Actually, understanding jpegs and filesizes is like knowing which kind of envelope to use and how much it weighs before FedExing it somewhere. If you tried to mail a massive poster instead of a polaroid to share a picture, I'm sure your boss would question your common sense.
So... TiVo's true intent is now revealed. Now that we see that they are tracking remote clicks.
They likely wanted to do this in order to serve custom-tailored advertising and be the company propelling the custom-tv movement we've heard predicted so much in the past.
They want to be able to be the service that could offer this easily to advertisers and bypass part of what goes through the networks and the cable companies, like doubleclick for TV.
And the coup-de-grace is that TiVo will be able to update the TiVo boxes so that you CAN'T skip TiVo commercials. This would mean advertisers would flock to TiVo at the expense of cable companies and networks. This move, unforeseen, would very quickly put TiVo into a dominant position in the TV industry before anyone else could really do anything about it, putting TiVo in control of TV in much the way Microsoft controlled the computer industry.
Well, at least I imagine how they planned/pictured it would go.
afaik, you canNOT use TiVo without the subscription. The box will not do anything without the subscription (except, supposedly, replay stuff you already recorded, until,it ahem, expires).
Without a subscription, you have a large, ugly paperweight.
And my cable company provides me with listings for free, why should I pay monthly for listings? TiVo is not charging you for the listings, that's a ruse. They're charging you to make money and pretending it's the listings. There are plenty of other ways for a box to get listings, but TiVo won't let you use anything but their service.
Now they turn around and use this "service" to further cripple the functionality you paid for.
I agree with the parent/grandparent who pointed out: either rent something or sell something. There can be no in between.
> I consider Gmail to be the best webmail interface ever.
"webmail" -- I see you agree with the parent's point then.
Unfortunately, the rest of your reply seems more like flamebait than reasoned rhetoric, so it's difficult for me to find an position to respond to; but to elaborate on my gmail position (yes, these gmail arguments have nothing to do with ajax--but the original poster took care of that already--however, I do see it as symptomatic of a development group putting all it's eggs in the 'live update' cool-factor basket and losing sight of detail).
* Every time I want to reply to someone in gmail, it takes me at least 20 seconds to find the reply link. Other people I talk to agree on this particular point as well as on the bad overall ui in general.
* I want folders for my mail. I don't want to see a giant stream of everything. I like to see all related mail together in one place without being distracted by other stuff. To clean my inbox, I am forced to 'archive.' With a typical mail client, stuff I move to a new 'folder' (category in the gmail world) gets removed from my inbox. I like that because I keep all my actionable email in my inbox and move it when I'm done.
* When I'm looking for a specific email I remember getting about 4 days ago, I don't want to have to dig into the thread that started that conversation half a year ago because we know everyone likes to use the reply button to send email instead of composing fresh mail. My only other alternative is to use search, but that means I can't see other email that arrived around the same date because search only gives me what I looked for. Sometimes I remember getting an email from someone I don't know on the same day Doug replied to me about something related (he had referred them). So in a typical email client, I look for Doug's email from two weeks ago, and find that this other person's email sits about 5 lines away. In gmail, Doug's email is burried under an email from me! of all things, to him, that started last year... and after figuring that out and expanding all the different emails, I finally find the one I want and get the name of the person so I can run a stupid search for that person's email.
Yeah, none of this is the fault of ajax, so I apologize for being OT. The original poster's point about inconsistent UIs and widget appearance, location, and behaviors remains quite valid and what I agreed to and compared to the problem with 90% of swing (and that other one, whatever it's called) apps I've ever run on my machine.
gmail has the worst UI i've ever seen. It's embarrassing coming from a company that prides itself on minimalist and simple design.
Similarly, the problem with java aps is their ui's are also inconsistent at best, and flaky in many cases, with quirky redraw bugs popping up ever so often that make me feel a little bit like I'm not quite in the same 'space' s the application.
I'd rather have applications that are optimized for my computing situation, right down to the processor and my own built-in OS widget preferences.
It's more 'intuitive' because when gramma takes it out of the box and starts using it, it will look and act like a one-button mouse.
