Totally agree with you regarding moronic UI designer arrogance. It is the same attitude that gives us 'mobile' versions of websites (often without any way back to the normal version than changing the User Agent string in your device's browser) which disable zooming. The only justification I've heard is that it 'preserves the integrity of the design' which matters not one fucking iota if the user can't actually see the content that the design is meant to be presenting.
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" - Samuel Johnson.
"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" - GK Chesterton
(1) Non-technical people who like knowing they have thousands of dollars in equipment, blissfully ignorant of the technical details, but trusting in the outlandish claims of the various companies.
(2) Technical people who know about skin depth, SNR, etc. and make informed purchases and more often than not (as in my case) build their own high end audio equipment. You guys really need to come up with another name for your type of audio enthusiast. The term audiophile has been irrevocably associated with the utterly clueless $500-power-cable-buying nitwits.
They're the (almost exclusively) male equivalents of bored middle aged, middle class housewives who develop an obsession with airy-fairy new-agey nonsense like crystals and feng shui. No amount of reason, logic or science will dissuade them from belief in their magical toys, and they will take indignant offense at any attempt to do so.
Just as the new-agey types each tend to consider themselves uniquely attuned to their past lives, phases of the moon, mystical powers, etc., audiophiles of this sort almost always defend their fantasies from reality by asserting that anyone who doesn't claim to be able to hear the effect of their special $495 volume knob is a philistine without the sensitive hearing of a true audiophile.
It's a technique that some very boring, unimaginative people use in order to make themselves feel interesting and special.
Where I live it reached 107 degrees on New Year's Eve (and was almost as hot again just a couple of days ago). Hell, the temperature didn't go below about 90 all night. A hundred years ago many people simply died of heat exhaustion in weather like that. I agree that AC is vastly overused but for many places and people it is more than a luxury.
Re:As an 18 year old, I notice the reason people S
on
Kids Say Email is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Answer: predictive text. Get a phone with decent predictive text, learn to use it, and you'll never want to go back to hunt'n'pecking on those tiny little keyboards.
For a work phone I have an HTC 'smartphone' running Windows Mobile 5 (my god how it sucks) with a full slide-out querty keyboard, and for my personal phone a lovely little Nokia E65 with excellent predictive text. I can write messages at least twice as fast with the Nokia, and it only needs one hand to operate (which comes in handy for surreptitious messaging in boring meetings).
Predictive text takes about an hour or so to get used to, but once you've got the hang of it text messaging suddenly becomes useful and non-annoying. You're using a tiny fraction of the keypresses you'd use to tap out each word manually, and so the temptation to use moronic TXT SPK never arises.
[ digression ] Having said that, even the nicer smartphones seem slower and less responsive than some of the old dumbphones - my old Nokia 8210 was the fastest phone I've every used for any given function, and basically everything the phone could do could be done in about 5 keypresses. The Nokia 6230i was a great phone and much fancier, but not as responsive. The E65 is very fancy indeed, but slower again. [ end digression ]
Oh, and yes, you have a bad phone. Samsung make OK handsets in my experience, but their software is beyond awful. Stick to Nokia, Moto, Sony Ericsson. Do *not* get any model of Windows phone unless you are looking forward to having your mood constantly swing between suicidal and homicidal.
There is a significant possibility that "I" would be dead - obliterated - and the person at the other end would be a new person, albeit with my memories, characteristics, and perceptions, but not me.
But how could you tell? And if you couldn't tell why would it matter? It is arguable that nothing in the universe (and certainly no living organism) is exactly the same as itself from one second to the next anyway, and that doesn't seem to bother most people...
I believe the parent poster was speaking in terms of removing the platter from the drive and heating it in some sort of induction heater. This allows precise control of temperature and only directly heats conductive materials. Building one requires only some fairly simple electronics (scroll down for action shots).
I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but Windows Mobile (at least up to ver 5.0 - haven't tried 6 yet) does all of these things extremely badly. About the only useful thing it does properly out of the box is Outlook, and even that was a fair pain to set up. It is by miles the worst Microsoft product I've ever used. The iPhone may not have much that WM5 smartphones don't have, but it would be amazed if it was any more painfully unpleasant to use.
