Rather than premium content, perhaps they need premium service.
One of the reasons why slashdot (and similar sites) work so well and as you mentioned with blogs is there's way too much information out there. Sometimes I want detail. But most of the time I just want to get a general sense of things I care about.
So a premium service for traditional news reporting would be to aggregate news and just show me what I'm interested in. Your job then is to figure out what I'm interested in. And if most of the time you're right, I'll keep reading.
Of course for me personally, my news is slashdot and if I had to pay for it, I'd rather just go uninformed. So I can't say I'm a model customer.
Okay, this is radical idea. But it seems to me all this complication of how to restrict passwords is working the wrong end of the spectrum. Why not instead simply trust the user to offer the level of security he cares about?
Just give him some information, so he can make an informed decision. Display the "weakness" of the password and probably even an ETA to being cracked. Sometimes I really don't care.
I mean really if I had to create an account for some random online calendar app or evite or whatever, what do I care if someone goes and RSVPs me to a bunch of parties.
Or similarly, if I have to log into an HR site for submitting vacation requests, which my manager must approve anyway, what do I care if someone steals the password. And certainly why do I have to change the password every month and be unique for the last 3 passwords used? Really? I'm talking iEmployee (a horrible service...don't use it if you can avoid it).
I actually had to use a dictionary cracker recently. It was to gain access to an encrypted filesystem I created before going away on vacation. It was a very successful vacation because I really had absolutely no idea what I set the password to. I ended up using a password cracker and feeding it a few combinations of things that I typically put into passwords. Even then the list was quite huge and took it a few hours. But I eventually found it.
So I think I'm supporting your argument... dictionary attacks are only really useful if you already know something about the password that you can limit the size of the dictionary.
All this pandering to children and keeping them "happy" is a terrible idea... they just grow up thinking the world is a happy place, which just sets them up for disappointment. We should make sure they have a miserable childhood so they won't expect much when they grow up. Then when they get stuck in a dead-end job, in an apartment that's about to be demolished, and a relationship that reminds them of their parents because of all the yelling, they'll be quite happy because this is the life they knew and expected. They'll save to themselves, "hey I've got a job, an apartment, and a relationship... this is way better than my childhood." It's much better than waking up every day saying to yourself "why can't I be happy again, like I was when I was 7". Make them miserable; think of the children!
Personally I agree with the one-button mouse approach (let me clarify by calling it the one-button mouse approach to UI design). In fact having watched many users (including IT professionals) use a computer, even single vs double clicking confuses most people.
Most people just make a habit of double-clicking everything, including web links because they just don't understand the different contexts.
Many years ago I was thinking about this problem of usability, and honestly I think that even overlapping windows is just too much for the vast majority of people. It's too abstract and to date really not presented in a way that makes sense. There's also too many modes... sometimes separate windows are linked so they all have focus sometimes not.
While I personally don't have a problem keeping track of these things, it seems an all too common problem for a lot of people out there. My solution was to follow the PDA concept of fast-loading apps that remember state when you switch between them and that all take over the whole screen. Ideally you'd want to get rid of the mouse and keyboard. The mouse is simple (touch screen). Keyboard however, just doesn't seem like it's going to go away until we have strong AI.
I never thought it would happen, but that's exactly what the iPad is. Sure it's a little rough here and there, but for a 1st gen product in this category, I think it's a good step in the right direction for "usable computing" for the non-techie.
It's not a computer that I'd want to use. But I can see it dealing nicely with a lot of usability issues for a lot of people at a price that surprisingly competitive.
I only played 7 and 7 Part 2 myself, and the beginning of 8 but never got anywhere (was already in college by that time).
But what I'd love to see is the old games that they already have good ports/rewrites for done with fresh artwork and voice.
Don't get me wrong, I think what they've done already is fantastic. But sadly the presentation shows it's age. And while still quite cool and fun, it could definitely use a little sprucing up. Perhaps some vector graphics would help make it age better. Though I would guess this would be a a fairly challenging undertaking, possibly more so than rewriting the game engine.
