Bad design is giving a program an insufferablely cute name that does absolutely nothing to describe its function....
Giving programs stupid names is a deep disfunction of the Linux/Open Source community. Seriously, we need to get over this.
This is not just a problem in the OSS community -- it's endemic in the entire computing community.
1) Nero. Yes, I get the (bad) joke.
2) BlackBerry.
3) Google.
None of these names describe the function of the product. In each case, the (trademarked) name functions as a mechanism to get a monopoly on user imagination.
I work in IT support, so I see and hear the effects of this all the time.
1) Half of the users who want to burn CDs call up and ask for a copy of Nero. Our approved corporate CD/DVD solution is Roxio Easy Media Creator.
2) If user X buys a Nokia phone with mail support, he wants to use it "as a BlackBerry".
3) And of course, everyone "googles" now.
It makes it difficult for competitors, of course. However, the problem goes deeper. Say "Ubercodemeister" releases "Ultrawendel Hyper+". Us, as IT, know the package as "Ultrawendel Hyper+". However, what the user sees when he opens the app is the corporate logo -- "Ubercodemeister" -- so that's the name as far as he's concerned. Now, say Finance use Ubercodemeister's "FigureJigger". We've got to work out which one the user emails in saying "Please reinstall Ubercodemeister".
Meaningful naming is not simply a question of obviousness vs affordances -- it would be an affordance if it was a generic term that gave itself a lasting meaning, but tech naming does not aim to do this.
I believe that Tufte's biggest gripe with Powerpoint is that it encourages low information density.
Yes.
If you use the default templates you will have just a few bullet points on each slide and lots of space lost to border embellishments.
That's not the full story. Even without the wasted space in the "Auto-content" templates, Tufte argues that there still isn't enough space/resolution on a PowerPoint screen. I tend to agree with him when I compare the 3x3' office projection screen with the 10' tall, 6' wide blackboard in my old high-school.
But if you know what you're doing, then you can put much higher information content into a presentation (especially when it's projected from a laptop, allowing animation)
That's not it all: if you know what you're doing, then you can use the "slideware" to display material suited to the medium, and keep the information that can't be displayed in the slides off the slides.
HAL.
Read "The Pianist's Talent"
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
There is a commonly-held belief among teachers:
"I was taught it this way, I'm good at it, so that's the right way of teaching it." Really, what "it" is doesn't matter. This belief is held by language teachers, sports coaches, music teachers and many more. This belief is then supported with examples of pupils/students who are also good at their particular "it".
Over the last hundred years, many many teachers have studied teaching or their disciplines in new ways which have disproved this commonly-believed falsehood.
The first example I'm aware of is described in Harold Taylor's book The Pianist's Talent. In it, he examines the work of a turn-of-the-19th/20th-century Parisian piano teacher by the name of Raymond Thiberge. Thiberge was vexed by the vastly differing -- even contradictory -- advice coming from the various piano conservatories in Paris, so he went to all the individual conservatories for further study. In one, he would be told that there should be tension in the front of the forearm; in the next, tension in the back of the forearm. Thiberge was blind, so to study another's technique he had to touch them. When he lay his hands on any of the teachers, he found that they all had one technique: no tension anywhere.
The teachers were not successful because they followed their professed technique, but because they didn't. Worse, their pupils who they used as proof of the efficacy of their techniques also used a completely different technique than that which they were taught. Worse still, teachers were dismissing their failures as not the teacher's fault -- they were simply untalented -- while the reason they failed was because they were doing what they were told. To quote shlmco, another \.er:
Too many people think practice makes perfect, when in reality, most people who do so simply perfect their mistakes.
