There are different ways to get the effect that this keyboard is supposed to get.
Learning Dvorak is a good place to start. I don't think there's any real hard evidence that it's faster (the tests that Dvorak commissioned are under scrutiny for suspicion of his obvious bias), but I DO notice that it's easier on the hands, as I hardly have to move my fingers from the home row.
Additionally, it gives the effect of not being able to look at the keyboard since the keys will be mislabelled. In fact, Dvorak might even be *better* for this because looking at the keyboard will be a detriment since the keys will be mislabelled, while looking at a blank keyboard won't mislead you as to which key is what.
However, Dvorak isn't very work-friendly. If anybody else needs to use my computer for whatever reason I find myself having to continually switch it to QWERTY (also, in Dvorak, QWERTY is much harder to type:) ), which only takes a CTRL-SHIFT but is confusing enough. A blank keyboard will probably be better at work but might be just as bad if the person can't type.
Also, great thing about Dvorak is it limits what a random person can do on your computer (the upside of using one at work).
It does remind me somewhat of a study discussed in the book Freakonomics in which the author did statistical studies on voting in The Weakest Link. He crunched actual numbers and discovered there were some biases at work, such as:
Hispanics had a performance bias going against them (they were voted off earlier rounds when strong players are desireable, and kept in later rounds when weaker players are desireable) and the elderly had a general bias against them (they were voted off in all phases of the game indicating people simply found contact with them undesireable)
All in all, it was an interesting study with actual data done by an economist studying within his field. More enlightening that this article.
I would agree but the incremental cost of sending spam is basically free... especially if people let spyware hijack their computers to do the heavy lifting.
This isn't spam-detection on a user basis (e.g. a network with "these email addresses are trustworthy and these email addresses are spammers") it's spam detection based on a spam database.
The potentials for abuse that I see are if you don't keep a spam database at all, and so you will not flag any query as spam (even if it clearly is), or if you try to keep an "Anti-Spam" database (I dunno, a database of legitimate emails. Only problems with these abuses are if you have no database it shouldn't matter because hopefully several others that have been polled will recognize it as spam, and for the "Anti-Spam" database, where you try to flag real emails as spam, there's really no way you could reasonably predict the format of all the legitimate emails that would be received.
I use gmail, which does an excellent job at filtering spam.
But I think this could even be a step back. Like the parent says, I think most informed people have solved the issue of filtering spam pretty effectively (Thunderbird, Yahoo, Gmail, Bayesian filters, etc.) and so we don't generally *see* much spam.
The *REAL* problem with spam is traffic and network pollution. Spam wastes a ridiculous amount of bandwidth and (through spyware) hijacks our systems' cycles to do something that is (with filters) ultimately to no end. This seemingly won't solve the bandwidth consumption issue and might worsen the problem by polling all your friends over the network and then using your personal cycles to scan said email against all the known spam on your friends' computers.
People forget that the true detriment of spam these days is the traffic it causes, not cluttering your inbox (if you're smart).
Oh please. It has to start somewhere and the Patriot Act isn't a step in the right direction. The very fact that Americans would allow this to occur (as relatively minor as you assert it is) could very well indicate a changing sentiment among Americans about censorship.
The advertising agencies. Try to dispute that they profile the demographics of who watches daytime soaps and then profile the people who most often purchase those items and schedule their advertising that way. That's why I say that the advertising agencies are insulting for jumping these stereotypes. Read my post.
In fact it might recreate the whole industry. Instead of PCs we'll just have keycards that we can plug into terminals to access our remote system, with all of our information and software and contacts and everything.
You wouldn't need millions of copies of the software running around, just one on the server that everybody can access. Instead of buying software you pay for access to that software. No need to worry about patches and updates, and presumably these servers would be more stable than an average desktop.
Only problem is this could turn into 1984 pretty easily.
But in your stating you don't mind advertising for items you would want, you are hitting at an inherent fallacy of advertising as it is. It *should* (from a consumer's point of view) be opt-in and not opt-out. You probably signalled your interest in Dell computers by purchasing one (or checking the "Send me your catalog" box or something), whereas you've done nothing to indicate your interest in whatever commercial pops up during the TV show aside from being a viewer of that show. So in this sense it feels like information is being pried from you (though we've become accustomed to this).
