On this day 30 years ago, I took a girl to go see it as my first date. We were all riding back from our high school senior picnic, and she asked about the book I was reading (the novelization), so I took her to the movie.
The second movie I took my fiancee too, and by the third movie we were married. Wow, you took that girl and your fiancee to the second movie? Did they mind? Were all three of you married? (Are you from Utah or something?)
Also Nintendo thumb. I mean, c'mon. How cool is that? Actually, I converted one of those to USB a while back - mostly for the retro charm and bragging rights, but also to learn USB - but in actually using it for games I found it had a great feel to it and the D-pad was very responsive. Having used various other controllers on the PC (such as PS2 gamepads or similar USB gamepads) I think the NES controller performed favorably.
Certainly not too shabby - though I feel like the ergonomic grip-base made the thing a little unstable. (Essentially, the stability of the stick is dependent on your ability to hold the base of the stick, stably, with your left hand.)
I was more into the various Suncom products - the Tac 5 was a great stick. When mine broke I used parts from a Tac 3 to fix it. Also the original Icon-troller, the little joystick that was built to stick on to the side of a C-64C or C-128 keyboard as a mouse alternative - that thing was surprisingly good for games. Very responsive and easy to control, especially when you had it semi-permanently mounted to your computer.:)
Before you know it there'll be a big forest of this stuff emitting deadly lung-rotting spores, and the forest will be home to a legion of giant, deadly, and extremely vindictive insects...
Absolutely, but all examples and all problems you mentioned here are in no way specific for Linux. They are not even specific for free or open source software in general.
I'm talking about how Linux as an operating platform - so I must include the software that's available for and commonly used on Linux as part of the definition of the "Platform". After all, Linux itself is not and never will be "in touch with the average user". It's a technical tool with a very specific set of jobs to perform. So when we talk about "Linux" being made friendly to "average users" what we're really talking about is packaging and bundled software.
Or are you saying that to code with one's own sensibilities in mind is egotistical?
This comes a bit closer of what I meant. Of course I did not mean programs your or me write for ourselves, but it could be seen as a bit egoistical to demand that others write programs for us advanced (or adept) users and ignoring the rest.
Well, the theory is that technically-minded people are writing all the software out there, and some of them may see it my way - and we can effectively choose to write software for ourselves, as a collective group, rather than writing the software for other people to use in an effort to advocate Linux. It's true that different development groups could pursue both goals simultaneously - but that isn't happening at present.
.... while making the GUI gradually approach equivalence to Windows.
I really cannot agree to you pessimistic view. I am with Linux since some 0.9.x kernel and still I don't think something has taken away from me.
That's not the point. Nothing's been taken away but in some sense neither has much been added. There's been lots of kernel development, of course, and new programming languages, better libraries and daemons, and so on - but not a lot of thought put into making all that work nicely together. And simultaneously, most of the GUI development is being done as a kind of veneer over this layer - not really an extension of the system that it runs on, but a mechanism that serves to hide the underlying system, or provide abstractions that aren't applicable outside of the GUI.
I have seen that Linux becomes more and more end-user friendly, but I have yet to see that this has any negative effect for me as tech-geek.
Not the point. The point is not that development in that direction harms adept users - just that I feel like we're missing out on some potential. We could be designing this system for ourselves, and coming up with something really beautiful as a result. Instead all serious UI work on Linux is geared toward "average users".
Without leadership of some kind there's no consensus on how things should work
I am not 100% sure if this is not a contradiction to your previous statements. A consensus how things should work is IMHO only for noobs necessary. For your adept user I see it more as a hindrance. An adept user should be able to experiment with a wide field of concepts and ideas. I do write software for myself. Some of my GUIs are 100% adapted to my personal needs and might be a bit peculiar to anyone else. I like my software the way it is and I give a **** how others might think it should work.
I wouldn't say it's a contradiction, but I certainly don't regard it as a trivial problem either. I see the creation of operating environments for self-proclaimed adept users as a largely unexplored field, and these kinds of users also tend to have eccentric or very particular tastes. How do you boil that down to some common conventions without tramping on all that? That is a problem, but I think exploring that is a lot more interesting than catering to t
At what point in time did it become the company's responsibility to enforce the law? Shouldn't JT be going after the Justice Deparment or Police Departments or something like that? If a law is not being enforced it's the law enforcement entity's problem.