I've used it. It's one of the few things on WM 5.0 that actually works more or less as you'd expect it to. That said, it's really not terribly useful. I can't see any situation where it would be more useful than, say, an automatic Word-to-txt converter on the phone.
begin sort-of on-topic rant:
WM 5.0 has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen on any computing device. Inconsistent from things like the "dismiss" button which swaps sides depending on the app you're dismissing, to the utterly abitrary selection of which functions have buttons on the bottom bar and which have nice big buttons in the main screen, to the random way you quit various applications - do I click the "OK" button, or the "X" in the top right, or the "close" text on the bottom bar - the answer is different with nearly every app. Or the fact it takes 7 clicks on tiny little menu items and icons with the stylus to find the task manager to switch between running applications. Some of our more impatient and less technical users were just rebooting their phones when they ran out of memory rather than navigating that maze each time.
Then there's the flat out bugs and glitches (some of which I'm told will be fixed in some subsequent release... on a thousand dollar phone... which is a crucial business tool in my job... great, thanks, let me just bend over a bit more for you) like the way the hard buttons just stop working every so often (sometimes all of them, sometimes just one or two, like the "answer call" button). Or the screen which sometimes randomly fades to white. i.e., when you're on a call to a client and want to hang up, but the buttons don't work and the screen has gone white so you can't see where to click, the only way to hang up is to take the battery out. Prior to this I'd never seen a telephone handset that crashes and has to be rebooted.
These are the barest tip of the iceburg of the problems with these phones. They're totally unsuitable for business use or any other use where the phone needs to be relied upon. The idea of the makers of this toy dissing the as yet unreleased iPhone as irrelevant for business is hilarious.
If you need a phone to impress your friends at the bar or to play solitare on the train home from work, a WM 5.0 device is perfect for you. If you actually need to rely on it as a phone, mobile data connection, and PDA, i.e., as a business tool... I'm not sure what your other options are, but loads of phones do PDA stuff now, and plenty can do email, and although admittedly Exchange calendering integration is well-implemented and handy in WM 5, if you can give that one feature up it is well worth doing so.
These bloody things were pushed on us geeks by management and have been an unmitigated disaster from day 1. My immediate manager, not a particularly technical guy, implied I was some kind of Luddite when I expressed some doubts (fairly mild ones, as it turned out) prior to the rollout. We previously all had Nokia 8210i handsets and iBurst PCMCIA cards for our laptops, which worked reliably and quickly about 95% of the time.
I am *not* a blind MS hater. I use and deploy their products at work, and they're much better than they once were. But WM is simply crap in the very worst traditions of half-assed marketing-department-driven Microsoft dross.
Apple would have to try pretty hard with the iPhone to make it any less relevant than Windows Mobile.
*sigh* end rant. Sorry about that, WM 5.0 has made me quite bitter.
I have to say that he didn't strike me that way at all in person, neither giving a public lecture for a few hundred people, nor at dinner afterwards with a small group of fairly awestruck local Linux types.
2. his inability to get a grip and cope with the real world instead of the funny one that exists in his mind only, where head of states welcome you with arms wide open just because the insects in your beard are saying "hello".
Ignoring the bitchy nonsense, I'm genuinely curious what you're referring to with this comment. What particular head of state did he mistakenly expect to welcome him with arms wide open?
Having just this very day finally resigned from the startup some friends and I founded about 5 years ago (in Australia) when our previous employers fell victim to the burst dot.com bubble, some of my experiences may be relevant:
- There's some good advice in eariler posts on composing the business plan itself, but don't get too attached to it. Depending on your investors, partners, and clients, it will change. Once you get the VCs involved, they will write the business plans.
- Don't get the VCs in until you absolutely have to. They will screw you for everything they can get, eventually. That's just what they do, even the relatively benign ones.
