People do this exact same thing with movies as well...especially now that pacing has sped up and attention spans have decreased. Even movies that aren't that old like alien or blade runner are slow enough to make people fall asleep and complain that it was just a more boring version of themes and techniques they have seen done before. Most of these reviews sounded like high school students reading required texts--short attention spans + slightly more mature concepts + a large amount of work tacked on top (somewhere I have a listing from 10th grade of every single simile and metaphor in the scarlet letter)= OMG THIS BUK SUX
That being said, I don't think the blog author thought they were discovering anything phenomenal or profound--just writing a little pop-interest piece about something that can be an amusing past time (reading reviews written by idiots is fun for just about any topic).
There is a differance between watching and reading shakespeare though...maybe the GP just hasn't bothered to see a worthwhile production. Many people are not huge fans of reading his plays but will enjoy seeing them performed.
The language can be an issue, and often directors modernize the language somewhat in their productions (making particularly tricky passages a little more clearer or even doing a completely modernized dialogue)
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
Too bad he can't seem to figure out how the location thing works.
Ipod touches have had location support for a long time now (and they do not have gps or 3g chips). Google scrapes base station ID numbers from wifi points when it takes street-view photos--this was enough to put my friends dot on a map within 20-30ft of our actual room when he first got his ipod touch (it was in the right building...just not quite in the right apartment).
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
Air Mouse or Snatch let you use your iphone/ipod touch as a wireless keyboard/mouse for controlling things like HTPCs
Look for the people who make those (or maybe the people who make boxee or xbmc) to make something for the ipad to control HTPCs. Have that keyboard/mouse function, but also let you browse your library on the ipad and click play to have it show up on the TV. You can do this somewhat already with xbmc's web interface but it is a little clunky.
I have not used amarok in a year or so, but I resent the winamp comparison. Amarok is much closer to itunes (with slightly better handling of library vs. now playing conventions).
Winamp is far more powerful...it has its idiosyncrasies but once I got used to the power-user features, I have been unable to drop it. Itunes is like a toy music player...amarok gets rid of the toy distinction but I have not been able to make it match winamp when it comes to interaction between the library and the active playlist which has its own pretty advanced set set of queuing options (you can fake some of this in recent itunes by forcing everything to play under the guise of itunes dj but it is kind of silly).
Songbird was starting to be an interesting program...I think it was getting ready to surpass Amarok and move close to winamp in the way it handled libraries/active playlists.
Honestly, the rise in micro-priced apps (and ad-supported stuff) has got to be a boon for developers in lower cost of living countries.
If you can code and operate with rather clear english (or get someone to help you with translation), even a moderately successful iphone app or facebook game could generate pretty significant revenues. IIRC, Scrabulous was made by a pair of coders in India--while it was a dubious rip of scrabble, I would imagine that the ad commissions translated into a fortune by Indian standards. Now that there are platforms like facebook or the various app stores, you really do not need the kind of reach and marketing that would have been very difficult to accomplish for a group of coders in the middle of Africa--the distribution platform is already good to go and if you make something interesting, word of mouth will take care of a lot of the advertising. Thousands of sales of a 99c app don't amount to much in the US...but there are lots of places where a few thousand USD a year would be great to cover living expenses or provide working capital for something more ambitious.
Now if only they had kept the algorithm to themselves for a little while...with the hollywood stock exchange becoming a public real money exchange, they could make a bunch of money and use that to pay for serious research!
I had a computer that was stuck in their beta test (until I figured out what combination of logging out/clearing cache and cookies would get rid of it). The layout was similar although they had some even worse features. The search tried to dynamically shrink the currently playing video (to the a small box in the top left) to display the search results next to the recommended videos...this simply did not work for me (firefox on ubuntu). The first search might sort of work but after that I would have to first go to the youtube homepage (search box would become non-responsive otherwise). Also, videos would frequently refuse to load, even if the same video in embedded mode played fine (or played fine on a system not running the new layout). Another hated change was the automatic play of the next video on the right hand side--you could disable it, but only per session...leave youtube and come back and it is back to autoplay.
There were a few posts about it on the youtube blog and the comments mostly seemed to hate it (although in the youtube language of "f this crap you are all idiots who cant design shitzzz"). There was an opt-out link that didn't work (and mention of an opt out link that should be on every single page in the new layout but I could never find it). Looks like they at least fixed SOME of those problems before releasing it into the wild.
I can still see a few clear formatting bugs (firefox, winxp) but at least the videos actually play...
Unfortunately, it also looks like they are pushing through the new page design which I am not a huge fan of.