Of course, if it isn't a law and it's just an industry accepted practice, shouldn't the industry that is committing the offence be held accountable? Why hold MS responsible is Walmart sells something in a way they shouldn't?
Can someone please explain this without using the word Chewbacca? Well, you see, the thing is, Wookies don't live on Endor, so having a Wookie on Endor with a bunch of tiny little midget Ewoks doesn't make any sense. If it doesn't make any sense, you must acquit.
Who do you root for in a case like this? I mean, I don't always approve of Microsoft. And Thompson, well......I take it back. Go Microsoft! Wipe the floor with this punk!
I understand what you mean, but I cannot agree. Especially:
Do you base your text editor on the assumption of a lot of mouse use and so follow today's typical GUI guidelines, or do you tailor it to a higher degree of keyboard usage, and maybe come up with something Emacs-ish?
or
You could have two text editors, naturally - but one of the requirements for being friendly to the "average user" - or to anybody at all, for that matter, is a certain degree of consistency. Wildly disparate user interfaces don't serve anybody - so the software world is (necessarily?) divided into camps
You don't talk about Linux, you talk about programs.
The system is no good without the programs. The existence of the system is meaningless without the programs. The system exists only to provide a way to run the programs. The programs people run effectively are the system, from a user perspective, and how they interact with them defines their interaction with the system.
When I say "I want Linux to be a system for me", I mean that I'm not interested in writing code to run on Linux that is specifically targeted to the "average user".
Right, if I had to choose, whether it is code for me or someone else, I would be egoistical, too. But this choice is not necessary.
I don't get what you're saying here. If you're saying it's egotistical to regard myself as an "adept" and the "average user" as something less sophisticated than myself - well, yeah. I don't mean to be a judgmental prick about it, it just seems the most convenient way to explain the situation - rather than saying "that which I regard as common, or perceive as the lowest common denominator, but in fact refers to the large majority of people who are not interested in computers for their own sake" I just say "average user", as was said in the article. Rather than saying "people like myself, who are interested in technology for its own sake, often programmers who carry programmers' sensibilities to their interactions with the system", I say "adept". It is judgmental but it's just meant to be convenient terminology.
Or are you saying that to code with one's own sensibilities in mind is egotistical? I see no reason why this should be the case. As programmers we can make things work how we like. This gives us the potential to explore new or different ideas as we see fit. That kind of exploration isn't always the most productive thing to do from a practical standpoint, as a lot of effort goes into making any kind of real, useful application and it's kind of a shame to slap useful code with a UI that's so quirky as to be useless...
You can make your GUI app's search field expect regexps and adept users won't be bothered. "Average users" generally hate ideas like that, despite the power that kind of thing can give you.
Yeah, in a way you are right. In this example it is easy to create a search field, which allows simple searches and regexp searches.
There are all kinds of problems with that idea - at least according to accepted GUI dogma. Basically, unless you bury that feature deep (and maybe, even if you do) then all users need to be educated about it.
Let's suppose Regexp mode kicks in when your search starts with a slash character. If a non-regexp-savvy user types in a search that happens to start with a slash, they'll wonder why it didn't work. Let's suppose you have a pop-up list next to the search field that tells the user what search mode they're in. Non-savvy users might wonder what it does, or might just ignore it - and then if they someday wound up in regexp mode by accident they might not know why their searches are failing to produce the results they expect. Finally, suppose you buried the option deep in your config dialogs - now non-savvy users are safe, adept users are annoy
Certainly, to an extent, it's possible to make everybody happy. But at some point, say, when you're writing a large application, you have to decide who you're writing it for, and make sure it suits them. Do you base your text editor on the assumption of a lot of mouse use and so follow today's typical GUI guidelines, or do you tailor it to a higher degree of keyboard usage, and maybe come up with something Emacs-ish?
You could have two text editors, naturally - but one of the requirements for being friendly to the "average user" - or to anybody at all, for that matter, is a certain degree of consistency. Wildly disparate user interfaces don't serve anybody - so the software world is (necessarily?) divided into camps - within each camp you can get your consistent, interoperable software experience, but cross the borders and things get messy. There are multiple "camps" on Linux - and that is fine, but each one basically defines its own operating platform.