- Don't give up your day job unless you can take a really hard, pessimistic look in the mirror and be confident that you can raise enough seed capital from family, friends, etc., to do at least a convincing proof of concept. It will put you in a much better position when you do have to talk to VCs.
- Australian VCs and seed-funders are almost absurdly conservative. Many talk big about supporting local innovation, but the reality is very different in my experience if you need more than about $100k to get your idea off the ground. Expect to fight over every last cent - you won't be fitting the office out with Aeron chairs.
- For this reason, when you do get VCs in, get them in big the first time. You do not want to be in the position of needing another 6 months funds to get your product ready when you've already given the VCs a big chunk of the company. Once you lose your majority share holding (and they have more directors on the board than you do), you're completely in their power.
As a postscript, the reason I'm leaving my startup is that it is, at last, in a position where it can almost afford to hire someone to replace me. I'm taking an entry level position at one of our clients that is almost exactly double my salary at the startup.
You might be interested to know that the german verb fingen means, roughly, to seize or grasp. This is in reference to your sig.
As a matter of fact, I *am* interested to know that, thank you TheIndefiniteArticle! The minimal high-school German I have retained was not sufficient for that to occur to me. Though of course now we should probably let Otto know...
They seem to be on a trolling binge in recent weeks. I don't really mind this - their tone as always been cynical and has respected no sacred cows, but the current flock of flamebait arcticles just seem to me to be a little desperate.
The blog attacks were kind of amusing last year, when the blogging hype was at it's most ridiculous, the snarky Wikipedia articles were occasionally entertaining, though I've never really understood the motivation in attacking that project (unless you happen to be an encyclopedia publisher). But it now just seems to be axe-grinding for no obvious reason than to bait various predictably-easy-to-bait groups of people, and the writing itself is less subtle and much less entertaining.
How long can you keep generating sparks from that axe you're grinding when there's no axe left?
Rupert Murdoch hasn't been an Australian citizen for decades (he was US nationalised in 1985), and News Corp moved it's base of operations to the US in 2004.
I doubt you're sincere in this spurious argument, but in case you are, try to understand that the theory of the Big Bang is a hypothesis spawned as a result of observations and developed into a theory by further observation and experimentation.
Hell I don't know - maybe you really do think that entire endevour of science is about scientists just sitting around in their 'ivory towers' making shit up in order to belittle the God of far-right American Baptists.
First of all I appreciate your post - it's interesting to hear an honest explanation of fundamentalist faith. A few quick questions though:
Why would God be any less careful when choosing His human represenative on Earth (the Pope if you're Catholic) than he was when he wrote/dictated/ispired the Bible?
I'm not anti-social, I'm at work damn it! I'm paid to drag my ass every weekday in and produce things that make my company money. I'm not interested in socialising with my co-workers just for the sake of it, and beyond a certain point I couldn't give a flying fuck how they find me.
But you know what? I get along with them just fine, because I don't waste two hours of their day chatting about inane bullshit (we do this at the pub after work... and sometimes at the pub at lunch, or a slow afternoon...), and I don't play my favoirite bloody music or radio station for all to 'enjoy'. When I'm at work, I do work.
Look maybe you don't have a job like that, but I need to concentrate to do mine, and if you waste an hour of my time in the morning opining about some shit on TV last night, that's an hour I have to stay in the evening, which I do *not* appreciate, even though social norms in most offices means I have to more or less politely put up with it. If you want to talk about 'socially repulsive', that's what it is to me.
Yes, I think you *should* consult a real scientist, and ask them what "theory" means in a scentific context, and then get them to explain to you the difference between a theory and a hypothesis, as you clearly haven't the faintest idea what you're blathering about.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree with you regarding moronic UI designer arrogance. It is the same attitude that gives us 'mobile' versions of websites (often without any way back to the normal version than changing the User Agent string in your device's browser) which disable zooming. The only justification I've heard is that it 'preserves the integrity of the design' which matters not one fucking iota if the user can't actually see the content that the design is meant to be presenting.
"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" - Samuel Johnson.
