I'm not sure I even see the point of that. What if I want to copy one file from the album to my MP3 player? Do I have to copy the whole file, or do I have to split the individual file out somehow?
I guess I don't even understand what the point is. What's the benefit of MKA files over MP3?
Dubbed MusicDNA, the files contain embedded additional content including lyrics, videos, news updates and album artwork.
Ok, so lyrics and album art totally makes sense, but... can't you already do that with ID3 tags? But videos? Why would I want to store a video in my MP3 file instead of as its own video file? And the news updates, as you said, sound like spam.
To include some context to your quote:
MusicDNA was developed by Norwegian firm Bach Technology, the company that also created the MP3 file, in an attempt to combat illegal file-sharing. Using the new technology, music labels and bands will be able to send updates to the music files – with tour dates, interviews or updates to social networking pages – while illegally-downloaded files remain static.
Ok, so to me this makes it sound like, if I want to avoid getting spammed, I should listen to "illegally-downloaded files". This also implies that these files have some sort of phone-home DRM when the music is played, which is a potential privacy violation.
You know, when I'm listening to music, I often do think, "The only way this could be better is if it had DRM and reported my listening habits back to record labels, and if I was getting spammed right now. If only someone would develop the technology!"
I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago, after 10 years of dismissing it as a pain in the ass.
Well it was a pain in the ass 12 years ago. I know that lots of long-time Apple loyalists will claim that OS9 was terrific, but it was really buggy and finicky. The security was terrible, you had to manually fiddle with your virtual memory depending on which application you were using, and you had to delete your application preferences all the time because they were constantly getting corrupted.
When OSX first came out, it showed a lot of potential, but wasn't very usable. It wasn't until 10.2 (late 2002) that OSX started to show some maturity. It wasn't until they switched over to Intel processors (2006) that people really started to become happy with performance.
Further the notion that "the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity" is about a decade out of date.
Well I'd agree that it's out of date in this sense: A couple decades ago, almost all graphic designers I knew insisted on using Macs. In the intervening years, everyone has gotten more used to using Windows, Windows has gotten better, and the Adobe suite's Windows version is perfectly fine, and so Apple's dominance in the design world has waned.
However, right or wrong, there are still a lot of people who think of Apple computers as being for people who don't want to know about computers and only want to get their own work done. That in itself has the whiff of freedom, admittedly in a weird way. Often people think of computers as almost bureaucratic-- that there are all these arbitrary and stupid rules that you have to know and obey in order to get what you want. Apple has successfully marketed itself as a company that cuts down on that bureaucracy.
But overall, I wouldn't say that Apple is a niche product for the creative class (i.e. designers, filmmakers, musicians) anymore. Where it has been picking up steam has been the general consumer market and among IT people, for whom the friendly face and Unix underpinnings are an attractive combination.
Apple, as a publicly traded company, only has one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders.
I hear this all the time, and it's BS. No offense intended to you, but publicly traded companies have all sorts of obligations. IANAL, but I read a lawyer on this site explain that technically they only have the obligation to make money for shareholders if they state that intent, and that a corporation can claim that their intent is to make the world a better place-- to people interested in buying stock, caveat emptor. Regardless of that, corporations have all sorts of laws and regulations that they must adhere to. They are obligated to follow those laws, and are only permitted to seek profit within that framework.
Beyond their legal obligations, corporations have ethical and moral obligations. Yes they do. Part of the problem here is circular reasoning where people subconsciously redefine "obligation" as "legal obligation" and then say, "Well, corporations are only legally obligated to do what they're legally obligated to do." And of course that's true. That's true of people too (i.e. people are only legally obligated to do what they're legally obligated to do), but that doesn't remove the possibility of non-legal obligations. If you believe people have moral obligations beyond what the law requires, those moral obligations don't cease just because you're running a corporation.
There is (literally) no financial incentive to do a good job... Pointing the fingers at contractors is simply extraneous information. Good teams do good work no matter who they work for.
Well there are issues of incentive that aren't immediately obvious, and who you work for does matter. If you work for the government directly, there's a sense in which your stated job is basically to make the government run better, whereas when you work for an outside contractor, your stated job is to make money for the contractor. That seeps into your head and affects the way you do things.
I'm not saying that contractors can't be helpful or even that it can't be a better route to go, but it's not quite a simple issue. Contractors where you're giving them steady work aren't too bad, but short-term consultants are the worst. Their incentive is often to get things working long enough to get out the door with a check; beyond that, it can actually be in their interest to have things break now and then so you call them back in. No thanks.
I've learned over the years that laziness can be a terrific motivator in IT. That's right. Laziness. It sounds weird if you don't understand true laziness, but what you have to remember is it takes more work to support a system that isn't working well than it is to support a system that's well designed and well maintained. I remember learning that as a helpdesk tech, realizing that I could spend 5 minutes every day fixing the same problem, or I could spend 5 hours in one day fixing the problem properly, and then never have to fix it again.