E.g. if you watch a daytime soap you are probably a housewife therefore we'll show you mop ads and diaper commercials. This is insulting not only to housewives who have their interests and needs stereotyped (you are a housewife so you must be interested in such and such) but it's also insulting to the person who isn't in the demographic (you are watching something only housewives really watch). Obviously, though, opt-out (forced) advertising operates on these stereotypes and in their reaching many many people so none of this will change, but it doesn't mean that this form is actually very effective.
In this case, Google's ad-bits feel to me like the forced advertising you hate. You watch this show so you'd like this product just as you read this email so you would like this product. (Word of mouth seems to me to be opt-in: "Hey, you know a good restaurant/barber?" "Yeah...")
Brilliant comment.
Google is continually transforming itself into a huge personal information repository which it can use for targetted advertisement (though it's presumably automatically generated). GMail's great because it offers an ever-increasing 2.5 Gigs worth of storage... but to Google that's 2.5 Gigs worth of personal information to target. It does become a double-standard when Google is embraced because it remains "hip" and because they are trying to ply some of the share from Microsoft. The truth is that it's one monopolistic behemoth against another.
Indeed. Having recently travelled through China there are still very strict media controls (I hear that all of the television stations, and hence all the TV news is state controlled) which include blocking some sites such as cnn. However, this doesn't reflect the Chinese perspective as the Chinese actually seek this censored information (with such hacks as routing through Hong Kong servers). Which makes one wonder, if the citizens seem to want access to this information, who is creating all of this censorship? The answer shouldn't be so hard.
This sort of government-sanctioned information control smacks of Patriot Act which I don't deem to be a good thing. It goes back to Jefferson's quote about choosing press over politicians.
It is very interesting. So it'd be *similar* to browsing/. with "friends +5" and "foes -5" in that if you trust a certain particular UID, then you'll trust anything that user will say.
Except since the user doesn't provide the files, but only verify them, then it'd be like saying that Dukael moderated this +1, so I'll trust his judgment and give it more (additional) weight.
I'll definitely check it out, but I wonder if it actually improves the selection, or if it just saves you time from sifting through trash. I.e. I presume that there are no *more* files to get for any particular song (or whatever), but now you won't have to waste time looking for it?
a replacement peer to peer trusted reviewer system should be perfectly viable using encryption to guarantee the validity of a particular vouch for a link. Good reviewers, identified by their public key, build their reputation by word of mouth (or text of keyboard)
You mean like a poster/moderator/meta-mod system such as implemented right here on/.? Yeah, that's worked wonders for quality assurance on these message boards!
Well, I'm sure that the frivolous bandwidth consumption is annoying, except to those who get free media, and those hoping to make a buck from massed emails.
It is a good point that you make, because much of the stuff that they had written (from a brief I'm-at-work perusal) is stuff that we (at least the slashdot community) already know. It's just compiled into one convenient package that will merit an award of a PhD.
What I feel would have been more interesting (and has been discussed here) would have been the sly coordination of P2P and SPAM, or how the consumer evil and the corporate evil are working together in many cases.
It's no secret now that P2P exists in many different forms and seemingly refuses to be put down, but to the consumer greed of free goods. And it's no secret that SPAM is a blatant abuse of a (relatively) free communication medium to hawk cheap products or worse con people out of money.
The interesting thing is that Kazaa and the like plug your computer full of advertising spyware spawn pop-ups like crazy to make its buck. And even worse, they sell off your cycles to relay the SPAM. I guess when consumer greed and corporate greed get together some awesome (or annoying) things can happen.
What you say is true, and is the perfect solution... in the same sense that Communism is the perfect government (don't call Homeland Security).
Communism depends on every person contributing (essentially) equally and taking equally, and the system falls apart if one (or worse, several) individuals decide to take advantage of the community.
