I think that most people would not understand that a button they're pressing is pressure-sensitive. Most naïve users would just repeatedly press it then complain about how difficult the device is to use. If you're designing an interface for a device and you're putting that kind of nuance into it, you're really overestimating how much ordinary users are actually going to fiddle with it. The scrollwheel is more intuitive simply because the speed of scrolling does naturally follow the speed of the motion of your thumb.
When you're designing something like this you have to think of how spastic kids and grandmothers might approach using it. Grandmas would repeatedly press the buttons, spastic kids would just hold them down all the way and never care about the pressure sensitivity.
Not necessarily. Politicians here like to cater to middle america because those are the ones who actually get out to the polls, for whatever reason.
Also, if you're talking about stuff like the war on drugs you have to be fair: that was an executive order, not a congressional thing. The President isn't really directly elected by the people so, you know, not really the people's fault. Congress, however, is publicly elected and they control how much money goes towards it. That's a little something nobody really seems to remember when they're bashing Bush: we have the power to cut off the money to things that we think are wasteful.
Whatever. Doesn't seem like it'll be likely to change any time soon and honestly it's a political strategy that's existed since the Puritan pilgrims helped settle this decaying republic.
It's because on a mac all the libraries and stuff that make the iTunes window look like it does are already on there and built in. On Windows they have to be ported, and I think there's quite a great deal of duct tape and chewing gum behind the scenes keeping that look together. It's a trojan horse, sorta, because it's styled like the Mac UI and it's in Windows, but it took a lot of effort to make that happen and it doesn't always hold itself together so well.
Perhaps. What I mean though is that here in the US that approach never works but it gets politicians reelected like crazy. See also: war on drugs, abstinence education, teen alcohol abuse, etc, etc. I don't know to what extent that approach works for politicians who don't have to worry about reelection and for a populace that's much more under control than here.
I don't think that's been the approach with gun control, but in any case I think that the approach with gun control has been just as damaging.
Sometimes people have to do this thing called 'learning' before they can get the best out of a device.
Sure. But you have to make an interface with a steady learning curve. If you have a bicycle, you can put training wheels on it right? Well, devices and interfaces have to work the same way. Also, the bicycle analogy is kind of flawed since every bicycle essentially has the same interface, so bicycle-riding isn't a very specific skill that you have to re-learn many times. With application interfaces, there really are no standards like that so you have to make it so that it's like an onion, with many different layers of functionality that are all easy to follow from one to another. You can't have totally counterintuitive things crop up because they make the user frustrated.
And while we're on the topic, I don't know how anyone could think that buttons you hold down (presumably accelerating the rate of scroll continuously like scroll buttons on a computer) could possibly be more intuitive to a user who's never used an mp3 player than a scrollwheel. Generally speaking, I think that any physical device that works by gesturing rather than pressing buttons is better. Provided, of course, that the gestures are intuitive (like the scrollwheel "gesture" is).
The Mayak plant outside of Chelyabinsk produced two or three contaminated water related accidents, one of which caused Lake Karachay to dry up and become extremely radioactive. The dust from the bottom of the lakebed still spreads sometimes through strong winds in the area.
First of all, nobody's gonna buy a second iPhone just because the price dropped. Second of all, the product that I purchased recently is now worth dramatically less in terms of money. Were I to want to sell my iPhone, I couldn't get nearly as much for it as I could've a couple of days ago.
I think the huge difference between the "iPhone early adopters need to quit their bitching" camp and the "Apple done screwed us over" camp is that the former camp didn't buy iPhones in the past month and the latter one did. Somewhere in between there's got to be a rational opinion somewhere, but I'm probably looking in the wrong place to find it;p
First of all, I paid $500 for it, and yes I thought it was worth it. That doesn't mean I'm not pretty miffed about such a huge drop in price so quickly.
Imagine it was you... would you be mollified by the thought that at the time that you paid for something it was worth it to you?
