I understand that it is a real bad concept. (Kinda like missile defence, but that's a whole other flame war...:). Go read the Bruce Schneier article that was mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, then reconsider your position. The value of a network rises as the number of nodes rises, and as a corrollary falls as the number of nodes falls. Thus for this private government [contradiction in terms?] network to have value, it will have to be big enough to be of value. But as the size of the network increases, the difficulty of defending it also increases. And the difficulty of having a sizable network that really is completely physically separate from the public internet will be considerable.
Think about it: every employee could end up needing two separate computers on their desk, one for the local network and one for the government one. That employee would have to be vigilant about not ever transferring files from one to the other, either by wire, wireless, or disc. If the employee needs to transfer an email, it'll have to be a hard copy or a retype. If any personnel have laptops, they can't be brought out onto the internet, and laptops from home can't be plugged into the network. For that matter, pretty much any kind of wireless networking is out since none of it can be trusted not to accidentally send or receive anything that wasn't supposed to be sent or received.
The chief problem here is that it places a ridiculous emphasis on perimiter defence without paying any attention to internal defences. Kinda like missile defence. Kinda like a bad firewall product. Kinda like the Maginot Line. These kinds of systems are difficult to set up in the first place, difficult to maintain across any span of time, and once a chink in the armor is found you tend to have a complete collapse in defences, because you've placed all your resources into this one point of failure.
Again, read the Schneier article, and the points about viruses running rampant through military networks because some idiot plugged his laptop into both the public & private networks. If this proposed network is to be useful, again, it will have to be big -- because the utility of a network generally rises as the square of its node count -- but chances are the difficulty of defending it will rise at about the same rate. That's untenable in the long term.
You're right that I'm no expert, and maybe the people advising the moron in the white house are smarter than I am. Certainly they were pretty clever to get that Orwellian Patriot Act passed without anyone noticing in time. But my hunch is that if we want to have some sort of secure networking capabilities, the way to do it is not "vertically" by cutting off parts of the 'net & placing them behind a Maginot line, but "horizontally", with secure protocols, encryption, and the like. I'm not well versed enough to express this more coherently, but it seems to me that protocols like ssh are reasonably secure while being able to leverage the high utility of a large network, whereas this kind of isolated subnet can't guarantee any greater level of security and yet it loses out on that large network usefulness.
And I want Bambi's father to come back, but it ain't gonna happen. Sorry to disappoint you with this Real World stuff, Dubyuh, but there's no such thing....
I would think that would only be a problem once.... PZZZZT!
Re:GUI's still aren't good enough
on
Do You Remember Bob?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In Donald Norman's excellent book The Psychology of Everyday Things (or in paperback, less colorfully, the Design of Everyday Things), he notes that it takes several iterations before a really new & revolutionary product can mature enough to be accepted by the public. The examples he gives are the talking vending machines & cars that you used to see in the 80s: being able to walk up to a coke machine & say "give me a coke please", or telling your car "change the station to WZBC" isn't such a bad idea, but the early implementations of it were so bad that the public completely soured on the whole concept, and now no one will even research it because it doesn't seem to be viable in the market anymore. Microsoft Bob, as it was developed & release in the early 90s, was another great example of a highly revolutionary but incredibly unfinished / unready product, but maybe it deserves to be reconsidered in this light.
As the commenter above notes, the now standard WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface isn't necessarily the optimal way to interact with a computer; it's just what we've all learned to work with. And it's worth noting that even that interface took several iterations to get right, just as it does for a lot of MS software (IE, Office, Windows, etc all seemed to come of age with the 3.x versions, and start surpassing the competition that they copied with the 4.x & 5.x versions. They of course start bloating by the time they get to 5.x & 6.x, but that's a separate problem...:)
Computer hardware is now drastically more capable than it was when Bob came out, to the point that software developers are always looking for ways to fill up all those extra clock cycles -- anything from running Seti in the background to having hooks in the Windows interface that pause for a few hundred milliseconds before opening a menus so that "it feels like the computer is working harder" -- surely my least favorite part of the Windows interrface and the first thing I try to disable with TweakUI on any computer I'll be using regularly. The really "revolutionary" releases of the recent past -- Mac OSX and Win XP -- aren't really revolutionary at all, but glossier and more refined versions of what we've been using for well over a decade now -- and in the case of OSX at least, you could argue that the interface is a step backwards in terms of flexibility and usability, emphasizing style over substance at the UI level, even if the underpinnings are surely much more advanced than before. XP might also be guilty of this, but I haven't used it yet so I can't say; I do know that the dissolving menus that Win2k had were guilty of the same sort of cute wastefulness that OSX/Aqua's pervasive translucence & drop shadows represent...