This is why Blizzard had to instigate centralized servers where all the games are run, and all Diablo characters were stored. People were hacking and HexEditing their characters too much to be trusted.
The trust ring would help, but, like you say, a mob of cheaters can bring the whole thing down by sufficiently fooling the community into believing the hack over the truth.
I mean, just look at P2P (or filesharing) today. When grabbing something off of Kazaa, music you're downloading could be pr0n, or a different song, or a 30 second sample that the RIAA put on to prevent the real one from being grabbed. However, from a centralized, controlled server (iTunes) you know what you're getting beforehand (essentially) cheat-free.
Of course, with true P2P everybody gets access to the product mostly free, whereas in the capitalistic model of iTunes, one entity has all the power and control, and hence will be profiting from all of this.
And I'm sure that they didn't do anything to give the feel of "credit-card style" protection. I used Paypal for my ebay transactions and without problem, but I thought that it was shady as hell the whole time.
Of course Paypal succeeded because of its partnership with ebay, and thus allowed ebay to further exalt its convenience by such a simple utility.
However, at heart, Paypal just seems to be the well-dressed, charming schiester that you think is completely trustworthy, but you realize the whole time is just a fraud. Expensive suit, nothing to back his promises.
The Apple IIe was godly. I was too young to own one, but my cousin got one when he was like 15 or something and the first thing he did was print off a huge banner: "THE APPLE IIe, THE ULTIMATE" in dot-matrix and hung it up across the family room.
Yeah, Bill Gates never promised that you'd want to "lick" anything. But Microsoft doesn't make hardware.
Apple had long been lauded for it's ease of use (read: intuitive and friendly UI), and for hardware that favored graphics processing, from what I could tell. Fair or not, Apple is regarded as the best platform for image/media/graphics processing and rendering (I'm not so familiar with the Apple hardware config, so verification, anybody?).
It seems that pulling away from the good old intuitive interface and heading for a sleeker interface, and one that is based off of FreeBSD nonetheless, seems to indicate that they want to capture the trendier, more tech-savvy crowd. They've got their rep as the media processor of choice, so now they're trying to grab the cool hackers and developers who are sick of Windows and are tired of the command line.
And I guess it's working. My roommate last year got a G4 running OSX and he loves it. This is after years of dealing with various versions of windows and trying over and over to get Mandrake on his system.
Me? I'm still running a PC with Redhat, though.
Re:Email postage will get abused by spammers
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, if email costs spammers a lot of money, then they will stop. But if email stops making them so much money also, then it will also stop. This is the key.
Billy is just trying to find a way to cash in on the ignorance of most users (surprise!). The solution is to download Mozilla or something with a Bayesian SpamKiller and/bin all Spam as soon as they are received. Requires some computation, but nothing excessive. If you run a mailserver, do the same, or just don't relay, or whatever. Let all the other people sift through hundreds of emails a day, and waste their money of P e N 1 5 En l@R g3m enT S! and the like.
What I do agree with is that it hurts the infrastructure, and that Spam reduces efficiency outside of your box. ISPs should get their act together and scour these emails, or there should be some action that prevents Spammers from buying cycles and relays off of these servers (big business for them).
What I don't understand is how these people make so much money. If anybody ANYBODY who owns a computer receives 200 emails daily all hawking the same stuff in the same manner preventing access to real email, how can they not be annoyed? How can they possibly want to give them business?
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
·
· Score: 1
It looks like he's holding a MSClicker(R, TM, C, MS Corp.) for a MSPowerPoint(R, TM, C, MS Corp.) MSApplication(R, TM, C, MS Corp.), used to give his MSSpeech(R, TM, C, MS Corp.) on the MSOutlook(R, TM, C, MS Corp.) of SPAM.
Maybe he feels that it's a fading and gradually unprofitable franchise and is just making these press releases to save face and die with some amount of self-inflicted dignity.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree.
:) ), which only takes a CTRL-SHIFT but is confusing enough. A blank keyboard will probably be better at work but might be just as bad if the person can't type.
There are different ways to get the effect that this keyboard is supposed to get.
