It is complete bullshit to be accusatory of the USA in that manner. The USA does deserve to be blamed for not doing more than anyone else, but you need to recognize that, by signing the Kyoto protocol, the USA would be doing far more and suffering far more than anyone else would.
Russia and most of Europe actually do not need to do anything to comply. They can just sit on their asses and brag about being compliant. The USA and Australia, two major polluters and evaders of Kyoto would need to make enormous strides to comply with Kyoto.
Don't claim that Russia has some higher priority here. They're not doing a damn thing by signing because their country has been in collapse so long that they don't cause that much pollution now.
It occurs to me that the FSF is representative of an incredibly vast amount of copyrighted material. Although many people would not want to have the FSF be considered there representative, I think it's reasonable to consider the FSF to be the representative of at least a slight majority of all GPLed and LGPLed software. (I mean this in the same way that the RIAA is a representative of many other labels, yet usually doesn't hold the rights itself.)
In that light, how much copyrighted software does the FSF represent when compared to other software organizations? I would not be surprised if that would make the FSF the largest in the world. In that light, the FSF should have an enormous amount of sway in such a situation.
So, to take this further, could those of us who do have GPLed software which is used heavily denote the fact that the FSF does in some manner represent us, thus showing to the governments of the world how important they are? Governments tend not to listen to people who do not have some delineated backing, so I think so sort of declaration of this would be needed.
Re:TV is actually worse than movies...
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 1
Myself and a lot of my friends in the US like to watch Japanese anime. The fansubbing of anime has been going on in an almost industry-like manner for longer than most free piracy. I can watch about half of anything shown in Japan (yes, even the crap) in the US within a week of its first show, translated without adds.
However, if I don't download my copy, about half of everything I like never comes to the US. Ever. So, no, I don't feel guilty about 'pirating' anime. The executives need to deal with those situations before they can stop this.
(Oh, and the fansubs often have better translations because they don't get so worried about dumming stuff down. Yet another hurdle.)
Well, Gunnm is a bit of a rare case, and this is definitely the way to do it. The anime adaption of the manga was badly done, mangling the story and the art, yet it was still fairly good because it was working off of something so well done.
What makes Gunnm so strong is that it has outstanding combat without the combat being its strong point. That is, the emotions and the storyline are more important than the action, but the action is still excellent.
Cameron is a great director and he might be able to do justice to the story. And, being about a robotic girl who is definitely not human, doing her with CG is definitely the way to go. The things that Gally do cannot be simulated in real life, so CG will be neccesary no matter what.
I prefer the Maya3D handling of pie menus. I didn't mention them since I was mostly talking about the menu bar at the top, but Maya does use a pie-menu for all context menus.
The Maya pie menu is a burst all around the cursor, except that it just has a list going down below it. The key commands in any situation are always situated near the cursor at the top and any new items added to the menu due to that specific context are just appended onto the bottom menu which functions like a perfectly normal context menu in any other program, meaning that it can handle almost any amount of options (as many as fit on the screen) without any weird tricks. I've never seen a menu large enough that it couldn't be handled, so I really don't know what would happen.
Well, the drop-down isn't too distinctive, as I recall, except that it's the only dropdown on that bar and it never moves no matter what mode you're in. It's one of those things which isn't immediately intuitive but is extremely easy to use after having spent a few minutes learning it.
Maya's is much better. It does not change modes unexplicitly. There is a dropdown in the upper-right corner of the toolbar that says what mode you are in and everything changes when you change that.
Also, the toolbox itself changes a bit depending on which tool you are using, but only a bit.
The point is that, if this new functionality is better, that should be the default. The problem with the article is that it assumes that there is a technical possibility of giving users what they want, which there is not, which is why I cannot abide using a Mac. Apple thought it gave people what they want, and it didn't. I gave a goodly amount of people what they want, but I can't use it. That's why good defaults are key, not just a lack of options.