So one of the problems with outside contractors is, depending on the exact deal, laziness might not be a big motivator. Contractors and consultants might be just as happy to keep all those 5-minute-a-day problems, because fixing things properly might mean the end of their contract.
Then that makes them no different from a corporation
I'm not complaining about unions in particular, I'm asking why any group-- whether it's union or a corporation or whatever you want to call it-- be able to make political contributions at all? The members of the group are already allowed to make donations as individuals, so why should groups be allowed to donate in addition to that? It's particularly screwed up because (and this is what my thought experiment was about) individuals have tighter limits on their contributions to campaigns than groups do. As an individual, I can only give a limited amount of money to a campaign. For the presidential campaign, I think it's $2,400.
So this is my understanding: If I donate $2,400 to a presidential campaign of a particular candidate, then I am legally barred from donating more. If you donate $2,400 to another candidate, then you're barred from donating more. However, if you happen to run a corporation (or union) then you can donate as much as you want. You can now essentially donate $3 million to your candidate and say, "Well, the first $2,400 of that $3 million was my personal contribution, but the $2,997,600 was from my corporation."** I'm still barred from donating more.
If donating money is speech, then in this example you're being permitted a greater freedom of speech than I have-- and I don't mean because you have more money, but because I'm legally barred from donating as much money as you're allowed to donate. IANAL, but that sounds like unequal protection under the law. The only two solutions would be (a) permit everyone to donate as much as they like; or (b) refuse groups (e.g. corporations, unions) the right to make donations to political campaigns.
** Yes, I understand that technically they would have to be accounted for differently, come out of different accounts, etc. Still, for every corporate contribution to a campaign, some person or group of people within that corporation are deciding who to contribute to. Effectively, they are able to donate money above and beyond what they're legally allowed to donate as individuals.
Right. Lots of the "free" stuff in the Internet age are cases where people have found an alternate way to make money from it. Google provides some great services by selling ad space. IBM and Intel are alway listed as big Linux code contributors, but they don't sell Linux. They sell hardware, and they want a good software to run on their hardware so that they can sell more hardware. IBM also sells lots of "e-business" services and they develop custom solutions, but they need good operating systems to run those solutions on top of. I think Google has also made contributions to the kernel because they use it for their in-house servers.
It's not charity, but it does disturb the dichotomy of competition vs. cooperation. It provides a very good example of how life is not a zero-sum game-- that one person's gain doesn't necessarily come at someone else's loss.
Yeah, except I mean something even more robust. Something where you could use it as legal proof of identification or maybe even as an ATM card. I've just had experiences where various companies and government organizations have weird requirements of proof of ID, and the worst in my opinion is treating your SSN as authentication. I've even had places refuse to accept my passport as evidence of ID but require my birth certificate instead-- in spite of the fact that anyone can request a birth certificate. It just seems like you could address a lot of real-world identification problems by creating a robust infrastructure for public-key signing/encryption.
Though it might sound like I'm off-topic and conflating two different problems, they're really part of the same problem in my mind. So much of our professional, commercial, and governmental interactions are impersonal, and sometimes even online or over the phone. You never see people, and so they couldn't possibly know you personally, yet they need to be able to be sure you are who you say you are. It's the same problem whether you visit your bank online, visit the ATM machine, or go to the bank in person.
So it's really an issue of an authentication scheme and associated infrastructure that extends to both cyberspace and meatspace-- a single simple way to verify that you are who you claim to be. Of course there would be technical concerns, security concerns, usability concerns, and even privacy concerns that would need to be addressed.
Well, a fair amount of my email reading has gone to my phone. If I had an ebook reader, I think I'd probably find a way to have it aggregate the weblogs that I frequent. I used to watch podcasts on my computer, but I now watch them on my TV. So it's not strictly new tasks.
But yes, you're right, they are often either "new tasks" or taking old tasks into new settings. Now I can read my email wherever I want to instead of at my desk. I can watch podcasts as part of my TV-watching rituals. In a sense, those are new tasks too.
it may be more nuanced than people originally thought
The only thing that seems slightly silly about the summary claiming that "the uncanny valley doesn't matter" or claiming that it's nuanced than previously thought is that, while reading about it when it was first proposed, I didn't think it was un-nuanced. It didn't seem to quite be quite clear about anything like "absolute human likeness".
The original idea, as I understood it, was kind of vague. It was more like a general trend, that you could be very far from looking like a realistic person and people would accept it. In fact, people could often accept it more readily than if it appeared much closer to a "real person". The theory was that when we were presented with reality, we were fine. When we were presented with something that was clearly not real, we were fine because we could understand very clearly, even on an intuitive/perceptual level, that we were not dealing with reality. However, when something became real enough to mostly fool us, the unrealistic features that didn't fool us became much more jarring.