In another example, over the last few decades, top-level swimming coaching has changed dramatically, leading to athletes capable of such incredible feats as the Thorpedo's alleged ability to cross a swimming pool in two strokes. The trigger for this was the invention of the underwater tracking camera now so commonly used in major competitive events. Traditional teaching of front-crawl stroke said that the arms should travel in an "S-stroke" and that the fingers should be closed against each other. Coaches who were former gold-medal winners professed this technique as the technique that had won them their fame, but when the cameras started rolling, suddenly people could see that their hands were travelling in an almost straight line, and that their fingers were slightly apart. It became noticed that coaches were ignoring their star students' "non-standard" technique because they were doing so well, but were constantly "correcting" the technique of their other students, hindering their progress.
I was discussing all this with a Scottish country dance teacher recently, trying to demonstrate that another commonly-held notion -- the idea that there are different teaching techniques suited to different people -- was at best an overstatement, at worst a complete falacy, and in any case a result of bad teaching practice. At this point he tied it in to his own personal experience -- one tricky dance-step, the "pas-de-bas", which his student's could never get, although he taught it as all the top teachers do. He eventually came to the conclusion that it was a teaching problem, not a learning problem, so he stopped to study it. At every possible opportunity, he watched the feet of the top dancers until he saw what they were doing and realised that it was not what he was teaching, but it is what he was doing. It is now a point of frustration to him that the teaching fraternity continues to teach it incorrectly when it is perfectly possible to teach it correctly.
Effort will always fail to bear fruit if misdirected. Concientious hard work will make matters worse if the teaching is wrong. In fact, as the Inner Game philosophy is now trying to popularise,
If your business model can't survive, get the government to legislates mandatory taxes that get passed onto you. I believe this concept is called either Communism (or similiar controlled economy) or Welfare. I don't know which.
It's not a new concept: it's called monopolism and it has been around for hundreds of years. The kings or certain prosperous nations would reward certain nobles (or latterly merchants) who performed some great patriotic act (normally involving a donation to the treasury in times of need, such as wartime) with a "monopoly", a flat-rate levy charged on a particular type of goods. At various times, and in various countries, there have been monopolies on everything from shoes to diamonds. Monopolies came into their own in colonial times when more and more exotic goods became available. Merchants would be granted import monopolies, so a ship returning from the tropics with a mixed load of goods could be paying tax to umpteen different parties.
It is anything but communist. Why is it that a certain type of person insists on calling every political/economic ideology they disagree with "communism"? Communism is diametrically opposed to monopolism in that monopolism looks to benefit an individual, whereas communism looks to benefit society. (Stalin may have claimed to be a communist, but if I said I was a fish, would the world consequently believe that fish have arms and nipples?)
Schools, Colleges and Universities the world over have always had guidelines on social conduct.
For example, a university may ban its students from going to a particular pub (bar) as a result of violent incidents. For a year or two, this is rigourously enforced, then the rule gets ignored when it isn't really a problem any more. If the problems kick off again, the rule gets hauled out and enforced.
The same thing goes with internal computing policies. At my uni, access was for "educational use" and instant messaging was not allowed, except where requested for students by course administrators. However, the staff were perfectly happy to let us MSN and surf to our hearts' content -- until something went wrong, at which point warnings would come out and scare us back onto the straight-and-narrow.
The same thing will happen here -- a harsh, strict rule required to put a quick stop to unacceptable behaviour that will be forgotten in a year or two.
You can redefine anything you want to be a fundamental human right, but I wouldn't want society to get to the stage where speed limits are removed as a restriction on personal freedom....
Free software works because it reduces duplication of labour: anyone can write a Bubble-Sort routine for language X, so if the first person who writes a bubble-sort in X releases it freely, no-one is forced to rewrite the Bubble-Sort. This is efficient. Is the coder being ripped off? Probably not, as someone else will have programmed it, so he can pick it up free. Distribution of labour.
However, it is only me who can write my songs -- they are the product of my brain and my personal interpretation of my environment and culture. No-one else is ever going to write the same songs independently of me. By making my songs free, I reduce the impetus for others to write their own (they can just cover mine). This leads to a reduction in effort, definitely, but also to a reduction in variety.