If the argument is that textual equivalents should replace the icons, that just means that the setting in Preferences -> Appearance & Themes -> Style -> Miscellaneous should have 'Text by Application' in addition to 'Icons Only', 'Text Only', and 'Text Under Icons' so that the icons which need it can have it when the others do not.
Flexible software typically has a lot of functions and options. The capacity of short term memory is important here: a person at random can remember or concentrate on 7 +/- 2 items at once. At no point should a person be presented with more than 9 items in a selection when one has to be chosen. So there should be at most 9 menus, 9 items per menu, etc. Any more than that and people are operating at less than peak efficiency in order to find the functionality they want.
I've always found this particular problem to be extremely troublesome. One solution I have seen is the MicroSoft Office one where menus are self-shortening, which has overall just meant that people have an easier time doing things they found easy anyway and a near-to-impossible time doing things that were once only complex.
Another solution is the Maya3D one, where what menus exist are context sensitive and the program has three contexts. As an end result, you are essentially using three programs which you can swap between very swiftly. There, the menus are far too long still, but it is a pro tool so some different rules apply.
The last solution is the Apple solution which is to just remove options which are not needed. This definitely makes for easy to use software, but it also often makes for weak software. For some programs, it is the perfect solution, as those programs are extremely single-purpose (Safari, Preview, iTunes). However, the specification of a single application results in a prolification of applications, which is a whole different problem.
In general, I've been thinking recently that the proper solution is often the Maya3D solution, a solution that is basically unused. An office suite could have a solid separation between the input of the basic data and the presentation aspects, leaving each section fairly simple. That way, the editing interface would essentially enter data into a template, but you could swiftly switch to the layout interface to change the template itself.
Of course, that doesn't apply for every program and it introduces the problem that some programs (Konqueror) that try that get of having an inconsistent toolbar set.
Fitt's law is not the "most basic... of UI design". Fitt's law has become unreasonably important because UI designers stopped giving users visual cues about keyboard shortcuts. Even my Dad uses the backspace key rather than the back button! Its so much easier. Mouse gestures will also dramatically change the effect of Fitt's law.
Exactly. Of course, KDE Usability had a big argument about doing exactly that so that people wouldn't have to try so hard to learn short-cut keys.
What was the proposed solution? Place Shortcuts in Tooltips.
So, when you hover over the refresh button, it doesn't say ' Refresh ' it says ' Refresh (F5) '. Imagine that.
So, if you're among the camp that feels that the fact that, over a year after the wishlist item was posted, this still is marked as 'New' and nobody has even attempted to impliment it, vote for bug 67178 and try to convince them that such a minor change could make a world of differnce for the K Desktop Environment's usability quotient.
You're implying that it is because most of the technologies are hopeless, but I really think that isn't the case. The fact is, when a hundred new technologies are developed to solve one problem, only one is actually needed. The others are tossed by the wayside not because they are useless but because they are not as useful as another technology.
The article mentioned studies in the medical field and I was trying to point out how they differ. In the medical field, what they care about is whether or not people make a mistake at all, since it tends to be very bad no matter what the mistake is. By contrast, a whole lot of mistakes can come up in software development and still get solved before it ever leaves the house, meaning that the magnitude of the error and the time it will take to fix is much more relevant.
You talked back to the editors in reply to someone else? I suppose that's why you started with, "Under the same faulty thinking," making it pretty damn obvious that you were talking to the person who had already taken into account that the machine was unpatched and had as his key point that, "To get browser security from Microsoft requirs a user of Windows 98 to spend $100 to get XP and then spend the next two days trying to install it and getting it to work right with his scanner/fax/printer."
If you want to talk shit about the crappy editors, don't do it with off-base replies to other people, just reply to the damn story.
And, on another note, don't make dumbass assumptions that I posted anonymously in reply to your comment, because I don't post anonymously. Don't go around making stupid and baseless insults.
At 80-110 hours a week, a $100,000 is shit pay. Especially if you live anywhere in California. I wouldn't work for that, not a chance in hell.