When I say "I want Linux to be a system for me", I mean that I'm not interested in writing code to run on Linux that is specifically targeted to the "average user". I believe in the idea of creating a system - a well-designed system, mind you, not a big pile of hacks - which is particularly suited to adept users. Adept users do benefit from many of the same things "average users" need - a well-written and contextual help system, a certain degree of consistency between various UI apps, and so on - but there is a significant difference: adept users don't scare as easily at the sight of complicated concepts. You can make your GUI app's search field expect regexps and adept users won't be bothered. "Average users" generally hate ideas like that, despite the power that kind of thing can give you. Adept users can deal with software that's poorly designed or not specifically written to help people learn to use it - stuff written quickly or without much attention given to things other than the basic goal of functionality - but that's not the ideal situation, either. You don't want your entire system to be built up out of marginally faulty shell scripts. To really serve these users, the system's core tools, at least, ought to be very reliable and sensible. Linux is a system built upon a lot of tradition, so consistency isn't one of its strong points.
The problem with trying to satisfy everybody is that there's a finite capacity for quality software development in the free software world, as in anywhere. KDE and Gnome projects have been working for years to create good-quality, modern GUI systems on top of Unix - mostly oriented toward the "average" - and they've been successful but it's taken a lot of work. Starting another project on par with one of those two would be a massive undertaking. As a result, it's tough for anyone other than those two projects to establish clear leadership on what a Linux operating environment should be like. My goal and the goal of catering to the "average user" are not mutually exclusive - but it takes more energy to pursue both goals than to pursue one.
I want Linux to be a system that's nice for me. I think the idea of the "average" user is a bit of a fallacy - a very useful simplification, I'm sure, and very effective in practice. Most people, probably, actually do fit the profile or are content with that style of working. But I feel that some people are bound to benefit from something a bit different - maybe they feel like too much hand-holding just slows them down, maybe they want a bit more hands-on control of what's going on, whatever. Usually it doesn't pay to cater to these kinds of users, but there's no reason why, if we write a system for ourselves, that we need to write it with the "average" user in mind. I don't need or want Linux to be another Microsoft Windows.
You can expect the transformation sequence to look awesome. I'm sure they are just blurring the effect in the trailer.
-j Oh, I'm sure it looks dandy. That's not the issue.
The issue is that there's no perceptible relationship between the car mode and the robot mode of these designs. When that's the case, there's not much point, from a design perspective, in that thing being a transformer. From an aesthetic sense, a thematic sense, etc. it's a lot better to have visible ties between the two modes.
Suppose, for instance, that the granularity of the transformation was so fine that it went right down to the atoms - then the bot could transform into just about anything. It wouldn't be a "transformer" anymore, it'd be a "shape-shifter". On the other extreme, you could have a transformation like in the crappiest of Transformer toys - either a car folds in half and sprouts arms and legs, or maybe it's like a robot with a jet plane on its back, and you don't see the robot part from certain views or whatever. The movie designs aren't "shape-shifters" but the granularity of the transformation is fine enough that they almost could be.
Upon locating a small quantity of water on the Martian surface, the rover was greeted by a strange young man who drank from the rover's collection vessel and said "may you always drink deep", and then made some kind of noise like a cat fighting a bullfrog.
IIRC, and it's been a while since my last physics class, the magnet will attempt to induce a current in the superconductor (which would be infinite), so a counter-force is generated to push the magnet away. The stronger you push it towards the superconductor, the stronger the superconductor rejects the magnetic field. After all, it cannot allow an infinite current to be induced!
If memory serves, this is how you can have magnets levitate over a superconductor, giving you those cool pictures of things floating. This is only true up to a certain point. Once the magnetic field is strong enough, it penetrates the superconductor and affects its ability to carry current.
But this is where the redundancy of this system comes in, right? It'd be a real tall order to create a powerful magnetic field over all the redundant power lines...
Hear hear. The idea of copyright was to protect and allow property rights holders to profit from their work before it entered the public domain and therefore became impossible to profit from. I wholeheartedly agree that 7 years is plenty of time to recoup costs and make profit in this day and age.
