(Posting anonymously to avoid karma hit for going OT)
Only on Slashdot would a discussion of Buddhism give you bad karma ; )
Physical Interfaces for Dummies
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
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· Score: 1
It's annoying to me how handheld manufacturers keep pushing features into handhelds that don't really help people to use it, it just clutters the device.
What I want is a good physical interface that has, in order of priority:
5-way thumbpad or scroller, like the new Palms and Sonys.
Transparent cover - this one's so simple, you wonder why more companies don't do it. Give it a transparent screen cover so you can pull it out of your pocket and look stuff up using just the buttons on the bottom without having to flip the cover and get the stylus. I love this about my Treo 90, just wish it had a 5-way arrow key.
Full screen use - if it uses Graffiti, have the bottom of the screen usable, instead of having a permanent graffiti pad. Like on PocketPCs and high-end Sonys.
Keyboard overlay on the Graffiti pad - if the above is too expensive, just put a keyboard overlay on top of the graffiti pad.
High-res screen - doesn't have to be color, just sharp.
Physical keyboard features - if it has a keyboard like the Treos, make sure it can be touch-typed! The Treo, Palms or Sonys don't have the little nub on the keyboard that allows for touch-typing. Also, why do they use Qwerty, instead of Dvorak or somthing better? It's not like making it Qwerty removes the learning curve for thumb-typing, they may as well make a more efficent design.
Oh god, you just gave me an great idea for a new sport - NUDE TABLE TENNIS!
Imagine the, ahem, bouncing you'd witness in such a sport! And if you want to get interesting, you could have doubles matches! Don't even get me started on the paddles...
The symbol of technological progress and man's yearning for faster framerates, being used to comb some hacker's goatee...
Somewhere, Alan Moore is crying.
Re:Site is slashdotted, here is an anticipated lis
on
Liberated Games Launches
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know what their source license is, but I was able to apt-get install Beneath a Steel Sky onto my Debian box, so it seems to meet Debian's requirements for distribution...
Damn, you're right, I remember when Gigahertz procs first came out, and I remember thinking, "We'll never be short of processing power again".
Whatever happened to the days of getting 3 fps in Doom on my 386/16 with 8 megs of RAM, and being totally blown away by it? Now I can get a whopping 3 fps in Doom 3 on my AthlonXP 2600+ with 512 megs, and it totally rocks my world.
That would never sell in America. You need "Jesus is My Zen Motorcycle Repairman Who Taught Me The Six Sigma Habits of Highly Synergized Dot-Com Billionaires Who Won Friends, Influenced People And Went From Good To Great By Moving Their Cheese In A Mythical Man-Month 2.0"
Yes folks, Jesus is coming, and he's bringing that book with him. Pheer.
But "Tantric Security Monitoring" brings up nasty images of overweight guys screwing their networks, and "Pray for Security Monitoring" doesn't inspire confidence...
Gosh, I was wondering where the Iraqi Information Minister went...
"There is no Linux here!! It is LIES, from the mouth of the evil Stallman!! It is all a Zionist conspiracy against the brave people of Utah! The people are united undet the benevolent and loving rule of Darl McBride, who shall lead us to glorious victory against the heathen penguins!! The infidels shall commit suicide against the walls of our bullshit!!
Every man and boy in Utah is ready to resist the invading horde of penguins with his life! We have held them off, and are slaughtering them like sheep on the shores of our Greeat Salt Lake! There are no Linuxes within Salt Lake City, as we defeat the avian aggressors and drive them from their homes! Our lawyers are mercilessly cutting them down as we speak, any reports of Novell or IBM winning are lies! LIES!!!
SCO is great! Praise be to SCO! There is no UNIX but SCO!!"
I have a Dreamcast and a GameCube - those are really great consoles pushed by veterans in the industry, and they both ended up as also-rans. Sega even ended up getting out of the hardware business altogether. To succeed in this industry, you need a very good hype campaign, good games, and lots of developers, as well as good hardware. Everything I've seen of Infinium so far says that they're a novice company with no marketing skills whatsoever.
The fact that Infinium is trying to change the business model of consoles a bit is interesting, but that's going to be a liability rather than an asset to them. Their attempt to turn games into a subscription-based model does not seem particularly compelling - anyone can go to a store and get a game, and no one I know is complaining about having to get physical media to play games. Besides, their plan - to sell $500 consoles and have a subsciption plan of $30/month - sounds like it'd work better for obsessive gamers, not "former gameers who have a family" like they say.
