The real problem with PPT is that it's a crutch for people who don't know how to present information. A presenation should have two components, at least: the speech, or text, and the visual data. The visual data should illuminate ideas and expand on data.
Consider a news article that has a few accompanying images or a chart. The visuals are a very small part, perhaps 5%. The text contains the information.
Steve Jobs is an excellent of a presenter who knows that the slide show is just the show behind him. He will put up a slide with a single word on it, and then speak about that for five minutes. The slideshow isn't the important thing, it's a very minor component. Or, consider Jack Ryan's presentation in Hunt for Red October.
"A picture is worth a thousand words" should be understood as 'A picture needs a thousand words.'
Unfortunately, too many presenters have gotten it backwards. They try to put all their ideas on screen, relying on the visuals to speak for them. And then they learn that they have to reduce the information on-screen (word-wise at least), but they don't learn to shift the extracted information to their mouth (or accompanying texts).
Here the blame can leveled on PPT, and Excel for that matter, for guiding idiots toward making bad presentations. They guide the average person away from KISS. Default chart styles add so much visual noise that data becomes secondary.
I can't count the number of times I've had to ask a presenter, whom I was re-designing slides for, what are you trying to communicate here? Only to have them either look at me blankly or get mad at me for pointing out, indirectly, that there was no information to be gotten from their jumble of animated arrows, boxes, 11pt text, and senselessly over-contrasted colors.
Bad design kills people. Whether it's a car or the information presented to managers about it's safety. Bad information design can hide, or just simply fail to reveal, salient facts.
Powerpoint gives people without a clue a way to add chartoonery to information. It helps people make bad design. It is only a tool, but it is a tool that gives too many a false sense that they are making good presentations.
Martin-Marietta didn't need PPT to make un-illuminating charts before the Challenger explosion that failed to show why taking off in freezing weather was a bad idea. Bad information design hid the facts.
Even having a good designer, one who knows how to present data that can be quickly and easily understood, can't help a presenter who doesn't honestly know how to communicate.
Don't go too far down the 'text is all you need route.' Nothing but text is a great way to hide information. Presenting data in graphs is an aid to understanding, but those graphics need to be well-designed, information rich, non-manipulative and visually enlightening. For example, compare a table of numbers showing GDP for 100 years to a line graph with the numbers in a table beneath - the numbers specify, but the line illuminates the pattern.
Graphs aren't the problem, bad information design is. Powerpoint doesn't help with design. It does help add clutter, however.
However, Pyro can be replaced by high concentrations of... are you ready for this... Green Tea.
As for Weston's medical problems, his amidol based paper developer was the greatest contributor (next time you see a photo of him that includes his hands, note the black fingernails).
many of his famous photographs were printed by a darkroom assistant
True, he did eventually have an assistant (Ted Dresser, I think is his name) whom he trusted to make prints, but they were according to printing formulas he would work out. It wasn't so much direction as a Master Chef's recipe and technique replicated by a Souce Chef.
if it wasn't on the negative, it wasn't going to be in the print. You can't coax a masterpiece from a mediocre piece of film. Adams planned his shots, set up his big old camera, then waited for the scene to appear and the light to be just right.
You should see some of those negatives. To call them mediocre is to elevate them. Most printers would give up. The extensive dodging and burning that he is known for, wasn't manipulation so much as compensation.
His negatives were awesome!
For the most part, but not always. The infallable legend is a bit exagerated. He did preach: Visualize, Capture, Render (my terms) as a single process that should mesh perfectly, and mostly he did as preached. But when step 2 fell short of easily rendering step 1, he had an amazing talent to correct.
In Houston, Texas, the highway department has placed transponders all over the highway system...
That's actually pretty common in most larger metro areas in the country... and those aren't really data transponders, but simply series of electromagnetic coils in the road bed that sense the presence of hunks of iron traveling over them.