The problem is, it's somewhat socialist to prevent someone from profiting on their work indefinitely.
Limiting copyright doesn't prevent someone from profiting on their work indefinitely, it just removes a specific mechanism that grants them the exclusive right to do so. In other words, yes, you're taking something away from the artists - but the question is whether that level of exclusivity should have been given to them in the first place. Copyright is a fundamentally artificial thing - you can't "possess" an idea, once you've shared it with others - that doesn't make copyright wrong, but I personally feel it shouldn't be quite so extensive.
For instance: suppose Aerosmith were to perform a song they wrote twenty years ago. Fine, they're still making money from their old work, good for them. Copyright isn't what grants them that ability - it's the fact that the audience recognizes them as the original performers of the song that makes their performance of the song notable. And if the song fell into the public domain, the loss of copyright control doesn't deny them the ability to do that, either. Other artists could cover the song if it passed into the public domain, or sample it for use in their songs. So long as they do a good job of it they, too, deserve a measure of financial reward.
With something like a film it's more difficult, of course: when the film goes public domain, anyone can sell copies of it. The profitability of the movie is then rather limited once copyright lapses. Copyright could be re-asserted by creating a new version of the work, but that's about it. (for instance, suppose "Star Wars" had fallen into public domain by 1997: the "Special Editions" would contain the original film, of course, but would constitute a new work based upon it - meaning that if the audience wants the special edition rather than the original, the copyright control is effectively extended... though nothing prevents someone else from making their own "Special Edition" in this scenario...) Alternately, remakes, sequels, etc. could be made - since again, other people could do this as well, the creators would have to distinguish their works somehow - name-dropping (getting the original cast and writers back, or getting their endorsements, and making this known) would be one way, simply making a better film would be another.
The recurring theme in either case, however, is this: During the copyright period you get exclusivity that increases your profits. Afterwards, you have to keep working if you want to keep getting paid.:) I don't think that's unreasonable. In this way, artists either must continue making new works, or be creative enough in how they milk their existing works that, copyright or not, people still want their version.
There's nothing inherently "right" about the current length of copyright - it currently gives the creator enough exclusivity to give them a lifetime of profit from a single work, to maintain exclusivity through three generations worth of audience. That's enough time for a work to be not only a major hit, but a major cultural phenomenon - combining that kind of span with exclusivity gives the creator a lot of power - too much, perhaps.
Not to mention that Optimus doesn't have flames, I'm sorry. Call me a purist, but he's only the most iconic character from that franchise, you'd think they'd REALLY WANT to get him right.
I'll quote the director losely (from memory):
"At first we went with designs that looked much more like the original cartoon designs. Simpler, blocky, faceplates and all that. We all agreed they looked terrible in a live actions set. There are things that look perfectly fine in a cartoon or a comicbook but need to be modified to be believable in a live movie." I think they went too far in the opposite direction. Now the robot forms have almost no connection to the vehicle forms. I don't need these to be the classic designs, but I would enjoy it if you could look at one of the Autobots, say, and recognize some parts from the car mode. I suspect they may have intentionally decided not to do that to guard against the possibility that they might lose permission to use a particular car design in the future. If the robot design has no particular ties to the vehicle design, they can just swap out vehicle mode for something else and keep the robot mode pretty much the same.
I don't think the Citroen commercial looked bad in a live-action setting. And I do believe that relatively simple, clean designs have a lot of merit. All the detail that goes into the movie bots is impressive but I think it creates a bit too much clutter.
Because they're "evil" right? Wanna destroy your childhood memories. Them bastards. Uh, no. They just have poor taste sometimes.:)
I get just a bit tired of people assuming that, because I don't agree with them, I must embody the worst, most short-sighted, fickle, and petty versions of their opposition. Give people a little credit, would ya?
you had it easy. Try typing your hex codes into a hex keypad after you converted your Assembly language to machine code in your head or from the books.
I freak out new CS grads today when I convert hex in my head almost instantly. You had a hex keypad?
I had to upgrade to a Commodore 128 to get a keypad - before that, it was the number row...