The article doesn't seem to indicate that this isn't true. It mostly gives us some more details about how people may be more sensitive to some unrealistic details rather than others. It's definitely interesting, but it doesn't diminish the importance of "the uncanny valley". It just examines some specific details about how the uncanny valley works.
Good point. In a sense, you could say that these companies are "volunteers". They're each a group of people who are "scratching their own itch" and donating their resulting work back to the rest of the community.
And even if 75% of Linux code is contributed by these companies, that still leaves 25% which isn't. If you think about it, that's actually kind of impressive. You have all these huge companies paying very good developers to build a robust professional-level kernel-- heavyweight companies like Intel, Oracle, IBM, Novell, and Redhat-- and still 25% of the code comes from individual unpaid developers?
It should be apparent from the election of Obama that if a lot of people actually care about a candidate they can give in both time and money a lot more than even many large corporations
Right. Poor large corporations are so powerless when dealing with individuals. After all, the common man has so many more resources at his fingertips.
Who said corporations are supposed to be involved in the political process anyway? They're not people. They don't get a vote. Let's stop talking about this abstractly for a second: when a "corporation" donates money to a candidate, that means that a person or a set of people running a company decided who do donate money to and they directed those funds to that candidate. AFAIK, for me to donate more than a couple thousand dollars is illegal. Meanwhile, some guy running a corporation can donate as much as he wants to whoever he wants? Why, because he's wearing a special magic "corporation" hat?
What I don't quite understand is, why should the union be able to contribute money at all?
Each of the workers can contribute money. All 11 million of them can contribute money up to a specific limit. Every person working for the union itself can contribute the same amount of money as you can or as I can. Shouldn't that be enough?
If not, let's do a little thought experiment. Let's say everyone in the union and everyone associated with the union and everyone who is in a position to direct the unions funds has already contributed up to their limit. Then the union contributes more. Haven't the union members then effectively contributed more than their limit? If it's a freedom of speech issue, doesn't that grant those union members (or whoever is directing that contribution) a greater freedom of speech than I have as an individual? Is that equal protection under the law?
I guess all men are equal, but some men are more equal than others.
It's pretty normal for support personnel to have access to production systems in order to provide support.
Right. Every IT support job I've had, I've made it widely known within the company, "I can read your email." It's not "I want to read your email," or "I will read your email," but "I am able to read your email and I may have to under some weird circumstances. If there's any personal information that you're too embarrassed for me to know, don't put it in your work email."
Ultimately we should all understand that email isn't completely secure unless you encrypt it. Your search habits aren't secure, and neither is your Facebook profile. Of course Facebook should, as a matter of policy, avoid invading your privacy without good reason, but of course there are employees at Facebook who have full access to the database and are technically able to read everything you post.
Yeah, I don't think the general-purpose desktop computer will go away, but I think it's true that we are starting to see computing a little more distributed among a bunch of single-purpose devices. (not really single-purpose, but limited-purpose devices?)
Years ago, people foresaw computers in everything, and each computer being used for pretty much 1 thing. So you saw things where there was a computer built-in to a refrigerator and everyone laughed at how impractical and silly that was. It was silly, but on the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if we saw embedded computers in most TVs in the next few years. We have the technology now to put a small computer with wireless networking and video decoding into our TVs without adding a whole lot of size, weight, or cost, and so it's already happening.
Another example of this sort of thing is the Kindle. It's a little computer that does a few things, but does them better than a desktop would. It's light, easy to carry around, easy to hold in one hand, and because of the e-paper display it provides a good reading experience.
And then of course there's smart phones. They don't aim to replace desktop computers. Though lots of people act like they're going to take over, they really only do a few things very well. For a smartphone to be adequate, you need to be able to get by with slow input, no tactile feedback, small screens, and big UI elements. (GPS devices are another example of single-purpose computers, but they're really being swallowed by smartphones these days)
So in this sense, I agree with the author: more computing tasks are probably going to move into being done on limited-purpose devices (i.e. "single-purpose devices" that actually do a handful of things). There will be a shift in how we interact with computers and how we think of them. There will still be desktop computers where we sit down to work and multitask, but there may also be a couple of different devices that you carry around and use for communication/entertainment/utility as well as a couple devices in your home, and these devices will be targeted towards mostly doing one thing at a time.
Because honestly, when I'm using my phone, I don't generally just sit down and multitask on it unless I'm trying to kill time. I take it out when I want to make a phone call or when I want to look a particular thing up on the Internet. I'm sure part of the value of an e-reader to me would be that I would only use it for one thing at a time. When I sit with my laptop, I read web pages, check email, listen to music, IM people, watch videos, and do all kinds of stuff more or less at the same time. When I sit down to read a book, I want to just sit down to read a book. When I talk to someone on the phone, I just want to talk to that person on the phone.
