... whenever I see one of these modding projects I get this odd taste in my mouth and it all reminds me too much of my gawky teenage years and the mech-geeks that would mod Puch Maxi mopeds to go 100km/h either by using illegal german tuning kits or by drilling or filing various parts of it.
To those who don't know the Puch Maxi let's describe it as a... pratical vehicle. With its slim bycyclish appearance it looked kinda stupid with a death-defying teenager on top of it at a hundred kilometers per hour.
Whenever modding is brought up I come to think of these things.
Jaaaagwire on a ~400mhz G3
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I am fortunate enough to be using a 400-something mhz G3 with around 384MB RAM and OS 10.2 at work.
I use it primarily for hacking in php, perl, mysql and the likes, which doesn't really require a lot of computational power. I use a lot of photoshop aswell, which is a somewhat different story. I am able to outperform photoshop in using keyboard shortcuts. That is, I experience a (sometimes significant) lag after keying in a keyboard shortcut sequence.
This has however little to do with the performance of the OS itself, which I find perty darn smooth. To me OS X has always been very responsive in all situations though programs (photoshop, golive etc.) take can take some seconds to start up. Apart from this the overall filehandling and mucking about is done with ease.
quoting the Tom Lehrer tune as found at http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/vonbraun. htm
Wernher von Braun: And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know how, that's what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun, A man whose allegiance Is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown, "Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical. "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown, But some think our attitude Should be one of gratitude, Like the widows and cripples in old London town, Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
You too may be a big hero, Once you've learned to count backwards to zero. "In German oder English I know how to count down, Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
Please enlighten a doofus
on
LinuXbox Boots
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Though I have a hunch I'm going to regret asking this question I'm doing it anyway. Please don't see this as flamebait or as a provocation - I'd genuinely like to know:
What's the point of the effort? Yes I've seen the 'You're in control of Your box' screenshot, but how many users conceptually think of themselves as restricted in their use of an X-box - or any other gaming console for that matter - apart from the occasional Slashdot'er?
I can hardly see people moaning about not being able to use a desktop environment on what is supposed to be a gaming device. Either these people already have a desktop computer or they don't need one in the first place.
Have I missed the bleeding obvious or what?
Sorry for being a dumb*ss.
Physical placement of roll holder overlooked
on
Toilet Paper Algorithms
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
One neglected aspect of this whole discussion is the all important physical placement of the roll holder.
One some toilets I've visited the arrangement fails to acknowledge that the distance to and / or placement of the roll holder relative to the actual toilet seat is an important design parameter.
On some of these poorly designed arrangements the roll is placed almost, but not entirely out of reach forcing one to leave the seat which we all know feels somewhat ackward. Others place the roll holder closely besides or even behind the actual toilet in such a way that you initially panic in search of it and - after discovering it - physically stress your body trying to find a way to get to the roll.
I think there's enough material in these observations for at least another paper on the subject.
"An external docking cradle for your PDA is good for portability, but it's a waste of valuable desk space. "
If a PDA dock roughly the size of a 3.5" disk counts as valuable deskspace that you'd go through the troubles of building the Quasimodo of all mods wouldn't a more obvious solution to the problem be to have gotten a bigger desk in the first place? Ofcourse you may have a hard time finding a desk at $30 but none the less - my Visor dock tugs neatly away underneath my monitor stand.
Pardon me, but this sounds more like a geeky excuse to get to mod things than the solution to any problem you may think of. Which ofcourse is fair enough; modding can be a fun activity.
The next thing: modding filecabinets to fit employee's (horisontally) because employee's are simply a waste of good valuable space.
Sorry for being lame.
Re:It's not epistemology!!
on
Gaming Zone?
·
· Score: 1
"You're doing a graduate thesis and you don't know the difference between epistemology and phenomenology? Right on, dude!"
I think that all depends on who you consult. When talking about epistemology I refer to Gregory Bateson's "Steps to an ecology of mind":
"The living man is thus bound within a net of epistemological and ontological premises which - regardless of ultimate truth or falsity - become partially self-validating for him."
(Bateson; p314)
Now, there's a distinct difference between ontology and phenomenology but thats an altogether different discussion. What's important here is that Bateson adresses a significant problem of understanding and comprehending the world around us: problems of how things are and problems of how we think about how things are cannot be seperated and suggests that they ought to be one and the same. In lack of a better term Bateson simply uses 'epistemology'.
Sorry for not being clear about this.