And here's the killer. What if I get involved in a road accident which crushes my right hand and leads me to need a trachyotomy? I would never sing or play any musical instrument again. Thus to make a living from my music, I would need to be able to sell my songs, not just my performances, which I couldn't do if all other songs were free.
Why couldn't they have used standard 3-inch mini-DVD discs (1.46gb) ? Instead Sony went along with it's good old fashioned lock-in and invented a new format that does NOTHING more than the standards. This is like Minidisc, only worse.
They say two wrongs don't make a right, but in this case they could have done.
Sony's Hi-MD was a big step up from the original MD and as it stands I can't see a better portable device for the amateur sound engineer at a similar price.
Yet at more or less the same time they come up with the idea of the "UMD". Why? If they'd run the two projects together, they could have created a killer format -- let's call it MDu (MiniDisc universal).
Record video on your pocket camcorder to MDu -- record your soundtrack to MDu (in your garage/bedroom/practise room) -- mix and edit on your Viao MDu Media Centre to MDu -- watch your films at home with your combined DVD-player/MDu-recorder or on the go on your PSP.
But no -- lets have one format for each device. Wasted opportunity.
Someone who wants to multiply or divide it by another fraction, or add it or subtract it from another fraction?
OK, so you may well go through that stage in your head rather than on paper, but you do still how to make that conversion. (Oh, and it's very easy to lose the decimal place if you don't write it down.)
As someone with a personal and professional interest in ergonomics, I'm not too happy about this.
First up, scroll wheels are a Bad Thing to start off with as they encourage unnatural movements of the middle finger while holding the rest of the fingers static.
Secondly, things like zero-travel buttons and trackpads all too often prove far too sensitive -- any small twitch is interpreted as a meaningful movement. The result is that the user tenses up to avoid making any inadvertant movements.
As all computer-people should know: tension is the root cause of many an RSI.
That's all well and good, but any sort of registration system complicates cross-border copyrights significantly. Does the author have to register and renew in all countries, or do we take a homeland registration as an international copyright?
The differences in laws between countries would lead to a market for "copyright import agents" who would no doubt do their best to exploit foreigners seeking publication in a taxable country. (In a manner similar to US record companies ripping off rural (mainly African-American) artists' composition royalties in the first half of last century.)
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned the level of digital vandalism all forms of moving image have been subjected to in the name of "restoration".
I mean, there's plenty of jokes about Greedo and Han Solo but no-one has mentioned anything about starfields.
When the remastered Star Wars trilogy came out, I was appalled by the hatchet job they'd performed. In any of the outer space scenes, when the camera panned, the stars changed size. It convinced me that digital remastering was worthless.
However, a few years later I did a module on Computer Graphics at uni and I worked out that the problem was simply that they use point sampling. (I'd already had a vague notion of what must be happening, but couldn't put it into words.)
Throughout the computer world, we use anti-aliasing to try to avoid such size issues and to get rid of jaggy lines; chemical film anti-aliased itself due to its natural area-sampling behaviour; surely it's only natural that when these two worlds meet, we anti-alias our video?
Seemingly not. Even today, "Definition" and "Clarity" are the goals or the digital remasterer (remastermaster?) against all past experience. I recently bought an Italian film on DVD. It had such beautiful scenery -- the cliffs and rock-pools of the Sicilian coast, the clear blue skies and the bone-white stone walls of the houses and fields. The complex motion of the waves on the surface, the shape of the rocks on the bottom and the eratic patterns of light were translated into seemingly random noise if the camera panned slowly across them. Hit the pause button, though, and the picture leapt out from the screen.
I think that's the problem -- the people making decisions on the technology have probably been given stills to compare; so the commercial products would have been designed to produce stunning stills that can be used to sell their products to the production companies, and video would have become a secondary consideration to the developers.
you give something to somebody for free they will NOT respect it, all you have to do is look at the free gov't programs (like free houseing) to see that statement is false...