At least I hope that's the default out of the box behavior because that's why Steve's been clinging to one-button mice all this time.
Think of the old people!
-- (and then her grandson billy comes over to use it to play WoW and reprograms it completely and Grammie comes to try it later and gets utterly confused....)
I guess my facetiousness was too subtle, or did you all miss the comparison to those annoying club cards?
The first part of my post was serious, however, and the reply I got makes me see that earlier posts in the tree were wrong, or at best, confusingly worded.
It's clear to me now that journaling is not a norton filesaver type deal, but simply something so the system can clean up a mess after the whole system gets improperly shut down.
So how do you benefit from journaling? Does only Apple's Disk Utility use it when it's repairing the disk? Does DiskWarrior use it? Or is there some secret way to use it no one ever talks about?
Seriously, if journaling is such a good thing, they should act like those supermarkets that force you to use discount cards. When you check out, they make a point to tell you how much you saved today with your club card.
Journaling should advertise: "hey, I just saved your butt! Check it out, file blah.foo is all happy now. Thank you, have a nice day."
If you are near a university, the students probably already have all the free broadband they need. Why would they come to your coffee shop just for free internet... unless: they want ambience and good food and beverages. The fact that you offer free WiFi makes you that much more attractive than the other coffee shops that don't. Besides, university kids will loiter in coffee shops for hours regardless of WiFi.
Starving artists? If they have a laptop, they can afford a cup of coffee. If they love you, they will buy many cups of coffee. If they can't afford the coffee, and people of this type somehow manage to comprise the majority of your clientele, then you picked a bad location. Free WiFi is not your problem.
If you are downtown or near a business park, business people will come in to get away from the office. They also have broadband at work, so no big deal there either, they are coming again for ambience and something to consume. These people generally have schedules to keep, so no fear of freeloaders here. They may bring clients to meet with, but that means more purchases and free advertising for you. Sounds like a win.
I don't know how much Starbucks makes from each T-mobile purchase, but when I used it once, I know I felt like I had paid my 11 bucks for the day and I was entitled to every last minute without having to buy anything from the shop. I sat next to an outlet for a large part of the day. This is because I was traveling and the hotel I was at had no internet access. So unless Starbucks gets a kickback from t-mobile, this can be counted as a potential loss. Had Starbucks been providing the access, I would have felt like buying something from them to support it.
Other random tidbits:
My netgear router let's me block specific websites.
If free WiFi loitering really does become a problem (meaning paying customers don't come anymore because non-paying customers are using up all the resources), post a sign that says 'no loitering; internet access, seating, and restrooms reserved for paying customers only; 1hr time limit.' Enforce it like any other food and drink establishment does: monitor the customers and gently ask them to leave if they aren't consuming anything.
If you were to turn off access for 20 minutes after every so often, people relying on the WiFi would be left with nothing to do for 20 minutes. They could buy something and wait, or leave. It would be pretty obvious who was there 'just for the WiFi' in that case.
sorry about the horrible formatting mess. I didn't preview it and though it was set to convert linebreaks to br
finding it is not the same as storing it
on
The Death of Folders?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Losing 'Finder' or any similar filesystem UI, in favor of dynamic smart folders, queries and searches, is a bad idea.
In the real world, you put stuff in a closet, in a trunk, under the table, in the attic, in your left pants pocket or your shirt pocket... you devise all these great schemes to know exactly where everything you own should be. When you get to your car you pull your keys out of your pocket. If you have them in your briefcase, you get disoriented for a second. When you leave your car, you feel the keys in your pocket and are reassured everything is as it should be.
But, in the real world, you also lose stuff because sometimes you misplace it or you forget just what your logic was so many years ago. So search tools, maps, etc, are great aids to finding stuff so you can once again use them. But they are NOT themselves the stuff you seek. Feel free to throw away a used up map and be confident it's just a map you're tossing, not the destination itself.
Also, you're always going to want some stuff to be far away and archived, out of the way, out of sight, out of mind so you can focus on the stuff you care about right now. You really don't ever need to see that invoice from 1989 again, do you? Well, just in case, you'll keep it in a safe place, but out of the way.