The psychology of optimal experience
on
Gaming Zone?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
FYI - what Dr. Karageorghis is referring to is Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's work on "Flow - The psychology of optimal experience" in which he describes the characteristics of enjoyable experiences. The following is an excerpt from the book, describing these characteristics:
1. the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. 2. we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. 3. - 4. concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. 5. one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. 6. enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. 7. concern for the self disappears yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. 8. the sense of the duration of time is altered. (Csikszentmihalyi; p49)
What's interesting is the similarity of these characteristics to some works done on computergames by Greg Costikyan ("I have no words and I must design"), Chris Crawford ("The Art of Computer Game Design") as well as works on games in general, such as Avedon & Sutton-Smiths "The study of games".
Csikszentmihalyi's work is !very! interesting if you're into the epistemology of computergaming, which - humbly - happens to be the topic of my graduate thesis;)
No a tablet is not good for people who use the keyboard all the time (ie. coders) and no a tablet might not be very useful for artists and yes, some things might be done different (ie. slower) than how its done as we speak.
But by golly I'm a sucker for a TabletPC. Of all the uses I've found for my computer very few of them make me appreciate that I can't take my computing into the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the couch, my friends places, a café or whereever I may please. The TabletPC will offer a !much! more casual way of computing.
What I think is important to recognize is that the TabletPC is not a computercentric device - that is, its applications and usage is an entirely different framework than that of coding, digital imagery and the likes. It's main aplicability are topics beyond the computer itself. Things that has to do with the world we live in and the things we do every day - not things that has to do with keeping a computer running. We use other computers for that - ones that are tailered more specifically to this application.
Further, I've seen hybrids of desktop / Tablet PC's that make the best of both worlds: dock the tablet and you've got a full fledged destop pc. Pick up the display and you've got a Tablet PC.
For those interested you should go check out The Computer Museum History Center (I find the timeline especially interesting). I stumbled upon it when I visited the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. Although the guys there were in a meeting they were kind enough to hand us three issues of Core magasine publication as well as giving us a quick look-see around the premises.
I still have dreams about the Octopus card.
on
Hong Kong's Octopus
·
· Score: 1
Backpacking through Hong-Kong the Octopus Card was a godsend. Admittedly I haven't given much thought to the ethical aspects of using it - what impressed me was the smoothness and elegance that was apparent in all aspects of using it: getting a hold of one, actually using it, putting more money on it and getting your deposit back when finished using it.
Whenever you'd spot other backpackers manically trying to figure out the price of a busfare not the least scrape the exact amount together I thought warm thoughts about the Octopus card.
Needless to say that the efficiency in use rubs off on the flow of the general public transportation system; I've never experienced public transportation this hassle-free and smooth. I wish we had this thought of thing where I live.
I do believe the original prototype is still on display at The Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, CA.
It's encased in a transparent plastic box and you can actually pick it up and study it at close. I was lucky enough to get a couple of snapshots of it.
"What, exactly, does Amiga offer other then seeing an old friend again? I know nothing else is quite like it but after all these years is it really viable as an ongoing concern?"
NOTE: I'll have to admit that I am a Windows user and have never got the hang of *NIX beyond installing the occasional mandrake, redhat and fiddling around with it.
For one thing: the Amiga OS was in many ways designed with and incredible elegance. I have never seen this degree of transparency in use since then. Datatypes are an excellent example of this: need to read PNG's? Find a PNG datatype and plonk it in SYS:Devs/DataTypes and your programs would recognize and read PNG's just like that.
Another thing was the ease with which you'd install programs and / or upgraded system components. Shared libraries went into LIBS:, Device managers into DEVS: and so on. With the Amiga you didn't need programs to manage programs: they were easily managed via the GUI and / or Shell.
This type of integrity, ease and straight-forwardness was evident throughout the entire OS.
After next to two decades things like these still - makes me tick.
And still, you'll have to excuse me not being able to compare it to *nix, but I'm a complete moron with respect to that.
This kinda sounds like Bill Buxton and Mark Weisers thoughts on Ubiquitous Computing and Calm Technology.
Then one can look upon this new OS as an alternative to the.Net strategy in that the latter concentrates on providing services confined within a computer (with the slight modification of the TabletPC which is by all means Weiser and Buxtons inventions at Xerox aswell) while the former sorta reaches beyond the computer itself and further into the real world.
I think this is a healthy step and hopefully one that will help decentralize computing. Personally I'd love to be able to do computerstuff in a much more casual and relaxed fashion than what's possible today.
Slashdot Mirror
... whenever I see one of these modding projects I get this odd taste in my mouth and it all reminds me too much of my gawky teenage years and the mech-geeks that would mod Puch Maxi mopeds to go 100km/h either by using illegal german tuning kits or by drilling or filing various parts of it.
... pratical vehicle. With its slim bycyclish appearance it looked kinda stupid with a death-defying teenager on top of it at a hundred kilometers per hour.