The comments there are filled with people who think early adopters pissed off about this are whining, but seriously... COME ON NOW! I bought my 4Gb iPhone a month ago, and would not really consider myself an extreme early adopter. If the price went down $50 or went down this much six months from now, obviously I wouldn't have reason to complain at all, but $200 just 30 days after I bought it? Not cool at all. If it were less that 14 I could've returned mine today, paid a nominal restocking fee, and left the store with an 8Gb for less than I originally paid for my 4Gb. Seriously this sucks.
I know/.'s not the best venue for me to vent my anger about this, but you know. Everybody else is off-topic, why can't I be once in a while?/p.
I really liked Jello Biafra's notion that communities could vote for the policemen who would walk their beat. In a country like the US with such a low voter participation rate, I don't think it could really work though.
This has been a problem in the US for a few years now and I fear that with No Child Left Behind we're going to start seeing more of it here. The valedictorian at my high school had a perfect 100% average all throughout, and he did it by never taking any advanced courses even though he was smart enough to take them, because they might've messed up his grades. (He went to Yale; he was an asshole; that's a story for elsewhere.)
With physics especially, calculus was *meant* for physics. The two belong together, and taking calculus out of physics makes physics a very, very, very dull pursuit. I think that more and more colleges are seeing that their applicants with high marks from high school just don't match up to what's expected of them in college. I got by through my own studies, by myself, in high school, because I was at a vocational high school anyway and the math programs just weren't challenging enough.
It just depresses me that the solution to low test scores seems to always be to set the bar lower and lower each year. Soon enough we'll have kids who scored perfect in high school but really are as smart as a box of rocks. I've written a lot of stuff on my blog about this, actually, as it makes me really sad a lot.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
If the music business can't compete with this convenience, there's little reason for me to give them my money as well.
It's not just convenience. It's that the pirated copies have a higher value than the legally purchased ones. If I download an album illegally, sure I might not have the highest quality recording I could of the music, but I also don't have any rootkits, spyware, or the need of one specific program or device to read my files. I can play them anywhere, make copies of them, and use them however I want simply because they're not obtained through official channels.
The worst part about all of this is not only do they get to foist an inferiour product on people (I don't care what anyone else has to say, even a 196Kbps MP3 doesn't sound nearly as good as a 45rpm vinyl record), but that product doesn't even come with the same rights previous formats did. Buying off iTunes music store will get you an almost CD-quality track that you can burn to CD a couple of times and that you can't play on any portable device besides an iPod. Pirating a CD off the internet gets you audio files of varying quality but that you can play anywhere, copy anywhere, do anything with.
They should try giving us something that's an incentive to buy legally, not a deterrent.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
Ever call triple-A? It takes them less than 5 seconds to open most car-doors. 3-seconds with mine.
I know this is not the case with the Nintendo DS because Nintendo's policy has always been not to do this, but many game consoles are sold to the consumer at a loss. So your PS2 and Xbox actually cost more to make than you paid for them. Same with the PSP. They sell the console to you at a loss under the presumption that you will purchase games from their partners, putting licensing fees in their pockets that will more than make up for the loss.
So, yeah. The companies that make game consoles have a vested interest in not allowing you to just run whatever software you want to on there, because buying games is what gets them their money.
(Again, though, Nintendo's policy has always been to sell their consoles at a profit. So even with the Wii being as cheap as it is, it's not sold at a loss but the Playstation 3 is. Wild!)
But I did learn about optimizing instruction fetches by scattering the compiled code around the circumference of a magnetic drum so that the drum would have rotated around beneath the read head in time for the next instruction.
Your comment is actually a lot more insightful than anyone might realize.
Would anyone try hijacking a plane if they knew there was a pretty good chance that even a handful of regular passengers were carrying guns?
