front of the case. It's amazing how little thought you give that after ten seconds. Go noodle on one in the store, see if you even notice it; I'm used to a two-button trackball, and the Apple Optical mouse feels fine.
You can buy the mouse of your choosing -- my optical trackball works fine -- and set it up any which way on your Mac. The Control-click thing works just fine. The OS will let you configure key equivalents for right-clicks and so on. In this case, it'd be simple to assign whatever combo-platter of clicks, chords, and keys you wanted to work this program. I've done the same thing for Photoshop, Pagemaker, and all sorts of games.
There is no correct mouse layout, it's a matter of taste. Apple's deliberately gone a different way, which is kind of cool, okay? Their OS can take anything you throw at it really. What's the big deal? Are you just so completely conditioned by your machine that you can't imagine someone designing it better?
But instead of waiting for a ruling on the case, the BSA abruptly dropped the suit in the fall of 1997. The BSA receives funding from most of the top software companies but appears to be most heavily funded by Microsoft. And, according to Antel's information technology manager, Ricardo Tascenho, the company settled the matter by signing a "special agreement" with Microsoft to replace all of its software with Microsoft products.
The BSA's lawyer in Uruguay, Eduardo DeFreitas, supports Tascenho's story: "Microsoft told me to stop working on the case because they would write an agreement with Antel." DeFreitas says Microsoft's Uruguay manager, Tomas Blatt, instructed him to drop the suit so that Microsoft could "work out a deal for the future."
Okay, so just how did they get the lunking big safe out? This wasn't only a few ounces of moonrock. It was a few ounces of moonrock, several bits of the Martian meteor that had the suggested microbial signatures in it, and a BIG safe around them: a 600-pound safe. How do you check out of the NASA building lugging a 600-lb safe? Where do you dispose of it later? Why didn't NASA have an alarm on any of this stuff? Guess we'll find out now.
At $8,000 U.S. per gram, the outside price, the moon rocks (5 oz = around 142 grams) would have fetched a little over a quarter million bucks each for the four kids. The low end, $2000, would get around 71 grand apiece. The meteor would have added to that some. Was it worth the risk of having no career?
The good news is that the "Belgium (sic) rock hound" and his friends knew when they'd be over the line. Fencing something unique isn't always this hard; stolen original paintings end up in private collections, for example. The people on the other end of this had consciences.
According to the original story -- this is a/. repeat -- the cops got into the sites' computers and posted pages with their police department's official seal in place of the offending sites. It wasn't enough to take down the sites, or anyway they didn't bother trying -- they wanted to substitute something nice and wholesome like police insignia.
The naughty pages constituted defamation of the Virgin Mary, to hear the police say it. Italian law, supposedly, includes strict restrictions of blasphemy against any religion, whatever that means. (I'm still wondering how they reacted to Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses.")
Why would you need to do this with something as expensive and potentially hard to maintain as this custom drive? Wouldn't it be more worthwhile to work out a public and private key arrangement, with the dedicated offline box's private key necessary to make writes to the common drive? That sort of thing'd be much more portable, not to mention cheaper than $800 hard drives.
(And what's the symbolism of the Scarab beetle? In Egypt they stand for immortality -- life from dung. The www.scarab.com site has an animated graphic of a beetle rolling a dung ball. Is this their metaphor for backups? Those whacky Japanese...)
Was this about "spam"? The link here doesn't really say something that's much like the Slashdot version, does it? I mean,
Emailing a question to hordes of people is no use if you really want to know the answer, says psychologists. They found that the more people you copy an email to, the more each recipient is likely to ignore it.
That's not spam, it's more of a general how-to-mine-e-mail question. People could apply it at work, for example -- don't ask 45 people to fix something, ask one.
There's no argument here about how sending to more addresses lessens the rate of return; instead I see sociological thoughts about "diffusion of responsibility" and a little study where they sent enquiries from a ficitious person and categorized the responses across 200+ recipients.
The lesson you'd take away, if you were an advertizing skunk, is to address things specifically to individuals as much as is possible. Advertisers know that, which is why they spend money on mailing lists and attempt to make everything look like it's personally addressed to the recipient. Next time you win the sweepstakes, Name of Addressee, you'll see that.