Enter Spotlight and smart folders. Amazing tools that help us find the long lost stuff. Cooler still is how you can use them as reporting tools. How many different times did you write something about your pyscho ex? Spotlight knows.
But the signal-to-noise ratio when using such tools is disorienting and unreliable. If I go to my kitchen to use my favorite chef's knife, I depend on it being in the place where I put it. I don't want to utter "chef's knife" to a 'smart drawer' that suddenly slides open showing me all 10 different chef knives in my household and poke through them all just to select my favorite knife. No, I want to move my hand to the exact spot where I know it always will be; right at the top right of my other 4 premium cooking knives, none of which is a chef's knife, and all in one nice wooden block, on the counter, in my kitchen.
Now imagine the chaos of a shared environment or corporate setting. That's where smart folders actually shine. Because now each person in the company can organize the files for which they are responsible as they see fit, and everyone else can use smart folders to cross-reference across departments or use search tools to find specific cases.
But Smart folders must remain exactly what they are: a _View_ of an existing organization; not an organization unto themselves. Users must never confuse the two because a file may be found in more than one smart folder. So it's imperative that the user understand that the file really only exists once. Back to my kitchen, while it would kick ass if I could open one magic drawer that give me access to all the chef's knives so I can take inventory, or I can decide that it's time to replace, sharpen or retire one or another, and another magic drawer that shows me all kitchen utensils of a certain brand, I don't want these dynamic slice of the current state of my kitchen to become the organization of my kitchen.
Finally, think about this: databases can be searched, sliced and diced in anyway you like. But you still have to organize the data into tables, never repeating the same information twice; any database guy worth his salt will bend over backwards to keep it as normalized as possible. It's not just one big table.
The filesystem is no exception. Reality is not an exception. Even your brain can't effectively perceive the world using a model that would be an exception. It can't.
So why bother pursuing an organizational system without logical groups, hierarchies, and spatial cues?
Slashdot Mirror
amen
Actually, understanding jpegs and filesizes is like knowing which kind of envelope to use and how much it weighs before FedExing it somewhere. If you tried to mail a massive poster instead of a polaroid to share a picture, I'm sure your boss would question your common sense.
So... TiVo's true intent is now revealed. Now that we see that they are tracking remote clicks.
They likely wanted to do this in order to serve custom-tailored advertising and be the company propelling the custom-tv movement we've heard predicted so much in the past.
They want to be able to be the service that could offer this easily to advertisers and bypass part of what goes through the networks and the cable companies, like doubleclick for TV.
And the coup-de-grace is that TiVo will be able to update the TiVo boxes so that you CAN'T skip TiVo commercials. This would mean advertisers would flock to TiVo at the expense of cable companies and networks. This move, unforeseen, would very quickly put TiVo into a dominant position in the TV industry before anyone else could really do anything about it, putting TiVo in control of TV in much the way Microsoft controlled the computer industry.
Well, at least I imagine how they planned/pictured it would go.
afaik, you canNOT use TiVo without the subscription. The box will not do anything without the subscription (except, supposedly, replay stuff you already recorded, until,it ahem, expires).
Without a subscription, you have a large, ugly paperweight.
And my cable company provides me with listings for free, why should I pay monthly for listings? TiVo is not charging you for the listings, that's a ruse. They're charging you to make money and pretending it's the listings. There are plenty of other ways for a box to get listings, but TiVo won't let you use anything but their service.
Now they turn around and use this "service" to further cripple the functionality you paid for.
I agree with the parent/grandparent who pointed out: either rent something or sell something. There can be no in between.
> I consider Gmail to be the best webmail interface ever.
"webmail" -- I see you agree with the parent's point then.
Unfortunately, the rest of your reply seems more like flamebait than reasoned rhetoric, so it's difficult for me to find an position to respond to; but to elaborate on my gmail position (yes, these gmail arguments have nothing to do with ajax--but the original poster took care of that already--however, I do see it as symptomatic of a development group putting all it's eggs in the 'live update' cool-factor basket and losing sight of detail).