The SCSI controller I had was DPT, and it was probably 3 years old at the time (this was a good number of years ago). But fortunately I was able to call them up and they were able to supply me with the correct firmware. But the lesson was learned. Later on we had an Intel Vortex controller... again we had some issues with the controller. Granted I never saw data loss. But with every controller (either the cheapos or pricier options) they at some point just stopped working in a way where we had a big scare, but I was eventually able to recover.
We were a smaller shop, but by the end of my stay at that company we had a couple of 12 drive arrays hosting data for about 50 people. Not huge by any measure... and eventually I think I did see a disk error. But as I said, most of it was hardware controllers. And given our size, to have gone through so many controllers, that really tells me something about the reliability of those things. I think we went through at least the 2 different SCSI RAID controllers and 4 different IDE controllers in my 10 years there.
These days you can't really say "purchase a decent controller" because it's built into the BIOS of may systems. Lots of home users now feel they have the benefits of RAID. Little do they know in the event of a m/b problem (or heck maybe even migration), their drives are useless.
As I said, Linux Software RAID completely solves this problem. If the controller dies on you, no big deal. Put it in another computer and Linux will continue to read it. No need to wait to restore from your backups.
(Aside: I do seem to find weird issues with IBM hardware and IDE disks running Linux. There are some cases where you can get data corruption with 0 errors reported by the hardware and nothing in the system logs. I guess I'm just lucky).
If you want to have a better chance at saving your data also make sure to buy your drives from different distributors so you're ensured their from different batches. I even try to make sure they're different vendors. Most people think that's crazy for performance reasons or whatnot. But in my case I cared more about data integrity.
Nice distinction. I think people tend to forget that.
However, RAID has a huge failing in reliability. Every single time I've had a failure in a RAID setup, it was due to the controller -- your new single point of failure. But there's no standard (even for mirrored data) for the data on disk. So that means in a hardware RAID solution, you're rather screwed when the controller fails (unless you happened to have bought 2 -- firmware updates negate the possibility of purchasing in the future; I've run into that problem).
The best solution I've found in terms of reliability is Linux Software RAID. Then you don't have those sorts of problems.
What I find interesting is that no one comments on this problem. The cheapo NAS devices typically use Linux, and probably even software RAID. I'd think they'd taught this in their marketing. But they tend to keep quiet about such things.
I personally think we need to cultivate more of a long-term investment mentality. Make it so trades can only occur once a month. Queue or cancel your buy/sells all you want. But they'll only get executed that one day, all at one.
Trading down to seconds does little for a company, and only serves as a get rich quick scheme. This sort of mentality, then passed on to the decision makers of those companies just leads to business that burn out trying to serve short-term investment goals.
In the case of online games like WoW, the world is also more than just preserving the avatars, NPCs, and buildings. It's also about the interaction of the people.
If you're interested in preserving the thing, it just isn't the same. I mean try wandering around Feralas for more than a few hours on a low population server. It gets old real quick. Half the fun of the game is going into common areas and just seeing a bunch of people doing stuff... even if you're not interacting with them. Or even if the trade channel is full of chuck norris jokes or alliance-sucks comments.
If you're interested in preserving that world, much of it is the society of the world, not just the architecture.
In contrast, standalone games build the "society" as they're more of an interactive story. WoW on the other hand is like a little city.
If I may add to your comments... The mobile market was far worse before Apple as well. Take my Verizon VX836 for example.. yes it's a freebie phone, not a smart phone. But how are you ever going to write apps for that? Yes, some of the tools are available and there's simulators and such. And you might even be able to install on your own handset. But if you want to get it distributed, you have to go through Verizon. And they're FAR more restrictive than Apple. And believe it or not, their process is far less well documented/established.
I worked for a short time at a mobile startup. Unfortunately it went under because Verizon decided not to carry it. I'm sure we wouldn't have had that problem if we aimed for the iPhone (but this was before the iPhone came out).
Personally, I think this is an example of an industry getting what it deserves. Commercials on television got so irritating (occasionally 50% of the airtime) that it became worth it for people to invent and other people to purchase Tivo.