I suppose the only upshot is that, with that little free time, you forced to save for the early retirement you get due to health problems from overworking yourself.
"Even if you were to assume that my productivity were to go down 10% for every hour over 50 I worked, I'd still be *somewhat* productive at hour 80. Of course it's not linear like that, but if something's *got* to get done, then it's got to get done, whether I'm tired or not."
You're making the faulty assumption that negative work never occurs. However, it is not at all rare that a mistake made in one minute can later require ten minutes of time to correct.
At a certain point, the productivity of an individual reaches the point where the mistakes they make during an hour will take more than an hour to correct. Since errors in coding aren't fatal, the problem probably won't arise after fifty hours a week, but it seems possible and even likely that it will arise after sixty hours a week.
Although this may not apply as much to EA, it applies a lot in most the rest of computing. EA makes games, and games are mostly just a get-it-out-the-door type of product. You test for errors, make sure it's clean, then sell it. However, anything that will need to be upgraded to a newer version at some point will need to have clean, maintainable code. For that sort of material, I think you will, overall, start getting negative returns after about sixty hours a week. As far as games go, though, you really might not hit the point until after seventy or eighty hours.
Exactly! So you agree that the cost of protecting an old Firefox installation is $0 and the cost of protecting an old Windows installation is $100 dollars. It's good to see we're on the same page here.
The reason it's different here is that the patch was submitted swiftly. They clearly were dealing with the problem as quickly as possible. Some other organizations have sat on information for over a year without issuing a patch, which is an unacceptable turn-around.
Most people believe in giving companies a head-start on fixing problems, because they often can fix them swiftly. In this case, that head-start worked out.
That is interesting, and I'd have to agree in general. Of course, the USA didn't score too low, hanging regularly around 7.7 since '95.
However, I have some doubts about a survey which is entirely based off of the perceptions of businessmen and financial journalists. In many cases, that will result in a correct result, but it also often will not. Especially, nations which have companies getting a lot more press might have some shift in that, even if that doesn't reflect on the nation itself. Of course, to refute my own point, the US actually increased its ranking after the Enron and Worldcom scandals hit the news.
Slashdot Mirror
It is complete bullshit to be accusatory of the USA in that manner. The USA does deserve to be blamed for not doing more than anyone else, but you need to recognize that, by signing the Kyoto protocol, the USA would be doing far more and suffering far more than anyone else would.
Russia and most of Europe actually do not need to do anything to comply. They can just sit on their asses and brag about being compliant. The USA and Australia, two major polluters and evaders of Kyoto would need to make enormous strides to comply with Kyoto.
Don't claim that Russia has some higher priority here. They're not doing a damn thing by signing because their country has been in collapse so long that they don't cause that much pollution now.
But, you need to orient it directly south. Now, if that pocket version had a built-in compass, I'd get one to take camping with me. No joke.
Amphetamines are legal over international waters, somewhere I expect he will be spending a lot of time.
However, I suspect good-old-fashioned sleep will be the solution he uses.
I just love that the acronym for that would be NCLU, which would be a great foil for the ACLU.
Please, leave me here, behind. I feel safer when you're in front of me.
Sincerely,
Jame
"Where is America's edge left?"
You mean besides the military?
It occurs to me that the FSF is representative of an incredibly vast amount of copyrighted material. Although many people would not want to have the FSF be considered there representative, I think it's reasonable to consider the FSF to be the representative of at least a slight majority of all GPLed and LGPLed software. (I mean this in the same way that the RIAA is a representative of many other labels, yet usually doesn't hold the rights itself.)
In that light, how much copyrighted software does the FSF represent when compared to other software organizations? I would not be surprised if that would make the FSF the largest in the world. In that light, the FSF should have an enormous amount of sway in such a situation.
So, to take this further, could those of us who do have GPLed software which is used heavily denote the fact that the FSF does in some manner represent us, thus showing to the governments of the world how important they are? Governments tend not to listen to people who do not have some delineated backing, so I think so sort of declaration of this would be needed.