* Every time I want to reply to someone in gmail, it takes me at least 20 seconds to find the reply link. Other people I talk to agree on this particular point as well as on the bad overall ui in general.
* I want folders for my mail. I don't want to see a giant stream of everything. I like to see all related mail together in one place without being distracted by other stuff. To clean my inbox, I am forced to 'archive.' With a typical mail client, stuff I move to a new 'folder' (category in the gmail world) gets removed from my inbox. I like that because I keep all my actionable email in my inbox and move it when I'm done.
* When I'm looking for a specific email I remember getting about 4 days ago, I don't want to have to dig into the thread that started that conversation half a year ago because we know everyone likes to use the reply button to send email instead of composing fresh mail. My only other alternative is to use search, but that means I can't see other email that arrived around the same date because search only gives me what I looked for. Sometimes I remember getting an email from someone I don't know on the same day Doug replied to me about something related (he had referred them). So in a typical email client, I look for Doug's email from two weeks ago, and find that this other person's email sits about 5 lines away. In gmail, Doug's email is burried under an email from me! of all things, to him, that started last year... and after figuring that out and expanding all the different emails, I finally find the one I want and get the name of the person so I can run a stupid search for that person's email.
Yeah, none of this is the fault of ajax, so I apologize for being OT. The original poster's point about inconsistent UIs and widget appearance, location, and behaviors remains quite valid and what I agreed to and compared to the problem with 90% of swing (and that other one, whatever it's called) apps I've ever run on my machine.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
gmail has the worst UI i've ever seen. It's embarrassing coming from a company that prides itself on minimalist and simple design.
Similarly, the problem with java aps is their ui's are also inconsistent at best, and flaky in many cases, with quirky redraw bugs popping up ever so often that make me feel a little bit like I'm not quite in the same 'space' s the application.
I'd rather have applications that are optimized for my computing situation, right down to the processor and my own built-in OS widget preferences.
rotflmao
parent is dead-on.
I think that's insightful and informative in one fell swoop.
It's more 'intuitive' because when gramma takes it out of the box and starts using it, it will look and act like a one-button mouse.
At least I hope that's the default out of the box behavior because that's why Steve's been clinging to one-button mice all this time.
Think of the old people!
--
(and then her grandson billy comes over to use it to play WoW and reprograms it completely and Grammie comes to try it later and gets utterly confused....)
I guess my facetiousness was too subtle, or did you all miss the comparison to those annoying club cards?
The first part of my post was serious, however, and the reply I got makes me see that earlier posts in the tree were wrong, or at best, confusingly worded.
It's clear to me now that journaling is not a norton filesaver type deal, but simply something so the system can clean up a mess after the whole system gets improperly shut down.
ok, now I get it. thank you.
So how do you benefit from journaling? Does only Apple's Disk Utility use it when it's repairing the disk? Does DiskWarrior use it? Or is there some secret way to use it no one ever talks about?
Seriously, if journaling is such a good thing, they should act like those supermarkets that force you to use discount cards. When you check out, they make a point to tell you how much you saved today with your club card.
Journaling should advertise: "hey, I just saved your butt! Check it out, file blah.foo is all happy now. Thank you, have a nice day."
In Soviet Russia.... Brains eat ...
/. pulse
did I get it right comrade? first SR post I've ever attempted. Maybe I should wait until I have a better sense of the
If you are near a university, the students probably already have all the free broadband they need. Why would they come to your coffee shop just for free internet... unless: they want ambience and good food and beverages. The fact that you offer free WiFi makes you that much more attractive than the other coffee shops that don't. Besides, university kids will loiter in coffee shops for hours regardless of WiFi.
Starving artists? If they have a laptop, they can afford a cup of coffee. If they love you, they will buy many cups of coffee. If they can't afford the coffee, and people of this type somehow manage to comprise the majority of your clientele, then you picked a bad location. Free WiFi is not your problem.
If you are downtown or near a business park, business people will come in to get away from the office. They also have broadband at work, so no big deal there either, they are coming again for ambience and something to consume. These people generally have schedules to keep, so no fear of freeloaders here. They may bring clients to meet with, but that means more purchases and free advertising for you. Sounds like a win.