Learning Dvorak is a good place to start. I don't think there's any real hard evidence that it's faster (the tests that Dvorak commissioned are under scrutiny for suspicion of his obvious bias), but I DO notice that it's easier on the hands, as I hardly have to move my fingers from the home row.
Additionally, it gives the effect of not being able to look at the keyboard since the keys will be mislabelled. In fact, Dvorak might even be *better* for this because looking at the keyboard will be a detriment since the keys will be mislabelled, while looking at a blank keyboard won't mislead you as to which key is what.
However, Dvorak isn't very work-friendly. If anybody else needs to use my computer for whatever reason I find myself having to continually switch it to QWERTY (also, in Dvorak, QWERTY is much harder to type
Also, great thing about Dvorak is it limits what a random person can do on your computer (the upside of using one at work).
Incidentally other types of these stories do break (albeit in sort of a ha-ha weird bit of the day sense).
Bud employee fired for drinking Coors (the link itself says "offbeat").
It does remind me somewhat of a study discussed in the book Freakonomics in which the author did statistical studies on voting in The Weakest Link. He crunched actual numbers and discovered there were some biases at work, such as:
Hispanics had a performance bias going against them (they were voted off earlier rounds when strong players are desireable, and kept in later rounds when weaker players are desireable) and the elderly had a general bias against them (they were voted off in all phases of the game indicating people simply found contact with them undesireable)
All in all, it was an interesting study with actual data done by an economist studying within his field. More enlightening that this article.
I would agree but the incremental cost of sending spam is basically free ... especially if people let spyware hijack their computers to do the heavy lifting.
This isn't spam-detection on a user basis (e.g. a network with "these email addresses are trustworthy and these email addresses are spammers") it's spam detection based on a spam database.
The potentials for abuse that I see are if you don't keep a spam database at all, and so you will not flag any query as spam (even if it clearly is), or if you try to keep an "Anti-Spam" database (I dunno, a database of legitimate emails. Only problems with these abuses are if you have no database it shouldn't matter because hopefully several others that have been polled will recognize it as spam, and for the "Anti-Spam" database, where you try to flag real emails as spam, there's really no way you could reasonably predict the format of all the legitimate emails that would be received.
I use gmail, which does an excellent job at filtering spam.
But I think this could even be a step back. Like the parent says, I think most informed people have solved the issue of filtering spam pretty effectively (Thunderbird, Yahoo, Gmail, Bayesian filters, etc.) and so we don't generally *see* much spam.
The *REAL* problem with spam is traffic and network pollution. Spam wastes a ridiculous amount of bandwidth and (through spyware) hijacks our systems' cycles to do something that is (with filters) ultimately to no end. This seemingly won't solve the bandwidth consumption issue and might worsen the problem by polling all your friends over the network and then using your personal cycles to scan said email against all the known spam on your friends' computers.
People forget that the true detriment of spam these days is the traffic it causes, not cluttering your inbox (if you're smart).
Oh please. It has to start somewhere and the Patriot Act isn't a step in the right direction. The very fact that Americans would allow this to occur (as relatively minor as you assert it is) could very well indicate a changing sentiment among Americans about censorship.
The advertising agencies. Try to dispute that they profile the demographics of who watches daytime soaps and then profile the people who most often purchase those items and schedule their advertising that way. That's why I say that the advertising agencies are insulting for jumping these stereotypes. Read my post.
In fact it might recreate the whole industry. Instead of PCs we'll just have keycards that we can plug into terminals to access our remote system, with all of our information and software and contacts and everything.
You wouldn't need millions of copies of the software running around, just one on the server that everybody can access. Instead of buying software you pay for access to that software. No need to worry about patches and updates, and presumably these servers would be more stable than an average desktop.
Only problem is this could turn into 1984 pretty easily.
But in your stating you don't mind advertising for items you would want, you are hitting at an inherent fallacy of advertising as it is. It *should* (from a consumer's point of view) be opt-in and not opt-out. You probably signalled your interest in Dell computers by purchasing one (or checking the "Send me your catalog" box or something), whereas you've done nothing to indicate your interest in whatever commercial pops up during the TV show aside from being a viewer of that show. So in this sense it feels like information is being pried from you (though we've become accustomed to this).