"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" - GK Chesterton
Patriotism: it's nothing to be proud of. - Me
Uh really? That seems more likely to you does it?
(1) Non-technical people who like knowing they have thousands of dollars in equipment, blissfully ignorant of the technical details, but trusting in the outlandish claims of the various companies.
(2) Technical people who know about skin depth, SNR, etc. and make informed purchases and more often than not (as in my case) build their own high end audio equipment. You guys really need to come up with another name for your type of audio enthusiast. The term audiophile has been irrevocably associated with the utterly clueless $500-power-cable-buying nitwits.
They're the (almost exclusively) male equivalents of bored middle aged, middle class housewives who develop an obsession with airy-fairy new-agey nonsense like crystals and feng shui. No amount of reason, logic or science will dissuade them from belief in their magical toys, and they will take indignant offense at any attempt to do so.
Just as the new-agey types each tend to consider themselves uniquely attuned to their past lives, phases of the moon, mystical powers, etc., audiophiles of this sort almost always defend their fantasies from reality by asserting that anyone who doesn't claim to be able to hear the effect of their special $495 volume knob is a philistine without the sensitive hearing of a true audiophile.
It's a technique that some very boring, unimaginative people use in order to make themselves feel interesting and special.
Wouldn't that be the "Blue Badges" conference ? No? Well where did they get the "Blue Hat" from then?
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
That's a great quote - where is it from?
Where I live it reached 107 degrees on New Year's Eve (and was almost as hot again just a couple of days ago). Hell, the temperature didn't go below about 90 all night. A hundred years ago many people simply died of heat exhaustion in weather like that. I agree that AC is vastly overused but for many places and people it is more than a luxury.
Answer: predictive text. Get a phone with decent predictive text, learn to use it, and you'll never want to go back to hunt'n'pecking on those tiny little keyboards.
For a work phone I have an HTC 'smartphone' running Windows Mobile 5 (my god how it sucks) with a full slide-out querty keyboard, and for my personal phone a lovely little Nokia E65 with excellent predictive text. I can write messages at least twice as fast with the Nokia, and it only needs one hand to operate (which comes in handy for surreptitious messaging in boring meetings).
Predictive text takes about an hour or so to get used to, but once you've got the hang of it text messaging suddenly becomes useful and non-annoying. You're using a tiny fraction of the keypresses you'd use to tap out each word manually, and so the temptation to use moronic TXT SPK never arises.
[ digression ]
Having said that, even the nicer smartphones seem slower and less responsive than some of the old dumbphones - my old Nokia 8210 was the fastest phone I've every used for any given function, and basically everything the phone could do could be done in about 5 keypresses. The Nokia 6230i was a great phone and much fancier, but not as responsive. The E65 is very fancy indeed, but slower again.
[ end digression ]
Oh, and yes, you have a bad phone. Samsung make OK handsets in my experience, but their software is beyond awful. Stick to Nokia, Moto, Sony Ericsson. Do *not* get any model of Windows phone unless you are looking forward to having your mood constantly swing between suicidal and homicidal.
There is a significant possibility that "I" would be dead - obliterated - and the person at the other end would be a new person, albeit with my memories, characteristics, and perceptions, but not me.
But how could you tell? And if you couldn't tell why would it matter? It is arguable that nothing in the universe (and certainly no living organism) is exactly the same as itself from one second to the next anyway, and that doesn't seem to bother most people...
I believe the parent poster was speaking in terms of removing the platter from the drive and heating it in some sort of induction heater. This allows precise control of temperature and only directly heats conductive materials. Building one requires only some fairly simple electronics (scroll down for action shots).
I don't want to sound like a broken record here, but Windows Mobile (at least up to ver 5.0 - haven't tried 6 yet) does all of these things extremely badly. About the only useful thing it does properly out of the box is Outlook, and even that was a fair pain to set up. It is by miles the worst Microsoft product I've ever used. The iPhone may not have much that WM5 smartphones don't have, but it would be amazed if it was any more painfully unpleasant to use.