Bungie's response sounds like, "Oh yeah well... You're a poopy head!" Given cultural differences and the possibility of a hokey translation, I wouldn't take this as a slam. Just another persons opinion. Well, to Bungie, Halo isn't just some 3-D FPS out there, a game that happens to sell quite well. They made it - and it's done damn well. Design decisions that may seem unimportant to outsiders are issues that must have been the subject of a lot of careful consideration within the development group. For someone to write all that off as pandering to the audience is a bit of an insult.
Personally, I think Miyamoto was just saying that he's not out to specifically create popular games - games that sell large numbers. ("I mean, Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees.") He's interested, I guess, in making games that interest him. The bit where he says "I could make Halo" is a bit confusing in a way - why the need to assert that? I think that might be a translation issue - something that just reads differently in English I'm guessing.
As for Bungie's challenge - I think it's a funny idea. I think to outsiders something like that could look like a bitter rivalry - and that could be unfortunate - but if the people involved look at it from a more light-hearted perspective something like that can be a lot of fun. Kind of like pro wrestling - the wrestlers probably don't really hate each other, but it's a bit more fun for everyone involved if they act as if they do - generates a lot of excitement, you know?
Slashdot Mirror
The second movie I took my fiancee too, and by the third movie we were married. Wow, you took that girl and your fiancee to the second movie? Did they mind? Were all three of you married? (Are you from Utah or something?)
Because nostalgia always defeats improved design.
Also Nintendo thumb. I mean, c'mon. How cool is that? Actually, I converted one of those to USB a while back - mostly for the retro charm and bragging rights, but also to learn USB - but in actually using it for games I found it had a great feel to it and the D-pad was very responsive. Having used various other controllers on the PC (such as PS2 gamepads or similar USB gamepads) I think the NES controller performed favorably.
Certainly not too shabby - though I feel like the ergonomic grip-base made the thing a little unstable. (Essentially, the stability of the stick is dependent on your ability to hold the base of the stick, stably, with your left hand.)
:)
I was more into the various Suncom products - the Tac 5 was a great stick. When mine broke I used parts from a Tac 3 to fix it. Also the original Icon-troller, the little joystick that was built to stick on to the side of a C-64C or C-128 keyboard as a mouse alternative - that thing was surprisingly good for games. Very responsive and easy to control, especially when you had it semi-permanently mounted to your computer.
Eek! The heir to Slytherin!
Something to do with having to take the mains off the line, I believe?
Before you know it there'll be a big forest of this stuff emitting deadly lung-rotting spores, and the forest will be home to a legion of giant, deadly, and extremely vindictive insects...
Absolutely, but all examples and all problems you mentioned here are in no way specific for Linux. They are not even specific for free or open source software in general.
I'm talking about how Linux as an operating platform - so I must include the software that's available for and commonly used on Linux as part of the definition of the "Platform". After all, Linux itself is not and never will be "in touch with the average user". It's a technical tool with a very specific set of jobs to perform. So when we talk about "Linux" being made friendly to "average users" what we're really talking about is packaging and bundled software.
This comes a bit closer of what I meant. Of course I did not mean programs your or me write for ourselves, but it could be seen as a bit egoistical to demand that others write programs for us advanced (or adept) users and ignoring the rest.
Well, the theory is that technically-minded people are writing all the software out there, and some of them may see it my way - and we can effectively choose to write software for ourselves, as a collective group, rather than writing the software for other people to use in an effort to advocate Linux. It's true that different development groups could pursue both goals simultaneously - but that isn't happening at present.
I really cannot agree to you pessimistic view. I am with Linux since some 0.9.x kernel and still I don't think something has taken away from me.
That's not the point. Nothing's been taken away but in some sense neither has much been added. There's been lots of kernel development, of course, and new programming languages, better libraries and daemons, and so on - but not a lot of thought put into making all that work nicely together. And simultaneously, most of the GUI development is being done as a kind of veneer over this layer - not really an extension of the system that it runs on, but a mechanism that serves to hide the underlying system, or provide abstractions that aren't applicable outside of the GUI.
I have seen that Linux becomes more and more end-user friendly, but I have yet to see that this has any negative effect for me as tech-geek.
Not the point. The point is not that development in that direction harms adept users - just that I feel like we're missing out on some potential. We could be designing this system for ourselves, and coming up with something really beautiful as a result. Instead all serious UI work on Linux is geared toward "average users".