...")
E.g. if you watch a daytime soap you are probably a housewife therefore we'll show you mop ads and diaper commercials. This is insulting not only to housewives who have their interests and needs stereotyped (you are a housewife so you must be interested in such and such) but it's also insulting to the person who isn't in the demographic (you are watching something only housewives really watch). Obviously, though, opt-out (forced) advertising operates on these stereotypes and in their reaching many many people so none of this will change, but it doesn't mean that this form is actually very effective.
In this case, Google's ad-bits feel to me like the forced advertising you hate. You watch this show so you'd like this product just as you read this email so you would like this product. (Word of mouth seems to me to be opt-in: "Hey, you know a good restaurant/barber?" "Yeah
Brilliant comment. Google is continually transforming itself into a huge personal information repository which it can use for targetted advertisement (though it's presumably automatically generated). GMail's great because it offers an ever-increasing 2.5 Gigs worth of storage ... but to Google that's 2.5 Gigs worth of personal information to target. It does become a double-standard when Google is embraced because it remains "hip" and because they are trying to ply some of the share from Microsoft. The truth is that it's one monopolistic behemoth against another.
Indeed. Having recently travelled through China there are still very strict media controls (I hear that all of the television stations, and hence all the TV news is state controlled) which include blocking some sites such as cnn. However, this doesn't reflect the Chinese perspective as the Chinese actually seek this censored information (with such hacks as routing through Hong Kong servers). Which makes one wonder, if the citizens seem to want access to this information, who is creating all of this censorship? The answer shouldn't be so hard.
This sort of government-sanctioned information control smacks of Patriot Act which I don't deem to be a good thing. It goes back to Jefferson's quote about choosing press over politicians.
I'm impotent you insensitive clod!
It is very interesting. So it'd be *similar* to browsing /. with "friends +5" and "foes -5" in that if you trust a certain particular UID, then you'll trust anything that user will say.
Except since the user doesn't provide the files, but only verify them, then it'd be like saying that Dukael moderated this +1, so I'll trust his judgment and give it more (additional) weight.
I'll definitely check it out, but I wonder if it actually improves the selection, or if it just saves you time from sifting through trash. I.e. I presume that there are no *more* files to get for any particular song (or whatever), but now you won't have to waste time looking for it?
a replacement peer to peer trusted reviewer system should be perfectly viable using encryption to guarantee the validity of a particular vouch for a link. Good reviewers, identified by their public key, build their reputation by word of mouth (or text of keyboard)
/.? Yeah, that's worked wonders for quality assurance on these message boards!
You mean like a poster/moderator/meta-mod system such as implemented right here on
Well, I'm sure that the frivolous bandwidth consumption is annoying, except to those who get free media, and those hoping to make a buck from massed emails.
It is a good point that you make, because much of the stuff that they had written (from a brief I'm-at-work perusal) is stuff that we (at least the slashdot community) already know. It's just compiled into one convenient package that will merit an award of a PhD.
What I feel would have been more interesting (and has been discussed here) would have been the sly coordination of P2P and SPAM, or how the consumer evil and the corporate evil are working together in many cases.
It's no secret now that P2P exists in many different forms and seemingly refuses to be put down, but to the consumer greed of free goods. And it's no secret that SPAM is a blatant abuse of a (relatively) free communication medium to hawk cheap products or worse con people out of money.
The interesting thing is that Kazaa and the like plug your computer full of advertising spyware spawn pop-ups like crazy to make its buck. And even worse, they sell off your cycles to relay the SPAM. I guess when consumer greed and corporate greed get together some awesome (or annoying) things can happen.
What you say is true, and is the perfect solution ... in the same sense that Communism is the perfect government (don't call Homeland Security).
Communism depends on every person contributing (essentially) equally and taking equally, and the system falls apart if one (or worse, several) individuals decide to take advantage of the community.
This is why Blizzard had to instigate centralized servers where all the games are run, and all Diablo characters were stored. People were hacking and HexEditing their characters too much to be trusted.