Err, actually I meant to say we used use the 6230i - the 8210 was my phone before that.
*raises hand reluctantly*
I've used it. It's one of the few things on WM 5.0 that actually works more or less as you'd expect it to. That said, it's really not terribly useful. I can't see any situation where it would be more useful than, say, an automatic Word-to-txt converter on the phone.
begin sort-of on-topic rant:
WM 5.0 has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen on any computing device. Inconsistent from things like the "dismiss" button which swaps sides depending on the app you're dismissing, to the utterly abitrary selection of which functions have buttons on the bottom bar and which have nice big buttons in the main screen, to the random way you quit various applications - do I click the "OK" button, or the "X" in the top right, or the "close" text on the bottom bar - the answer is different with nearly every app. Or the fact it takes 7 clicks on tiny little menu items and icons with the stylus to find the task manager to switch between running applications. Some of our more impatient and less technical users were just rebooting their phones when they ran out of memory rather than navigating that maze each time.
Then there's the flat out bugs and glitches (some of which I'm told will be fixed in some subsequent release... on a thousand dollar phone... which is a crucial business tool in my job... great, thanks, let me just bend over a bit more for you) like the way the hard buttons just stop working every so often (sometimes all of them, sometimes just one or two, like the "answer call" button). Or the screen which sometimes randomly fades to white. i.e., when you're on a call to a client and want to hang up, but the buttons don't work and the screen has gone white so you can't see where to click, the only way to hang up is to take the battery out. Prior to this I'd never seen a telephone handset that crashes and has to be rebooted.
These are the barest tip of the iceburg of the problems with these phones. They're totally unsuitable for business use or any other use where the phone needs to be relied upon. The idea of the makers of this toy dissing the as yet unreleased iPhone as irrelevant for business is hilarious.
If you need a phone to impress your friends at the bar or to play solitare on the train home from work, a WM 5.0 device is perfect for you. If you actually need to rely on it as a phone, mobile data connection, and PDA, i.e., as a business tool... I'm not sure what your other options are, but loads of phones do PDA stuff now, and plenty can do email, and although admittedly Exchange calendering integration is well-implemented and handy in WM 5, if you can give that one feature up it is well worth doing so.
These bloody things were pushed on us geeks by management and have been an unmitigated disaster from day 1. My immediate manager, not a particularly technical guy, implied I was some kind of Luddite when I expressed some doubts (fairly mild ones, as it turned out) prior to the rollout. We previously all had Nokia 8210i handsets and iBurst PCMCIA cards for our laptops, which worked reliably and quickly about 95% of the time.
I am *not* a blind MS hater. I use and deploy their products at work, and they're much better than they once were. But WM is simply crap in the very worst traditions of half-assed marketing-department-driven Microsoft dross.
Apple would have to try pretty hard with the iPhone to make it any less relevant than Windows Mobile.
*sigh* end rant. Sorry about that, WM 5.0 has made me quite bitter.
Try http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/04102 2104658.htm, or http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/2 4/0024241&tid=191 for the slashdot take on it at the time.
This one
Heh - thanks, that is kinda amusing, but I'd be very surprised if he expected to be welcomed with arms wide open...
1. his sense of self-importance,
I have to say that he didn't strike me that way at all in person, neither giving a public lecture for a few hundred people, nor at dinner afterwards with a small group of fairly awestruck local Linux types.
2. his inability to get a grip and cope with the real world instead of the funny one that exists in his mind only, where head of states welcome you with arms wide open just because the insects in your beard are saying "hello".
Ignoring the bitchy nonsense, I'm genuinely curious what you're referring to with this comment. What particular head of state did he mistakenly expect to welcome him with arms wide open?
Having just this very day finally resigned from the startup some friends and I founded about 5 years ago (in Australia) when our previous employers fell victim to the burst dot.com bubble, some of my experiences may be relevant:
- There's some good advice in eariler posts on composing the business plan itself, but don't get too attached to it. Depending on your investors, partners, and clients, it will change. Once you get the VCs involved, they will write the business plans.