Maybe it's time to consider abandoning the WIMP interface. Maybe the world is ready for Bob or something like Bob to give it another shot. Or is it? Bob tried to represent the computer 'space' as the interior of a home, and for a desktop computer of sufficient power (i.e. what most of us have now, but didn't have when Bob came out), this isn't so bad. But in a networked world? Can you achieve some sort of network transparency & represent it in that sort of metaphor? I dunno, maybe. I am sure that it's an interesting challenge, much more than ever more glossy iterations of the same old Mac & Win interfaces could ever be, as they both try to refine their implementations of the Macintosh Interface Guidelines ever further.
Maybe it's time to give the Anti-Mac Interface a try -- a system that inverts all the assumptions that we've been working with for years now.
Mailman rocks. Much better than Majordomo, even if it is written in Python.;)
Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager
Mailman is software to help manage electronic mail discussion lists, much like Majordomo or Smartmail. Mailman gives each mailing list a unique web page and allows users to subscribe, unsubscribe, and change their account options over the web. Even the list manager can administer his or her list entirely via the web. Mailman has most of the features that people want in a mailing list management system, including built-in archiving, mail-to-news gateways, spam filters, bounce detection, digest delivery, and so on. See the features page for more detail.
Mailman is free software. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License. The canonical Mailman home page is at a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman. html">www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman.html , with more information available at www.list.org. Mailman is written in the Python programming language, with a little bit of C code for security.
It really is good software -- easy to administer, and easy for users. I wouldn't bother with Majordomo anymore...
I heard a nice story -- apparently not true but I like it anyway -- that Apple got it's name & logo from Alan Turing. Turing was an important researcher for the British during World War Two, but he was also a homosexual and unfortunately that had certain security implications for him, so he never really had as much freedom to work as he would have liked and during his lifetime he didn't get much credit for his contributions to both the war effort and to the embryonic field of computing.
Eventually, sadly, Turing committed suicide by injecting cyanide into an apple & eating it. The original version of Apple's logo was, it is said, Turing's apple, with a bite out of one side and the stripes of the gay pride flag.
Like I say, apparently this is just a coincidence and Apple was paying no such homage to Turing, but I still think it fits pretty well, & wish it were true. Oh well...
Heh, sorry, I'm not really trying to belittle you or your pipe dream. Pipe dream on, I say. I have no problem with hobby tinkerers doing whatever they'd like, and on the desktop I've done a bit of it myself. But part of the reason it's possible at all on the desktop is that the parts involved have been commoditized & standardized, so it's fairly easy to spec out what you'd like to find and what put it all together. Not so with laptops, or at least I've never seen commodity laptop cases & motherboards and such in the shops & catalogs I've looked at.
Maybe the difference between us is that I'd rather tinker around with an up & running system, rather than agonizing over what the exact specs of that system are. I never was much of a hardware guy.
If your idea of a good idea is cobbling together at, I still think, great effort an expense a system that will IMO be not all that different than the off the shelf stuff, then hey have at it & have fun. I'm not trying to stand in the way of that, Mr Quixote. Everyone has their quest, I suppose, and if this is yours then I wish you the best. I just can't help but think it looks a little silly for anyone to try so determinedly, but generally it's considered best to ignore people that think things like that about you, right?:):):)
If it can do that, I don't care all that much about CPU speed, disk storage, CD-ROM or DVD drives, USB, FireWire, IrDA or integrated late makers. Oh, and it needs to run Linux, or at least OpenBSD or NetBSD. So, basically, I want a tough little system with a StrongARM CPU, a flash disk and grayscale 1024x768 LCD. Insofar as I can tell, no one makes such a thing.