Many advertisers and search engines got squashed by Google. Besides having decent search capabilities, my primary motivation for using it was because their ads weren't annoying. I find it interesting that many websites haven't learned from that.
But the end result is that many websites continue to be horribly irritating for users. So the natural result is that it becomes cost effective for someone to provide a solution. If it wasn't Apple, it'd be someone else. It just happens that Apple always seems to do these things in a way that their users actually want.
Actually a high power laser is quite useful as a projector. Imagine I wanted to use lasers to do a raster scan to act as a display. Then I'm basically splitting my power across the entire surface area of the display and the time it takes to scan the area. I haven't done the calculations, but I imagine you'd need something more than the typical 1-2mW pocket lasers out there.
I'd say the best innovation of Microsoft is making users expect computers to not work. Remember, it's never a Microsoft failure, it's a computer failure. It's not an outlook virus, it's an email virus, etc. etc. I don't know how they do it, but that's awesome business.
Posh, all you people complaining about privacy. But hey when someone comes and steals your identity, I'll be ready with DNA proof that I'm the real Berkeley student. Unless it's my clone. Then I'm screwed. Then again, he's my clone, so he's me, so it wouldn't matter. yay, problem solved.
Say what you (not you specifically, that's a general "you") want about Apple's certification process. But what they do for containing apps and controlling distribution does deal with this type of problem fairly effectively.
And if you have a problem on a jailbroken iPhone... well, that was the risk you accepted to do that.
Alright, that was an exaggeration. But seriously... useable windowed applications, RPC, etc. yeah maybe they had some issues here and there but they were around in the early '90s and that was 15-20 years ago, and there were some quite useable apps.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than premium content, perhaps they need premium service.
One of the reasons why slashdot (and similar sites) work so well and as you mentioned with blogs is there's way too much information out there. Sometimes I want detail. But most of the time I just want to get a general sense of things I care about.
So a premium service for traditional news reporting would be to aggregate news and just show me what I'm interested in. Your job then is to figure out what I'm interested in. And if most of the time you're right, I'll keep reading.
Of course for me personally, my news is slashdot and if I had to pay for it, I'd rather just go uninformed. So I can't say I'm a model customer.
Okay, this is radical idea. But it seems to me all this complication of how to restrict passwords is working the wrong end of the spectrum. Why not instead simply trust the user to offer the level of security he cares about?
Just give him some information, so he can make an informed decision. Display the "weakness" of the password and probably even an ETA to being cracked. Sometimes I really don't care.
I mean really if I had to create an account for some random online calendar app or evite or whatever, what do I care if someone goes and RSVPs me to a bunch of parties.
Or similarly, if I have to log into an HR site for submitting vacation requests, which my manager must approve anyway, what do I care if someone steals the password. And certainly why do I have to change the password every month and be unique for the last 3 passwords used? Really? I'm talking iEmployee (a horrible service...don't use it if you can avoid it).
I actually had to use a dictionary cracker recently. It was to gain access to an encrypted filesystem I created before going away on vacation. It was a very successful vacation because I really had absolutely no idea what I set the password to. I ended up using a password cracker and feeding it a few combinations of things that I typically put into passwords. Even then the list was quite huge and took it a few hours. But I eventually found it.
So I think I'm supporting your argument... dictionary attacks are only really useful if you already know something about the password that you can limit the size of the dictionary.
Every line of source code? That's just silly. Who can be sure of anything that way? I inspect every packet going into and out of the computer by hand.
All this pandering to children and keeping them "happy" is a terrible idea... they just grow up thinking the world is a happy place, which just sets them up for disappointment. We should make sure they have a miserable childhood so they won't expect much when they grow up. Then when they get stuck in a dead-end job, in an apartment that's about to be demolished, and a relationship that reminds them of their parents because of all the yelling, they'll be quite happy because this is the life they knew and expected. They'll save to themselves, "hey I've got a job, an apartment, and a relationship... this is way better than my childhood." It's much better than waking up every day saying to yourself "why can't I be happy again, like I was when I was 7". Make them miserable; think of the children!