The trust ring would help, but, like you say, a mob of cheaters can bring the whole thing down by sufficiently fooling the community into believing the hack over the truth.
I mean, just look at P2P (or filesharing) today. When grabbing something off of Kazaa, music you're downloading could be pr0n, or a different song, or a 30 second sample that the RIAA put on to prevent the real one from being grabbed. However, from a centralized, controlled server (iTunes) you know what you're getting beforehand (essentially) cheat-free.
Of course, with true P2P everybody gets access to the product mostly free, whereas in the capitalistic model of iTunes, one entity has all the power and control, and hence will be profiting from all of this.
And I'm sure that they didn't do anything to give the feel of "credit-card style" protection. I used Paypal for my ebay transactions and without problem, but I thought that it was shady as hell the whole time.
Of course Paypal succeeded because of its partnership with ebay, and thus allowed ebay to further exalt its convenience by such a simple utility.
However, at heart, Paypal just seems to be the well-dressed, charming schiester that you think is completely trustworthy, but you realize the whole time is just a fraud. Expensive suit, nothing to back his promises.
You're right, paypal is a very useful utility for sending money to and receiving money from parties that you might not entirely trust.
Unless, of course, the untrusted utility is paypal itself, as appears to be the case.
The Apple IIe was godly. I was too young to own one, but my cousin got one when he was like 15 or something and the first thing he did was print off a huge banner: "THE APPLE IIe, THE ULTIMATE" in dot-matrix and hung it up across the family room.
Hideous, but awesome.
Yeah, Bill Gates never promised that you'd want to "lick" anything. But Microsoft doesn't make hardware.
Apple had long been lauded for it's ease of use (read: intuitive and friendly UI), and for hardware that favored graphics processing, from what I could tell. Fair or not, Apple is regarded as the best platform for image/media/graphics processing and rendering (I'm not so familiar with the Apple hardware config, so verification, anybody?).
It seems that pulling away from the good old intuitive interface and heading for a sleeker interface, and one that is based off of FreeBSD nonetheless, seems to indicate that they want to capture the trendier, more tech-savvy crowd. They've got their rep as the media processor of choice, so now they're trying to grab the cool hackers and developers who are sick of Windows and are tired of the command line.
And I guess it's working. My roommate last year got a G4 running OSX and he loves it. This is after years of dealing with various versions of windows and trying over and over to get Mandrake on his system.
Me? I'm still running a PC with Redhat, though.
Yeah, if email costs spammers a lot of money, then they will stop. But if email stops making them so much money also, then it will also stop. This is the key.
/bin all Spam as soon as they are received. Requires some computation, but nothing excessive. If you run a mailserver, do the same, or just don't relay, or whatever. Let all the other people sift through hundreds of emails a day, and waste their money of P e N 1 5 En l@R g3m enT S! and the like.
Billy is just trying to find a way to cash in on the ignorance of most users (surprise!). The solution is to download Mozilla or something with a Bayesian SpamKiller and
What I do agree with is that it hurts the infrastructure, and that Spam reduces efficiency outside of your box. ISPs should get their act together and scour these emails, or there should be some action that prevents Spammers from buying cycles and relays off of these servers (big business for them).
What I don't understand is how these people make so much money. If anybody ANYBODY who owns a computer receives 200 emails daily all hawking the same stuff in the same manner preventing access to real email, how can they not be annoyed? How can they possibly want to give them business?
It looks like he's holding a MSClicker(R, TM, C, MS Corp.) for a MSPowerPoint(R, TM, C, MS Corp.) MSApplication(R, TM, C, MS Corp.), used to give his MSSpeech(R, TM, C, MS Corp.) on the MSOutlook(R, TM, C, MS Corp.) of SPAM.
Well, I was referring to the quality of the movies that might be released in the future.
I presume that the movies are glorious.
Nice 3-digit UID, though. Gotta respect that.
Maybe he feels that it's a fading and gradually unprofitable franchise and is just making these press releases to save face and die with some amount of self-inflicted dignity.
A harikari of the career, if you will.