But spam? That's different. (Or did they have "Sarah Feldman" ask how she could date more women?)
Another decent comparison would be lawnmowers. People buy a lot of wasteful, noisy, polluting internal-combustion lawn mowers. The energy efficent stickers, too, go on the more efficient gas mowers and the electric ones -- the hand reel models that everyone used in 1951 get ignored. People don't really need all the power and convenience and cutting consistency of a behemoth lawn tractor, but there's a sort of keeping-up-with-the-latest thing that drives the market in that direction. Reel mowers aren't as profitable, either, so there you go.
You gotta think most people who use their laptops to take notes and write outlines don't need a fully decked out modern machine like the ones we're getting sold. They might like an efficient, smaller, market-specific one, if only those got made. Students really need something like an iBook, not a mondo desktop machine only smaller and less reliable. In a lot of ways a less performance-beefed machine would be better for most people: longer battery life, lighter weight, and so on. But we're buying (and being sold) into a lawn tractor market.
You'd think this would be changing as more people started to have both a portable and a desktop. Doesn't seem like the manufacturers see that middle ground between Palms and desktops, though. So, the "innovative" stickers get put on stuff like this that mitigates the negative sides of the ever-more-powerful trend. This tractor is a little less obnoxious than the others, give it the "Energy Star" sticker.
Maybe three years ago one of the Smithsonian ComputerWorld awards went to a company that was working on heart surgeries like this.
And no, nobody was exactly volunteering to be the first high-risk surgery attempt. It seems right that we'd try knee surgeries in a situation like this first; both the isolated patient and the lack of really bad potential outcomes make this a decent first choice.
The people with the remote heart surgery systems saw them as a training tool, for one example, first. They had some specific ideas about the steps that'd happen before the technology could be adapted for real surgery, anyway.
They're arguing that Congress intended the royalty payments to apply only to internet services which allow one to pick what music one receives...
If we're having a debate about what congress intended, as opposed to what the law actually says, then somebody did a p*ss poor job of writing the legislation. Golly, which moneyed interest could be behind such a poorly conceived bill's being voted through?
... - if the listener is force-fed a stream, like regular radio, Congress didn't intend for the royalty payments to apply.
"Force-fed" -- unusually good word choice for slashdot. If we have too much choice about what we're getting, that's piracy -- PIRACY! If radio programmers get to steer the boat, though, stopping off only at Disney-owned resort islands along the way and keeping us from collecting any shells except from the sanctioned gift shops -- well, Welcome to the Love Boat, I'm Julie McCoy and I'll be your cruise director. It's piracy, see, if you try to steer the boat yourself...
Man, do broadcast industries just not get the point-to-point mojo. These are companies that think the internet is just another distribution channel, and that advertizing Time Magazine on CNN's Web site is really happening "synergy." Hoo-boy, what a grand vision that is, huh?
The team of Berkeley Lab scientists that announced two years ago the observation of what appeared to be Element 118 -- heaviest undiscovered transuranic element at the time -- has retracted its original paper after several confirmation experiments failed to reproduce the results.
That was dated July of 2001 if I remember right.
So they said they'd found something, but the confirming experiments didn't come through. They've retracted their claim. That's pretty much how it works. Seems like you can still trust science, precisely because of stories like this. Right?
If it was just PR blather vs. PR blather, this wouldn't be that interesting. It also, though, touched on some distinctly different approaches by the two companies:
Microsoft, "making announcements about new technologies far ahead of their delivery to market"? The heck you say! By contrast, you have Apple, trying its level best not to reveal anything until it's ready for Steve Jobs to give a keynote speech. Apple's got the 17" iMacs in the supply chain by now, probably, and MS is trying to undercut their announcement with futureware. How different could that be?
The complaint from MS that Apple isn't pushing OSX enough comes down to wanting Apple to move its entire user base at once. MS wants to develop (Office) for OSX only, without worrying about losing the market share that hasn't moved up. Seems like MS's model is to force upgrades -- shocking, yes? Apple has less trouble with the user population migrating in depth gradually; they expect it to happen as people get new machines.
