I can honestly tell you that the above review could never exist in a real gaming magazine
I guess you never read the magazine "Amiga Power". A UK based Amiga games mag that really didn't hold back in their reviews. Their opinion was that a % scale is utterly meaningless if you never give a game anything less than 70% (Which is what all the other game mags seemed to do).
Consequently, scores of 4% were not unusual. Publishing companies whined, bitched, claimed that AP was "killing the Amiga" (Despite the fact that it was already dying), but they always stuck to their word, despite being sued from time to time and quite frequently having to go out and buy games because the publishing houses wouldn't send them copies any more.
AP was undoubtedly the best magazine I've ever read. It's a shame it had to die, but when the platform you're writing for dies, there's not a lot you can do.
There's a difference between time spent at work, and time spent at work working. I mean, seriously, I spend probably 8 or 9 hours in the office every day, but when you take out time spent reading personal email, visiting online cartoons, reading Slashdot, The Register and however many other sites, does it really work out to be that much?
People may claim to be spending far too much time in their offices, but is it because they're being overworked? Or because they have access to high speed net links and computers where they can procrastinate and still appear to be working?
Personally, I'm a geek. I like having access to this stuff (Whenever I walk into the server room I have to resist the urge to say "Hey! Nice rack!"), so the fact that I spend a great deal of time in the office is not a problem for me.
This reminds me of some software I saw several years ago.. Redshift which "allows you to recreate a view of the night sky from anywhere in the Solar System from 4700BC to 9999AD".
It seems to have changed quite a bit since I first saw it. Now seems to be more of an educational tool/encyclopedia..
Tivo has a serial interface through which you can update over your net connection with no opening of the case required. Read the howto here. (You'll need a Linux box or something you can establish a ppp session with over the serial line).
Abstract:
A method and apparatus for information presentation and management in an online trading environment are provided. According to one aspect of the present invention, person-to-person commerce over the Internet is facilitated by providing prospective buyers the ability to quickly preview items for sale. Images are harvested from a plurality of sites based upon user-supplied information. The user-supplied information includes descriptions of items for sale and locations from which images that are to be associated with the items can be retrieved. Thumbnail images are created corresponding to the harvested images and are aggregated onto a web page for presentation at a remote site. According to another aspect of the present invention, a user may submit a query to preview items for sale. After receiving the query, thumbnail images corresponding to items that satisfy the user query are displayed, each of the thumbnail images previously having been created based upon a user-specified image.
So, it sounds like it's specific to online auctions, so although this isn't any less stupid than it originally sounds, I wouldn't start to worry about your online gallery of cat photos too quickly.
Sounds really intuitive, no no, really.
on
3D GUI Project
·
· Score: 5
C3D will use a 4 button mouse with mouse wheel as the standard mouse. The user emulates this four button mouse with a 3 button mouse with a mouse wheel by clicking the middle and right buttons at the same time
I'm sorry, but this just sounds ridiculous to me. User interfaces are pretty badly designed as it is, adding more mouse buttons doesn't solve anything. It just makes it worse.
Some time ago, someone posted a link to a site discussing user interface design, which discussed some of the great ideas and concepts that are simply ignored. For example, what are the 4 locations on the screen to which you can move the mouse very fast? The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized.
Perhaps a bigger problem in this scenario is that of the menus within these windows. If they're not maximized, then to get to the menu in each window you have to click in a different location every time. This is very non-intuitive. I personally love the system on the Amiga workbench, where holding down the right mouse button anywhere inside the app would bring down the previously invisible menu at the top. Since it was at the edge of the screen, you could move and select a menu item very quickly. I'd love to see this system implement again, but I haven't yet.
Oops, kind of got a bit off topic there. I guess my point is, people who design user interfaces should really be looking at some of the great useability studies that have been done, and start implementing them before they concentrate on the eye-candy.