Interestingly, even with Apple's lead there, their search is really no better.
You're right though, this is certainly going to a deciding factor for people's perceived value of apps.
Personally I agree with the one-button mouse approach (let me clarify by calling it the one-button mouse approach to UI design). In fact having watched many users (including IT professionals) use a computer, even single vs double clicking confuses most people.
Most people just make a habit of double-clicking everything, including web links because they just don't understand the different contexts.
Many years ago I was thinking about this problem of usability, and honestly I think that even overlapping windows is just too much for the vast majority of people. It's too abstract and to date really not presented in a way that makes sense. There's also too many modes... sometimes separate windows are linked so they all have focus sometimes not.
While I personally don't have a problem keeping track of these things, it seems an all too common problem for a lot of people out there. My solution was to follow the PDA concept of fast-loading apps that remember state when you switch between them and that all take over the whole screen. Ideally you'd want to get rid of the mouse and keyboard. The mouse is simple (touch screen). Keyboard however, just doesn't seem like it's going to go away until we have strong AI.
I never thought it would happen, but that's exactly what the iPad is. Sure it's a little rough here and there, but for a 1st gen product in this category, I think it's a good step in the right direction for "usable computing" for the non-techie.
It's not a computer that I'd want to use. But I can see it dealing nicely with a lot of usability issues for a lot of people at a price that surprisingly competitive.
I only played 7 and 7 Part 2 myself, and the beginning of 8 but never got anywhere (was already in college by that time).
But what I'd love to see is the old games that they already have good ports/rewrites for done with fresh artwork and voice.
Don't get me wrong, I think what they've done already is fantastic. But sadly the presentation shows it's age. And while still quite cool and fun, it could definitely use a little sprucing up. Perhaps some vector graphics would help make it age better. Though I would guess this would be a a fairly challenging undertaking, possibly more so than rewriting the game engine.
That actually sounds like an awesome idea to me!
How about a flying self-driving car that folds up into a MacBook Air.
The SCSI controller I had was DPT, and it was probably 3 years old at the time (this was a good number of years ago). But fortunately I was able to call them up and they were able to supply me with the correct firmware. But the lesson was learned. Later on we had an Intel Vortex controller... again we had some issues with the controller. Granted I never saw data loss. But with every controller (either the cheapos or pricier options) they at some point just stopped working in a way where we had a big scare, but I was eventually able to recover.
We were a smaller shop, but by the end of my stay at that company we had a couple of 12 drive arrays hosting data for about 50 people. Not huge by any measure... and eventually I think I did see a disk error. But as I said, most of it was hardware controllers. And given our size, to have gone through so many controllers, that really tells me something about the reliability of those things. I think we went through at least the 2 different SCSI RAID controllers and 4 different IDE controllers in my 10 years there.
These days you can't really say "purchase a decent controller" because it's built into the BIOS of may systems. Lots of home users now feel they have the benefits of RAID. Little do they know in the event of a m/b problem (or heck maybe even migration), their drives are useless.
As I said, Linux Software RAID completely solves this problem. If the controller dies on you, no big deal. Put it in another computer and Linux will continue to read it. No need to wait to restore from your backups.
(Aside: I do seem to find weird issues with IBM hardware and IDE disks running Linux. There are some cases where you can get data corruption with 0 errors reported by the hardware and nothing in the system logs. I guess I'm just lucky).
If you want to have a better chance at saving your data also make sure to buy your drives from different distributors so you're ensured their from different batches. I even try to make sure they're different vendors. Most people think that's crazy for performance reasons or whatnot. But in my case I cared more about data integrity.
Nice distinction. I think people tend to forget that.
However, RAID has a huge failing in reliability. Every single time I've had a failure in a RAID setup, it was due to the controller -- your new single point of failure. But there's no standard (even for mirrored data) for the data on disk. So that means in a hardware RAID solution, you're rather screwed when the controller fails (unless you happened to have bought 2 -- firmware updates negate the possibility of purchasing in the future; I've run into that problem).