The other huge difference, of course, is that Apple's PR machine usually would quash incompetent quotes like that "gratitude" thing. Oh, man. Generalissimo Jobs would have that guy's head.
I appreciated Mr. Anthony's candor about women in his books. Those were pretty pointed questions, and he got defensive (okay, "feisty") in response all right. Unfortunately, when someone refers to conflicted, complex human feelings this way...
It's like bird watching: one looks and appreciates but does not touch. I suspect that 90% of men who claim to feel otherwise are lying.
...the impression that he's basically an author for 14-year-olds at heart starts to seem pretty spot on.
As a pretty avid birder, I can say that, um, it's a different sort of feeling altogether. Are the novels his binoculars in this tortured analogy? The spotting scope? His Peterson's guide? What?
(And anyway, does writing novels about those subjects count as "looking" or "touching"? He's actively putting a point of view out there, not just "looking.")
Does this sound like a state fair ride you'd want to take?
The first step is "Rocket Skydiving" -- simple, catapult launched giant water rockets that can take a load of skydivers to 15,000 feet in under a minute. This would be safer than airplanes.
"Simple, catapult launched giant water rockets" which you would ride from, say, sea level to 15,000 feet in less than a minute and then jump out of.
Okay, so the idea of these monuments, their potential meanings about the near future and so on, might be interestingly enigmatic. A little derivative, but hey, it was a good idea so why not steal it? (If you didn't immediately think of 2001, you may be alone.)
This doesn't sound anything like subtle, though. Gee, these huge (city stomping) monuments have specific dates on them, and they all commemorate military victories (yawn) by some sort of conqueror named "Kuin." Talk about your ploddingly obvious directions to go...
a video teleconference to re-enact the first satellite broadcast was planned.
I'm imagining a bunch of people all conferenced up, trying to get ancient equipment up to send a trans-atlantic signal but meanwhile able to problem solve in real time with each other. Bizarre.
Either that or they're going to do a videoconference that shows little more than a flag flying in front of the Earth Dome thing. ("Let's try to dumb it down some more, people, this isn't a re-enactment until the signal's a hazy, fixed frame. Oops -- our conferencing software heard the flag snapping in the breeze and automatically zoomed in a little to center on the speaker...")
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, look at recent TV design trends. Flat screens -- who cares if Jennifer Aniston's pregnant belly is somewhat more concave or not? You get used to it either way. Wide screens -- they seemingly can't make 'em nearly cheap enough, because everyone would want one if the price was at all acceptable. HDTV -- who can afford it 0 to watch Monday Night Football?
Meanwhile the sets only get more monstrous, wildly overpriced flat panels aside, and we have warrens of wire running from the TV to the sound system through the special additions we added to our houses for the home theater. The TV's supposed to fit our lives, not the other way around, right?
If you expect these people to have a clear sense of their own interests, even, that's pretty optimistic of you. They can't even come up with a set I want to buy.
No, no, this mandated spending is all about "consumer confidence." Keep your head down and fight the terrorists, citizen.
Hey, I like the idea of digital TV. I bought a close-captioning television before they were required, too. But mandating it? When airbags aren't required in cars??
In related news, you will also now be required to purchase a TiVo with each new television.
When did we dispense with the whole free markey thing? Isn't demand supposed to have something to do with this? This from the government that won't require airbags in cars.
Imagine, though, how clear they'll all look on the new, digital C-Span. That'll be something.
"Inflexible" is the word they use, and it's not a bad choice. Mozilla isn't just a non-Windows API style, it's also a break whatever other OS you like. Sure, the authors may be in the dark about some of the customization options, but they're not just Windows ignoramuses (ignorami? :-]) who can't get used to anything else.
I'm with the people who're saying this is a common open source development theme -- both the problem and the dismissive response. UI is a crucial side of development, it requires more meaningful collaboration than "you slap on the interface for your part, and I'll slap it on for mine." Mozilla's above that level, and I personally like and use it, but I can definitely see where my father wouldn't switch from what he already knows without some reassuringly familiar looks and feels.
At the OS level, adoption of any OS as a desktop is affected by the elegance of UI across apps. Windows has enough problems with this kind of stuff just because of different teams within the MS mother ship. (The "styles" people and the "numbered outline" people working on Word seem to be warring camps, don't they? And how about those windows where there are three buttons -- Okay, Cancel, and the X button, all of which just close the window? Sloppy crap like that just pains you to see.)