The Los Angeles-based toy retailer blamed poor sales on "a harsh retail climate" caused by concerns over the economy, current attitudes toward Internet retailing, and consumers who have been "meaningfully distracted by the presidential election and its aftermath."
"... and that mean slashdot site. They keep picking on us, and global warming! It affected out sales! Yeah, that's the ticket! And.. my dog ate all the orders! My car broke down! I had to go out of town, There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! IT WASN'T OUR FAULT!!! *whine* *whine*"
Or, another dot.bomb with no business plan? You decide.
Saw this last night. There's a little more information in their article which can be found here.
From their article:
The accident happened at 9.30pm (New York time) on route 95 as a result of a previous accident. Mike hit a car stuck in the middle of the road and was pushed into the path of an oncoming tractor.
Is it just me, or does this not actually look all that impressive? This is not a troll, I genuinely don't think it looks all that much better than, say, Half Life, which has been around for oooh, ages, or any of the more recent games.
The buildings in particular don't appear to have any depth. The first image on the main page shows buildings that appear to be made up of some fairly chunky bitmaps.
Ok, so the butterflies in one of the images look pretty cool, and the snow is nice too, but it's a well known fact: Pretty graphics do not necessarily make a great game. The concepts behind this one make it sound like it should be pretty cool, but I'd rather judge a game on the gameplay than the graphics any day.
So, sorry.. it just doesn't look all that revolutionary to me..
According to the BBC article on this subject, it's not just a case of dropping it into the ocean (They say the Indian Ocean, incidentally, not the Pacific):
Mir's orbit, already decaying naturally because of atmospheric drag, will be reduced to 80 km (50 miles), causing the space station to enter the dense layers of the atmosphere where most of it will burn up. The remains of the station will then fall in a sparsely populated region of the Indian Ocean.
"Everything will go according to the laws of physics: the station will burn and break apart," Blagov said, adding that the entire operation would take several days.
Several days? Is this something that will be visible from the ground? That would look uber-cool.
It's late on, so this probably wont even get moderated, but I have to respond to this.
This is the most ridiculous story I've seen posted for a while.. A system that ships with a blank password by default? OH NO! What a disaster!
"But clueless newbies might not know to change it!"
2 Points:
1. Anyone with half a clue knows to set a password on any system of this sort, but more importantly..
2. What would you rather have? A system that sets a default password of "microsoft" or something else? What difference does it make? As long as there's a default of something then it will be common knowledge. Ok so you could make the password be required before being allowed to continue, but anyone who knows enough about SQL server to set it up knows to change the password.
This is the biggest pile of FUD I've seen for a while, I would expect better from Slashdot.
Let's assume life evolves to suit the surroundings, but this planet is "probably larger than Jupiter". Now it's been a number of years since I studied physics, and I can't for the life of me remember any of the necessary equations, but surely a planet of this size would have a tremendous gravitational force?
Not withstanding the fact that the chances of life are extremely slim anyway, with such a massive gravitational force, any life that might have evolved is going to either be very, very strong, or very, very short.
(Chipmonk voice) "Greetings Earthling!"
"Huh? Where did that come from?" (Chipmonk voice) "Down here!"
"Weird, I wonder.. " *squish*
Those that do not wish to be tracked can surely disable it
So you're saying that for every commercial website I go to, I have to work out how they're collecting information about me, who they're sending it to, and work out how to disable it?
Why is that up to me to work out? It's not like they make it easy to opt-out.
Of course, what should really happen is that the default is opt-out, not opt-in. This will never happen though. How many people are going to look at a box that says "Click here to have your privacy invaded" and think "Oooh, I'd better do that, sounds like a greate idea"? That's right, none.
As has been mentioned before, a good start would be more defensive measures on the part of the browser. Wait a while.. I'm sure it will happen..
A bad decision in the Daemon UK case, (IIRC a basically bigmouthed person successfully sued the ISP for not removing some inflammatory information about him)
Actually, there was no decision. Demon decided to settle the case before it got to court. No legal precedant has been set here by any means, and you should not try to compare these two totally independant cases.