While the idea was popular amongst the children, it initially received some resistance from the teachers and there were problems with laptops getting broken.
However, Mr Negroponte has adapted the idea to his own work in Cambodia where he set up two schools together with his wife and gave the children laptops.
"We put in 25 laptops three years ago , only one has been broken, the kids cherish these things, it's also a TV a telephone and a games machine, not just a textbook."
If the Linux community are so short on games, why don't they do their usual collaborative thing and make game engines.
An extensible flight engine using public domain mapping data could catch the imagination of the MS Flight Simulator fans -- let's call this Open Air -- and the other firm favourite that should be fairly straighforward would instantly have a catchy name: Open Golf.
First person shooter engines, RTS engines, Turn-based map/strategy engines.... Once you have all these available for free, the the average home-coder gains the ability to generate a decent game quickly and easily, and the profit for those who chose to make a commercial game increases dramatically.
No, the gas given off will be chlorine, until all the salt has been electrolysed.
Only once the salt has been electrolysed will any significant amount of electrolysis of the water take place, causing a (very dangerous) mixture of hydrogen and oxygen to be given off.
To prevent this situation, I would recommend against using salt. An alkaline electrolyte, such as washing soda, can be monitor with simple pH paper. While the pH paper shows alkali, you're safe. When it reaches neutral (7), Stop Electrolysing!
(Acid isn't advisable as this could attack the electrodes.)
Development needs to start with the basics. They don't need computers and they don't need college.
They need roads, (which can be planned quickly and efficiently by trained civil engineers using CAD software)
they need medical care, (supplied by trained doctors)
they need clean drinking water, (from wells built by trained engineers, planned using CAD and geological modelling software)
they need immunizations, (performed by trained nurses, coordinated using logistical planning software)
they need family planning, (that's a contentious point, but if they do then they will need trained health care professionals to administer it, and a logistical planning system to run it)
they need assistance with sustainable farming techniques (at agricultural college)
and they need primary education. (delivered by graduates of teacher training college).
What you must understand is that a stable society must be supported by itself. Without sufficient education to train their own educators, they remain perpetually in need of aid.
capitalism is still the best thing we've come up with to deal with the limited resources we have, relative to the world population.
Aye right. Capitalism has led to such gross overconsumption that 10% of the population use 90% of the world's resources.
Please do not forget that without capitalism, there would be no cash crops forced on farmers in underdeveloped regions and no multinational corporations buying up all the viable land in these regions.
Without capitalism, people would be able to feed themselves properly instead of suffering acute malnutrition.
Please remember that Trotsky, one of the architects of the revolution, was assassinated by Stalinists as he had taken to speaking out against Stalin's policies as being contrary to the principles of Marx....
According to dictionary.com
Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks.
Ah, but according to askoxford.com (the Oxford dictionary is the official source for Standard English) property is defined as follows:
? noun (pl. properties) 1 a thing or things belonging to someone. 2 a building and the land belonging to it. 3 Law the right to the possession, use, or disposal of something; ownership. 4 a characteristic: a perfumed oil with calming properties. 5 old-fashioned term for PROP2.
? ORIGIN Latin proprietas, from proprius ?one?s own, special?.
UK Health and Safety law states that any mains powered device must have PAT certification (Portable Appliance Test) at regular intervals if it is to be used in any public place (ie anywhere outside of your own home -- even your friend's house counts as a public place).
I do not know if the establishment owner has a responsibility to ensure that all visitors adhere to this, but I have yet to see a privately owned laptop with a PAT sticker....
How I miss those days... walking towards the time clock, thinking of what I?d do the next day, punching out and moving onto personal things for the evening and not having work come to mind until the next morning just after I punched in.
When one is a salary man, a bit more is expected, within reason (which is the key).
Nonsense. An hourly worker may be paid by exact number of hours, but a salaried worker has hours too -- just look at your contract.