Yeah, but calling it a "document" is still a little weird. Like if I'm in Windows and I see a DLL file, is that a document? I guess so, but it's also a "library". Totally weird if you stop to think about it.
But mostly I wasn't even talking about what makes sense to me or what I think should make sense, but the sorts of questions I ran into back in the mid-90s or so, when computers were becoming more common and GUIs were becoming a more common UI. It seems like everyone is used to it now, but at the time people didn't understand "folders" and couldn't figure out how to use a mouse.
Lots of people don't realize, but it's the same thing with MP3s. If you're distributing an MP3 encoder/decoder, you're supposed to pay a licensing fee for associated patents, even if there are no copyright issues. In addition, you're distributing MP3s, you're supposed to pay a fee for those as well.
Apparently part of the reason Apple decided to go with AAC instead of MP3 is that the licensing terms are better. They still have to pay a fee for the encoders and decoders, but they don't have to pay a fee for each AAC they sell.
It's good for zooming into a particular set of text or something, but the pinching action does give a bit of additional control. For example, try zooming in and out to different degrees on different details in photos on your iPhone.
It never ceases to amaze me how some people think that things like files
and folders are too confusing for the novice
I've actually thought sometimes that the "folder" metaphor was a little confusing, but probably not for the reason you're talking about. I remember trying to teach people about computers back in the command-line days and then teaching people when the directories became "folders", and at first people seemed to have a harder time understanding "folders".
It seems that the idea of "files" or "documents" as discrete packets of information is easy enough, and then those files can be sorted into logical containers called "directories". A directory can hold files and can also hold other directories. It's pretty straight forward.
But then I remember the first few times I tried to teach someone who was computer illiterate about folders, and they seemed to get confused in ways that were hard to wrap my head around. People asked things like, why are these folders? and why would I want to put folders in other folders? Do folders get full? Where's the file cabinet? How do I put folders into a "hard drive"?
I mean, if you think about it, the desktop metaphor is a little bit screwed up. I go to my computer's "desktop" and on that desktop I have "my computer", which in turn has the "desktop" in it. And then my real computer is on my real desktop, which is kind of weird. Like why should their be a graphic representation of the computer inside the computer's GUI? Do you have a computer in your computer? It's totally weird, but we've gotten somewhat used to it.
The whole thing reminds me of a study a few years back where they found computer novices often had an easier time learning about computers if they learned on a CLI instead of a GUI. Apparently the interaction of issuing a command and then receiving a response was easier to deal with than being given a symbolic representational little world to navigate around in.
. There's no such thing as an intuitive computer interface, so I wish so-called UI "experts" would drop that word from their vocabulary.
I think you can only claim that if you're looking at the UI objectively rather than as a human tool.
Now I'm sure that statement of mine is terrifically unclear, so let me see if I can flesh it out a little: No UI is absolutely objectively more "intuitive" than another, but some are more intuitive to human beings than others. If you stop looking at computers as bear objects and look at them in the context of human use, you find that certain metaphors are easier than others for people to relate to. If you layout information one way, it might be very difficult for a person to understand quickly. Lay the exact same information out a different way, and people might be able to understand it immediately.
More and more we're finding that the tabula rasa model of mental development doesn't reflect reality. People don't seem to come with a whole lot of information at birth, but people generally share a bunch of instincts, intuitions, biases, and methods of processing information. Whether it's from birth or we learn it from early-life experience, we all understand the concepts of grabbing things, pushing things, pulling things, and pointing at things.
All this isn't an argument for 3D interfaces instead of 2D interfaces, but some interfaces are more intuitive than others. Successful 2D interfaces already make use of our spacial intuition and common non-inborn ideas like "trash". Even things like "checkboxes" come from conventions that existed before computers, and those conventions were in turn based on layouts that were easy for people to understand.
I think the only people talk about being "revolutionary" is the multitouch stuff. It's more than just "cute", but there is a limit to its usefulness. Also, when you get down to it, it's only a couple of gestures implemented in a couple of places. It mostly amounts to a very good way of zooming in and out.
I think what people like about the interface is that it's simple and direct and it works well. Instead of using a stylus to point to tiny checkboxes or using scroll wheel with your thumb to navigate through the OS, they just made all the controls simple enough and big enough that you can just point to what you want and it does what you want. It's well designed, not revolutionary.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I even see the point of that. What if I want to copy one file from the album to my MP3 player? Do I have to copy the whole file, or do I have to split the individual file out somehow?
I guess I don't even understand what the point is. What's the benefit of MKA files over MP3?