Actually, it wasn't voluntary and they use a penalty clause in their contract to increase revenue. They charge the renters credit card an added 'insurance fee' that increases per mph over limit. (I'll have to search the NPR archives to find it. I'm pretty sure it was a Morning Edition item.)
IBM has been running a commercial recently with three 'tech guys' discussing an EZ pass with two of them implying to the third that he's a fool for not having the pass. Whereas my reaction has always been that he's the smart one for not submitting to having his every trip filed in a database.
Actually, I responded to him last night and he even replied:
From: "Ulanoff, Lance"
Date: Thu Dec 11, 2003 5:59:02 AM US/Pacific
Excellent comments. I hope you posted them in the forum!
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 10:42 PM
To: Ulanoff, Lance
Subject: Eureka! Mac's Are Not Invulnerable
Briefly,
1) the 'significant security hole' does require that malicious code to
exploit it be launched on an intranet -- not quite the glaring
vulberability that most windows holes provide
2) The obscurity argument is the first cunard of all windows apologists
that relies on circular logic.
3) Malicious hooks aren't built into Mac email clients. Executables
don't just run upon receipt.
4) Mac folk have been touting the OS's invulnerability for quite some
time now, like a red flag challenge -- making the creation of a
successful attack a real feather for the successful hacker. If the
system is so vulnerable, why hasn't the challenge been met in a decade?
name another...operating system that has a similar patch system that's easy to use and works for "average joe" ?
One that issues patches it's not supposed to? I don't know of another that sux that much, but I do know of another system that does work for the 'avg Jacque' better than m$: OS X, not only easy to use, it's got understandable explanatory info, perpetual-but-reversable-update-specific deactivation, accurate file size, and it looks better.
It isn't enough that it creates some of the crappiest html since Pagemill, but an html editor that creates security holes, too? What will they have to patch next? Notepad?
This appears more like a move to make "the browser" an more indisputably intregal part of the OS. Planning for the future when Bush & Co. are not in power and the DOJ goes back to enforcing laws agains monopolies.
When it comes to classified systems and networks, the government is pretty damn secure.
That's wishful thinking on your part. The point of the review is to review all systems.
Chairman Putnam added, "One of the most disturbing findings is that 19 of the 24 agencies reviewed had not completed an inventory of their mission critical systems. Obviously, an agency can't ensure its systems are secure if it can't account for all of its mission critical systems.
If they can't even identify and inventory 'mission critical systems,' can't be claimed that those critical systems are secure.
Slashdot Mirror
It's already outsourced to China, is India cheaper?
I suspect the drive is actually 2cm, and the .85 inch dimension is diseminated for my fellow backward americans.
The real problem with PPT is that it's a crutch for people who don't know how to present information. A presenation should have two components, at least: the speech, or text, and the visual data. The visual data should illuminate ideas and expand on data.
Consider a news article that has a few accompanying images or a chart. The visuals are a very small part, perhaps 5%. The text contains the information.
Steve Jobs is an excellent of a presenter who knows that the slide show is just the show behind him. He will put up a slide with a single word on it, and then speak about that for five minutes. The slideshow isn't the important thing, it's a very minor component. Or, consider Jack Ryan's presentation in Hunt for Red October.
"A picture is worth a thousand words" should be understood as 'A picture needs a thousand words.'
Unfortunately, too many presenters have gotten it backwards. They try to put all their ideas on screen, relying on the visuals to speak for them. And then they learn that they have to reduce the information on-screen (word-wise at least), but they don't learn to shift the extracted information to their mouth (or accompanying texts).
Here the blame can leveled on PPT, and Excel for that matter, for guiding idiots toward making bad presentations. They guide the average person away from KISS. Default chart styles add so much visual noise that data becomes secondary.
I can't count the number of times I've had to ask a presenter, whom I was re-designing slides for, what are you trying to communicate here? Only to have them either look at me blankly or get mad at me for pointing out, indirectly, that there was no information to be gotten from their jumble of animated arrows, boxes, 11pt text, and senselessly over-contrasted colors.