Those who work extra hours without extra pay are unbalancing the books -- from the company's perspective a job takes less hours than it does, meaning in the future they won't budget sufficiently and people will be pressured into working unpaid overtime. If they don't, they won't get the job done (because the time has been underbudgetted) and they will be blamed (because the miscalculated figures say it should have been possible in the available).
People doing unpaid overtime are doing a disservice to everyone except their bosses.
It's worth reviewing ESR's discussion of Moore's Law as part of Halloween IX - basically, the easily-overlooked consequence of computer power roughly doubling every 18 months is that the software to make use of that power must also double in complexity concurrently with this.
I'm afraid that that is quite simply rubbish. There is a (seemingly irrisistable) temptation for software developers to believe this, but it isn't to be true. Resisting would mean getting the job done quicker. Software is overcomplicated already.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not just a problem in the OSS community -- it's endemic in the entire computing community.
1) Nero. Yes, I get the (bad) joke.
2) BlackBerry.
3) Google.
None of these names describe the function of the product. In each case, the (trademarked) name functions as a mechanism to get a monopoly on user imagination.
I work in IT support, so I see and hear the effects of this all the time.
1) Half of the users who want to burn CDs call up and ask for a copy of Nero. Our approved corporate CD/DVD solution is Roxio Easy Media Creator.
2) If user X buys a Nokia phone with mail support, he wants to use it "as a BlackBerry".
3) And of course, everyone "googles" now.
It makes it difficult for competitors, of course. However, the problem goes deeper. Say "Ubercodemeister" releases "Ultrawendel Hyper+". Us, as IT, know the package as "Ultrawendel Hyper+". However, what the user sees when he opens the app is the corporate logo -- "Ubercodemeister" -- so that's the name as far as he's concerned. Now, say Finance use Ubercodemeister's "FigureJigger". We've got to work out which one the user emails in saying "Please reinstall Ubercodemeister".
Meaningful naming is not simply a question of obviousness vs affordances -- it would be an affordance if it was a generic term that gave itself a lasting meaning, but tech naming does not aim to do this.
HAL.
Yes.
If you use the default templates you will have just a few bullet points on each slide and lots of space lost to border embellishments.
That's not the full story. Even without the wasted space in the "Auto-content" templates, Tufte argues that there still isn't enough space/resolution on a PowerPoint screen. I tend to agree with him when I compare the 3x3' office projection screen with the 10' tall, 6' wide blackboard in my old high-school.
But if you know what you're doing, then you can put much higher information content into a presentation (especially when it's projected from a laptop, allowing animation)
That's not it all: if you know what you're doing, then you can use the "slideware" to display material suited to the medium, and keep the information that can't be displayed in the slides off the slides.
HAL.
"I was taught it this way, I'm good at it, so that's the right way of teaching it." Really, what "it" is doesn't matter. This belief is held by language teachers, sports coaches, music teachers and many more. This belief is then supported with examples of pupils/students who are also good at their particular "it".
Over the last hundred years, many many teachers have studied teaching or their disciplines in new ways which have disproved this commonly-believed falsehood.
The first example I'm aware of is described in Harold Taylor's book The Pianist's Talent. In it, he examines the work of a turn-of-the-19th/20th-century Parisian piano teacher by the name of Raymond Thiberge. Thiberge was vexed by the vastly differing -- even contradictory -- advice coming from the various piano conservatories in Paris, so he went to all the individual conservatories for further study. In one, he would be told that there should be tension in the front of the forearm; in the next, tension in the back of the forearm. Thiberge was blind, so to study another's technique he had to touch them. When he lay his hands on any of the teachers, he found that they all had one technique: no tension anywhere.