I am not 100% sure if this is not a contradiction to your previous statements. A consensus how things should work is IMHO only for noobs necessary. For your adept user I see it more as a hindrance. An adept user should be able to experiment with a wide field of concepts and ideas. I do write software for myself. Some of my GUIs are 100% adapted to my personal needs and might be a bit peculiar to anyone else. I like my software the way it is and I give a **** how others might think it should work.
I wouldn't say it's a contradiction, but I certainly don't regard it as a trivial problem either. I see the creation of operating environments for self-proclaimed adept users as a largely unexplored field, and these kinds of users also tend to have eccentric or very particular tastes. How do you boil that down to some common conventions without tramping on all that? That is a problem, but I think exploring that is a lot more interesting than catering to t
Of course, if it isn't a law and it's just an industry accepted practice, shouldn't the industry that is committing the offence be held accountable? Why hold MS responsible is Walmart sells something in a way they shouldn't?
Can someone please explain this without using the word Chewbacca? Well, you see, the thing is, Wookies don't live on Endor, so having a Wookie on Endor with a bunch of tiny little midget Ewoks doesn't make any sense. If it doesn't make any sense, you must acquit.
Who do you root for in a case like this? I mean, I don't always approve of Microsoft. And Thompson, well... ...I take it back. Go Microsoft! Wipe the floor with this punk!
I understand what you mean, but I cannot agree. Especially:
or
You don't talk about Linux, you talk about programs.
The system is no good without the programs. The existence of the system is meaningless without the programs. The system exists only to provide a way to run the programs. The programs people run effectively are the system, from a user perspective, and how they interact with them defines their interaction with the system.
Right, if I had to choose, whether it is code for me or someone else, I would be egoistical, too. But this choice is not necessary.
I don't get what you're saying here. If you're saying it's egotistical to regard myself as an "adept" and the "average user" as something less sophisticated than myself - well, yeah. I don't mean to be a judgmental prick about it, it just seems the most convenient way to explain the situation - rather than saying "that which I regard as common, or perceive as the lowest common denominator, but in fact refers to the large majority of people who are not interested in computers for their own sake" I just say "average user", as was said in the article. Rather than saying "people like myself, who are interested in technology for its own sake, often programmers who carry programmers' sensibilities to their interactions with the system", I say "adept". It is judgmental but it's just meant to be convenient terminology.
Or are you saying that to code with one's own sensibilities in mind is egotistical? I see no reason why this should be the case. As programmers we can make things work how we like. This gives us the potential to explore new or different ideas as we see fit. That kind of exploration isn't always the most productive thing to do from a practical standpoint, as a lot of effort goes into making any kind of real, useful application and it's kind of a shame to slap useful code with a UI that's so quirky as to be useless...
Yeah, in a way you are right. In this example it is easy to create a search field, which allows simple searches and regexp searches.
There are all kinds of problems with that idea - at least according to accepted GUI dogma. Basically, unless you bury that feature deep (and maybe, even if you do) then all users need to be educated about it.
Let's suppose Regexp mode kicks in when your search starts with a slash character. If a non-regexp-savvy user types in a search that happens to start with a slash, they'll wonder why it didn't work.
Let's suppose you have a pop-up list next to the search field that tells the user what search mode they're in. Non-savvy users might wonder what it does, or might just ignore it - and then if they someday wound up in regexp mode by accident they might not know why their searches are failing to produce the results they expect.
Finally, suppose you buried the option deep in your config dialogs - now non-savvy users are safe, adept users are annoy
Certainly, to an extent, it's possible to make everybody happy. But at some point, say, when you're writing a large application, you have to decide who you're writing it for, and make sure it suits them. Do you base your text editor on the assumption of a lot of mouse use and so follow today's typical GUI guidelines, or do you tailor it to a higher degree of keyboard usage, and maybe come up with something Emacs-ish?
You could have two text editors, naturally - but one of the requirements for being friendly to the "average user" - or to anybody at all, for that matter, is a certain degree of consistency. Wildly disparate user interfaces don't serve anybody - so the software world is (necessarily?) divided into camps - within each camp you can get your consistent, interoperable software experience, but cross the borders and things get messy. There are multiple "camps" on Linux - and that is fine, but each one basically defines its own operating platform.