The *glaring* problems have been fixed, but the way things are placed does not seem as smart to me...particularily the video description. It should be to the side of the video...especially on wide screen displays. Often it will have lyrics or something you want to read while the video is playing and you can not do this with a longer block of text (or with any text on a netbook screen).
How exactly can you make sweeping generalizations about the crowd that plays HoN when the game is still in a relatively small closed beta.
The people who get into and play betas tend to be the people most interested and devoted to the game--they have probably played a lot of DoTA--Basshunter is probably happily playing away. The rush of noobs won't hit until the launch (although there will be more people joining in tonight).
I just nabbed one on ebay with bing cashback and double ebay bucks (only if you have already used ebay bucks...) and its final price was $254 (265 if you skip the ebay bucks...bing is instant into your paypal and back into your back account so you are a fool if you don't use it).
I think it was something like $289 without taking anything off...no win7 but I was planning to ubuntu anyways.
Nah, there is room for real time games that are more strategy focused. Some people don't like waiting for other people to go...they would rather it always be your turn (but development steps take time). There is some benefit to being faster (getting things started right as one development ends) but there can be overpowering strategic requirements so the click-handling only matters when people are about equal on strategy levels.
lets face it, you have to have a pretty uncommon infrastructure to not be standardized on MS Office.
About the only major large-corp departure from office would be lotus notes...but you can still use sharepoint (and IBM has lots of lotus notes based stuff that can do similar things). Odds are even if the IT infrastructure is different, they share an email paradigm because otherwise stuff is a big pain (the company I work for switched to our parent company's exchange system from our own lotus notes even though we do the rest of the stuff in house).
Nah, it is his job to know how to use the calculation.
I certainly don't remember how to do all those statistics calculations by hand but I use SAS and excel almost every day and they don't seem to have forgotten...give me a few more years and I might be at the point where I wouldn't be confident trying to explain what a standard deviation actually "is"
I know some people weren't bothered by it, but they must not like to explore the scene and only stay focused on whatever the director is forcing you to look at. Hopefully those people aren't the judges for the cinematography oscar...because they are missing out on everything else the director hid in the sides/background of the shot (and believe me...its intentionally placed there).
Not being able to pull something into focus just feels so jarring in 3d. In 2d, the depth of field effects are fine because your eyes are not perceiving a different focal plane, but in 3d your eyes think they are focused on the foreground object so when you try and look away, they will try to focus for distance and get confused (since everything is still on the same focal plane).
I don't necessarily buy the price increase argument (though I wouldn't be surprised if they outpaced inflation...). What makes it too expensive are the snacks...so I just avoid those. Also the alternatives have gotten cheaper and easier to comparatively the movie seems more expensive (redbox movies for a buck...netflix...the last time I rented a movie was years ago and it cost far more than $1).
I agree that people seem to have gotten worse at behaving in the theater though and this is more important to me. I am trying to mentally control for the variables (different cities, being a different age, etc) and I still get the feeling that people are just more rude. Things like cell phones were not such a problem 8 years ago...people would be annoyed if they went off but less people had them (especially as theaters are often filled with a bunch of HS students and stuff...2002-2005 was about when I observed mobile phone ownership to be occasional to near-100% in that age group)and people seemed more hesitant to fool with them. It would be rare to have someone actually think they could get away with a quiet phone call and you didn't have pockets of light popping up as people check and respond to messages on their smartphones (hell, back then phone screens were much more dim...color was rare). Now the blips of message-checking lights are pretty frequent and bad behavior abounds...
Because most ACH transfers require a two way relationship to exist. Also ACH transfers can have some strict limits...BofA and Citibank both seem to limit you to something around 3000 a day and 6-10k a month from a bit of googling...there are some online-only places with higher limits (25k/day and 50k/m for discover) but I prefer to do my standard payments with brick and mortar banks (we ARE talking about replacing checks here...not occasional transfers from your high interest savings account). Also, if its a high-interest savings account, you will hit reg D limits after 6 transactions...
Also, 3 days may not be much of a problem but it is not good enough to replace a check. I hand you a check right now and you can deposit it right away (withdrawal availability times may vary, but the balance will show and some will be available). I can also write you a check for $10,000 without issue. A wire transfer does this the same or better--thus making it a good replacement for a check. Funds are available fast and there are no silly limits...It is a workable solution that is used the rest of the world over...so why does it cost so much here? It's not an artificial limit at all--I have been asked to wire money to Europe in quantities less than the fee for sending a wire transfer (my cost-minimizing solution was to make an international phone call and read them my credit card number). ACH can't do this (and honestly why in this world should moving numbers between electronic accounts take 3 days?)