Going to a restaraunt with you is a staggering exercise in pain & humiliation, isn't it? I can just tell: you must be the sort of person that looks over the menu at a fine dining establishment and then makes the staff do backflips to come up with some esoteric custom dish for you, because the many, many fine offerings they provide are never quite right. Give me a break...:)
I wouldn't pick at you, because you've clearly thought about this a lot, but somehow you haven't noticed that your requirements are, aside from just plain silly, mutually exclusive & thus impossible. You want a week long battery -- yeah right! -- and you want ultra light weight (thus, um, no battery??) and built in high speed wireless networking? How much power do you think that's going to draw? I'll admit, I'm not sure myself & maybe it's less than I'm thinking, but you are going to have to make some compromises between these wildly varying demands. If you want long life, it means a big battery. If you want lightweight, it means a small battery. You pick.
And in the, assuredly long time you're going to spend ruminating over that dilemma, there will be thousands of others that take one of the many fine off the shelf offerings, meet 90% of what you seem to really want here, and they'll be able to get on with their lives without a second thought. Might I suggest relaxing & trying to do the same?
If you're going to give a url, you can at least make a link out of it:). i was going to offer to make a shorter link, but for some reason that site is mutating the map url into something that yahoo can't recognize (it either points to rockaway new jersey, or it just doesn't point). not sure why, it's never been a problem before. oh well, the one above should work, but in the future, when referencing a really long url, makeashorterlink.com rocks...
I'm not sure what the cartoon version of the character was like -- I only saw part of one episode -- but a mildly profane line wouldn't have been totally out of character for the comic book version. I'm guessing that had to be toned down for the Saturday morning cartoon, and maybe that's what you're used to, but I think a prime time version of the character can, like the indie comic book back in the beginning, get away with being a little more adult / edgy / profane / whatever.
The only time I ever got a letter published in a comic, it was me begging for a #2 in Latin. I'm pretty sure it's in the Omnibus I've got at home, but I'd have to check. They basically replied "this is getting ridiculous, cut it out, no more #2s will be given for creative letters to the editor -- you ruined it" and that was that.
But I figured, hey, we're in WorldWideWebLand now, it's worth another shot...:)
It's worth noting that the original comic had the same adult/kid duality. The very first issue had Tick "saving" a homeless man, and the guy replying something to the effect of "Oh shit not again..." (it's been a while, but he definitely swore:).
If the cartoon was more "kids only", I'd suggest that's because it was, well, a Saturday morning kid's cartoon, and had to work with the market it was put into. Granted, the audience of the average comic book is probably only slightly older than the Saturday morning cartoon audience, but still there's more variability there, with room for more edgy stuff like Tick. Now this show is aimed at prime time television, which will have an older demographic than the cartoon did, so they have the freedom to go back to the more mature humor.
If it counts as a shift, it's a shift back to where the characters & stories started out, and that's a good thing in my eyes. A lot of the best storytelling does the same dual humor thing: from "the Simpsons" and "Theres Something About Mary", back to Shakespeare's comedies. It's an old trick -- include slapstick for the kids & immature adults, and more ironic, biting humor for the more mature portion of the audicene. Heigh ho, everyone goes home happy...:)
...um, part of the joke with The Tick, the comic in particular (I didn't see enough of the cartoon to get a feel for it) is that more or less *all* of the characters are one dimensional. That's the *joke*. Surely you can't be saying that Tick has any real depth or substance to him, beyond being an endearingly bumbling oaf. If any of the characters in the original comic had depth, surely one of them would have been Oedipus, the [female] Ninja In Training.
My take on the early issues of The Tick was that it was making fun of, among other things, exactly the representations you describe in your first paragraph. All the testosterone fueled heros & heroines, the latent homoeroticism, the predictable pinup figures of all female characters, etc. I don't think "Tick" was part of the problem you're describing, I think "Tick" was taking a swipe at it...
I've been reading the comic since the early 90s, when a high school friend lent me a copy of a comic that his sister's friend had written -- that would be you:). I loved "The Tick" from the start and have been a fan ever since, so I was delighted to find out yesterday -- just in time to watch it -- that there was now a live action tv show version. I remember many of the later comics saying this sort of thing was in the pipeline, but considering how long it has been in coming, I was a bit skeptical that anything would come of it. Glad to see that I was wrong on that one.
So, now that you have your show, I'm curious:
How involved in it are you? Writing? Producing? Can we expect a cameo? How much creative control do you have over where the show goes, particularly considering some of the copyright issues that I've been hearing about?