From TFA:
Dubbed MusicDNA, the files contain embedded additional content including lyrics, videos, news updates and album artwork.
Ok, so lyrics and album art totally makes sense, but... can't you already do that with ID3 tags? But videos? Why would I want to store a video in my MP3 file instead of as its own video file? And the news updates, as you said, sound like spam.
To include some context to your quote:
MusicDNA was developed by Norwegian firm Bach Technology, the company that also created the MP3 file, in an attempt to combat illegal file-sharing. Using the new technology, music labels and bands will be able to send updates to the music files – with tour dates, interviews or updates to social networking pages – while illegally-downloaded files remain static.
Ok, so to me this makes it sound like, if I want to avoid getting spammed, I should listen to "illegally-downloaded files". This also implies that these files have some sort of phone-home DRM when the music is played, which is a potential privacy violation.
You know, when I'm listening to music, I often do think, "The only way this could be better is if it had DRM and reported my listening habits back to record labels, and if I was getting spammed right now. If only someone would develop the technology!"
I switched to the Mac about 2 years ago, after 10 years of dismissing it as a pain in the ass.
Well it was a pain in the ass 12 years ago. I know that lots of long-time Apple loyalists will claim that OS9 was terrific, but it was really buggy and finicky. The security was terrible, you had to manually fiddle with your virtual memory depending on which application you were using, and you had to delete your application preferences all the time because they were constantly getting corrupted.
When OSX first came out, it showed a lot of potential, but wasn't very usable. It wasn't until 10.2 (late 2002) that OSX started to show some maturity. It wasn't until they switched over to Intel processors (2006) that people really started to become happy with performance.
Further the notion that "the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity" is about a decade out of date.
Well I'd agree that it's out of date in this sense: A couple decades ago, almost all graphic designers I knew insisted on using Macs. In the intervening years, everyone has gotten more used to using Windows, Windows has gotten better, and the Adobe suite's Windows version is perfectly fine, and so Apple's dominance in the design world has waned.
However, right or wrong, there are still a lot of people who think of Apple computers as being for people who don't want to know about computers and only want to get their own work done. That in itself has the whiff of freedom, admittedly in a weird way. Often people think of computers as almost bureaucratic-- that there are all these arbitrary and stupid rules that you have to know and obey in order to get what you want. Apple has successfully marketed itself as a company that cuts down on that bureaucracy.
But overall, I wouldn't say that Apple is a niche product for the creative class (i.e. designers, filmmakers, musicians) anymore. Where it has been picking up steam has been the general consumer market and among IT people, for whom the friendly face and Unix underpinnings are an attractive combination.
Apple, as a publicly traded company, only has one obligation: to make a profit for shareholders.
I hear this all the time, and it's BS. No offense intended to you, but publicly traded companies have all sorts of obligations. IANAL, but I read a lawyer on this site explain that technically they only have the obligation to make money for shareholders if they state that intent, and that a corporation can claim that their intent is to make the world a better place-- to people interested in buying stock, caveat emptor. Regardless of that, corporations have all sorts of laws and regulations that they must adhere to. They are obligated to follow those laws, and are only permitted to seek profit within that framework.
Beyond their legal obligations, corporations have ethical and moral obligations. Yes they do. Part of the problem here is circular reasoning where people subconsciously redefine "obligation" as "legal obligation" and then say, "Well, corporations are only legally obligated to do what they're legally obligated to do." And of course that's true. That's true of people too (i.e. people are only legally obligated to do what they're legally obligated to do), but that doesn't remove the possibility of non-legal obligations. If you believe people have moral obligations beyond what the law requires, those moral obligations don't cease just because you're running a corporation.
There is (literally) no financial incentive to do a good job... Pointing the fingers at contractors is simply extraneous information. Good teams do good work no matter who they work for.
Well there are issues of incentive that aren't immediately obvious, and who you work for does matter. If you work for the government directly, there's a sense in which your stated job is basically to make the government run better, whereas when you work for an outside contractor, your stated job is to make money for the contractor. That seeps into your head and affects the way you do things.
I'm not saying that contractors can't be helpful or even that it can't be a better route to go, but it's not quite a simple issue. Contractors where you're giving them steady work aren't too bad, but short-term consultants are the worst. Their incentive is often to get things working long enough to get out the door with a check; beyond that, it can actually be in their interest to have things break now and then so you call them back in. No thanks.
I've learned over the years that laziness can be a terrific motivator in IT. That's right. Laziness. It sounds weird if you don't understand true laziness, but what you have to remember is it takes more work to support a system that isn't working well than it is to support a system that's well designed and well maintained. I remember learning that as a helpdesk tech, realizing that I could spend 5 minutes every day fixing the same problem, or I could spend 5 hours in one day fixing the problem properly, and then never have to fix it again.