When I say "I want Linux to be a system for me", I mean that I'm not interested in writing code to run on Linux that is specifically targeted to the "average user". I believe in the idea of creating a system - a well-designed system, mind you, not a big pile of hacks - which is particularly suited to adept users. Adept users do benefit from many of the same things "average users" need - a well-written and contextual help system, a certain degree of consistency between various UI apps, and so on - but there is a significant difference: adept users don't scare as easily at the sight of complicated concepts. You can make your GUI app's search field expect regexps and adept users won't be bothered. "Average users" generally hate ideas like that, despite the power that kind of thing can give you. Adept users can deal with software that's poorly designed or not specifically written to help people learn to use it - stuff written quickly or without much attention given to things other than the basic goal of functionality - but that's not the ideal situation, either. You don't want your entire system to be built up out of marginally faulty shell scripts. To really serve these users, the system's core tools, at least, ought to be very reliable and sensible. Linux is a system built upon a lot of tradition, so consistency isn't one of its strong points.
The problem with trying to satisfy everybody is that there's a finite capacity for quality software development in the free software world, as in anywhere. KDE and Gnome projects have been working for years to create good-quality, modern GUI systems on top of Unix - mostly oriented toward the "average" - and they've been successful but it's taken a lot of work. Starting another project on par with one of those two would be a massive undertaking. As a result, it's tough for anyone other than those two projects to establish clear leadership on what a Linux operating environment should be like. My goal and the goal of catering to the "average user" are not mutually exclusive - but it takes more energy to pursue both goals than to pursue one.
I want Linux to be a system that's nice for me. I think the idea of the "average" user is a bit of a fallacy - a very useful simplification, I'm sure, and very effective in practice. Most people, probably, actually do fit the profile or are content with that style of working. But I feel that some people are bound to benefit from something a bit different - maybe they feel like too much hand-holding just slows them down, maybe they want a bit more hands-on control of what's going on, whatever. Usually it doesn't pay to cater to these kinds of users, but there's no reason why, if we write a system for ourselves, that we need to write it with the "average" user in mind. I don't need or want Linux to be another Microsoft Windows.
-j Oh, I'm sure it looks dandy. That's not the issue.
The issue is that there's no perceptible relationship between the car mode and the robot mode of these designs. When that's the case, there's not much point, from a design perspective, in that thing being a transformer. From an aesthetic sense, a thematic sense, etc. it's a lot better to have visible ties between the two modes.
Suppose, for instance, that the granularity of the transformation was so fine that it went right down to the atoms - then the bot could transform into just about anything. It wouldn't be a "transformer" anymore, it'd be a "shape-shifter". On the other extreme, you could have a transformation like in the crappiest of Transformer toys - either a car folds in half and sprouts arms and legs, or maybe it's like a robot with a jet plane on its back, and you don't see the robot part from certain views or whatever. The movie designs aren't "shape-shifters" but the granularity of the transformation is fine enough that they almost could be.
Doesn't "bang" imply success, and therefore, not going out?
- RG> Ever played "Armored Core: Last Raven"?
Upon locating a small quantity of water on the Martian surface, the rover was greeted by a strange young man who drank from the rover's collection vessel and said "may you always drink deep", and then made some kind of noise like a cat fighting a bullfrog.
If memory serves, this is how you can have magnets levitate over a superconductor, giving you those cool pictures of things floating. This is only true up to a certain point. Once the magnetic field is strong enough, it penetrates the superconductor and affects its ability to carry current.
But this is where the redundancy of this system comes in, right? It'd be a real tall order to create a powerful magnetic field over all the redundant power lines...
The problem is, it's somewhat socialist to prevent someone from profiting on their work indefinitely.