The teachers were not successful because they followed their professed technique, but because they didn't. Worse, their pupils who they used as proof of the efficacy of their techniques also used a completely different technique than that which they were taught. Worse still, teachers were dismissing their failures as not the teacher's fault -- they were simply untalented -- while the reason they failed was because they were doing what they were told. To quote shlmco, another \.er: Too many people think practice makes perfect, when in reality, most people who do so simply perfect their mistakes. In another example, over the last few decades, top-level swimming coaching has changed dramatically, leading to athletes capable of such incredible feats as the Thorpedo's alleged ability to cross a swimming pool in two strokes. The trigger for this was the invention of the underwater tracking camera now so commonly used in major competitive events. Traditional teaching of front-crawl stroke said that the arms should travel in an "S-stroke" and that the fingers should be closed against each other. Coaches who were former gold-medal winners professed this technique as the technique that had won them their fame, but when the cameras started rolling, suddenly people could see that their hands were travelling in an almost straight line, and that their fingers were slightly apart. It became noticed that coaches were ignoring their star students' "non-standard" technique because they were doing so well, but were constantly "correcting" the technique of their other students, hindering their progress.
I was discussing all this with a Scottish country dance teacher recently, trying to demonstrate that another commonly-held notion -- the idea that there are different teaching techniques suited to different people -- was at best an overstatement, at worst a complete falacy, and in any case a result of bad teaching practice. At this point he tied it in to his own personal experience -- one tricky dance-step, the "pas-de-bas", which his student's could never get, although he taught it as all the top teachers do. He eventually came to the conclusion that it was a teaching problem, not a learning problem, so he stopped to study it. At every possible opportunity, he watched the feet of the top dancers until he saw what they were doing and realised that it was not what he was teaching, but it is what he was doing. It is now a point of frustration to him that the teaching fraternity continues to teach it incorrectly when it is perfectly possible to teach it correctly.
Effort will always fail to bear fruit if misdirected. Concientious hard work will make matters worse if the teaching is wrong. In fact, as the Inner Game philosophy is now trying to popularise,
It's not a new concept: it's called monopolism and it has been around for hundreds of years. The kings or certain prosperous nations would reward certain nobles (or latterly merchants) who performed some great patriotic act (normally involving a donation to the treasury in times of need, such as wartime) with a "monopoly", a flat-rate levy charged on a particular type of goods. At various times, and in various countries, there have been monopolies on everything from shoes to diamonds. Monopolies came into their own in colonial times when more and more exotic goods became available. Merchants would be granted import monopolies, so a ship returning from the tropics with a mixed load of goods could be paying tax to umpteen different parties.
It is anything but communist. Why is it that a certain type of person insists on calling every political/economic ideology they disagree with "communism"? Communism is diametrically opposed to monopolism in that monopolism looks to benefit an individual, whereas communism looks to benefit society. (Stalin may have claimed to be a communist, but if I said I was a fish, would the world consequently believe that fish have arms and nipples?)
Schools, Colleges and Universities the world over have always had guidelines on social conduct.
For example, a university may ban its students from going to a particular pub (bar) as a result of violent incidents. For a year or two, this is rigourously enforced, then the rule gets ignored when it isn't really a problem any more. If the problems kick off again, the rule gets hauled out and enforced.
The same thing goes with internal computing policies. At my uni, access was for "educational use" and instant messaging was not allowed, except where requested for students by course administrators. However, the staff were perfectly happy to let us MSN and surf to our hearts' content -- until something went wrong, at which point warnings would come out and scare us back onto the straight-and-narrow.
The same thing will happen here -- a harsh, strict rule required to put a quick stop to unacceptable behaviour that will be forgotten in a year or two.
You can redefine anything you want to be a fundamental human right, but I wouldn't want society to get to the stage where speed limits are removed as a restriction on personal freedom....
Free software works because it reduces duplication of labour: anyone can write a Bubble-Sort routine for language X, so if the first person who writes a bubble-sort in X releases it freely, no-one is forced to rewrite the Bubble-Sort. This is efficient. Is the coder being ripped off? Probably not, as someone else will have programmed it, so he can pick it up free. Distribution of labour.
