Great plan of action to accomplish this (as described in the Groklaw article). My take on it is basically:
1. Distributed network of tech-savvy people collect usability data by observing newbs interact with GNU/Linux systems in basic set of tasks ("email, a simple letter, a firewall, and surf the internet").
2. Usabilty data (collected from step 1) is aggregated and publicly archived in its raw form.
3. A public Wiki is created by the community (based upon the collected data from step 2).
4. At the same time, an "official" Wiki is created by smaller core team (based upon the collected data from step 2).
The result of this is to have a huge archive of usability studies, a self-moderated public discussion on it, and an official document with polished observations and recommendations. So a few details need to be worked out (including a good format for the usability data), but the overall plan sounds excellent.
I used this before for network monitoring.
on
The Sound of Cells
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've used audio feedback in conjunction with network monitoring, and it worked VERY well. I was developing a SOAP-based client/server app, and I tied a different sound (MIDI note actually, sometimes from the percussion instrument, sometimes ascending chords on piano) to each type of message the client and server could send.
In the course of a standard interaction, it would play login, login ack, getlist, getlist-resp, etc. I could hear the timing between calls (yeh, SOAP is kind of slow like that), and more importantly hear if it was doing the right things. You pick it up *immediately* when a chord progression is major, minor, or just plain wrong), All this without taking up any screen real estate.
This works so well, I recommend it highly. AFAIK there are no standard ways of doing this, but it certainly would be great to put some standard techniques and libraries together!
Really? I actually like it. But the way I watch it is I turn on MTV and *MUTE* the TV. Then I play my own music off of CDs. A little bootyshaking and cleavage in the background makes almost any kind of music just a little bit better. For example, try Gypsy Kings over a Jay-Z video. Nice!
Hopefully this will help preempt the 5000 coming posts of "Why is this better than GPS?"...
1. GPS doesn't work well in cities with tall buildings where sky is obscured by large buildings.
2. GPS has only 10m accuracy. This is important when you're giving pedestrians directions (eg cross the street and enter the second door on your right).
3. Unlike GPS or cell-phone base station approaches, this method gives information specific to the direction the user is facing (eg cross the street and enter the second door on your right).
6MB instead of 4MB just for signing up for German Yahoo mail? Whatever, all those umlauts and shit take up a lot more space, so it works out to be the same anyway.
Well the whole beauty of this type of service is that pruning old mail is a boring task that humans shouldn't have to spend time doing. And it's one that computers are VERY well suited for, especially if they include a super-fast search engine. Hence, gmail. I for one, welcome our new mail-pruning super-fast-searching overlords.
"In a larger sense,
Sun's actions remind us of Compaq/Digital in their later days," analyst Andrew Neff of Bear Stearns said in a research note. "If history is a guide, Sun could follow the path of those companies with further disappointments leading to an eventual acquisition."
LibertineR: Facts as flamebait? Way to argue. If you can dispute the facts, then do that, dont just mod it down because you dont like it.
No, not "facts as flamebait". Calling people "losers", "asshole", and "Smart Boy" mixed in with mostly irrelevant quotes (regarding the Sun/MSFT contract and negotiations, not the technology, I might add) is what makes your post flamebait.
Then you go on to say "Instead of being concerned about their developers or the potential HUGE market for Java, [Sun] tried to suck everything back under their own umbrella." Here, again, your sense of history is quite far from reality and shows a childish "mine!" mentality. Let me correct your statement: Sun tried to "suck everything back under their own umbrella" (as you so elegantly put it) in an effort to positively shape the future of the Java language rather than letting monopolistic market forces fragment this potent technological legacy into useless pieces, thereby becoming just another programming language that half a generation of computer scientists will remember in 30 years from now.
You also said "I was there" and "Sun hated that they had to play with us". Are you claiming to work for or be a representative of Microsoft? I find this extermely hard to believe.
Your whole post is unsubstantiated anthropomorphization of Sun and Microsoft, boiled down to "MSFT made a better Java than Sun, and Sun wanted to hog the credit, so they rejected every reasonable offer simply out of spite". Amazing that this gets modded to +5 insightful... Please, go tell this story to a room of kindergarteners.
Sun worried (rightfully) about the proprietary extensions MSFT was adding to Java, which would have had the result of tying "Java" to Windows and shattering the "Write Once Run Anywhere" promise, while at the same time having the (mostly false) appearance that MSFT was playing nice with its competition. And that's just one part of the whole issue.
Get your history right, or at least don't try to pass off your skewed opinions as fact.
The ONLY viable alternative is for groundskeepers to hire dozens of workers to *manually remove weeds*, but this requires abolition of the socialist minimum wage laws to be economically feasible. Are you prepared for THAT solution? You can't have your free organic cake and eat it too.
Military jobs work against an economy of production. In fact, that's their only point.
I generally agree with what you say, Doc, but this is an overly simplistic view of the military. The concept of "peace-keeping forces" is one now shared by many major powers in the world (including NATO). The goal of these forces is frequently to provide a stable environment in which economic and social growth can take place, which in turn leads to production and even more jobs.