- Don't get the VCs in until you absolutely have to. They will screw you for everything they can get, eventually. That's just what they do, even the relatively benign ones.
- Don't give up your day job unless you can take a really hard, pessimistic look in the mirror and be confident that you can raise enough seed capital from family, friends, etc., to do at least a convincing proof of concept. It will put you in a much better position when you do have to talk to VCs.
- Australian VCs and seed-funders are almost absurdly conservative. Many talk big about supporting local innovation, but the reality is very different in my experience if you need more than about $100k to get your idea off the ground. Expect to fight over every last cent - you won't be fitting the office out with Aeron chairs.
- For this reason, when you do get VCs in, get them in big the first time. You do not want to be in the position of needing another 6 months funds to get your product ready when you've already given the VCs a big chunk of the company. Once you lose your majority share holding (and they have more directors on the board than you do), you're completely in their power.
As a postscript, the reason I'm leaving my startup is that it is, at last, in a position where it can almost afford to hire someone to replace me. I'm taking an entry level position at one of our clients that is almost exactly double my salary at the startup.
Finally, good luck!
You might be interested to know that the german verb fingen means, roughly, to seize or grasp. This is in reference to your sig.
As a matter of fact, I *am* interested to know that, thank you TheIndefiniteArticle! The minimal high-school German I have retained was not sufficient for that to occur to me. Though of course now we should probably let Otto know...
They seem to be on a trolling binge in recent weeks. I don't really mind this - their tone as always been cynical and has respected no sacred cows, but the current flock of flamebait arcticles just seem to me to be a little desperate.
The blog attacks were kind of amusing last year, when the blogging hype was at it's most ridiculous, the snarky Wikipedia articles were occasionally entertaining, though I've never really understood the motivation in attacking that project (unless you happen to be an encyclopedia publisher). But it now just seems to be axe-grinding for no obvious reason than to bait various predictably-easy-to-bait groups of people, and the writing itself is less subtle and much less entertaining.
How long can you keep generating sparks from that axe you're grinding when there's no axe left?
Rupert Murdoch hasn't been an Australian citizen for decades (he was US nationalised in 1985), and News Corp moved it's base of operations to the US in 2004.
I doubt you're sincere in this spurious argument, but in case you are, try to understand that the theory of the Big Bang is a hypothesis spawned as a result of observations and developed into a theory by further observation and experimentation.
Hell I don't know - maybe you really do think that entire endevour of science is about scientists just sitting around in their 'ivory towers' making shit up in order to belittle the God of far-right American Baptists.
First of all I appreciate your post - it's interesting to hear an honest explanation of fundamentalist faith. A few quick questions though:
Why would God be any less careful when choosing His human represenative on Earth (the Pope if you're Catholic) than he was when he wrote/dictated/ispired the Bible?
You're not posting this from work, are you?
.au, and had finished work, returned home, and drank half a beer by the time I posted that, thanks to my considerate co-workers.
No. I'm in
I'm not anti-social, I'm at work damn it! I'm paid to drag my ass every weekday in and produce things that make my company money. I'm not interested in socialising with my co-workers just for the sake of it, and beyond a certain point I couldn't give a flying fuck how they find me.
But you know what? I get along with them just fine, because I don't waste two hours of their day chatting about inane bullshit (we do this at the pub after work... and sometimes at the pub at lunch, or a slow afternoon...), and I don't play my favoirite bloody music or radio station for all to 'enjoy'. When I'm at work, I do work.
Look maybe you don't have a job like that, but I need to concentrate to do mine, and if you waste an hour of my time in the morning opining about some shit on TV last night, that's an hour I have to stay in the evening, which I do *not* appreciate, even though social norms in most offices means I have to more or less politely put up with it. If you want to talk about 'socially repulsive', that's what it is to me.
Yes, I think you *should* consult a real scientist, and ask them what "theory" means in a scentific context, and then get them to explain to you the difference between a theory and a hypothesis, as you clearly haven't the faintest idea what you're blathering about.
You're welcome.