Do you have the time or the interest to go back and do any more issues of the comic? It seemed like each issue took longer & longer to come out, until eventually they seemed to just peter out (not counting for the moment variants written by others). Is there any chance that there could be another original Ben Edlund penned Tick comic someday, or are your interests elsewhere now?
It's kind of outside the scope of the original contest, but will getting a question to you on Slashdot make anyone eligible for one of the Super Rare Uncut Copies Of Issue #2? I suppose by asking I've disqualified myself, but still I can't help but wonder:). How many of those were there, and are they all gone now?
Congratulations on your success, from a fellow southeastern Mass person...:)
Note to original poster: reinventing the wheel is overrated. Search on Sourceforge & you'll find at least a couple of XML resume schemes, but Sean Kelly's seems to be the authoritative one.
Otherwise, I'm on a similar track: I was laid off two weeks or so ago, and am temping now for a very interesting company & am hoping it'll become a permanent position. I submitted dozens & dozens of online applications, but the job I'm at was discovered by a *good* headhunter (Randstad -- nice folks, I like working with them because they actually seem to want to place you in a job where you & the employrer will be happy, rather than just filling seats so they can pocket the commission). I had an offer for freelance work & that was found by word of mouth. None of the online applications I tried amounted to anything, and yes I've been following up with emails & phone calls. I've had a handful of "no thanks" responses, but mostly I just get silence.
Keep in mind also that if trying all avenues doesn't work out, now would be a great time to go back to school, consider a career change or reapplication of old IT skills to new non-IT jobs, or, if you're into that sort of thing, enlist in the military. It would of course be risky, but it would also be patriotic (in a *good* way, not a jingoistic one) and it would be a sure paycheck.
Just try to keep all of your options in mind & try everything that seems like it'll help...
Easy -- developers want to be able to code in Java, but Microsoft is legally forbidden to develop a newer, noncompliant version of the language environment due to their settlement with Sun a few months ago. Result?
"You want Java syntax, fine, our.NET framework can do that, and you'll even get to take advantage of all the benefits.NET has to offer."
"Yeah, but what about the JVM? Why not keep up with the spec? Java is past 2.0 now, and you're trying to get me to use 1.1.x..." "Eh? Pardon me? Didn't quite catch that, sonny." *wink*
If MS can't ship a full fledged version of Java, I don't think trying to support the syntax (or a crippled version of it) is such a bad idea on their part. Developers with Java experience will be able to quickly get up to speed with.NET, and can then be encouraged to migrate over to C#. It's not good for Sun, but then hey that's not MS's job.
They didn't get to be the borg by being morons, guys...
By hardware, I'm referring specifically to the I/O devices attached to a typical desktop computer. I think the computer itself has great capacity for novel interface schemes, but the ools we use to interact with that display -- a 2D monitor, a 2D mouse, and a keyboard -- are fundamentally not well suited to 3D work. Fundamentally. If we replace those devices, the computer itself could go farther, but there is so much currently invested in the existing scheme and it has so much momentum behind it, that I really think change will come very, very slowly. That's not to say that an alternative couldn't emerge on the fringe, and move to the mainstream if it does well, but keep in mind that doing so would mean that all that I/O hardware would need to be replaced, the Windows & Macintosh would need to be at least partially subjected to a fundamental rewrite, etc.
The gaming audience is an interesting one. Quake is *not* 3D, just as my television is not 3D. It is a crude, but vaguely convincing rendering of a 3D space on a 2D plane. For some uses -- games, movies -- that's okay. But if I'm trying to find a file on my computer, I don't want to have to rummage through some sort of silly Quake inspired labyrinth to do it. If I have a rogue proceess thrashing my system, I don't want to have to fire up the Sysadmin version of Doom to go frag it. The way forward is *not* to relentlessly flog out the 3D space on a 2D plane metaphor, but to come up with better abstractions that allow us to better interact with that N-D space through hardware that we either have currently or could viably have in the relative near term.
The fundamental point you're missing is that 2D is only marginally farther away from ND than 3D is, so both 2D and 3D have to take on abstraction layers to cope with that, and 3D additionally has to tackle conceptual boundaries and hardware shortcomings. In other words, to go from 2D to 3D you have to do a lot of work, but you're not addressing the core problem: abstraction of the ND problem space, which is still substantially as complex as before.