To those who don't know the Puch Maxi let's describe it as a
Whenever modding is brought up I come to think of these things.
Sorry, flame me to death now.
"Which, by my calcuations, would be 1000 hertz or 1 kilohertz. "
With a clockspeed of 1000 hertz you'd actually be able to hear the thing go "OOOOOOOUUUUUOOOOUOOUUUUOOOOOUUUOUOUOOOOOO".
Man that !has! to have sucked completely to be a developer back then: "WATCHA SAYIN'?? I GOTTA WHAT??? CHANGE THE POINTER?? I !CAN'T! !HEAR! YA!!"
How about "The browser formerly known as Phoenix"?
... nothing new to the Toucan Kid.
I am fortunate enough to be using a 400-something mhz G3 with around 384MB RAM and OS 10.2 at work.
I use it primarily for hacking in php, perl, mysql and the likes, which doesn't really require a lot of computational power. I use a lot of photoshop aswell, which is a somewhat different story. I am able to outperform photoshop in using keyboard shortcuts. That is, I experience a (sometimes significant) lag after keying in a keyboard shortcut sequence.
This has however little to do with the performance of the OS itself, which I find perty darn smooth. To me OS X has always been very responsive in all situations though programs (photoshop, golive etc.) take can take some seconds to start up. Apart from this the overall filehandling and mucking about is done with ease.
My two mere cents.
Looks like we'll see faster floppy-drives sooner than we may think. Any day now ...
quoting the Tom Lehrer tune as found at http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/vonbraun. htm
Wernher von Braun:
And what is it that put America in the forefront of the nuclear nations? And what is it that will make it possible to spend twenty billion dollars of your money to put some clown on the moon? Well, it was good old American know how, that's what, as provided by good old Americans like Dr. Wernher von Braun!
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown,
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese!" says Wernher von Braun.
Though I have a hunch I'm going to regret asking this question I'm doing it anyway. Please don't see this as flamebait or as a provocation - I'd genuinely like to know:
What's the point of the effort? Yes I've seen the 'You're in control of Your box' screenshot, but how many users conceptually think of themselves as restricted in their use of an X-box - or any other gaming console for that matter - apart from the occasional Slashdot'er?
I can hardly see people moaning about not being able to use a desktop environment on what is supposed to be a gaming device. Either these people already have a desktop computer or they don't need one in the first place.
Have I missed the bleeding obvious or what?
Sorry for being a dumb*ss.
One neglected aspect of this whole discussion is the all important physical placement of the roll holder.
One some toilets I've visited the arrangement fails to acknowledge that the distance to and / or placement of the roll holder relative to the actual toilet seat is an important design parameter.
On some of these poorly designed arrangements the roll is placed almost, but not entirely out of reach forcing one to leave the seat which we all know feels somewhat ackward. Others place the roll holder closely besides or even behind the actual toilet in such a way that you initially panic in search of it and - after discovering it - physically stress your body trying to find a way to get to the roll.
I think there's enough material in these observations for at least another paper on the subject.
"An external docking cradle for your PDA is good for portability, but it's a waste of valuable desk space. "
If a PDA dock roughly the size of a 3.5" disk counts as valuable deskspace that you'd go through the troubles of building the Quasimodo of all mods wouldn't a more obvious solution to the problem be to have gotten a bigger desk in the first place? Ofcourse you may have a hard time finding a desk at $30 but none the less - my Visor dock tugs neatly away underneath my monitor stand.
Pardon me, but this sounds more like a geeky excuse to get to mod things than the solution to any problem you may think of. Which ofcourse is fair enough; modding can be a fun activity.
The next thing: modding filecabinets to fit employee's (horisontally) because employee's are simply a waste of good valuable space.
Sorry for being lame.
"You're doing a graduate thesis and you don't know the difference between epistemology and phenomenology? Right on, dude!" I think that all depends on who you consult. When talking about epistemology I refer to Gregory Bateson's "Steps to an ecology of mind": "The living man is thus bound within a net of epistemological and ontological premises which - regardless of ultimate truth or falsity - become partially self-validating for him." (Bateson; p314) Now, there's a distinct difference between ontology and phenomenology but thats an altogether different discussion. What's important here is that Bateson adresses a significant problem of understanding and comprehending the world around us: problems of how things are and problems of how we think about how things are cannot be seperated and suggests that they ought to be one and the same. In lack of a better term Bateson simply uses 'epistemology'. Sorry for not being clear about this.
FYI - what Dr. Karageorghis is referring to is Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's work on "Flow - The psychology of optimal experience" in which he describes the characteristics of enjoyable experiences. The following is an excerpt from the book, describing these characteristics:
;)
1. the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.