If they're going to launch a subscrription games service and they're going to be just making even on the console itself, why not just have a subscription service for regular PCs? That would cut out the cost of the hardware, since the user has already paid for it - why are they so intent on pushing hardware? Is there some special DRM thing in the Phantom?
And another thing - what happends when they go out of business? I can still play my Dreamcast, and even get more used games for it. Will I be able to play the "Phantom" for years afterwards, or will they cut off the supply of games when they go bankrupt or if "Phantom 2" comes out? I don't think many consumers will want to be tied to a company like that - remember the DiVX debacle.
In short, Infinium has a interesting but flawed business model, their hardware business is questionable, and they don't have enough of a good reputation with gamers to be able to pull this off. I think they will be remembered as another 3DO or CD-i, not the PlayStation killer.
I saw an interview with Moore done by Conan O'Brian... apparently, since after making "Roger & Me", he started overpaying his taxes on the theory that the IRS was less likely to harrass him if they would actually find that they owed *him* money if they audited. : )
Damn, I'd hate to be on the ship when *that* happens...
Picard: "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." Computer: "Confirmed. One Martini shaken not stirred, one Grey poupon, and one crack pipe. Please stand by." Picard: "???!" *click* Picard: "Picard to LaForge - I thought I told you to stop screwing with the ship's computer without authorization..." Computer: "Message has been blocked by firewall. Please gain authorization from Chief Engineer or Administrator." Picard: "What the- computer, open stateroom door." Computer: "Access denied. Please gain authorization from Chief Enginner or Administrator." Picard: "LAFORGE!!!"
I'm sorry, how did you come to believe the technology was a barrier? Do you not realize that the internet is doing just what you suggest - bringing candidates closer to the people, removing the barriers between them and the citizens? How is Dean getting PayPal donations directly from the people at large worse than GWB or Kerry holding $2000 per head dinners? Just because the gathering of the elites is done in person and PayPal is done through the internet, PayPal is more of a barrier to the candidates? Dean was the closest thing to a winnable candidate who speaks from the heart that you had, and the old guard deestroyed him because of a media blunder - you want to perpetuate this by taking away the tools he used to get so close to the candidacy?
The internet and other aspects of the computer revolution are probobly the closest thing to a democratizing influence to the system ever since the mainstream media became conglomeritized. A candidate like Dean would never have gotten as far as he was able to without the direct support of thousands of people pitching in through the internet. Through the internet, Dean (or Nader, or Buchanan, etc) can reach just as many people as Bush or Kerry. And with free software, that's one less hurdle to jump as a minor candidate.
The internet *is* the grass roots. With it, a candidate can reach the public directly, without going through five layers of advisors and reporters and media.
There are 250 million people in the U.S.(not all of them voters). There are two ways of getting your message out to 250 million people - a massive party's political machine and media campaign, or technology, especially the internet.
It would be impossible to run a presidential campaign as you suggest without leaving out about 249 million people. How many people, pray tell, is your dream candidate going to meet door-to-door? Do you think a candidate physically meets even one million people during campaign? So in your search for a more "accesible" candidate, you end up leaving out the vast majority of the population - but hey, as long as it looks populist, right?
Ironically, it's this childish wish for a candidate "among the people" that the media and campaign managers cater to. Look at every door-to-door meeting, "townhall discussion", and public speech given by the major candidates today - they're all fake staged newsbites, from the fake "Made in America" or "Mission accomplished" signs, the screened and vettted audience, canned jokes and focus group-tested phrases. All of it an attempt to look like they're in touch with "the common man". Your fear of technology is what's keeping these media blitzes going. I'd take a million screams from Dean before I listen to a mangled "speech" by GWB.
As for your last paragraph - with a population of 250 million, that's less than $1 per person. Would you trust a candidate that couldn't raise at least a few million from the people who would be voting for him? He(She)'s going to have to get about 40 million votes, after all.
And Joe Sixpack was never meant to be President of the United States. The Founders wanted the citizens to choose the wisest and most statesmanlike among them to be their leader, not settle for "the average Joe". Hell, there's even talk from the Republicans about Edwards not being "experienced", and he's a lawyer with 8 years in the Senate.
It's great because it detects any program that tries to connect to the internet from your PC, and pops up a window asking you if you want to allow the program to connect, or to block it, and if you want to set up a rule for future attempts. It also detects connection attempts from the outside, and asks you about those too. Best windows security tool I've seen.