I have yet to come across a 3D interface proposal that begins to address this problem, and until it does the scheme isn't worth the trouble, IMO.
...right, and people came up with good reasons to use a WIMP [windows, icons, menus, pointer] interface, and that answered the question. We're still waiting for an answer to the original poster's question.
Parroting Jakob Nielsen & Edward Tufte here, it's worth noting that conceptually, most problems we deal with are N-dimensional, where N is a very large number with probably several trailing zeroes. Going from a crude, vaguely 1-D interface like the command line to a somewhat less crude 2-D interface like the WIMP interface is a good aid & worth doing. Going from that 2-D interface to 3-D isn't as helpful.
For one thing, it doesn't really do much to flesh out a rendering of that huge N-D problem space. For another, it's bloody confusing in pretty much every implementation yet conceived. Even if we could get a decent visualization of a 3-D space on a flat monitor plane [hint: we can't, and no video games don't count], the input devices aren't suitable for interacting with a three dimensional space anyway. A mouse has no concept of elevation, and devices that do, like those silly VR gloves, don't work well enough to be useful.
It's my firm belief that a 3-D interface will never really be viable on contemporary hardware, because both the input & output devices are not designed for or capable of rendering such a visualization acceptably. Even if it were possible, or [more likely] if people were to migrate to say holographic displays and some sort of "tri-axial" mouse, you hit an even bigger problem: it's hard for people to conceptualize what's going on as the number of dimensions goes up [one is easy, two is common, three takes work, and four & higher we just can't do] and i've yet to see any argument or sample implementation that makes the marginally better mapping onto N-D problem sets worth the tradeoff of all the extra conceptualization effort required to understand such a scheme.
If contemporary 2D guis seem to be stagnating, it's probably because they're approaching a kind of maturity. That isn't a bad thing. After 20 years or so of mainstream deployment, we're getting a pretty good idea of what works well and what doesn't. I like that I was able to sit down in front of BeOS for the first time and realize that everything I'd learned with the Win & Mac interfaces was going to help me here. I don't want some kind of radical shift in how the display works, unless I know that in return for the considerable effort that learning it will require (including unlearning much of what I've gotten used to thus far) I'm going to get at least an order of magnitude more productivity out of the new interface.
And that just ain't gonna happen.
It's a nice pipe dream, but we don't even have anything good enough on the drawing board, and that's not by accident. And this article, in case you didn't realize it by now, is troll fodder. Your leg has been pulled...:)
Surprise! "Star Wars" is a kids movie. There's a reason that Jedi was "just a bunch of muppets", and Phantom Menace was dominated by Jar Jar. So, my question is "Why are you complaining about one children's story on a forum about a different children's story?"
Obviously adults can enjoy children's lit -- witness the appeal of _Gullivers Travels_, _Alice in Wonderland_, _Wizard of Oz_, etc up through the current examples.If you're too cool for all that, fine, but really why are you complaining about it here?
I was doing that for a while actually, but decided it didn't have much of a chance of helping anything. If a human was causing all that traffic, then redirecting them to a security bulletin might make sense, but of course that's not the case here. If a human was trying to get to that security bulletin, I wouldn't want all my redirected traffic (& anyone else's) to make it harder to reach that site. As much as I hold MS to blame for this mess, insult to injury won't help anything.
On the other hand, trying to swamp their Passport servers might not be such a bad idea...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Serves me right, I saw "Bambi" when I was like three, and of course I barely remember it now. Shoulda thought of a better example... ;)
Think about it: every employee could end up needing two separate computers on their desk, one for the local network and one for the government one. That employee would have to be vigilant about not ever transferring files from one to the other, either by wire, wireless, or disc. If the employee needs to transfer an email, it'll have to be a hard copy or a retype. If any personnel have laptops, they can't be brought out onto the internet, and laptops from home can't be plugged into the network. For that matter, pretty much any kind of wireless networking is out since none of it can be trusted not to accidentally send or receive anything that wasn't supposed to be sent or received.
The chief problem here is that it places a ridiculous emphasis on perimiter defence without paying any attention to internal defences. Kinda like missile defence. Kinda like a bad firewall product. Kinda like the Maginot Line. These kinds of systems are difficult to set up in the first place, difficult to maintain across any span of time, and once a chink in the armor is found you tend to have a complete collapse in defences, because you've placed all your resources into this one point of failure.