Slashdot Mirror
I think that most people would not understand that a button they're pressing is pressure-sensitive. Most naïve users would just repeatedly press it then complain about how difficult the device is to use. If you're designing an interface for a device and you're putting that kind of nuance into it, you're really overestimating how much ordinary users are actually going to fiddle with it. The scrollwheel is more intuitive simply because the speed of scrolling does naturally follow the speed of the motion of your thumb.
When you're designing something like this you have to think of how spastic kids and grandmothers might approach using it. Grandmas would repeatedly press the buttons, spastic kids would just hold them down all the way and never care about the pressure sensitivity.
Not necessarily. Politicians here like to cater to middle america because those are the ones who actually get out to the polls, for whatever reason.
Also, if you're talking about stuff like the war on drugs you have to be fair: that was an executive order, not a congressional thing. The President isn't really directly elected by the people so, you know, not really the people's fault. Congress, however, is publicly elected and they control how much money goes towards it. That's a little something nobody really seems to remember when they're bashing Bush: we have the power to cut off the money to things that we think are wasteful.
Whatever. Doesn't seem like it'll be likely to change any time soon and honestly it's a political strategy that's existed since the Puritan pilgrims helped settle this decaying republic.
It's because on a mac all the libraries and stuff that make the iTunes window look like it does are already on there and built in. On Windows they have to be ported, and I think there's quite a great deal of duct tape and chewing gum behind the scenes keeping that look together. It's a trojan horse, sorta, because it's styled like the Mac UI and it's in Windows, but it took a lot of effort to make that happen and it doesn't always hold itself together so well.
Perhaps. What I mean though is that here in the US that approach never works but it gets politicians reelected like crazy. See also: war on drugs, abstinence education, teen alcohol abuse, etc, etc. I don't know to what extent that approach works for politicians who don't have to worry about reelection and for a populace that's much more under control than here.
I don't think that's been the approach with gun control, but in any case I think that the approach with gun control has been just as damaging.
Sure. But you have to make an interface with a steady learning curve. If you have a bicycle, you can put training wheels on it right? Well, devices and interfaces have to work the same way. Also, the bicycle analogy is kind of flawed since every bicycle essentially has the same interface, so bicycle-riding isn't a very specific skill that you have to re-learn many times. With application interfaces, there really are no standards like that so you have to make it so that it's like an onion, with many different layers of functionality that are all easy to follow from one to another. You can't have totally counterintuitive things crop up because they make the user frustrated.
And while we're on the topic, I don't know how anyone could think that buttons you hold down (presumably accelerating the rate of scroll continuously like scroll buttons on a computer) could possibly be more intuitive to a user who's never used an mp3 player than a scrollwheel. Generally speaking, I think that any physical device that works by gesturing rather than pressing buttons is better. Provided, of course, that the gestures are intuitive (like the scrollwheel "gesture" is).
It worked here for the war on drugs... oh wait.
Best AC comment EVER. Way to go as far off-topic as humanly possible (without, of course, meta-commenting on the hilarity of an AC comment).
The Mayak plant outside of Chelyabinsk produced two or three contaminated water related accidents, one of which caused Lake Karachay to dry up and become extremely radioactive. The dust from the bottom of the lakebed still spreads sometimes through strong winds in the area.
Because we wanna be? I really can't give a better explanation than that.
First of all, nobody's gonna buy a second iPhone just because the price dropped. Second of all, the product that I purchased recently is now worth dramatically less in terms of money. Were I to want to sell my iPhone, I couldn't get nearly as much for it as I could've a couple of days ago.
I think the huge difference between the "iPhone early adopters need to quit their bitching" camp and the "Apple done screwed us over" camp is that the former camp didn't buy iPhones in the past month and the latter one did. Somewhere in between there's got to be a rational opinion somewhere, but I'm probably looking in the wrong place to find it ;p
First of all, I paid $500 for it, and yes I thought it was worth it. That doesn't mean I'm not pretty miffed about such a huge drop in price so quickly.
Imagine it was you... would you be mollified by the thought that at the time that you paid for something it was worth it to you?