Sigh... no, it's not hypocritical. What I am saying is that the law is wrong, but that it should be applied evenly if it is to be enforced at all.
Microsoft are one of the main proponents of software patents. If they were to be hit by some patent cases, perhaps they will re-think whether software patents are a good idea. Speaking of which, don't you find it hypocritical of a software patent advocate to be violating other's patents at all?
To use an analogy, it's like how I believe the drinking age in the U.S. should be lowered to 18, but I don't think the President's kids should be given a break when they get caught drinking 'underage'. Special treatment for a few is not the solution to bad laws, changing the law is.
Or with your war analogy, it's like what happened during Vietnam: the poor or middle class were drafted, but the rich could hide away in college or the national guard. Is it hypocritical for an anti-war protester to decry the war *and* how the rich weren't being sent off to fight the war? No it wasn't, because the fact that the rich were insulated from the war and its deaths through the selective draft meant that they supported the war and it was prolonged. If the draft had taken an even sample of rich or powerful people's kids, it's likely they would have ended the war sooner. Why do you think Michael Moore made such a big deal about senators not having kids in the military in his big anti-war movie?
Selective enforcement of the law should be fought at every level, because they lead to stupid, unjust, unfair laws. If the war on drugs actually caught all the people that did drugs, our current and previous presidents would have served jail time. Do you think that sort of thing might get them to re-think drug policy?
I don't like software patents, and I want a world where everyone, even Microsoft, can be free of them. The way to do that is through abolishing software patents, not by letting a few people and coporations 'off the hook' and making the rest held accountable.
Slashdot Mirror
(Posting anonymously to avoid karma hit for going OT)
Only on Slashdot would a discussion of Buddhism give you bad karma ; )
What I want is a good physical interface that has, in order of priority:
5-way thumbpad or scroller, like the new Palms and Sonys.
Transparent cover - this one's so simple, you wonder why more companies don't do it. Give it a transparent screen cover so you can pull it out of your pocket and look stuff up using just the buttons on the bottom without having to flip the cover and get the stylus. I love this about my Treo 90, just wish it had a 5-way arrow key.
Full screen use - if it uses Graffiti, have the bottom of the screen usable, instead of having a permanent graffiti pad. Like on PocketPCs and high-end Sonys.
Keyboard overlay on the Graffiti pad - if the above is too expensive, just put a keyboard overlay on top of the graffiti pad.
High-res screen - doesn't have to be color, just sharp.
Physical keyboard features - if it has a keyboard like the Treos, make sure it can be touch-typed! The Treo, Palms or Sonys don't have the little nub on the keyboard that allows for touch-typing. Also, why do they use Qwerty, instead of Dvorak or somthing better? It's not like making it Qwerty removes the learning curve for thumb-typing, they may as well make a more efficent design.
Oh god, you just gave me an great idea for a new sport - NUDE TABLE TENNIS!
:(
Imagine the, ahem, bouncing you'd witness in such a sport! And if you want to get interesting, you could have doubles matches! Don't even get me started on the paddles...
Sadly, no one in China can read this post
...and this is different from Cisco how?
enlish is actually pretty damn easy :)
I'll just pretend you meant to say Elvish, and agree. It is beautiful, though.
pedo mellon a minno (Speak, friend, and enter)
The symbol of technological progress and man's yearning for faster framerates, being used to comb some hacker's goatee...
Somewhere, Alan Moore is crying.
I don't know what their source license is, but I was able to apt-get install Beneath a Steel Sky onto my Debian box, so it seems to meet Debian's requirements for distribution...
Damn, you're right, I remember when Gigahertz procs first came out, and I remember thinking, "We'll never be short of processing power again".
Whatever happened to the days of getting 3 fps in Doom on my 386/16 with 8 megs of RAM, and being totally blown away by it? Now I can get a whopping 3 fps in Doom 3 on my AthlonXP 2600+ with 512 megs, and it totally rocks my world.
Things have changed so much since those days.
That would never sell in America. You need "Jesus is My Zen Motorcycle Repairman Who Taught Me The Six Sigma Habits of Highly Synergized Dot-Com Billionaires Who Won Friends, Influenced People And Went From Good To Great By Moving Their Cheese In A Mythical Man-Month 2.0"
Yes folks, Jesus is coming, and he's bringing that book with him. Pheer.
... you mean it's not Kosher?
But "Tantric Security Monitoring" brings up nasty images of overweight guys screwing their networks, and "Pray for Security Monitoring" doesn't inspire confidence...