However, it is only me who can write my songs -- they are the product of my brain and my personal interpretation of my environment and culture. No-one else is ever going to write the same songs independently of me. By making my songs free, I reduce the impetus for others to write their own (they can just cover mine). This leads to a reduction in effort, definitely, but also to a reduction in variety.
And here's the killer. What if I get involved in a road accident which crushes my right hand and leads me to need a trachyotomy? I would never sing or play any musical instrument again. Thus to make a living from my music, I would need to be able to sell my songs, not just my performances, which I couldn't do if all other songs were free.
HAL.
The stats in the article are for England, not the UK -- the topic header is wrong.
The UK is a union of nations, as the US is a union of states.
This is only a comparison of US vs UK in as much as a comparison of Delaware vs UK is a comparison of US vs UK.
They say two wrongs don't make a right, but in this case they could have done.
Sony's Hi-MD was a big step up from the original MD and as it stands I can't see a better portable device for the amateur sound engineer at a similar price.
Yet at more or less the same time they come up with the idea of the "UMD". Why? If they'd run the two projects together, they could have created a killer format -- let's call it MDu (MiniDisc universal).
Record video on your pocket camcorder to MDu -- record your soundtrack to MDu (in your garage/bedroom/practise room) -- mix and edit on your Viao MDu Media Centre to MDu -- watch your films at home with your combined DVD-player/MDu-recorder or on the go on your PSP.
But no -- lets have one format for each device. Wasted opportunity.
HAL
Someone who wants to multiply or divide it by another fraction, or add it or subtract it from another fraction?
OK, so you may well go through that stage in your head rather than on paper, but you do still how to make that conversion. (Oh, and it's very easy to lose the decimal place if you don't write it down.)
Mathematical HAL
First up, scroll wheels are a Bad Thing to start off with as they encourage unnatural movements of the middle finger while holding the rest of the fingers static.
Secondly, things like zero-travel buttons and trackpads all too often prove far too sensitive -- any small twitch is interpreted as a meaningful movement. The result is that the user tenses up to avoid making any inadvertant movements.
As all computer-people should know: tension is the root cause of many an RSI.
HAL
The differences in laws between countries would lead to a market for "copyright import agents" who would no doubt do their best to exploit foreigners seeking publication in a taxable country. (In a manner similar to US record companies ripping off rural (mainly African-American) artists' composition royalties in the first half of last century.)
HAL.
I mean, there's plenty of jokes about Greedo and Han Solo but no-one has mentioned anything about starfields.
When the remastered Star Wars trilogy came out, I was appalled by the hatchet job they'd performed. In any of the outer space scenes, when the camera panned, the stars changed size. It convinced me that digital remastering was worthless.
However, a few years later I did a module on Computer Graphics at uni and I worked out that the problem was simply that they use point sampling. (I'd already had a vague notion of what must be happening, but couldn't put it into words.)
Throughout the computer world, we use anti-aliasing to try to avoid such size issues and to get rid of jaggy lines; chemical film anti-aliased itself due to its natural area-sampling behaviour; surely it's only natural that when these two worlds meet, we anti-alias our video?
Seemingly not. Even today, "Definition" and "Clarity" are the goals or the digital remasterer (remastermaster?) against all past experience. I recently bought an Italian film on DVD. It had such beautiful scenery -- the cliffs and rock-pools of the Sicilian coast, the clear blue skies and the bone-white stone walls of the houses and fields. The complex motion of the waves on the surface, the shape of the rocks on the bottom and the eratic patterns of light were translated into seemingly random noise if the camera panned slowly across them. Hit the pause button, though, and the picture leapt out from the screen.
I think that's the problem -- the people making decisions on the technology have probably been given stills to compare; so the commercial products would have been designed to produce stunning stills that can be used to sell their products to the production companies, and video would have become a secondary consideration to the developers.
>sigh< ... market forces, eh?
I don't think that this is a case of double standards. I would like to see complete disarmement, but cannot realistically expect it.