So one of the problems with outside contractors is, depending on the exact deal, laziness might not be a big motivator. Contractors and consultants might be just as happy to keep all those 5-minute-a-day problems, because fixing things properly might mean the end of their contract.
Did you just abbreviate "in my experience" as "i.m.experience"? How many keystrokes did you save on that one?
What's not true?
Then that makes them no different from a corporation
I'm not complaining about unions in particular, I'm asking why any group-- whether it's union or a corporation or whatever you want to call it-- be able to make political contributions at all? The members of the group are already allowed to make donations as individuals, so why should groups be allowed to donate in addition to that? It's particularly screwed up because (and this is what my thought experiment was about) individuals have tighter limits on their contributions to campaigns than groups do. As an individual, I can only give a limited amount of money to a campaign. For the presidential campaign, I think it's $2,400.
So this is my understanding: If I donate $2,400 to a presidential campaign of a particular candidate, then I am legally barred from donating more. If you donate $2,400 to another candidate, then you're barred from donating more. However, if you happen to run a corporation (or union) then you can donate as much as you want. You can now essentially donate $3 million to your candidate and say, "Well, the first $2,400 of that $3 million was my personal contribution, but the $2,997,600 was from my corporation."** I'm still barred from donating more.
If donating money is speech, then in this example you're being permitted a greater freedom of speech than I have-- and I don't mean because you have more money, but because I'm legally barred from donating as much money as you're allowed to donate. IANAL, but that sounds like unequal protection under the law. The only two solutions would be (a) permit everyone to donate as much as they like; or (b) refuse groups (e.g. corporations, unions) the right to make donations to political campaigns.
** Yes, I understand that technically they would have to be accounted for differently, come out of different accounts, etc. Still, for every corporate contribution to a campaign, some person or group of people within that corporation are deciding who to contribute to. Effectively, they are able to donate money above and beyond what they're legally allowed to donate as individuals.
Right. Lots of the "free" stuff in the Internet age are cases where people have found an alternate way to make money from it. Google provides some great services by selling ad space. IBM and Intel are alway listed as big Linux code contributors, but they don't sell Linux. They sell hardware, and they want a good software to run on their hardware so that they can sell more hardware. IBM also sells lots of "e-business" services and they develop custom solutions, but they need good operating systems to run those solutions on top of. I think Google has also made contributions to the kernel because they use it for their in-house servers.
It's not charity, but it does disturb the dichotomy of competition vs. cooperation. It provides a very good example of how life is not a zero-sum game-- that one person's gain doesn't necessarily come at someone else's loss.
Yeah, except I mean something even more robust. Something where you could use it as legal proof of identification or maybe even as an ATM card. I've just had experiences where various companies and government organizations have weird requirements of proof of ID, and the worst in my opinion is treating your SSN as authentication. I've even had places refuse to accept my passport as evidence of ID but require my birth certificate instead-- in spite of the fact that anyone can request a birth certificate. It just seems like you could address a lot of real-world identification problems by creating a robust infrastructure for public-key signing/encryption.
Though it might sound like I'm off-topic and conflating two different problems, they're really part of the same problem in my mind. So much of our professional, commercial, and governmental interactions are impersonal, and sometimes even online or over the phone. You never see people, and so they couldn't possibly know you personally, yet they need to be able to be sure you are who you say you are. It's the same problem whether you visit your bank online, visit the ATM machine, or go to the bank in person.
So it's really an issue of an authentication scheme and associated infrastructure that extends to both cyberspace and meatspace-- a single simple way to verify that you are who you claim to be. Of course there would be technical concerns, security concerns, usability concerns, and even privacy concerns that would need to be addressed.
Well, a fair amount of my email reading has gone to my phone. If I had an ebook reader, I think I'd probably find a way to have it aggregate the weblogs that I frequent. I used to watch podcasts on my computer, but I now watch them on my TV. So it's not strictly new tasks.
But yes, you're right, they are often either "new tasks" or taking old tasks into new settings. Now I can read my email wherever I want to instead of at my desk. I can watch podcasts as part of my TV-watching rituals. In a sense, those are new tasks too.
it may be more nuanced than people originally thought
The only thing that seems slightly silly about the summary claiming that "the uncanny valley doesn't matter" or claiming that it's nuanced than previously thought is that, while reading about it when it was first proposed, I didn't think it was un-nuanced. It didn't seem to quite be quite clear about anything like "absolute human likeness".
The original idea, as I understood it, was kind of vague. It was more like a general trend, that you could be very far from looking like a realistic person and people would accept it. In fact, people could often accept it more readily than if it appeared much closer to a "real person". The theory was that when we were presented with reality, we were fine. When we were presented with something that was clearly not real, we were fine because we could understand very clearly, even on an intuitive/perceptual level, that we were not dealing with reality. However, when something became real enough to mostly fool us, the unrealistic features that didn't fool us became much more jarring.
