A billion messages of 'Your interface sucks' is nearly useless. It can only confirm that there is a problem, which was probably obvious long ago if it got a billion messages about it.
Of course but if you didn't get those messages you'd be happily considering it working. Someone has to send the messages.
'Your X tool doesn't do Z' is good. This is the first really usable message. It still doesn't say how to fix the problem, but it at least states what the user wants.
That's for functionality, usability includes things where the user can't even see what it needs, all he notices is that it works badly.
'If you did W, your X tool would be a lot better' is the best. It tells the programmer exactly what's needed in no uncertain terms. It would need someone that could write the tool themselves, and hits the attitude you think the previous poster has.
Why can't you figure out that W is needed without having users file bug reports? That's what an expert designer does for your team, figure out solutions to the user's problems. Neither the user nor the programmer is really qualified to design a UI, one sets requirements, the other produces an implementation but the bridging step, the design, is something a designer does.
Complaints about GIMP illustrate this nicely. I've seen everything up to 'GIMP isn't photoshop' and never anything better. I've even voiced my own 'GIMP's interface sucks' complaints, but I can't see how to make it better, either. I just know I hate it. (I still use it, though, because I can't afford $900 for Photoshop for a hobby.) If I could express what I wanted to be different about GIMP, I'd be a lot more help, and I recognize that.
Well, you can sit around hoping you will get lucky and attract a user who knows how to fix your problem or you can get an expert and have him find the solution.
That's really what it boils down to, the user sets the requirements but doesn't know how to turn them into a program, the designer takes the requirements and designs a plan for how the software should work and what approaches it uses and the coder implements the design. You can have people skilled in more than one area, sure, but you have to recognize that these are separate skills and someone who has one of them does not automatically gain the others.
The command line is an interface only a coder could love. It's usable for people who think in code lines anyway and whose goals are probably best expressed as code too but it fails for anyone who doesn't think like that or doesn't have such goals. E.g. you have something like powerpoint, while a coder would say "I need a label reading 'Coding for Dummies' horizontally centered, vertically at the top, font size bla, etc" a secretary would think "I want the title of the page to read 'Coding for Dummies'". Regular users think in human terms, they don't care what the computer does to get it done as long as it gets done.
Yeah but with those worrying about surveillance technology is pointless as they don't need it to hurt you. Your bigger concern should be getting those thugs removed rather than hoping they're less dangerous if you give them fewer tools (when they already have guns and the right to fuck you over).
It takes only one bad guy to figure that out by himself and you'll get owned, you have to know the exploit yourself to know what measures could be taken to prevent it.
Humans have faces and can't run very fast. Seeing someone's face in a car can be difficult and the car can easily become an anonymous block of metal moving at 150 km/h. Seeing a red car run someone over will not produce a useful description of the perpetrator (unless there's some really unique paint or whatever on the car) but seeing someone shoot another person will often end with a description of his face. Cars are dangerous (pobably one of the biggest dangers in any industrial nation) and have no unique identifiers beyond their license plate. You simply need identifiers on dangerous things like that, especially when they can blend into a crowd and move at very high speeds.
What counter-theory to evolution exists (I've heard of some claims that hardly qualify as hypothesises and fail badly on the no-needless-latent-factors requirement but no theories)? What reason is there for a counter-theory? Why bother looking for something when there is no need for it? If you find evidence that really doesn't fit into evolution THEN you look for a theory that would explain the additional evidence too, before then you don't even have a clue which direction you should go into.
The catholics use the bible as some sort of starting point for their dogma but the exact rules are set by the leadership, not the book (and are often mutable). The protestants are the ones who follow only the book (of course different groups follow it in different ways...). That's where the big division came from.
Well, stuff like plagues and mass murder are pretty much rare desasters, global warming isn't acting on the timeframes present in SimCity (probably a policy point but since air pollution is already handled by the game that's probably enough). Economic stuff would make sense in the game though, especially this whole business about attracting large factories and whatnot into the city with tax breaks which seems to be a common event in real life.
Naah, it still has the usual barrier: Obscurity. Anyone can run an internet radio station, true, but few run a popular one. Control the popular ones and you control the market, doesn't matter if people can set up alternatives when noone knows about them.
I think forcing people to get creative in their workaround is beneficial overall, I'd rather see e.g. new stories use their own characters (ecven if they share traits with existing ones) than use other people's characters. Especially since other writers often write other things so those "fan fics" would probably just annoy those who know a lot about the original characters.