I don't know how much Starbucks makes from each T-mobile purchase, but when I used it once, I know I felt like I had paid my 11 bucks for the day and I was entitled to every last minute without having to buy anything from the shop. I sat next to an outlet for a large part of the day. This is because I was traveling and the hotel I was at had no internet access. So unless Starbucks gets a kickback from t-mobile, this can be counted as a potential loss. Had Starbucks been providing the access, I would have felt like buying something from them to support it.
Other random tidbits:
My netgear router let's me block specific websites.
If free WiFi loitering really does become a problem (meaning paying customers don't come anymore because non-paying customers are using up all the resources), post a sign that says 'no loitering; internet access, seating, and restrooms reserved for paying customers only; 1hr time limit.' Enforce it like any other food and drink establishment does: monitor the customers and gently ask them to leave if they aren't consuming anything.
If you were to turn off access for 20 minutes after every so often, people relying on the WiFi would be left with nothing to do for 20 minutes. They could buy something and wait, or leave. It would be pretty obvious who was there 'just for the WiFi' in that case.
sorry about the horrible formatting mess. I didn't preview it and though it was set to convert linebreaks to br
Losing 'Finder' or any similar filesystem UI, in favor of dynamic smart folders, queries and searches, is a bad idea. In the real world, you put stuff in a closet, in a trunk, under the table, in the attic, in your left pants pocket or your shirt pocket... you devise all these great schemes to know exactly where everything you own should be. When you get to your car you pull your keys out of your pocket. If you have them in your briefcase, you get disoriented for a second. When you leave your car, you feel the keys in your pocket and are reassured everything is as it should be. But, in the real world, you also lose stuff because sometimes you misplace it or you forget just what your logic was so many years ago. So search tools, maps, etc, are great aids to finding stuff so you can once again use them. But they are NOT themselves the stuff you seek. Feel free to throw away a used up map and be confident it's just a map you're tossing, not the destination itself. Also, you're always going to want some stuff to be far away and archived, out of the way, out of sight, out of mind so you can focus on the stuff you care about right now. You really don't ever need to see that invoice from 1989 again, do you? Well, just in case, you'll keep it in a safe place, but out of the way. Enter Spotlight and smart folders. Amazing tools that help us find the long lost stuff. Cooler still is how you can use them as reporting tools. How many different times did you write something about your pyscho ex? Spotlight knows. But the signal-to-noise ratio when using such tools is disorienting and unreliable. If I go to my kitchen to use my favorite chef's knife, I depend on it being in the place where I put it. I don't want to utter "chef's knife" to a 'smart drawer' that suddenly slides open showing me all 10 different chef knives in my household and poke through them all just to select my favorite knife. No, I want to move my hand to the exact spot where I know it always will be; right at the top right of my other 4 premium cooking knives, none of which is a chef's knife, and all in one nice wooden block, on the counter, in my kitchen. Now imagine the chaos of a shared environment or corporate setting. That's where smart folders actually shine. Because now each person in the company can organize the files for which they are responsible as they see fit, and everyone else can use smart folders to cross-reference across departments or use search tools to find specific cases. But Smart folders must remain exactly what they are: a _View_ of an existing organization; not an organization unto themselves. Users must never confuse the two because a file may be found in more than one smart folder. So it's imperative that the user understand that the file really only exists once. Back to my kitchen, while it would kick ass if I could open one magic drawer that give me access to all the chef's knives so I can take inventory, or I can decide that it's time to replace, sharpen or retire one or another, and another magic drawer that shows me all kitchen utensils of a certain brand, I don't want these dynamic slice of the current state of my kitchen to become the organization of my kitchen. Finally, think about this: databases can be searched, sliced and diced in anyway you like. But you still have to organize the data into tables, never repeating the same information twice; any database guy worth his salt will bend over backwards to keep it as normalized as possible. It's not just one big table. The filesystem is no exception. Reality is not an exception. Even your brain can't effectively perceive the world using a model that would be an exception. It can't. So why bother pursuing an organizational system without logical groups, hierarchies, and spatial cues?