But have you tried to do a "Wire Transfer?" Not any other kind of transfer (which tend to only be between accounts that you have control over, but a wire transfer that could be to anyone in the world. Every American bank charges hefty fees for this--this isn't really a sign of evil, just a different evolution of the banking system--wires are typically only used for large transactions where the cost is insignificant. If we were to start using them more often, the price would fall off as the system became even more automated (although that is a bit of a chicken/egg problem).
As to the grandparent poster, I have a few similar arrangements where I still have to write checks for things because they want to charge me extra money to pay electronically. Of course, I don't actually write checks for those things any more...citibank cuts a check on my behalf and mails it to them on the date I choose (no fees at all). The only thing I would prefer is if I could pay everything including rent with my credit card...the frequent flier miles would be nice and then there is only one payment I have to make sure goes through each month.
As others mentioned, there are other transfer mechanisms in place at various parts of the system (ACH, ACAT, whatever they want to call moving funds between two accounts at the same bank) but the wire transfer costs $35 at each of the banks I have an account with. ACH transfers are free although they carry a transaction limit and are not instant (most of my banks say they will take 3 days...citibank is able to do less than $1000 next day). They also require account information on both sides...when I set up my bank to bank transfer relationship, I had to enter login info for the other bank and when I set up relationships with my brokerage (and paypal IIRC), I had to verify small deposits before it could work.
Wire transfers would be a good option but they are far too expensive here. I stayed in a hostel in lisbon last summer and they wanted me to wire them the deposit (which was only $30...so less than the wire fee)--even if I hadn't used skype, it was far cheaper to make an international phone call and read them my credit card number.
Exactly, I am sure it is a pretty generous limit, made to prevent serious flaws in technique...or more: force people to correct their inefficient errors instead of just saying "well, it works eventually"
If they are trying to teach people to program...there are probably kids who will want to stop at "good enough" (no incentive to make a program they won't actually use be any faster) and this gives you a reason why that they won't question. You just say "oh, doesn't meet the time limit" and it is done...much easier than trying to convince them to make it faster with no basis.
I don't mind the limited supply of taxis...it seems to maintain a standard of service and helps to maintain taxi availability (since licenses are expensive, there are still plenty of cabs out at less profitable times of the day but not too many out at busy times).
There is only room for so many active taxis in a city and having expensive badges is a decent way to manage that.
Also, cabbies tend to be much more aware of driving in the city than your average person. Take a big city like new york or chicago. A lot of people simply don't drive (they may be licensed but they don't drive in the city). Even those who do drive, may only know their neighborhood and other areas they frequent. Cabbies tend to know the city quite well and know the optimal routes to get places at different times of the day. I probably take a cab home from work (downtown chicago) about once a week and I can think of one driver in the past 3 months who I have had to give more detailed instructions to--and my destinations are rarely addresses on major intersections. They need to be able to do this because not everyone can tell them how--tourists might have an address and nothing more. An old trick I learned when going to ohare airport (or past it) is to follow the flood of taxis--sometimes the express lanes are a better option and sometimes they are not...the cabbies almost always get it right.
Except that the meter boxes are usually a pretty controlled and protected item...
in NYC they are actually quite complex, having a touchscreen unit in the back where people can swipe credit cards and stuff...it would be remarkably easy to implement something indicating out of town rate on this screen (and honestly, it probably already says it on the meter box--people just aren't paying attention)
Well the baseline broadband speed limit on comcast would be on the config that gets pushed to your modem over tftp on boot. AFAIK, this cap is unable to be changed for specific speed increases.
Maybe they will give everyone higher speeds during the testing period...it might kill load balancing and hurt the top speeds of the people who already pay for top end service, but it would definately raise the average. I don't know if comcast offers a super low speed connection, but RCN can do 1.5Mbit and there is no way that bumping all the 1.5 meg customers to 10Mbit or higher would kill the service (as the 1.5Mbit is less speed than even basic comcast had 6 years ago and pretty much exists to grab price sensitive customers and convince them to pay for faster service)
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That being said, I don't think the blog author thought they were discovering anything phenomenal or profound--just writing a little pop-interest piece about something that can be an amusing past time (reading reviews written by idiots is fun for just about any topic).
The language can be an issue, and often directors modernize the language somewhat in their productions (making particularly tricky passages a little more clearer or even doing a completely modernized dialogue)
Ipod touches have had location support for a long time now (and they do not have gps or 3g chips). Google scrapes base station ID numbers from wifi points when it takes street-view photos--this was enough to put my friends dot on a map within 20-30ft of our actual room when he first got his ipod touch (it was in the right building...just not quite in the right apartment).