The people involved in this case apparently didn't want to pay the $24 a month to get access in their room
Not necessarily. The article clearly states that not all rooms have ethernet available because they can't afford it. It's quite possible they applied for rooms with ethernet and did not get them, so they took it into their own hands.
Is that wrong? Well, maybe. They avoid paying the $24/mo fee, but on the other hand, if the university can't provide it, it's only to be expected.
Can you say you wouldn't do the same thing in the same situation?
I just got back from the WoA show in London, where I was witness to Jim Collas' speech. Nothing was specifically said about Transmeta. What did happen was they showed a video, where several logos were flashed up on the screen (Sun, Corel, Transmeta), and they then went on to talk about various future partnerships. In the actual speech bits, they mentioned Sun and Corel, but not Transmeta. As far as I'm aware, that's all there is, unless more was said at the Amiwest show.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you never read the magazine "Amiga Power". A UK based Amiga games mag that really didn't hold back in their reviews. Their opinion was that a % scale is utterly meaningless if you never give a game anything less than 70% (Which is what all the other game mags seemed to do).
Consequently, scores of 4% were not unusual. Publishing companies whined, bitched, claimed that AP was "killing the Amiga" (Despite the fact that it was already dying), but they always stuck to their word, despite being sued from time to time and quite frequently having to go out and buy games because the publishing houses wouldn't send them copies any more.
AP was undoubtedly the best magazine I've ever read. It's a shame it had to die, but when the platform you're writing for dies, there's not a lot you can do.
People may claim to be spending far too much time in their offices, but is it because they're being overworked? Or because they have access to high speed net links and computers where they can procrastinate and still appear to be working?
Personally, I'm a geek. I like having access to this stuff (Whenever I walk into the server room I have to resist the urge to say "Hey! Nice rack!"), so the fact that I spend a great deal of time in the office is not a problem for me.
It seems to have changed quite a bit since I first saw it. Now seems to be more of an educational tool/encyclopedia..
Tivo has a serial interface through which you can update over your net connection with no opening of the case required. Read the howto here. (You'll need a Linux box or something you can establish a ppp session with over the serial line).
Abstract: A method and apparatus for information presentation and management in an online trading environment are provided. According to one aspect of the present invention, person-to-person commerce over the Internet is facilitated by providing prospective buyers the ability to quickly preview items for sale. Images are harvested from a plurality of sites based upon user-supplied information. The user-supplied information includes descriptions of items for sale and locations from which images that are to be associated with the items can be retrieved. Thumbnail images are created corresponding to the harvested images and are aggregated onto a web page for presentation at a remote site. According to another aspect of the present invention, a user may submit a query to preview items for sale. After receiving the query, thumbnail images corresponding to items that satisfy the user query are displayed, each of the thumbnail images previously having been created based upon a user-specified image.
So, it sounds like it's specific to online auctions, so although this isn't any less stupid than it originally sounds, I wouldn't start to worry about your online gallery of cat photos too quickly.
I'm sorry, but this just sounds ridiculous to me. User interfaces are pretty badly designed as it is, adding more mouse buttons doesn't solve anything. It just makes it worse.
Some time ago, someone posted a link to a site discussing user interface design, which discussed some of the great ideas and concepts that are simply ignored. For example, what are the 4 locations on the screen to which you can move the mouse very fast? The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized.
Perhaps a bigger problem in this scenario is that of the menus within these windows. If they're not maximized, then to get to the menu in each window you have to click in a different location every time. This is very non-intuitive. I personally love the system on the Amiga workbench, where holding down the right mouse button anywhere inside the app would bring down the previously invisible menu at the top. Since it was at the edge of the screen, you could move and select a menu item very quickly. I'd love to see this system implement again, but I haven't yet.