And to counter your counter-argument, *sometimes* we use peace-keeping forces after we bomb the shit out of a country and try to rebuild it, but we also use them when we intervene to assist and stabilize a region torn apart by years of civil war and corruption. Be careful with your broad brush strokes regarding the military.
The inspiration for Gmail came from a Google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services, recalled Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products. "
She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them," Page said. "And when she's not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked, 'Can't you people fix this?'"
That is the lamest paragraph I've ever read in a press release. Quite funny in an April Fool's joke though. I can't *believe* so many papers picked this story up. I think this will cause some problems for Google, though as they say any press is good press.
But seriously, if you want that question answered, don't look in this book. Instead check out doubleyourdating.com and sign up for the free newsletter. Just reading the free content that comes through a couple times a week can be very eye-opening, especially in "the geek set" the members of which are probably amongst the most likely to fail over things like being too nice. Check it out, you have nothing to lose other than time spent reading.
Curious about what type of site this might be, I took a look at it and found it immediately asking for my email address. Being inquisitive, I checked the terms of service and found the following gem (emphasis mine, and down-cased to bypass shout-filter):
4. you understand that by entering your name and email address on the entry page that you are subscribing to a free, no obligation "dating tips" email newsletter. this newsletter is offered as a free service by david deangelo and doubleyourdating.com, and no purchase is necessary. on occasion,
subscribers have had trouble removing themselves from this free newsletter. if you have trouble subscribing or removing, you may contact us at support@doubleyourdating.com for personal attention. by entering this website, you agree that you wish to be subscribed to this newsletter, and that you will make no threats, and take no additional action against david deangelo or doubleyourdating.com in the event you are unhappy that you subscribed or are not able to remove yourself from this free mailing list, and you agree that the small inconvenience of receiving this unwanted newsletter will cause you no personal, emotional, or financial harm whatsoever. you further agree that if you take any action against david deangelo or doubleyourdating.com other than requesting from us directly to be removed, including reporting or complaining to spamcop.net or any other similar policing entity, reporting or complaining to our isp or hosting company, or any other company that we are affiliated, partnered, or do business with, or make any threats of any kind, that you are violating this agreement and are willfully inflicting irreparable damage upon david deangelo and doubleyourdating.com. in the event that you violate the above terms, you agree to immediately pay david deangelo $1,000.00 in cash and cease all violations, or risk further legal action and personal financial loss.
So to summarize, the site admits that it ignores requests for removal from the mailing list, and demands $1000 cash from any user who complains about this fact to anybody? Wow sign me up!!! Or, rather, go fuck yourself, David Deangelo, and take your email harvesting spam shit elsewhere!
if you kill someone who had broken into your house but was not threatening you then you might well face arrest.
Considering that most houses don't have 24/7 audio/video surveillance, I think it's safe to say that if you killed somebody who had broken into your house, you'd be smart to talk to a lawyer and then come up with a pretty good story for how the whole thing happened. And I'd rather face arrest than jail, death, or even significant risk of either.
Wish I could mod this up, as it's one of the most insightful posts in here.
It's interesting psychologically how people associate value with things. As another example, in the board game Monopoly during the frequently misunderstood property auction (see official rules), many players are unwilling to bid higher than the printed value of the property on the board. In reality, the value of the property is based on who has the other properties of that color, expected future income, and general strategy, yet people see the number and think "oh ok that's how much this is worth". Odd, but at least predictable and makes it easy to gain the upper hand...
The water in my toilet tank is blue and full of bleach. I won't be drinking that any time soon, no matter what. My bathroom smells nice and fresh though.
Why put this out there??? Come on... You put it out there because if we live with our heads in the sand, we'll be completely unprepared for all kinds of horrible situations that are likely to crop up in the coming years. I'm not saying we need to have our fingers on a red button to bomb USSR, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or whomever else is the enemy du jour. But I think it's reasonable to at least open a discussion on the topic. Your attitude (and the attitude of whoever initially modded the OP Overrated) is not constructive at all.
No, it's fun to gamble and take the risk of winning or losing. For you, it appears that misinterpreting posts is fun too, so more power to you.
"perfect examples of bad statistics"
Riddle me this Batman, if gambling is such a great idea, why don't the houses play against each other? "I'll raise you one Trump Tower and one Caesar's Palace!" Hahahahahaha
The context of what I said was "arguments like yours that are perfect examples of bad statistics". It had nothing to do with gambling. Gambling is entertainment with a chance to win in the short term but almost guaranteed net long term loss. It's not a sound business strategy, which is why the houses don't play each other. I'm glad you can so easily amuse yourself by wandering off topic, though. Keep it up.
Slashdot Mirror
The result of this is to have a huge archive of usability studies, a self-moderated public discussion on it, and an official document with polished observations and recommendations. So a few details need to be worked out (including a good format for the usability data), but the overall plan sounds excellent.
I've used audio feedback in conjunction with network monitoring, and it worked VERY well. I was developing a SOAP-based client/server app, and I tied a different sound (MIDI note actually, sometimes from the percussion instrument, sometimes ascending chords on piano) to each type of message the client and server could send.