Quick, buy a new iBook so they come out with a better model!
Bah, that's better than that abandoned industrial site I bought in Germany, it came with Rammstein :P
Gosh, I was wondering where the Iraqi Information Minister went...
"There is no Linux here!! It is LIES, from the mouth of the evil Stallman!! It is all a Zionist conspiracy against the brave people of Utah! The people are united undet the benevolent and loving rule of Darl McBride, who shall lead us to glorious victory against the heathen penguins!! The infidels shall commit suicide against the walls of our bullshit!!
Every man and boy in Utah is ready to resist the invading horde of penguins with his life! We have held them off, and are slaughtering them like sheep on the shores of our Greeat Salt Lake! There are no Linuxes within Salt Lake City, as we defeat the avian aggressors and drive them from their homes! Our lawyers are mercilessly cutting them down as we speak, any reports of Novell or IBM winning are lies! LIES!!!
SCO is great! Praise be to SCO! There is no UNIX but SCO!!"
A dupe story with an obvious bias towards file-sharrers filed under 'Your Rights Online', and a porn joke from a guy named 'ColonBlow'...
Yes folks, we've reached a new low. May Goatse have mercy on our souls.
(And for god's sake, the 'post anonymously' option is there for a reason...)
Right, I thought I'd be generous and give you all a break from the "Microsoft decade" and "Proprietary century", so enjoy it while you can, kids.
Now back to work, punks!
- Bill Gates
Well, at least you didn't get one that had some wierd ring burned into the image - hang on, I have to get the phone...
I have a Dreamcast and a GameCube - those are really great consoles pushed by veterans in the industry, and they both ended up as also-rans. Sega even ended up getting out of the hardware business altogether. To succeed in this industry, you need a very good hype campaign, good games, and lots of developers, as well as good hardware. Everything I've seen of Infinium so far says that they're a novice company with no marketing skills whatsoever.
The fact that Infinium is trying to change the business model of consoles a bit is interesting, but that's going to be a liability rather than an asset to them. Their attempt to turn games into a subscription-based model does not seem particularly compelling - anyone can go to a store and get a game, and no one I know is complaining about having to get physical media to play games. Besides, their plan - to sell $500 consoles and have a subsciption plan of $30/month - sounds like it'd work better for obsessive gamers, not "former gameers who have a family" like they say.
If they're going to launch a subscrription games service and they're going to be just making even on the console itself, why not just have a subscription service for regular PCs? That would cut out the cost of the hardware, since the user has already paid for it - why are they so intent on pushing hardware? Is there some special DRM thing in the Phantom?
And another thing - what happends when they go out of business? I can still play my Dreamcast, and even get more used games for it. Will I be able to play the "Phantom" for years afterwards, or will they cut off the supply of games when they go bankrupt or if "Phantom 2" comes out? I don't think many consumers will want to be tied to a company like that - remember the DiVX debacle.
In short, Infinium has a interesting but flawed business model, their hardware business is questionable, and they don't have enough of a good reputation with gamers to be able to pull this off. I think they will be remembered as another 3DO or CD-i, not the PlayStation killer.
I saw an interview with Moore done by Conan O'Brian... apparently, since after making "Roger & Me", he started overpaying his taxes on the theory that the IRS was less likely to harrass him if they would actually find that they owed *him* money if they audited. : )
Or, you know, they could just look at an atlas and save even more money - "Hey! We're in Canada! We don't need air conditioning! Hail to the Moose!"
Seriously, how hot does it get up there, anyway? I bet it's positively frigid compared to down here in Tennessee...
Damn, I'd hate to be on the ship when *that* happens...
Picard: "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
Computer: "Confirmed. One Martini shaken not stirred, one Grey poupon, and one crack pipe. Please stand by."
Picard: "???!"
*click*
Picard: "Picard to LaForge - I thought I told you to stop screwing with the ship's computer without authorization..."
Computer: "Message has been blocked by firewall. Please gain authorization from Chief Engineer or Administrator."
Picard: "What the- computer, open stateroom door."
Computer: "Access denied. Please gain authorization from Chief Enginner or Administrator."
Picard: "LAFORGE!!!"