Limiting copyright doesn't prevent someone from profiting on their work indefinitely, it just removes a specific mechanism that grants them the exclusive right to do so. In other words, yes, you're taking something away from the artists - but the question is whether that level of exclusivity should have been given to them in the first place. Copyright is a fundamentally artificial thing - you can't "possess" an idea, once you've shared it with others - that doesn't make copyright wrong, but I personally feel it shouldn't be quite so extensive.For instance: suppose Aerosmith were to perform a song they wrote twenty years ago. Fine, they're still making money from their old work, good for them. Copyright isn't what grants them that ability - it's the fact that the audience recognizes them as the original performers of the song that makes their performance of the song notable. And if the song fell into the public domain, the loss of copyright control doesn't deny them the ability to do that, either. Other artists could cover the song if it passed into the public domain, or sample it for use in their songs. So long as they do a good job of it they, too, deserve a measure of financial reward.
With something like a film it's more difficult, of course: when the film goes public domain, anyone can sell copies of it. The profitability of the movie is then rather limited once copyright lapses. Copyright could be re-asserted by creating a new version of the work, but that's about it. (for instance, suppose "Star Wars" had fallen into public domain by 1997: the "Special Editions" would contain the original film, of course, but would constitute a new work based upon it - meaning that if the audience wants the special edition rather than the original, the copyright control is effectively extended... though nothing prevents someone else from making their own "Special Edition" in this scenario...) Alternately, remakes, sequels, etc. could be made - since again, other people could do this as well, the creators would have to distinguish their works somehow - name-dropping (getting the original cast and writers back, or getting their endorsements, and making this known) would be one way, simply making a better film would be another.
The recurring theme in either case, however, is this: During the copyright period you get exclusivity that increases your profits. Afterwards, you have to keep working if you want to keep getting paid.
There's nothing inherently "right" about the current length of copyright - it currently gives the creator enough exclusivity to give them a lifetime of profit from a single work, to maintain exclusivity through three generations worth of audience. That's enough time for a work to be not only a major hit, but a major cultural phenomenon - combining that kind of span with exclusivity gives the creator a lot of power - too much, perhaps.
I'll quote the director losely (from memory):
"At first we went with designs that looked much more like the original cartoon designs. Simpler, blocky, faceplates and all that. We all agreed they looked terrible in a live actions set. There are things that look perfectly fine in a cartoon or a comicbook but need to be modified to be believable in a live movie." I think they went too far in the opposite direction. Now the robot forms have almost no connection to the vehicle forms. I don't need these to be the classic designs, but I would enjoy it if you could look at one of the Autobots, say, and recognize some parts from the car mode. I suspect they may have intentionally decided not to do that to guard against the possibility that they might lose permission to use a particular car design in the future. If the robot design has no particular ties to the vehicle design, they can just swap out vehicle mode for something else and keep the robot mode pretty much the same.
I don't think the Citroen commercial looked bad in a live-action setting. And I do believe that relatively simple, clean designs have a lot of merit. All the detail that goes into the movie bots is impressive but I think it creates a bit too much clutter. Because they're "evil" right? Wanna destroy your childhood memories. Them bastards. Uh, no. They just have poor taste sometimes.
I get just a bit tired of people assuming that, because I don't agree with them, I must embody the worst, most short-sighted, fickle, and petty versions of their opposition. Give people a little credit, would ya?
Resistors are Futile.
The parent post is a helpful visual diagram of how a high-capacity channel enables more traffic.
No, I "thinged" there was a missing comma between "security" and "concerns". :)
But, yes, while politics is often about power, it itself is not power...
"The filtering had three primary rationales, according to the report: politics and power, security concerns and social norms"
That's four rationales.
I freak out new CS grads today when I convert hex in my head almost instantly. You had a hex keypad?
I had to upgrade to a Commodore 128 to get a keypad - before that, it was the number row...
Personally, I think Miyamoto was just saying that he's not out to specifically create popular games - games that sell large numbers. ("I mean, Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes everybody liked. They left that to the Bee Gees.") He's interested, I guess, in making games that interest him. The bit where he says "I could make Halo" is a bit confusing in a way - why the need to assert that? I think that might be a translation issue - something that just reads differently in English I'm guessing.
As for Bungie's challenge - I think it's a funny idea. I think to outsiders something like that could look like a bitter rivalry - and that could be unfortunate - but if the people involved look at it from a more light-hearted perspective something like that can be a lot of fun. Kind of like pro wrestling - the wrestlers probably don't really hate each other, but it's a bit more fun for everyone involved if they act as if they do - generates a lot of excitement, you know?