Projects like Mozilla say there's even further to go for the open source world, though, and dismissing a considered review as ignorant is just not going to get you there.
(Why they start the review by saying it won't be just another 'should I switch from IE' review, and end it by saying you probably don't need to switch from IE... now that's another question.)
Of course, the last worst problem with internet layout was framesets. We can't link to the article about that one, though... it was in a frameset...
Architeuthis flesh has tons of ammonia in it. People -- Clyde Roper, I think -- have tried to eat the stuff. Nope.
The computer interfaces and the customized advertizing thing were the worst offenders. In the future, people will use computer interfaces so jerky and bewildering that nobody else can follow anything they're doing. They will then, inexplicably, display those interfaces on a really big screen so others can stand around wondering what the heck they're doing. Shopping in stores will become so intrusive that everyone will stagger from store to store, dodging the customized messages flung in their direction. Wouldn't it be more like "Choose your custom background music while you're shopping here"? The good folks at Muzak would be more imaginative with something like this than the "futurists" who consulted on the film. Or maybe you could get prices, or combination deals based on what you were looking at... you think?
Pop culture has some pretty backward ideas about how to design around new technologies. Maybe it's right, too; let me know when someone designs a decent alarm clock.
If you want to humiliate someone or win a great battle against indiscriminate or aggressive advertizing, try addressing yourself to the book company. The $8-an-hour clerk isn't responsible. Neither are the poor high school dropouts trying to sell you long distance service. Ask for a manager, and then explain to the manager that "suggestive selling" the membership was intrusive.
Macs come standard with a no-button mouse. The mouse is hinged, you press the front of the case. It's amazing how little thought you give that after ten seconds. Go noodle on one in the store, see if you even notice it; I'm used to a two-button trackball, and the Apple Optical mouse feels fine.
You can buy the mouse of your choosing -- my optical trackball works fine -- and set it up any which way on your Mac. The Control-click thing works just fine. The OS will let you configure key equivalents for right-clicks and so on. In this case, it'd be simple to assign whatever combo-platter of clicks, chords, and keys you wanted to work this program. I've done the same thing for Photoshop, Pagemaker, and all sorts of games.
There is no correct mouse layout, it's a matter of taste. Apple's deliberately gone a different way, which is kind of cool, okay? Their OS can take anything you throw at it really. What's the big deal? Are you just so completely conditioned by your machine that you can't imagine someone designing it better?
Overseas Invasion
Excerpt:
Okay, so just how did they get the lunking big safe out? This wasn't only a few ounces of moonrock. It was a few ounces of moonrock, several bits of the Martian meteor that had the suggested microbial signatures in it, and a BIG safe around them: a 600-pound safe. How do you check out of the NASA building lugging a 600-lb safe? Where do you dispose of it later? Why didn't NASA have an alarm on any of this stuff? Guess we'll find out now.
At $8,000 U.S. per gram, the outside price, the moon rocks (5 oz = around 142 grams) would have fetched a little over a quarter million bucks each for the four kids. The low end, $2000, would get around 71 grand apiece. The meteor would have added to that some. Was it worth the risk of having no career?
The good news is that the "Belgium (sic) rock hound" and his friends knew when they'd be over the line. Fencing something unique isn't always this hard; stolen original paintings end up in private collections, for example. The people on the other end of this had consciences.
The naughty pages constituted defamation of the Virgin Mary, to hear the police say it. Italian law, supposedly, includes strict restrictions of blasphemy against any religion, whatever that means. (I'm still wondering how they reacted to Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses.")
(And what's the symbolism of the Scarab beetle? In Egypt they stand for immortality -- life from dung. The www.scarab.com site has an animated graphic of a beetle rolling a dung ball. Is this their metaphor for backups? Those whacky Japanese...)
The lesson you'd take away, if you were an advertizing skunk, is to address things specifically to individuals as much as is possible. Advertisers know that, which is why they spend money on mailing lists and attempt to make everything look like it's personally addressed to the recipient. Next time you win the sweepstakes, Name of Addressee, you'll see that.