Myself and a lot of my friends in the US like to watch Japanese anime. The fansubbing of anime has been going on in an almost industry-like manner for longer than most free piracy. I can watch about half of anything shown in Japan (yes, even the crap) in the US within a week of its first show, translated without adds.
However, if I don't download my copy, about half of everything I like never comes to the US. Ever. So, no, I don't feel guilty about 'pirating' anime. The executives need to deal with those situations before they can stop this.
(Oh, and the fansubs often have better translations because they don't get so worried about dumming stuff down. Yet another hurdle.)
Well, Gunnm is a bit of a rare case, and this is definitely the way to do it. The anime adaption of the manga was badly done, mangling the story and the art, yet it was still fairly good because it was working off of something so well done.
What makes Gunnm so strong is that it has outstanding combat without the combat being its strong point. That is, the emotions and the storyline are more important than the action, but the action is still excellent.
Cameron is a great director and he might be able to do justice to the story. And, being about a robotic girl who is definitely not human, doing her with CG is definitely the way to go. The things that Gally do cannot be simulated in real life, so CG will be neccesary no matter what.
I prefer the Maya3D handling of pie menus. I didn't mention them since I was mostly talking about the menu bar at the top, but Maya does use a pie-menu for all context menus.
The Maya pie menu is a burst all around the cursor, except that it just has a list going down below it. The key commands in any situation are always situated near the cursor at the top and any new items added to the menu due to that specific context are just appended onto the bottom menu which functions like a perfectly normal context menu in any other program, meaning that it can handle almost any amount of options (as many as fit on the screen) without any weird tricks. I've never seen a menu large enough that it couldn't be handled, so I really don't know what would happen.
Well, the drop-down isn't too distinctive, as I recall, except that it's the only dropdown on that bar and it never moves no matter what mode you're in. It's one of those things which isn't immediately intuitive but is extremely easy to use after having spent a few minutes learning it.
Maya's is much better. It does not change modes unexplicitly. There is a dropdown in the upper-right corner of the toolbar that says what mode you are in and everything changes when you change that.
Also, the toolbox itself changes a bit depending on which tool you are using, but only a bit.
The point is that, if this new functionality is better, that should be the default. The problem with the article is that it assumes that there is a technical possibility of giving users what they want, which there is not, which is why I cannot abide using a Mac. Apple thought it gave people what they want, and it didn't. I gave a goodly amount of people what they want, but I can't use it. That's why good defaults are key, not just a lack of options.
If the argument is that textual equivalents should replace the icons, that just means that the setting in Preferences -> Appearance & Themes -> Style -> Miscellaneous should have 'Text by Application' in addition to 'Icons Only', 'Text Only', and 'Text Under Icons' so that the icons which need it can have it when the others do not.
Another solution is the Maya3D one, where what menus exist are context sensitive and the program has three contexts. As an end result, you are essentially using three programs which you can swap between very swiftly. There, the menus are far too long still, but it is a pro tool so some different rules apply.
The last solution is the Apple solution which is to just remove options which are not needed. This definitely makes for easy to use software, but it also often makes for weak software. For some programs, it is the perfect solution, as those programs are extremely single-purpose (Safari, Preview, iTunes). However, the specification of a single application results in a prolification of applications, which is a whole different problem.
In general, I've been thinking recently that the proper solution is often the Maya3D solution, a solution that is basically unused. An office suite could have a solid separation between the input of the basic data and the presentation aspects, leaving each section fairly simple. That way, the editing interface would essentially enter data into a template, but you could swiftly switch to the layout interface to change the template itself.
Of course, that doesn't apply for every program and it introduces the problem that some programs (Konqueror) that try that get of having an inconsistent toolbar set.
What was the proposed solution? Place Shortcuts in Tooltips.
So, when you hover over the refresh button, it doesn't say ' Refresh ' it says ' Refresh (F5) '. Imagine that.
