Now isn't that ironic. I generally love "fringe" presidential candidates since they tend to be more candid and spent time listening to what he had to say. He came off as a libertarian conservative. I am rather surprised now.
Huh? You are phrasing it as a "don't do drugs" message. Rather, it is a "how to cross the street safely" lesson.
I don't see how this is possibly a bad thing as long as they are only communicating established facts. And a spyware course (and other Internet common sense education) is much more relevant today than a baking course in today's world, in my opinion.
I am not sure why this is tagged "thinkofthechildren". While technically a correct tag, it is used on Slashdot to refer to unreasonable legislations that involve holy cow arguments involving children. That is not the case here.
Since when did Crysis become the official representative of PC games? Crysis shows what can be done with the currently available, albeit still expensive technology. YOU CHOOSE the cost of playing Crysis. It plays fine on my $80 overclocked 7900 GS at medium at standard desktop resolutions and still looks better than any console game I have seen. And my cheap card manages just about every other game on high, say UT3 and COD4 at 1680x1050, my native resolution. There will always be a PC game that pushes the envelope. That doesn't mean that I am REQUIRED to upgrade.
Believe it or not, I choose PC gaming because it is cheaper - for me. I need a semi-decent computer anyway (that is not the case for an average PC user) and slapping in a mid-range card is the cheaper route than buying a full console that I can't use for other things.
What's there to disagree? As parent suggested, that IS what FireBug does and MORE. Parent is not saying viewing source is not important. He is saying that the "View Source" function in FireFox is not relavant anymore since substantially better tools are available. But I agree, it is curious that they chose to reload the page for this.
> But, what were good design decisions for a Windows program are problematic for other people to implement. Boo hoo. And what assholes everyone was to the Microsoft poster, btw.
Yes. MS had good business reasons to do all that. Likewise, they got an edge when they dropped security and stability in favor of performance, when machines were slower. Problem is... they now want to call all that legacy "documentation" (an incomplete one at that) of their system, a standard. The whole point of this particular standard is to make alternate implementations possible and prevent vendor lock in. Who cares what historically justifiable reasons MS had. None of those reasons matter for applications NOW.
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 1
I am not sure I understand. How is this different from any of the ones listed here(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization). What makes your library any more of an XML alternative than them?
Re:Too many 'this stuff sucks' moments
on
The Future of XML
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I just am adding finishing touches for a several year long project where I was bitten by XML (My problems were with schema namespace support in libraries at the time). I had to resort to non-standard hacks.
While I share your disdain (and I agree with everyone of your points), the question is this - What other *standard* way do we have to describe a format that has *moderate to high* level of complexity. JSON is great when I don't need to apply any constraints on the data. I would gladly choose it (along with YAML and other choices) for all my simpler needs. But we need some format that is more general purpose.
Binary formats are efficient on the wire. I will gladly take CORBA over SOAP. But if I was to define a binary protocol for my own purposes, do you think I can? The effort required to model, inspect, migrate, provide language support and describe for others to understand is huge without the kind of tools that we have with XML today. We need some/any standard means to do this and whether you and I like it are not, XML is the only choice now. Hopefully, we will see better ways of representing information. But till then, XML, warts and all, is here to stay.
> What about introducing spelling and grammatical errors?
Ever typed a query into Google with a spelling mistake:-)? Most IR algorithms don't place much weight on grammar (if at all) to begin with. Many just consider sentences to be a bag of words. Some interpret basic rules. An error there won't change results much.
No whoosh! The GP's joke was not a perfect match. Grails is a *Groovy* framework. Jails, as a joke, is better applied for something like Trails, which is a Java clone of Rails.
I think people here are missing the target of his proposed kindness. He isn't trying to be kind to his competitors, but rather people in poverty. He has a decent track record there, although as the summary points out, looking for profits in the process rather than as charity may be an object of interest as well as concern.