2. we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.
3. - 4. concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.
5. one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
6. enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions.
7. concern for the self disappears yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
8. the sense of the duration of time is altered.
(Csikszentmihalyi; p49)
What's interesting is the similarity of these characteristics to some works done on computergames by Greg Costikyan ("I have no words and I must design"), Chris Crawford ("The Art of Computer Game Design") as well as works on games in general, such as Avedon & Sutton-Smiths "The study of games".
Csikszentmihalyi's work is !very! interesting if you're into the epistemology of computergaming, which - humbly - happens to be the topic of my graduate thesis
No a tablet is not good for people who use the keyboard all the time (ie. coders) and no a tablet might not be very useful for artists and yes, some things might be done different (ie. slower) than how its done as we speak.
But by golly I'm a sucker for a TabletPC. Of all the uses I've found for my computer very few of them make me appreciate that I can't take my computing into the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the couch, my friends places, a café or whereever I may please. The TabletPC will offer a !much! more casual way of computing.
What I think is important to recognize is that the TabletPC is not a computercentric device - that is, its applications and usage is an entirely different framework than that of coding, digital imagery and the likes. It's main aplicability are topics beyond the computer itself. Things that has to do with the world we live in and the things we do every day - not things that has to do with keeping a computer running. We use other computers for that - ones that are tailered more specifically to this application.
Further, I've seen hybrids of desktop / Tablet PC's that make the best of both worlds: dock the tablet and you've got a full fledged destop pc. Pick up the display and you've got a Tablet PC.
My two mere cents anyhoo
For those interested you should go check out The Computer Museum History Center (I find the timeline especially interesting). I stumbled upon it when I visited the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California. Although the guys there were in a meeting they were kind enough to hand us three issues of Core magasine publication as well as giving us a quick look-see around the premises.
Backpacking through Hong-Kong the Octopus Card was a godsend. Admittedly I haven't given much thought to the ethical aspects of using it - what impressed me was the smoothness and elegance that was apparent in all aspects of using it: getting a hold of one, actually using it, putting more money on it and getting your deposit back when finished using it.
Whenever you'd spot other backpackers manically trying to figure out the price of a busfare not the least scrape the exact amount together I thought warm thoughts about the Octopus card.
Needless to say that the efficiency in use rubs off on the flow of the general public transportation system; I've never experienced public transportation this hassle-free and smooth. I wish we had this thought of thing where I live.
Praise the Octopus I say.
I do believe the original prototype is still on display at The Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose, CA.
It's encased in a transparent plastic box and you can actually pick it up and study it at close. I was lucky enough to get a couple of snapshots of it.
Get a glimpse here.
"What, exactly, does Amiga offer other then seeing an old friend again? I know nothing else is quite like it but after all these years is it really viable as an ongoing concern?" NOTE: I'll have to admit that I am a Windows user and have never got the hang of *NIX beyond installing the occasional mandrake, redhat and fiddling around with it. For one thing: the Amiga OS was in many ways designed with and incredible elegance. I have never seen this degree of transparency in use since then. Datatypes are an excellent example of this: need to read PNG's? Find a PNG datatype and plonk it in SYS:Devs/DataTypes and your programs would recognize and read PNG's just like that. Another thing was the ease with which you'd install programs and / or upgraded system components. Shared libraries went into LIBS:, Device managers into DEVS: and so on. With the Amiga you didn't need programs to manage programs: they were easily managed via the GUI and / or Shell. This type of integrity, ease and straight-forwardness was evident throughout the entire OS. After next to two decades things like these still - makes me tick. And still, you'll have to excuse me not being able to compare it to *nix, but I'm a complete moron with respect to that.
You might wanna pick up a couple of these titles. They certainly are worth the time and money:
"Homo Ludens - a Study of the Play-element in Culture" (Johann Huizinga)
"The Study of Games" (Elliot M. Avedon and Brian Sutton-Smith)
"I have no words and I must design" (Greg Costikyan)
"The art of computer game design" (Chris Crawford)
"Finite and Infinite Games - A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility" (James P. Carse)
Hope you find this usefull.
This kinda sounds like Bill Buxton and Mark Weisers thoughts on Ubiquitous Computing and Calm Technology.
.Net strategy in that the latter concentrates on providing services confined within a computer (with the slight modification of the TabletPC which is by all means Weiser and Buxtons inventions at Xerox aswell) while the former sorta reaches beyond the computer itself and further into the real world.
Then one can look upon this new OS as an alternative to the
I think this is a healthy step and hopefully one that will help decentralize computing. Personally I'd love to be able to do computerstuff in a much more casual and relaxed fashion than what's possible today.
My two cents anyway.