As a compromise, I'll go with not opening up new realms of warfare/weaponry; whether it be orbital deathrays or hybrid aquatic/aerial missile systems.
</HAL>
Your point caller?
HAL
An extensible flight engine using public domain mapping data could catch the imagination of the MS Flight Simulator fans -- let's call this Open Air -- and the other firm favourite that should be fairly straighforward would instantly have a catchy name: Open Golf.
First person shooter engines, RTS engines, Turn-based map/strategy engines.... Once you have all these available for free, the the average home-coder gains the ability to generate a decent game quickly and easily, and the profit for those who chose to make a commercial game increases dramatically.
HAL.
Only once the salt has been electrolysed will any significant amount of electrolysis of the water take place, causing a (very dangerous) mixture of hydrogen and oxygen to be given off.
To prevent this situation, I would recommend against using salt. An alkaline electrolyte, such as washing soda, can be monitor with simple pH paper. While the pH paper shows alkali, you're safe. When it reaches neutral (7), Stop Electrolysing!
(Acid isn't advisable as this could attack the electrodes.)
HAL.
They need roads, (which can be planned quickly and efficiently by trained civil engineers using CAD software)
they need medical care, (supplied by trained doctors)
they need clean drinking water, (from wells built by trained engineers, planned using CAD and geological modelling software)
they need immunizations, (performed by trained nurses, coordinated using logistical planning software)
they need family planning, (that's a contentious point, but if they do then they will need trained health care professionals to administer it, and a logistical planning system to run it)
they need assistance with sustainable farming techniques (at agricultural college)
and they need primary education. (delivered by graduates of teacher training college).
What you must understand is that a stable society must be supported by itself. Without sufficient education to train their own educators, they remain perpetually in need of aid.
HAL
Aye right. Capitalism has led to such gross overconsumption that 10% of the population use 90% of the world's resources.
Please do not forget that without capitalism, there would be no cash crops forced on farmers in underdeveloped regions and no multinational corporations buying up all the viable land in these regions.
Without capitalism, people would be able to feed themselves properly instead of suffering acute malnutrition.
HAL
Please remember that Trotsky, one of the architects of the revolution, was assassinated by Stalinists as he had taken to speaking out against Stalin's policies as being contrary to the principles of Marx....
? noun (pl. properties) 1 a thing or things belonging to someone. 2 a building and the land belonging to it. 3 Law the right to the possession, use, or disposal of something; ownership. 4 a characteristic: a perfumed oil with calming properties. 5 old-fashioned term for PROP2.
? ORIGIN Latin proprietas, from proprius ?one?s own, special?.
I do not know if the establishment owner has a responsibility to ensure that all visitors adhere to this, but I have yet to see a privately owned laptop with a PAT sticker....
Otherwise you might as well have LAN points next to the power sockets....
HALStop Using Wheelmice.
Hal,
Accidental ergonomist
How I miss those days... walking towards the time clock, thinking of what I?d do the next day, punching out and moving onto personal things for the evening and not having work come to mind until the next morning just after I punched in.
When one is a salary man, a bit more is expected, within reason (which is the key).
Nonsense. An hourly worker may be paid by exact number of hours, but a salaried worker has hours too -- just look at your contract.
Those who work extra hours without extra pay are unbalancing the books -- from the company's perspective a job takes less hours than it does, meaning in the future they won't budget sufficiently and people will be pressured into working unpaid overtime. If they don't, they won't get the job done (because the time has been underbudgetted) and they will be blamed (because the miscalculated figures say it should have been possible in the available).
People doing unpaid overtime are doing a disservice to everyone except their bosses.
HAL.
I'm afraid that that is quite simply rubbish. There is a (seemingly irrisistable) temptation for software developers to believe this, but it isn't to be true. Resisting would mean getting the job done quicker. Software is overcomplicated already.
HAL,
Reformed Software Developer.