Again, read the Schneier article, and the points about viruses running rampant through military networks because some idiot plugged his laptop into both the public & private networks. If this proposed network is to be useful, again, it will have to be big -- because the utility of a network generally rises as the square of its node count -- but chances are the difficulty of defending it will rise at about the same rate. That's untenable in the long term.
You're right that I'm no expert, and maybe the people advising the moron in the white house are smarter than I am. Certainly they were pretty clever to get that Orwellian Patriot Act passed without anyone noticing in time. But my hunch is that if we want to have some sort of secure networking capabilities, the way to do it is not "vertically" by cutting off parts of the 'net & placing them behind a Maginot line, but "horizontally", with secure protocols, encryption, and the like. I'm not well versed enough to express this more coherently, but it seems to me that protocols like ssh are reasonably secure while being able to leverage the high utility of a large network, whereas this kind of isolated subnet can't guarantee any greater level of security and yet it loses out on that large network usefulness.
And I want Bambi's father to come back, but it ain't gonna happen. Sorry to disappoint you with this Real World stuff, Dubyuh, but there's no such thing....
I would think that would only be a problem once.... PZZZZT!
As the commenter above notes, the now standard WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface isn't necessarily the optimal way to interact with a computer; it's just what we've all learned to work with. And it's worth noting that even that interface took several iterations to get right, just as it does for a lot of MS software (IE, Office, Windows, etc all seemed to come of age with the 3.x versions, and start surpassing the competition that they copied with the 4.x & 5.x versions. They of course start bloating by the time they get to 5.x & 6.x, but that's a separate problem... :)
Computer hardware is now drastically more capable than it was when Bob came out, to the point that software developers are always looking for ways to fill up all those extra clock cycles -- anything from running Seti in the background to having hooks in the Windows interface that pause for a few hundred milliseconds before opening a menus so that "it feels like the computer is working harder" -- surely my least favorite part of the Windows interrface and the first thing I try to disable with TweakUI on any computer I'll be using regularly. The really "revolutionary" releases of the recent past -- Mac OSX and Win XP -- aren't really revolutionary at all, but glossier and more refined versions of what we've been using for well over a decade now -- and in the case of OSX at least, you could argue that the interface is a step backwards in terms of flexibility and usability, emphasizing style over substance at the UI level, even if the underpinnings are surely much more advanced than before. XP might also be guilty of this, but I haven't used it yet so I can't say; I do know that the dissolving menus that Win2k had were guilty of the same sort of cute wastefulness that OSX/Aqua's pervasive translucence & drop shadows represent...
Maybe it's time to consider abandoning the WIMP interface. Maybe the world is ready for Bob or something like Bob to give it another shot. Or is it? Bob tried to represent the computer 'space' as the interior of a home, and for a desktop computer of sufficient power (i.e. what most of us have now, but didn't have when Bob came out), this isn't so bad. But in a networked world? Can you achieve some sort of network transparency & represent it in that sort of metaphor? I dunno, maybe. I am sure that it's an interesting challenge, much more than ever more glossy iterations of the same old Mac & Win interfaces could ever be, as they both try to refine their implementations of the Macintosh Interface Guidelines ever further.
Maybe it's time to give the Anti-Mac Interface a try -- a system that inverts all the assumptions that we've been working with for years now.
It really is good software -- easy to administer, and easy for users. I wouldn't bother with Majordomo anymore...
Look dude, it was funny when you suggested this two days ago, but the jokes getting old, alright?... ;)
Eventually, sadly, Turing committed suicide by injecting cyanide into an apple & eating it. The original version of Apple's logo was, it is said, Turing's apple, with a bite out of one side and the stripes of the gay pride flag.
Like I say, apparently this is just a coincidence and Apple was paying no such homage to Turing, but I still think it fits pretty well, & wish it were true. Oh well...
Glad you liked my work... :)
Maybe the difference between us is that I'd rather tinker around with an up & running system, rather than agonizing over what the exact specs of that system are. I never was much of a hardware guy.