For early adopters: Apple Screwed You So Now What
The comments there are filled with people who think early adopters pissed off about this are whining, but seriously... COME ON NOW! I bought my 4Gb iPhone a month ago, and would not really consider myself an extreme early adopter. If the price went down $50 or went down this much six months from now, obviously I wouldn't have reason to complain at all, but $200 just 30 days after I bought it? Not cool at all. If it were less that 14 I could've returned mine today, paid a nominal restocking fee, and left the store with an 8Gb for less than I originally paid for my 4Gb. Seriously this sucks.
I know /.'s not the best venue for me to vent my anger about this, but you know. Everybody else is off-topic, why can't I be once in a while?/p.
They don't need it. What China has is cheap manufacturing. It's the new mercantilism baby!
And how long's it been since you've seen one of those out in the wild?
I really liked Jello Biafra's notion that communities could vote for the policemen who would walk their beat. In a country like the US with such a low voter participation rate, I don't think it could really work though.
This has been a problem in the US for a few years now and I fear that with No Child Left Behind we're going to start seeing more of it here. The valedictorian at my high school had a perfect 100% average all throughout, and he did it by never taking any advanced courses even though he was smart enough to take them, because they might've messed up his grades. (He went to Yale; he was an asshole; that's a story for elsewhere.)
With physics especially, calculus was *meant* for physics. The two belong together, and taking calculus out of physics makes physics a very, very, very dull pursuit. I think that more and more colleges are seeing that their applicants with high marks from high school just don't match up to what's expected of them in college. I got by through my own studies, by myself, in high school, because I was at a vocational high school anyway and the math programs just weren't challenging enough.
It just depresses me that the solution to low test scores seems to always be to set the bar lower and lower each year. Soon enough we'll have kids who scored perfect in high school but really are as smart as a box of rocks. I've written a lot of stuff on my blog about this, actually, as it makes me really sad a lot.
It's not just convenience. It's that the pirated copies have a higher value than the legally purchased ones. If I download an album illegally, sure I might not have the highest quality recording I could of the music, but I also don't have any rootkits, spyware, or the need of one specific program or device to read my files. I can play them anywhere, make copies of them, and use them however I want simply because they're not obtained through official channels.
The worst part about all of this is not only do they get to foist an inferiour product on people (I don't care what anyone else has to say, even a 196Kbps MP3 doesn't sound nearly as good as a 45rpm vinyl record), but that product doesn't even come with the same rights previous formats did. Buying off iTunes music store will get you an almost CD-quality track that you can burn to CD a couple of times and that you can't play on any portable device besides an iPod. Pirating a CD off the internet gets you audio files of varying quality but that you can play anywhere, copy anywhere, do anything with.
They should try giving us something that's an incentive to buy legally, not a deterrent.
Are you implying that AAA are dishonest?
I know this is not the case with the Nintendo DS because Nintendo's policy has always been not to do this, but many game consoles are sold to the consumer at a loss. So your PS2 and Xbox actually cost more to make than you paid for them. Same with the PSP. They sell the console to you at a loss under the presumption that you will purchase games from their partners, putting licensing fees in their pockets that will more than make up for the loss.
So, yeah. The companies that make game consoles have a vested interest in not allowing you to just run whatever software you want to on there, because buying games is what gets them their money.
(Again, though, Nintendo's policy has always been to sell their consoles at a profit. So even with the Wii being as cheap as it is, it's not sold at a loss but the Playstation 3 is. Wild!)
Mel? Is that you?
Your comment is actually a lot more insightful than anyone might realize. Would anyone try hijacking a plane if they knew there was a pretty good chance that even a handful of regular passengers were carrying guns?
Every time you CC (carbon-copy) someone on an email. That's when the little email gnomes use carbon paper to make more copies of your emails.
Yeah I got that now.... I lose at slashdot :(
bah! it took away your blink tags. That was part of the joke :(
*shudders* I feel a disturbance... as if millions of web designers cried out all at once, and were suddenly silenced.