The best solution I've found in terms of reliability is Linux Software RAID. Then you don't have those sorts of problems.
What I find interesting is that no one comments on this problem. The cheapo NAS devices typically use Linux, and probably even software RAID. I'd think they'd taught this in their marketing. But they tend to keep quiet about such things.
ASCII art is the way to go. All you need is JavaScript. Or perhaps what we need is an aalib browser plugin.
I for one welcome our new communist overlords.
I personally think we need to cultivate more of a long-term investment mentality. Make it so trades can only occur once a month. Queue or cancel your buy/sells all you want. But they'll only get executed that one day, all at one.
Trading down to seconds does little for a company, and only serves as a get rich quick scheme. This sort of mentality, then passed on to the decision makers of those companies just leads to business that burn out trying to serve short-term investment goals.
In the case of online games like WoW, the world is also more than just preserving the avatars, NPCs, and buildings. It's also about the interaction of the people.
If you're interested in preserving the thing, it just isn't the same. I mean try wandering around Feralas for more than a few hours on a low population server. It gets old real quick. Half the fun of the game is going into common areas and just seeing a bunch of people doing stuff... even if you're not interacting with them. Or even if the trade channel is full of chuck norris jokes or alliance-sucks comments.
If you're interested in preserving that world, much of it is the society of the world, not just the architecture.
In contrast, standalone games build the "society" as they're more of an interactive story. WoW on the other hand is like a little city.
If I may add to your comments... The mobile market was far worse before Apple as well. Take my Verizon VX836 for example.. yes it's a freebie phone, not a smart phone. But how are you ever going to write apps for that? Yes, some of the tools are available and there's simulators and such. And you might even be able to install on your own handset. But if you want to get it distributed, you have to go through Verizon. And they're FAR more restrictive than Apple. And believe it or not, their process is far less well documented/established.
I worked for a short time at a mobile startup. Unfortunately it went under because Verizon decided not to carry it. I'm sure we wouldn't have had that problem if we aimed for the iPhone (but this was before the iPhone came out).
Personally, I think this is an example of an industry getting what it deserves. Commercials on television got so irritating (occasionally 50% of the airtime) that it became worth it for people to invent and other people to purchase Tivo.
Many advertisers and search engines got squashed by Google. Besides having decent search capabilities, my primary motivation for using it was because their ads weren't annoying. I find it interesting that many websites haven't learned from that.
But the end result is that many websites continue to be horribly irritating for users. So the natural result is that it becomes cost effective for someone to provide a solution. If it wasn't Apple, it'd be someone else. It just happens that Apple always seems to do these things in a way that their users actually want.
Actually a high power laser is quite useful as a projector. Imagine I wanted to use lasers to do a raster scan to act as a display. Then I'm basically splitting my power across the entire surface area of the display and the time it takes to scan the area. I haven't done the calculations, but I imagine you'd need something more than the typical 1-2mW pocket lasers out there.
Yeah, but then you'd have Prolog.
And as bad as web programming is to me, Prolog seems worse.
I can't believe you skipped step 4...
Step 4: Profit!
Umm, DOS wasn't an innovation from Microsoft at all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS
I'd say the best innovation of Microsoft is making users expect computers to not work. Remember, it's never a Microsoft failure, it's a computer failure. It's not an outlook virus, it's an email virus, etc. etc. I don't know how they do it, but that's awesome business.
Posh, all you people complaining about privacy. But hey when someone comes and steals your identity, I'll be ready with DNA proof that I'm the real Berkeley student. Unless it's my clone. Then I'm screwed. Then again, he's my clone, so he's me, so it wouldn't matter. yay, problem solved.
Say what you (not you specifically, that's a general "you") want about Apple's certification process. But what they do for containing apps and controlling distribution does deal with this type of problem fairly effectively.
And if you have a problem on a jailbroken iPhone... well, that was the risk you accepted to do that.
Alright, that was an exaggeration. But seriously... useable windowed applications, RPC, etc. yeah maybe they had some issues here and there but they were around in the early '90s and that was 15-20 years ago, and there were some quite useable apps.