If your idea of a good idea is cobbling together at, I still think, great effort an expense a system that will IMO be not all that different than the off the shelf stuff, then hey have at it & have fun. I'm not trying to stand in the way of that, Mr Quixote. Everyone has their quest, I suppose, and if this is yours then I wish you the best. I just can't help but think it looks a little silly for anyone to try so determinedly, but generally it's considered best to ignore people that think things like that about you, right? :) :) :)
Going to a restaraunt with you is a staggering exercise in pain & humiliation, isn't it? I can just tell: you must be the sort of person that looks over the menu at a fine dining establishment and then makes the staff do backflips to come up with some esoteric custom dish for you, because the many, many fine offerings they provide are never quite right. Give me a break... :)
I wouldn't pick at you, because you've clearly thought about this a lot, but somehow you haven't noticed that your requirements are, aside from just plain silly, mutually exclusive & thus impossible. You want a week long battery -- yeah right! -- and you want ultra light weight (thus, um, no battery??) and built in high speed wireless networking? How much power do you think that's going to draw? I'll admit, I'm not sure myself & maybe it's less than I'm thinking, but you are going to have to make some compromises between these wildly varying demands. If you want long life, it means a big battery. If you want lightweight, it means a small battery. You pick.
And in the, assuredly long time you're going to spend ruminating over that dilemma, there will be thousands of others that take one of the many fine off the shelf offerings, meet 90% of what you seem to really want here, and they'll be able to get on with their lives without a second thought. Might I suggest relaxing & trying to do the same?
Thank you, Pierre Salinger, but I think you've already tried this theory... :)
If you're going to give a url, you can at least make a link out of it :) .
i was going to offer to make a shorter link, but for some reason that site is mutating the map url into something that yahoo can't recognize (it either points to rockaway new jersey, or it just doesn't point). not sure why, it's never been a problem before. oh well, the one above should work, but in the future, when referencing a really long url, makeashorterlink.com rocks...
I'm not sure what the cartoon version of the character was like -- I only saw part of one episode -- but a mildly profane line wouldn't have been totally out of character for the comic book version. I'm guessing that had to be toned down for the Saturday morning cartoon, and maybe that's what you're used to, but I think a prime time version of the character can, like the indie comic book back in the beginning, get away with being a little more adult / edgy / profane / whatever.
But I figured, hey, we're in WorldWideWebLand now, it's worth another shot... :)
If the cartoon was more "kids only", I'd suggest that's because it was, well, a Saturday morning kid's cartoon, and had to work with the market it was put into. Granted, the audience of the average comic book is probably only slightly older than the Saturday morning cartoon audience, but still there's more variability there, with room for more edgy stuff like Tick. Now this show is aimed at prime time television, which will have an older demographic than the cartoon did, so they have the freedom to go back to the more mature humor.
If it counts as a shift, it's a shift back to where the characters & stories started out, and that's a good thing in my eyes. A lot of the best storytelling does the same dual humor thing: from "the Simpsons" and "Theres Something About Mary", back to Shakespeare's comedies. It's an old trick -- include slapstick for the kids & immature adults, and more ironic, biting humor for the more mature portion of the audicene. Heigh ho, everyone goes home happy... :)
My take on the early issues of The Tick was that it was making fun of, among other things, exactly the representations you describe in your first paragraph. All the testosterone fueled heros & heroines, the latent homoeroticism, the predictable pinup figures of all female characters, etc. I don't think "Tick" was part of the problem you're describing, I think "Tick" was taking a swipe at it...
So, now that you have your show, I'm curious:
Congratulations on your success, from a fellow southeastern Mass person... :)
Otherwise, I'm on a similar track: I was laid off two weeks or so ago, and am temping now for a very interesting company & am hoping it'll become a permanent position. I submitted dozens & dozens of online applications, but the job I'm at was discovered by a *good* headhunter (Randstad -- nice folks, I like working with them because they actually seem to want to place you in a job where you & the employrer will be happy, rather than just filling seats so they can pocket the commission). I had an offer for freelance work & that was found by word of mouth. None of the online applications I tried amounted to anything, and yes I've been following up with emails & phone calls. I've had a handful of "no thanks" responses, but mostly I just get silence.
Keep in mind also that if trying all avenues doesn't work out, now would be a great time to go back to school, consider a career change or reapplication of old IT skills to new non-IT jobs, or, if you're into that sort of thing, enlist in the military. It would of course be risky, but it would also be patriotic (in a *good* way, not a jingoistic one) and it would be a sure paycheck.
Just try to keep all of your options in mind & try everything that seems like it'll help...