But spam? That's different. (Or did they have "Sarah Feldman" ask how she could date more women?)
Another decent comparison would be lawnmowers. People buy a lot of wasteful, noisy, polluting internal-combustion lawn mowers. The energy efficent stickers, too, go on the more efficient gas mowers and the electric ones -- the hand reel models that everyone used in 1951 get ignored. People don't really need all the power and convenience and cutting consistency of a behemoth lawn tractor, but there's a sort of keeping-up-with-the-latest thing that drives the market in that direction. Reel mowers aren't as profitable, either, so there you go.
You gotta think most people who use their laptops to take notes and write outlines don't need a fully decked out modern machine like the ones we're getting sold. They might like an efficient, smaller, market-specific one, if only those got made. Students really need something like an iBook, not a mondo desktop machine only smaller and less reliable. In a lot of ways a less performance-beefed machine would be better for most people: longer battery life, lighter weight, and so on. But we're buying (and being sold) into a lawn tractor market.
You'd think this would be changing as more people started to have both a portable and a desktop. Doesn't seem like the manufacturers see that middle ground between Palms and desktops, though. So, the "innovative" stickers get put on stuff like this that mitigates the negative sides of the ever-more-powerful trend. This tractor is a little less obnoxious than the others, give it the "Energy Star" sticker.
And no, nobody was exactly volunteering to be the first high-risk surgery attempt. It seems right that we'd try knee surgeries in a situation like this first; both the isolated patient and the lack of really bad potential outcomes make this a decent first choice.
The people with the remote heart surgery systems saw them as a training tool, for one example, first. They had some specific ideas about the steps that'd happen before the technology could be adapted for real surgery, anyway.
If we're having a debate about what congress intended, as opposed to what the law actually says, then somebody did a p*ss poor job of writing the legislation. Golly, which moneyed interest could be behind such a poorly conceived bill's being voted through?
"Force-fed" -- unusually good word choice for slashdot. If we have too much choice about what we're getting, that's piracy -- PIRACY! If radio programmers get to steer the boat, though, stopping off only at Disney-owned resort islands along the way and keeping us from collecting any shells except from the sanctioned gift shops -- well, Welcome to the Love Boat, I'm Julie McCoy and I'll be your cruise director. It's piracy, see, if you try to steer the boat yourself...
Man, do broadcast industries just not get the point-to-point mojo. These are companies that think the internet is just another distribution channel, and that advertizing Time Magazine on CNN's Web site is really happening "synergy." Hoo-boy, what a grand vision that is, huh?
The original retraction last July mentioned that the confirming experiments hadn't come through. The peer review process does work, yes.
So they said they'd found something, but the confirming experiments didn't come through. They've retracted their claim. That's pretty much how it works. Seems like you can still trust science, precisely because of stories like this. Right?
The other huge difference, of course, is that Apple's PR machine usually would quash incompetent quotes like that "gratitude" thing. Oh, man. Generalissimo Jobs would have that guy's head.
As a pretty avid birder, I can say that, um, it's a different sort of feeling altogether. Are the novels his binoculars in this tortured analogy? The spotting scope? His Peterson's guide? What?
(And anyway, does writing novels about those subjects count as "looking" or "touching"? He's actively putting a point of view out there, not just "looking.")
"Simple, catapult launched giant water rockets" which you would ride from, say, sea level to 15,000 feet in less than a minute and then jump out of.
Safer than which "airplanes," exactly?
This doesn't sound anything like subtle, though. Gee, these huge (city stomping) monuments have specific dates on them, and they all commemorate military victories (yawn) by some sort of conqueror named "Kuin." Talk about your ploddingly obvious directions to go...
I'm imagining a bunch of people all conferenced up, trying to get ancient equipment up to send a trans-atlantic signal but meanwhile able to problem solve in real time with each other. Bizarre.
Either that or they're going to do a videoconference that shows little more than a flag flying in front of the Earth Dome thing. ("Let's try to dumb it down some more, people, this isn't a re-enactment until the signal's a hazy, fixed frame. Oops -- our conferencing software heard the flag snapping in the breeze and automatically zoomed in a little to center on the speaker...")
It's a brave new world.