The article doesn't seem to indicate that this isn't true. It mostly gives us some more details about how people may be more sensitive to some unrealistic details rather than others. It's definitely interesting, but it doesn't diminish the importance of "the uncanny valley". It just examines some specific details about how the uncanny valley works.
Good point. In a sense, you could say that these companies are "volunteers". They're each a group of people who are "scratching their own itch" and donating their resulting work back to the rest of the community.
And even if 75% of Linux code is contributed by these companies, that still leaves 25% which isn't. If you think about it, that's actually kind of impressive. You have all these huge companies paying very good developers to build a robust professional-level kernel-- heavyweight companies like Intel, Oracle, IBM, Novell, and Redhat-- and still 25% of the code comes from individual unpaid developers?
Seems to me more like:
the right to free speech + right of association = right of members of an association to speak freely.
I don't see why the group itself should get special rights above and beyond what their individual members have.
It should be apparent from the election of Obama that if a lot of people actually care about a candidate they can give in both time and money a lot more than even many large corporations
Right. Poor large corporations are so powerless when dealing with individuals. After all, the common man has so many more resources at his fingertips.
Who said corporations are supposed to be involved in the political process anyway? They're not people. They don't get a vote. Let's stop talking about this abstractly for a second: when a "corporation" donates money to a candidate, that means that a person or a set of people running a company decided who do donate money to and they directed those funds to that candidate. AFAIK, for me to donate more than a couple thousand dollars is illegal. Meanwhile, some guy running a corporation can donate as much as he wants to whoever he wants? Why, because he's wearing a special magic "corporation" hat?
What I don't quite understand is, why should the union be able to contribute money at all?
Each of the workers can contribute money. All 11 million of them can contribute money up to a specific limit. Every person working for the union itself can contribute the same amount of money as you can or as I can. Shouldn't that be enough?
If not, let's do a little thought experiment. Let's say everyone in the union and everyone associated with the union and everyone who is in a position to direct the unions funds has already contributed up to their limit. Then the union contributes more. Haven't the union members then effectively contributed more than their limit? If it's a freedom of speech issue, doesn't that grant those union members (or whoever is directing that contribution) a greater freedom of speech than I have as an individual? Is that equal protection under the law?
I guess all men are equal, but some men are more equal than others.
It's pretty normal for support personnel to have access to production systems in order to provide support.
Right. Every IT support job I've had, I've made it widely known within the company, "I can read your email." It's not "I want to read your email," or "I will read your email," but "I am able to read your email and I may have to under some weird circumstances. If there's any personal information that you're too embarrassed for me to know, don't put it in your work email."
Ultimately we should all understand that email isn't completely secure unless you encrypt it. Your search habits aren't secure, and neither is your Facebook profile. Of course Facebook should, as a matter of policy, avoid invading your privacy without good reason, but of course there are employees at Facebook who have full access to the database and are technically able to read everything you post.
Yeah, I don't think the general-purpose desktop computer will go away, but I think it's true that we are starting to see computing a little more distributed among a bunch of single-purpose devices. (not really single-purpose, but limited-purpose devices?)
Years ago, people foresaw computers in everything, and each computer being used for pretty much 1 thing. So you saw things where there was a computer built-in to a refrigerator and everyone laughed at how impractical and silly that was. It was silly, but on the other hand I wouldn't be surprised if we saw embedded computers in most TVs in the next few years. We have the technology now to put a small computer with wireless networking and video decoding into our TVs without adding a whole lot of size, weight, or cost, and so it's already happening.
Another example of this sort of thing is the Kindle. It's a little computer that does a few things, but does them better than a desktop would. It's light, easy to carry around, easy to hold in one hand, and because of the e-paper display it provides a good reading experience.
And then of course there's smart phones. They don't aim to replace desktop computers. Though lots of people act like they're going to take over, they really only do a few things very well. For a smartphone to be adequate, you need to be able to get by with slow input, no tactile feedback, small screens, and big UI elements. (GPS devices are another example of single-purpose computers, but they're really being swallowed by smartphones these days)
So in this sense, I agree with the author: more computing tasks are probably going to move into being done on limited-purpose devices (i.e. "single-purpose devices" that actually do a handful of things). There will be a shift in how we interact with computers and how we think of them. There will still be desktop computers where we sit down to work and multitask, but there may also be a couple of different devices that you carry around and use for communication/entertainment/utility as well as a couple devices in your home, and these devices will be targeted towards mostly doing one thing at a time.