Well, you can change the board layout and the previous story on the official client said they couldn't even get a game going. Either way this seems to be getting way more attention than it deserves.
It might not be actual copyright infringement but it must be alledged in the claim so the court can decide if it is. AFAIK all charges must be raised at the start of a lawsuit, once the suit gets going you cannot file additional charges in the same suit or something like that. Gotta aim high because you can't correct upwards, only down.
I have a feeling it's because they know the Wii changed the rules of what games qare successful but they don't know into what, they're waiting for someone else to make more successful games they can clone (after cloning the "casual" games failed due to copying incorrectly).
What about build times? In real life it can be pretty problematic to expand a high traffic road for more capacity because the construction site will leave the road at lower capacity for months or years. Stuff wearing out and choosing whether and when to put up a construction site to repair it, managing the results of eminent domain use when you realize the low density residential area in the center of your town would be a better spot for expanding your commercial zones, old towns and marks of interest that need to be preserved, etc would add depth too but I don't know if you really want that.
The drinking level might be based more on psychology than real effect, people will often underestimate the alcohol they drank and a lower level will stop them earlier, preventing them from accidentally going over the real safe limit. Of course a limit of zero works best for that purpose, noone's going to dispute how many drinks you can have to be above that.
I believe the reason this was censored was that 1. It emulates a game that involves real drinking as part of the rules so players are tempted to recreate that part (pretty easy, legal and fun). 2. There is no way to enforce age limits for WiiWare downloads. No idea what the ESRB gave it but it might have been below the legal drinking age too and this game really shouldn't be sold below that.
Had they let this go uncensored there'd be a news story about how "Nintendo makes underage children drink beer! OMG!" and I guess they'd rather see a story about censoring some game noone wants to buy anyway.
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A billion messages of 'Your interface sucks' is nearly useless. It can only confirm that there is a problem, which was probably obvious long ago if it got a billion messages about it.
Of course but if you didn't get those messages you'd be happily considering it working. Someone has to send the messages.
'Your X tool doesn't do Z' is good. This is the first really usable message. It still doesn't say how to fix the problem, but it at least states what the user wants.
That's for functionality, usability includes things where the user can't even see what it needs, all he notices is that it works badly.
'If you did W, your X tool would be a lot better' is the best. It tells the programmer exactly what's needed in no uncertain terms. It would need someone that could write the tool themselves, and hits the attitude you think the previous poster has.
Why can't you figure out that W is needed without having users file bug reports? That's what an expert designer does for your team, figure out solutions to the user's problems. Neither the user nor the programmer is really qualified to design a UI, one sets requirements, the other produces an implementation but the bridging step, the design, is something a designer does.
Complaints about GIMP illustrate this nicely. I've seen everything up to 'GIMP isn't photoshop' and never anything better. I've even voiced my own 'GIMP's interface sucks' complaints, but I can't see how to make it better, either. I just know I hate it. (I still use it, though, because I can't afford $900 for Photoshop for a hobby.) If I could express what I wanted to be different about GIMP, I'd be a lot more help, and I recognize that.
Well, you can sit around hoping you will get lucky and attract a user who knows how to fix your problem or you can get an expert and have him find the solution.
That's really what it boils down to, the user sets the requirements but doesn't know how to turn them into a program, the designer takes the requirements and designs a plan for how the software should work and what approaches it uses and the coder implements the design. You can have people skilled in more than one area, sure, but you have to recognize that these are separate skills and someone who has one of them does not automatically gain the others.
The command line is an interface only a coder could love. It's usable for people who think in code lines anyway and whose goals are probably best expressed as code too but it fails for anyone who doesn't think like that or doesn't have such goals. E.g. you have something like powerpoint, while a coder would say "I need a label reading 'Coding for Dummies' horizontally centered, vertically at the top, font size bla, etc" a secretary would think "I want the title of the page to read 'Coding for Dummies'". Regular users think in human terms, they don't care what the computer does to get it done as long as it gets done.
The goal of a good interface is that you don't have to take the time to understand it, at least not to archieve basic use.
Yeah but with those worrying about surveillance technology is pointless as they don't need it to hurt you. Your bigger concern should be getting those thugs removed rather than hoping they're less dangerous if you give them fewer tools (when they already have guns and the right to fuck you over).