In the course of a standard interaction, it would play login, login ack, getlist, getlist-resp, etc. I could hear the timing between calls (yeh, SOAP is kind of slow like that), and more importantly hear if it was doing the right things. You pick it up *immediately* when a chord progression is major, minor, or just plain wrong), All this without taking up any screen real estate.
This works so well, I recommend it highly. AFAIK there are no standard ways of doing this, but it certainly would be great to put some standard techniques and libraries together!
Really? I actually like it. But the way I watch it is I turn on MTV and *MUTE* the TV. Then I play my own music off of CDs. A little bootyshaking and cleavage in the background makes almost any kind of music just a little bit better. For example, try Gypsy Kings over a Jay-Z video. Nice!
Haha, you missed it. See this one two posts back.
Hopefully this will help preempt the 5000 coming posts of "Why is this better than GPS?"...
1. GPS doesn't work well in cities with tall buildings where sky is obscured by large buildings.
2. GPS has only 10m accuracy. This is important when you're giving pedestrians directions (eg cross the street and enter the second door on your right).
3. Unlike GPS or cell-phone base station approaches, this method gives information specific to the direction the user is facing (eg cross the street and enter the second door on your right).
coLinux Wiki!
6MB instead of 4MB just for signing up for German Yahoo mail? Whatever, all those umlauts and shit take up a lot more space, so it works out to be the same anyway.
Well the whole beauty of this type of service is that pruning old mail is a boring task that humans shouldn't have to spend time doing. And it's one that computers are VERY well suited for, especially if they include a super-fast search engine. Hence, gmail. I for one, welcome our new mail-pruning super-fast-searching overlords.
Quote (emphasis mine):
LibertineR: Facts as flamebait? Way to argue. If you can dispute the facts, then do that, dont just mod it down because you dont like it.
No, not "facts as flamebait". Calling people "losers", "asshole", and "Smart Boy" mixed in with mostly irrelevant quotes (regarding the Sun/MSFT contract and negotiations, not the technology, I might add) is what makes your post flamebait.
Then you go on to say "Instead of being concerned about their developers or the potential HUGE market for Java, [Sun] tried to suck everything back under their own umbrella." Here, again, your sense of history is quite far from reality and shows a childish "mine!" mentality. Let me correct your statement: Sun tried to "suck everything back under their own umbrella" (as you so elegantly put it) in an effort to positively shape the future of the Java language rather than letting monopolistic market forces fragment this potent technological legacy into useless pieces, thereby becoming just another programming language that half a generation of computer scientists will remember in 30 years from now.
You also said "I was there" and "Sun hated that they had to play with us". Are you claiming to work for or be a representative of Microsoft? I find this extermely hard to believe.
Your whole post is unsubstantiated anthropomorphization of Sun and Microsoft, boiled down to "MSFT made a better Java than Sun, and Sun wanted to hog the credit, so they rejected every reasonable offer simply out of spite". Amazing that this gets modded to +5 insightful... Please, go tell this story to a room of kindergarteners.
Sun worried (rightfully) about the proprietary extensions MSFT was adding to Java, which would have had the result of tying "Java" to Windows and shattering the "Write Once Run Anywhere" promise, while at the same time having the (mostly false) appearance that MSFT was playing nice with its competition. And that's just one part of the whole issue.
Get your history right, or at least don't try to pass off your skewed opinions as fact.
The ONLY viable alternative is for groundskeepers to hire dozens of workers to *manually remove weeds*, but this requires abolition of the socialist minimum wage laws to be economically feasible. Are you prepared for THAT solution? You can't have your free organic cake and eat it too.
And to counter your counter-argument, *sometimes* we use peace-keeping forces after we bomb the shit out of a country and try to rebuild it, but we also use them when we intervene to assist and stabilize a region torn apart by years of civil war and corruption. Be careful with your broad brush strokes regarding the military.
Agreed. The commentary on Spinal Tap turns it essentially into a whole new movie. I was floored the first time I watched it! Buy it! (only $14.99).
Wish I could mod this up, as it's one of the most insightful posts in here.
It's interesting psychologically how people associate value with things. As another example, in the board game Monopoly during the frequently misunderstood property auction (see official rules), many players are unwilling to bid higher than the printed value of the property on the board. In reality, the value of the property is based on who has the other properties of that color, expected future income, and general strategy, yet people see the number and think "oh ok that's how much this is worth". Odd, but at least predictable and makes it easy to gain the upper hand...
The water in my toilet tank is blue and full of bleach. I won't be drinking that any time soon, no matter what. My bathroom smells nice and fresh though.
Why put this out there??? Come on... You put it out there because if we live with our heads in the sand, we'll be completely unprepared for all kinds of horrible situations that are likely to crop up in the coming years. I'm not saying we need to have our fingers on a red button to bomb USSR, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or whomever else is the enemy du jour. But I think it's reasonable to at least open a discussion on the topic. Your attitude (and the attitude of whoever initially modded the OP Overrated) is not constructive at all.