Easy -- developers want to be able to code in Java, but Microsoft is legally forbidden to develop a newer, noncompliant version of the language environment due to their settlement with Sun a few months ago. Result?
If MS can't ship a full fledged version of Java, I don't think trying to support the syntax (or a crippled version of it) is such a bad idea on their part. Developers with Java experience will be able to quickly get up to speed with .NET, and can then be encouraged to migrate over to C#. It's not good for Sun, but then hey that's not MS's job.
They didn't get to be the borg by being morons, guys...
The gaming audience is an interesting one. Quake is *not* 3D, just as my television is not 3D. It is a crude, but vaguely convincing rendering of a 3D space on a 2D plane. For some uses -- games, movies -- that's okay. But if I'm trying to find a file on my computer, I don't want to have to rummage through some sort of silly Quake inspired labyrinth to do it. If I have a rogue proceess thrashing my system, I don't want to have to fire up the Sysadmin version of Doom to go frag it. The way forward is *not* to relentlessly flog out the 3D space on a 2D plane metaphor, but to come up with better abstractions that allow us to better interact with that N-D space through hardware that we either have currently or could viably have in the relative near term.
The fundamental point you're missing is that 2D is only marginally farther away from ND than 3D is, so both 2D and 3D have to take on abstraction layers to cope with that, and 3D additionally has to tackle conceptual boundaries and hardware shortcomings. In other words, to go from 2D to 3D you have to do a lot of work, but you're not addressing the core problem: abstraction of the ND problem space, which is still substantially as complex as before.
I have yet to come across a 3D interface proposal that begins to address this problem, and until it does the scheme isn't worth the trouble, IMO.
...right, and people came up with good reasons to use a WIMP [windows, icons, menus, pointer] interface, and that answered the question. We're still waiting for an answer to the original poster's question.
Parroting Jakob Nielsen & Edward Tufte here, it's worth noting that conceptually, most problems we deal with are N-dimensional, where N is a very large number with probably several trailing zeroes. Going from a crude, vaguely 1-D interface like the command line to a somewhat less crude 2-D interface like the WIMP interface is a good aid & worth doing. Going from that 2-D interface to 3-D isn't as helpful.
For one thing, it doesn't really do much to flesh out a rendering of that huge N-D problem space. For another, it's bloody confusing in pretty much every implementation yet conceived. Even if we could get a decent visualization of a 3-D space on a flat monitor plane [hint: we can't, and no video games don't count], the input devices aren't suitable for interacting with a three dimensional space anyway. A mouse has no concept of elevation, and devices that do, like those silly VR gloves, don't work well enough to be useful.
It's my firm belief that a 3-D interface will never really be viable on contemporary hardware, because both the input & output devices are not designed for or capable of rendering such a visualization acceptably. Even if it were possible, or [more likely] if people were to migrate to say holographic displays and some sort of "tri-axial" mouse, you hit an even bigger problem: it's hard for people to conceptualize what's going on as the number of dimensions goes up [one is easy, two is common, three takes work, and four & higher we just can't do] and i've yet to see any argument or sample implementation that makes the marginally better mapping onto N-D problem sets worth the tradeoff of all the extra conceptualization effort required to understand such a scheme.
If contemporary 2D guis seem to be stagnating, it's probably because they're approaching a kind of maturity. That isn't a bad thing. After 20 years or so of mainstream deployment, we're getting a pretty good idea of what works well and what doesn't. I like that I was able to sit down in front of BeOS for the first time and realize that everything I'd learned with the Win & Mac interfaces was going to help me here. I don't want some kind of radical shift in how the display works, unless I know that in return for the considerable effort that learning it will require (including unlearning much of what I've gotten used to thus far) I'm going to get at least an order of magnitude more productivity out of the new interface.
And that just ain't gonna happen.
It's a nice pipe dream, but we don't even have anything good enough on the drawing board, and that's not by accident. And this article, in case you didn't realize it by now, is troll fodder. Your leg has been pulled... :)
Obviously adults can enjoy children's lit -- witness the appeal of _Gullivers Travels_, _Alice in Wonderland_, _Wizard of Oz_, etc up through the current examples.If you're too cool for all that, fine, but really why are you complaining about it here?
Might I suggest getting a life?
On the other hand, trying to swamp their Passport servers might not be such a bad idea... :)