It takes only one bad guy to figure that out by himself and you'll get owned, you have to know the exploit yourself to know what measures could be taken to prevent it.
Internet access is not a utility, it's not reasonable to expect everyone to have internet access.
Sounds like the marketing policy is "pretend there are no security issues". Hey, it seems to work.
Humans have faces and can't run very fast. Seeing someone's face in a car can be difficult and the car can easily become an anonymous block of metal moving at 150 km/h. Seeing a red car run someone over will not produce a useful description of the perpetrator (unless there's some really unique paint or whatever on the car) but seeing someone shoot another person will often end with a description of his face. Cars are dangerous (pobably one of the biggest dangers in any industrial nation) and have no unique identifiers beyond their license plate. You simply need identifiers on dangerous things like that, especially when they can blend into a crowd and move at very high speeds.
When you got violent thugs running around unchecked electronic tracking is the least of your concerns. They don't need evidence to beat your face in.
What counter-theory to evolution exists (I've heard of some claims that hardly qualify as hypothesises and fail badly on the no-needless-latent-factors requirement but no theories)? What reason is there for a counter-theory? Why bother looking for something when there is no need for it? If you find evidence that really doesn't fit into evolution THEN you look for a theory that would explain the additional evidence too, before then you don't even have a clue which direction you should go into.
The catholics use the bible as some sort of starting point for their dogma but the exact rules are set by the leadership, not the book (and are often mutable). The protestants are the ones who follow only the book (of course different groups follow it in different ways...). That's where the big division came from.
Well, stuff like plagues and mass murder are pretty much rare desasters, global warming isn't acting on the timeframes present in SimCity (probably a policy point but since air pollution is already handled by the game that's probably enough). Economic stuff would make sense in the game though, especially this whole business about attracting large factories and whatnot into the city with tax breaks which seems to be a common event in real life.
Me? No. A company interested on selling products to a large number of people who get all their information from the mainstream media? Yes.
Yeah but you got a physical key then, one they're very likely to seize along with your system.
Naah, it still has the usual barrier: Obscurity. Anyone can run an internet radio station, true, but few run a popular one. Control the popular ones and you control the market, doesn't matter if people can set up alternatives when noone knows about them.
I think forcing people to get creative in their workaround is beneficial overall, I'd rather see e.g. new stories use their own characters (ecven if they share traits with existing ones) than use other people's characters. Especially since other writers often write other things so those "fan fics" would probably just annoy those who know a lot about the original characters.
Well, you can change the board layout and the previous story on the official client said they couldn't even get a game going. Either way this seems to be getting way more attention than it deserves.
It might not be actual copyright infringement but it must be alledged in the claim so the court can decide if it is. AFAIK all charges must be raised at the start of a lawsuit, once the suit gets going you cannot file additional charges in the same suit or something like that. Gotta aim high because you can't correct upwards, only down.
I have a feeling it's because they know the Wii changed the rules of what games qare successful but they don't know into what, they're waiting for someone else to make more successful games they can clone (after cloning the "casual" games failed due to copying incorrectly).
What about build times? In real life it can be pretty problematic to expand a high traffic road for more capacity because the construction site will leave the road at lower capacity for months or years. Stuff wearing out and choosing whether and when to put up a construction site to repair it, managing the results of eminent domain use when you realize the low density residential area in the center of your town would be a better spot for expanding your commercial zones, old towns and marks of interest that need to be preserved, etc would add depth too but I don't know if you really want that.
Here in Germany Baywatch did succeed despite porn being very available. Might've had other reasons though.
I guess it would drive recruitment rates up if you could drink before joining the army...
Was added during the cold war as some way of segregating the US from the "godless" communists.
The drinking level might be based more on psychology than real effect, people will often underestimate the alcohol they drank and a lower level will stop them earlier, preventing them from accidentally going over the real safe limit. Of course a limit of zero works best for that purpose, noone's going to dispute how many drinks you can have to be above that.
I believe the reason this was censored was that
1. It emulates a game that involves real drinking as part of the rules so players are tempted to recreate that part (pretty easy, legal and fun).
2. There is no way to enforce age limits for WiiWare downloads. No idea what the ESRB gave it but it might have been below the legal drinking age too and this game really shouldn't be sold below that.
Had they let this go uncensored there'd be a news story about how "Nintendo makes underage children drink beer! OMG!" and I guess they'd rather see a story about censoring some game noone wants to buy anyway.