Oops, kind of got a bit off topic there. I guess my point is, people who design user interfaces should really be looking at some of the great useability studies that have been done, and start implementing them before they concentrate on the eye-candy.
"... and that mean slashdot site. They keep picking on us, and global warming! It affected out sales! Yeah, that's the ticket! And.. my dog ate all the orders! My car broke down! I had to go out of town, There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! IT WASN'T OUR FAULT!!! *whine* *whine*"
Or, another dot.bomb with no business plan? You decide.
From their article:
The accident happened at 9.30pm (New York time) on route 95 as a result of a previous accident. Mike hit a car stuck in the middle of the road and was pushed into the path of an oncoming tractor.
The buildings in particular don't appear to have any depth. The first image on the main page shows buildings that appear to be made up of some fairly chunky bitmaps.
Ok, so the butterflies in one of the images look pretty cool, and the snow is nice too, but it's a well known fact: Pretty graphics do not necessarily make a great game. The concepts behind this one make it sound like it should be pretty cool, but I'd rather judge a game on the gameplay than the graphics any day.
So, sorry.. it just doesn't look all that revolutionary to me..
Mir's orbit, already decaying naturally because of atmospheric drag, will be reduced to 80 km (50 miles), causing the space station to enter the dense layers of the atmosphere where most of it will burn up. The remains of the station will then fall in a sparsely populated region of the Indian Ocean.
"Everything will go according to the laws of physics: the station will burn and break apart," Blagov said, adding that the entire operation would take several days.
Several days? Is this something that will be visible from the ground? That would look uber-cool.
This is the most ridiculous story I've seen posted for a while.. A system that ships with a blank password by default? OH NO! What a disaster!
"But clueless newbies might not know to change it!"
2 Points:
1. Anyone with half a clue knows to set a password on any system of this sort, but more importantly..
2. What would you rather have? A system that sets a default password of "microsoft" or something else? What difference does it make? As long as there's a default of something then it will be common knowledge. Ok so you could make the password be required before being allowed to continue, but anyone who knows enough about SQL server to set it up knows to change the password.
This is the biggest pile of FUD I've seen for a while, I would expect better from Slashdot.
Not withstanding the fact that the chances of life are extremely slim anyway, with such a massive gravitational force, any life that might have evolved is going to either be very, very strong, or very, very short.
(Chipmonk voice) "Greetings Earthling!"
"Huh? Where did that come from?"
(Chipmonk voice) "Down here!"
"Weird, I wonder.. " *squish*
"Oops."
</SILLY>
So you're saying that for every commercial website I go to, I have to work out how they're collecting information about me, who they're sending it to, and work out how to disable it?
Why is that up to me to work out? It's not like they make it easy to opt-out.
Of course, what should really happen is that the default is opt-out, not opt-in. This will never happen though. How many people are going to look at a box that says "Click here to have your privacy invaded" and think "Oooh, I'd better do that, sounds like a greate idea"? That's right, none.
As has been mentioned before, a good start would be more defensive measures on the part of the browser. Wait a while.. I'm sure it will happen..
Actually, there was no decision. Demon decided to settle the case before it got to court. No legal precedant has been set here by any means, and you should not try to compare these two totally independant cases.
Not necessarily. The article clearly states that not all rooms have ethernet available because they can't afford it. It's quite possible they applied for rooms with ethernet and did not get them, so they took it into their own hands.
Is that wrong? Well, maybe. They avoid paying the $24/mo fee, but on the other hand, if the university can't provide it, it's only to be expected.
Can you say you wouldn't do the same thing in the same situation?
I just got back from the WoA show in London, where I was witness to Jim Collas' speech.
Nothing was specifically said about Transmeta. What did happen was they showed a video, where several logos were flashed up on the screen (Sun, Corel, Transmeta), and they then went on to talk about various future partnerships. In the actual speech bits, they mentioned Sun and Corel, but not Transmeta. As far as I'm aware, that's all there is, unless more was said at the Amiwest show.