Look for the people who make those (or maybe the people who make boxee or xbmc) to make something for the ipad to control HTPCs. Have that keyboard/mouse function, but also let you browse your library on the ipad and click play to have it show up on the TV. You can do this somewhat already with xbmc's web interface but it is a little clunky.
Winamp is far more powerful...it has its idiosyncrasies but once I got used to the power-user features, I have been unable to drop it. Itunes is like a toy music player...amarok gets rid of the toy distinction but I have not been able to make it match winamp when it comes to interaction between the library and the active playlist which has its own pretty advanced set set of queuing options (you can fake some of this in recent itunes by forcing everything to play under the guise of itunes dj but it is kind of silly).
Songbird was starting to be an interesting program...I think it was getting ready to surpass Amarok and move close to winamp in the way it handled libraries/active playlists.
If you can code and operate with rather clear english (or get someone to help you with translation), even a moderately successful iphone app or facebook game could generate pretty significant revenues. IIRC, Scrabulous was made by a pair of coders in India--while it was a dubious rip of scrabble, I would imagine that the ad commissions translated into a fortune by Indian standards. Now that there are platforms like facebook or the various app stores, you really do not need the kind of reach and marketing that would have been very difficult to accomplish for a group of coders in the middle of Africa--the distribution platform is already good to go and if you make something interesting, word of mouth will take care of a lot of the advertising. Thousands of sales of a 99c app don't amount to much in the US...but there are lots of places where a few thousand USD a year would be great to cover living expenses or provide working capital for something more ambitious.
Now if only they had kept the algorithm to themselves for a little while...with the hollywood stock exchange becoming a public real money exchange, they could make a bunch of money and use that to pay for serious research!
People will see it and think that the dude who actually planted the evidence is a sick bastard and feel bad for the victim.
I had a computer that was stuck in their beta test (until I figured out what combination of logging out/clearing cache and cookies would get rid of it). The layout was similar although they had some even worse features. The search tried to dynamically shrink the currently playing video (to the a small box in the top left) to display the search results next to the recommended videos...this simply did not work for me (firefox on ubuntu). The first search might sort of work but after that I would have to first go to the youtube homepage (search box would become non-responsive otherwise). Also, videos would frequently refuse to load, even if the same video in embedded mode played fine (or played fine on a system not running the new layout). Another hated change was the automatic play of the next video on the right hand side--you could disable it, but only per session...leave youtube and come back and it is back to autoplay.
There were a few posts about it on the youtube blog and the comments mostly seemed to hate it (although in the youtube language of "f this crap you are all idiots who cant design shitzzz"). There was an opt-out link that didn't work (and mention of an opt out link that should be on every single page in the new layout but I could never find it). Looks like they at least fixed SOME of those problems before releasing it into the wild.
I can still see a few clear formatting bugs (firefox, winxp) but at least the videos actually play...
The *glaring* problems have been fixed, but the way things are placed does not seem as smart to me...particularily the video description. It should be to the side of the video...especially on wide screen displays. Often it will have lyrics or something you want to read while the video is playing and you can not do this with a longer block of text (or with any text on a netbook screen).
The people who get into and play betas tend to be the people most interested and devoted to the game--they have probably played a lot of DoTA--Basshunter is probably happily playing away. The rush of noobs won't hit until the launch (although there will be more people joining in tonight).
I think it was something like $289 without taking anything off...no win7 but I was planning to ubuntu anyways.
Nah, there is room for real time games that are more strategy focused. Some people don't like waiting for other people to go...they would rather it always be your turn (but development steps take time). There is some benefit to being faster (getting things started right as one development ends) but there can be overpowering strategic requirements so the click-handling only matters when people are about equal on strategy levels.
About the only major large-corp departure from office would be lotus notes...but you can still use sharepoint (and IBM has lots of lotus notes based stuff that can do similar things). Odds are even if the IT infrastructure is different, they share an email paradigm because otherwise stuff is a big pain (the company I work for switched to our parent company's exchange system from our own lotus notes even though we do the rest of the stuff in house).
I certainly don't remember how to do all those statistics calculations by hand but I use SAS and excel almost every day and they don't seem to have forgotten...give me a few more years and I might be at the point where I wouldn't be confident trying to explain what a standard deviation actually "is"
I know some people weren't bothered by it, but they must not like to explore the scene and only stay focused on whatever the director is forcing you to look at. Hopefully those people aren't the judges for the cinematography oscar...because they are missing out on everything else the director hid in the sides/background of the shot (and believe me...its intentionally placed there).
Not being able to pull something into focus just feels so jarring in 3d. In 2d, the depth of field effects are fine because your eyes are not perceiving a different focal plane, but in 3d your eyes think they are focused on the foreground object so when you try and look away, they will try to focus for distance and get confused (since everything is still on the same focal plane).