So, if you're among the camp that feels that the fact that, over a year after the wishlist item was posted, this still is marked as 'New' and nobody has even attempted to impliment it, vote for bug 67178 and try to convince them that such a minor change could make a world of differnce for the K Desktop Environment's usability quotient.
That's http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67178 and click vote and you could help revolutionise the Linux desktop!
You're implying that it is because most of the technologies are hopeless, but I really think that isn't the case. The fact is, when a hundred new technologies are developed to solve one problem, only one is actually needed. The others are tossed by the wayside not because they are useless but because they are not as useful as another technology.
The article mentioned studies in the medical field and I was trying to point out how they differ. In the medical field, what they care about is whether or not people make a mistake at all, since it tends to be very bad no matter what the mistake is. By contrast, a whole lot of mistakes can come up in software development and still get solved before it ever leaves the house, meaning that the magnitude of the error and the time it will take to fix is much more relevant.
You talked back to the editors in reply to someone else? I suppose that's why you started with, "Under the same faulty thinking," making it pretty damn obvious that you were talking to the person who had already taken into account that the machine was unpatched and had as his key point that, "To get browser security from Microsoft requirs a user of Windows 98 to spend $100 to get XP and then spend the next two days trying to install it and getting it to work right with his scanner/fax/printer."
If you want to talk shit about the crappy editors, don't do it with off-base replies to other people, just reply to the damn story.
And, on another note, don't make dumbass assumptions that I posted anonymously in reply to your comment, because I don't post anonymously. Don't go around making stupid and baseless insults.
At 80-110 hours a week, a $100,000 is shit pay. Especially if you live anywhere in California. I wouldn't work for that, not a chance in hell.
I suppose the only upshot is that, with that little free time, you forced to save for the early retirement you get due to health problems from overworking yourself.
"Even if you were to assume that my productivity were to go down 10% for every hour over 50 I worked, I'd still be *somewhat* productive at hour 80. Of course it's not linear like that, but if something's *got* to get done, then it's got to get done, whether I'm tired or not."
You're making the faulty assumption that negative work never occurs. However, it is not at all rare that a mistake made in one minute can later require ten minutes of time to correct.
At a certain point, the productivity of an individual reaches the point where the mistakes they make during an hour will take more than an hour to correct. Since errors in coding aren't fatal, the problem probably won't arise after fifty hours a week, but it seems possible and even likely that it will arise after sixty hours a week.
Although this may not apply as much to EA, it applies a lot in most the rest of computing. EA makes games, and games are mostly just a get-it-out-the-door type of product. You test for errors, make sure it's clean, then sell it. However, anything that will need to be upgraded to a newer version at some point will need to have clean, maintainable code. For that sort of material, I think you will, overall, start getting negative returns after about sixty hours a week. As far as games go, though, you really might not hit the point until after seventy or eighty hours.
There were plenty of harsh words for Mozilla here. Perhaps we read a different article, where yours had completely different comments?
Exactly! So you agree that the cost of protecting an old Firefox installation is $0 and the cost of protecting an old Windows installation is $100 dollars. It's good to see we're on the same page here.
The reason it's different here is that the patch was submitted swiftly. They clearly were dealing with the problem as quickly as possible. Some other organizations have sat on information for over a year without issuing a patch, which is an unacceptable turn-around.
Most people believe in giving companies a head-start on fixing problems, because they often can fix them swiftly. In this case, that head-start worked out.
That is interesting, and I'd have to agree in general. Of course, the USA didn't score too low, hanging regularly around 7.7 since '95.
However, I have some doubts about a survey which is entirely based off of the perceptions of businessmen and financial journalists. In many cases, that will result in a correct result, but it also often will not. Especially, nations which have companies getting a lot more press might have some shift in that, even if that doesn't reflect on the nation itself. Of course, to refute my own point, the US actually increased its ranking after the Enron and Worldcom scandals hit the news.