I'm sorry, how did you come to believe the technology was a barrier? Do you not realize that the internet is doing just what you suggest - bringing candidates closer to the people, removing the barriers between them and the citizens? How is Dean getting PayPal donations directly from the people at large worse than GWB or Kerry holding $2000 per head dinners? Just because the gathering of the elites is done in person and PayPal is done through the internet, PayPal is more of a barrier to the candidates? Dean was the closest thing to a winnable candidate who speaks from the heart that you had, and the old guard deestroyed him because of a media blunder - you want to perpetuate this by taking away the tools he used to get so close to the candidacy?
The internet and other aspects of the computer revolution are probobly the closest thing to a democratizing influence to the system ever since the mainstream media became conglomeritized. A candidate like Dean would never have gotten as far as he was able to without the direct support of thousands of people pitching in through the internet. Through the internet, Dean (or Nader, or Buchanan, etc) can reach just as many people as Bush or Kerry. And with free software, that's one less hurdle to jump as a minor candidate.
The internet *is* the grass roots. With it, a candidate can reach the public directly, without going through five layers of advisors and reporters and media.
There are 250 million people in the U.S.(not all of them voters). There are two ways of getting your message out to 250 million people - a massive party's political machine and media campaign, or technology, especially the internet.
It would be impossible to run a presidential campaign as you suggest without leaving out about 249 million people. How many people, pray tell, is your dream candidate going to meet door-to-door? Do you think a candidate physically meets even one million people during campaign? So in your search for a more "accesible" candidate, you end up leaving out the vast majority of the population - but hey, as long as it looks populist, right?
Ironically, it's this childish wish for a candidate "among the people" that the media and campaign managers cater to. Look at every door-to-door meeting, "townhall discussion", and public speech given by the major candidates today - they're all fake staged newsbites, from the fake "Made in America" or "Mission accomplished" signs, the screened and vettted audience, canned jokes and focus group-tested phrases. All of it an attempt to look like they're in touch with "the common man". Your fear of technology is what's keeping these media blitzes going. I'd take a million screams from Dean before I listen to a mangled "speech" by GWB.
As for your last paragraph - with a population of 250 million, that's less than $1 per person. Would you trust a candidate that couldn't raise at least a few million from the people who would be voting for him? He(She)'s going to have to get about 40 million votes, after all.
And Joe Sixpack was never meant to be President of the United States. The Founders wanted the citizens to choose the wisest and most statesmanlike among them to be their leader, not settle for "the average Joe". Hell, there's even talk from the Republicans about Edwards not being "experienced", and he's a lawyer with 8 years in the Senate.
I use Tiny persoanl firewall.
It's great because it detects any program that tries to connect to the internet from your PC, and pops up a window asking you if you want to allow the program to connect, or to block it, and if you want to set up a rule for future attempts. It also detects connection attempts from the outside, and asks you about those too. Best windows security tool I've seen.
Aha! So *that's* how Saddam was making his WMD! We're on to you, punk!
Sigh... no, it's not hypocritical. What I am saying is that the law is wrong, but that it should be applied evenly if it is to be enforced at all.
Microsoft are one of the main proponents of software patents. If they were to be hit by some patent cases, perhaps they will re-think whether software patents are a good idea. Speaking of which, don't you find it hypocritical of a software patent advocate to be violating other's patents at all?
To use an analogy, it's like how I believe the drinking age in the U.S. should be lowered to 18, but I don't think the President's kids should be given a break when they get caught drinking 'underage'. Special treatment for a few is not the solution to bad laws, changing the law is.
Or with your war analogy, it's like what happened during Vietnam: the poor or middle class were drafted, but the rich could hide away in college or the national guard. Is it hypocritical for an anti-war protester to decry the war *and* how the rich weren't being sent off to fight the war? No it wasn't, because the fact that the rich were insulated from the war and its deaths through the selective draft meant that they supported the war and it was prolonged. If the draft had taken an even sample of rich or powerful people's kids, it's likely they would have ended the war sooner. Why do you think Michael Moore made such a big deal about senators not having kids in the military in his big anti-war movie?
Selective enforcement of the law should be fought at every level, because they lead to stupid, unjust, unfair laws. If the war on drugs actually caught all the people that did drugs, our current and previous presidents would have served jail time. Do you think that sort of thing might get them to re-think drug policy?
I don't like software patents, and I want a world where everyone, even Microsoft, can be free of them. The way to do that is through abolishing software patents, not by letting a few people and coporations 'off the hook' and making the rest held accountable.
build some giant Canada-space-mechs.
.... IN JAPAN!
"Konnichiwa! Watashi-eh wa Gianto-eh Robotto-eh desu-eh"