I agree that people seem to have gotten worse at behaving in the theater though and this is more important to me. I am trying to mentally control for the variables (different cities, being a different age, etc) and I still get the feeling that people are just more rude. Things like cell phones were not such a problem 8 years ago...people would be annoyed if they went off but less people had them (especially as theaters are often filled with a bunch of HS students and stuff...2002-2005 was about when I observed mobile phone ownership to be occasional to near-100% in that age group)and people seemed more hesitant to fool with them. It would be rare to have someone actually think they could get away with a quiet phone call and you didn't have pockets of light popping up as people check and respond to messages on their smartphones (hell, back then phone screens were much more dim...color was rare). Now the blips of message-checking lights are pretty frequent and bad behavior abounds...
Also, 3 days may not be much of a problem but it is not good enough to replace a check. I hand you a check right now and you can deposit it right away (withdrawal availability times may vary, but the balance will show and some will be available). I can also write you a check for $10,000 without issue. A wire transfer does this the same or better--thus making it a good replacement for a check. Funds are available fast and there are no silly limits...It is a workable solution that is used the rest of the world over...so why does it cost so much here? It's not an artificial limit at all--I have been asked to wire money to Europe in quantities less than the fee for sending a wire transfer (my cost-minimizing solution was to make an international phone call and read them my credit card number). ACH can't do this (and honestly why in this world should moving numbers between electronic accounts take 3 days?)
If only we could get the same for email. That way no copies can be made and handed off to another party.
Maybe the USPO needs to start an email service?
As to the grandparent poster, I have a few similar arrangements where I still have to write checks for things because they want to charge me extra money to pay electronically. Of course, I don't actually write checks for those things any more...citibank cuts a check on my behalf and mails it to them on the date I choose (no fees at all). The only thing I would prefer is if I could pay everything including rent with my credit card...the frequent flier miles would be nice and then there is only one payment I have to make sure goes through each month.
As others mentioned, there are other transfer mechanisms in place at various parts of the system (ACH, ACAT, whatever they want to call moving funds between two accounts at the same bank) but the wire transfer costs $35 at each of the banks I have an account with. ACH transfers are free although they carry a transaction limit and are not instant (most of my banks say they will take 3 days...citibank is able to do less than $1000 next day). They also require account information on both sides...when I set up my bank to bank transfer relationship, I had to enter login info for the other bank and when I set up relationships with my brokerage (and paypal IIRC), I had to verify small deposits before it could work.
Wire transfers would be a good option but they are far too expensive here. I stayed in a hostel in lisbon last summer and they wanted me to wire them the deposit (which was only $30...so less than the wire fee)--even if I hadn't used skype, it was far cheaper to make an international phone call and read them my credit card number.
If they are trying to teach people to program...there are probably kids who will want to stop at "good enough" (no incentive to make a program they won't actually use be any faster) and this gives you a reason why that they won't question. You just say "oh, doesn't meet the time limit" and it is done...much easier than trying to convince them to make it faster with no basis.
There is only room for so many active taxis in a city and having expensive badges is a decent way to manage that.
Also, cabbies tend to be much more aware of driving in the city than your average person. Take a big city like new york or chicago. A lot of people simply don't drive (they may be licensed but they don't drive in the city). Even those who do drive, may only know their neighborhood and other areas they frequent. Cabbies tend to know the city quite well and know the optimal routes to get places at different times of the day. I probably take a cab home from work (downtown chicago) about once a week and I can think of one driver in the past 3 months who I have had to give more detailed instructions to--and my destinations are rarely addresses on major intersections. They need to be able to do this because not everyone can tell them how--tourists might have an address and nothing more. An old trick I learned when going to ohare airport (or past it) is to follow the flood of taxis--sometimes the express lanes are a better option and sometimes they are not...the cabbies almost always get it right.
in NYC they are actually quite complex, having a touchscreen unit in the back where people can swipe credit cards and stuff...it would be remarkably easy to implement something indicating out of town rate on this screen (and honestly, it probably already says it on the meter box--people just aren't paying attention)
Maybe they will give everyone higher speeds during the testing period...it might kill load balancing and hurt the top speeds of the people who already pay for top end service, but it would definately raise the average. I don't know if comcast offers a super low speed connection, but RCN can do 1.5Mbit and there is no way that bumping all the 1.5 meg customers to 10Mbit or higher would kill the service (as the 1.5Mbit is less speed than even basic comcast had 6 years ago and pretty much exists to grab price sensitive customers and convince them to pay for faster service)