Because honestly, when I'm using my phone, I don't generally just sit down and multitask on it unless I'm trying to kill time. I take it out when I want to make a phone call or when I want to look a particular thing up on the Internet. I'm sure part of the value of an e-reader to me would be that I would only use it for one thing at a time. When I sit with my laptop, I read web pages, check email, listen to music, IM people, watch videos, and do all kinds of stuff more or less at the same time. When I sit down to read a book, I want to just sit down to read a book. When I talk to someone on the phone, I just want to talk to that person on the phone.
Yeah, but calling it a "document" is still a little weird. Like if I'm in Windows and I see a DLL file, is that a document? I guess so, but it's also a "library". Totally weird if you stop to think about it.
But mostly I wasn't even talking about what makes sense to me or what I think should make sense, but the sorts of questions I ran into back in the mid-90s or so, when computers were becoming more common and GUIs were becoming a more common UI. It seems like everyone is used to it now, but at the time people didn't understand "folders" and couldn't figure out how to use a mouse.
Yeah, well...
Lots of people don't realize, but it's the same thing with MP3s. If you're distributing an MP3 encoder/decoder, you're supposed to pay a licensing fee for associated patents, even if there are no copyright issues. In addition, you're distributing MP3s, you're supposed to pay a fee for those as well.
Apparently part of the reason Apple decided to go with AAC instead of MP3 is that the licensing terms are better. They still have to pay a fee for the encoders and decoders, but they don't have to pay a fee for each AAC they sell.
It's good for zooming into a particular set of text or something, but the pinching action does give a bit of additional control. For example, try zooming in and out to different degrees on different details in photos on your iPhone.
It never ceases to amaze me how some people think that things like files and folders are too confusing for the novice
I've actually thought sometimes that the "folder" metaphor was a little confusing, but probably not for the reason you're talking about. I remember trying to teach people about computers back in the command-line days and then teaching people when the directories became "folders", and at first people seemed to have a harder time understanding "folders".
It seems that the idea of "files" or "documents" as discrete packets of information is easy enough, and then those files can be sorted into logical containers called "directories". A directory can hold files and can also hold other directories. It's pretty straight forward.
But then I remember the first few times I tried to teach someone who was computer illiterate about folders, and they seemed to get confused in ways that were hard to wrap my head around. People asked things like, why are these folders? and why would I want to put folders in other folders? Do folders get full? Where's the file cabinet? How do I put folders into a "hard drive"?
I mean, if you think about it, the desktop metaphor is a little bit screwed up. I go to my computer's "desktop" and on that desktop I have "my computer", which in turn has the "desktop" in it. And then my real computer is on my real desktop, which is kind of weird. Like why should their be a graphic representation of the computer inside the computer's GUI? Do you have a computer in your computer? It's totally weird, but we've gotten somewhat used to it.
The whole thing reminds me of a study a few years back where they found computer novices often had an easier time learning about computers if they learned on a CLI instead of a GUI. Apparently the interaction of issuing a command and then receiving a response was easier to deal with than being given a symbolic representational little world to navigate around in.
. There's no such thing as an intuitive computer interface, so I wish so-called UI "experts" would drop that word from their vocabulary.
I think you can only claim that if you're looking at the UI objectively rather than as a human tool.
Now I'm sure that statement of mine is terrifically unclear, so let me see if I can flesh it out a little: No UI is absolutely objectively more "intuitive" than another, but some are more intuitive to human beings than others. If you stop looking at computers as bear objects and look at them in the context of human use, you find that certain metaphors are easier than others for people to relate to. If you layout information one way, it might be very difficult for a person to understand quickly. Lay the exact same information out a different way, and people might be able to understand it immediately.
More and more we're finding that the tabula rasa model of mental development doesn't reflect reality. People don't seem to come with a whole lot of information at birth, but people generally share a bunch of instincts, intuitions, biases, and methods of processing information. Whether it's from birth or we learn it from early-life experience, we all understand the concepts of grabbing things, pushing things, pulling things, and pointing at things.
All this isn't an argument for 3D interfaces instead of 2D interfaces, but some interfaces are more intuitive than others. Successful 2D interfaces already make use of our spacial intuition and common non-inborn ideas like "trash". Even things like "checkboxes" come from conventions that existed before computers, and those conventions were in turn based on layouts that were easy for people to understand.
I think the only people talk about being "revolutionary" is the multitouch stuff. It's more than just "cute", but there is a limit to its usefulness. Also, when you get down to it, it's only a couple of gestures implemented in a couple of places. It mostly amounts to a very good way of zooming in and out.
I think what people like about the interface is that it's simple and direct and it works well. Instead of using a stylus to point to tiny checkboxes or using scroll wheel with your thumb to navigate through the OS, they just made all the controls simple enough and big enough that you can just point to what you want and it does what you want. It's well designed, not revolutionary.