The worst tool I've every been directed to use for page layout: Excel.
Bad design kills people. Whether it's a car or the information presented to managers about it's safety. Bad information design can hide, or just simply fail to reveal, salient facts.
Powerpoint gives people without a clue a way to add chartoonery to information. It helps people make bad design. It is only a tool, but it is a tool that gives too many a false sense that they are making good presentations.
Martin-Marietta didn't need PPT to make un-illuminating charts before the Challenger explosion that failed to show why taking off in freezing weather was a bad idea. Bad information design hid the facts.
Even having a good designer, one who knows how to present data that can be quickly and easily understood, can't help a presenter who doesn't honestly know how to communicate.
You don't know Tufte.
Don't go too far down the 'text is all you need route.' Nothing but text is a great way to hide information. Presenting data in graphs is an aid to understanding, but those graphics need to be well-designed, information rich, non-manipulative and visually enlightening. For example, compare a table of numbers showing GDP for 100 years to a line graph with the numbers in a table beneath - the numbers specify, but the line illuminates the pattern.
Graphs aren't the problem, bad information design is. Powerpoint doesn't help with design. It does help add clutter, however.
96.3%... we'll not have such imprecision.
However, Pyro can be replaced by high concentrations of ... are you ready for this ... Green Tea.
As for Weston's medical problems, his amidol based paper developer was the greatest contributor (next time you see a photo of him that includes his hands, note the black fingernails).
True, he did eventually have an assistant (Ted Dresser, I think is his name) whom he trusted to make prints, but they were according to printing formulas he would work out. It wasn't so much direction as a Master Chef's recipe and technique replicated by a Souce Chef.
if it wasn't on the negative, it wasn't going to be in the print. You can't coax a masterpiece from a mediocre piece of film. Adams planned his shots, set up his big old camera, then waited for the scene to appear and the light to be just right.
You should see some of those negatives. To call them mediocre is to elevate them. Most printers would give up. The extensive dodging and burning that he is known for, wasn't manipulation so much as compensation.
His negatives were awesome!
For the most part, but not always. The infallable legend is a bit exagerated. He did preach: Visualize, Capture, Render (my terms) as a single process that should mesh perfectly, and mostly he did as preached. But when step 2 fell short of easily rendering step 1, he had an amazing talent to correct.
In Houston, Texas, the highway department has placed transponders all over the highway system...
That's actually pretty common in most larger metro areas in the country... and those aren't really data transponders, but simply series of electromagnetic coils in the road bed that sense the presence of hunks of iron traveling over them.
look closer next time... L&O was mentioned above
Actually, it wasn't voluntary and they use a penalty clause in their contract to increase revenue. They charge the renters credit card an added 'insurance fee' that increases per mph over limit. (I'll have to search the NPR archives to find it. I'm pretty sure it was a Morning Edition item.)
IBM has been running a commercial recently with three 'tech guys' discussing an EZ pass with two of them implying to the third that he's a fool for not having the pass. Whereas my reaction has always been that he's the smart one for not submitting to having his every trip filed in a database.
too bad your poll is running on .NET Framework. It just isn't up to the task of getting /. 'd and suffers a timeout error.
Not going with the sheep OS is being insecure?
It isn't enough that it creates some of the crappiest html since Pagemill, but an html editor that creates security holes, too? What will they have to patch next? Notepad?
This appears more like a move to make "the browser" an more indisputably intregal part of the OS. Planning for the future when Bush & Co. are not in power and the DOJ goes back to enforcing laws agains monopolies.
You are confusing Orwellian with doublespeak. That's double plus ungood.
You've never heard the phrase 'close enough for government work," have you?
They picked windoze. Obviously security was never a consideration (do your own /. search for that thread).
Is anyone really that surprised that the DC Stazi, err, USKGB, umm umm, Department of Homeland Security failed security.