> its possible that the demo was just put together inefficiently on a slow computer
Highly doubtful. The objects move just fine after he has successfully targeted them. I think it has more to do with human performance. The issue is simply with the low motor resolution of the arm muscles compared to the more dexterous fingers. It can also be more fatiguing to hold them up in air since larger muscle groups are needed. MS Surface and Minority Report UI use large muscle groups to roughly locate the object but use the fingers to actually interact. Having a combined visual, motor and partial tactile point of reference also helps at least in learnability but we can get used to that part like we did with Mice.
> I have no doubt that this could lead to an extremely well-polished and affordable interface in the not-so-distant future.
These types of interfaces are nothing new and have been studied for decades as multi-modal interfaces. What is nice however, about this one is that it has been put together using commodity hardware (Wii). It will help geeks play with such interfaces and by sheer numbers can help drive innovation since till now the technology has been limited to usability researchers.
> A 3-d RTS in which you can actually move around on the battlefield by changing position relative to the screen?
Now games are a different thing. They don't need efficient interfaces, just fun and cool ones... kind of like the Wiimote.
Great. The problem still is that we don't have infinite money for infinite uncommon scenarios that suicidal idiots with determination can come up with. The question is... would air travelers be willing to foot the bill as part of their fare instead than through taxes where they have no say.
> Luckily, I don't generally have to prove God's existence or my husband's love for me to anyone else. That's my POINT. An individual person (even a scientist) can believe something to be true even if they can't prove it to someone else, and that doesn't make them an idiot.
It generally makes them idiots only when they try to push that belief (or its outcomes) onto someone ELSE who does not share those conclusions without furnishing logical arguments. Secondly, extra-ordinary claims demand extra-ordinary proof. If someone says, their spouse loves them, this rather ordinary claim requires no special proof. But if someone asked me to believe in their relationship with an entity that originated and controls the universe of size at least 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kms (pardon my quick math) in diameter - they better bring a lot more compelling reasons than "I know in my heart its true" or "you just have to experience it" or "because they say he can walk on fire/water/space". If "An individual person (even a scientist)" believes TODAY against all evidence that the earth is flat and can't prove it to others, it DOES make him/her an idiot. Not being an idiot is not about being right. It is about drawing reasonable conclusions from known information. For someone with no access or awareness of proper astronomical data in pre-Copernican times, it was perfectly intelligible to say that the earth was flat.
> If you can't separate your research/work from the rest of your life, you've got some problems. Being logical in my work doesn't mean that I have to logically work out, say, what I want for dinner tonight. Sometimes I think about the costs and benefits of various options, yes. Sometimes I say "Fuck it, I want a pizza."
Logic is an acquired skill and can be cognitively expensive as well as a slow process. We value philosophers just for that. It is not expected to be applied to every minute of life, just for making significant choices.
Human natural logical capabilities are limited. We tend to instinctively draw causal inferences between co-occurring events. If a person says "I prayed to this deity and it came to be true, therefore I think prayer to this deity works. Since I now accept that this deity is real, everything else this deity supposedly said must also be true and I therefore understand the purpose of this ~14 billion year old universe" and if that person happens to be incidentally a functioning scientist, I would say that the said scientist knows the rules of logic enough to apply them in a job but has not internalized them. I would recommend readings on the history of the elusive scientific method all the way from the logic used in the witch trials.
P.S: If you think an occasional pizza is not fitting your cost benefit analysis, it could be that you are not considering all the variables. I would consider an infrequent/occational indulgence quite high on the happiness scale to balance out the costs (saturated fat?).
I recommend all of Norman's lay literature. He is a Cognitive Psychologist who can write well for non-technical audience. This brings up another point. HCI should ideally be always grounded in Cognitive Psychology. It should simply be the application of the theories of cognition to tool interfaces. The problem is that we don't understand human cognition well enough to create structured and comprehensive rule sets of how interfaces need to be. So HCI is still a bit of an art. Nevertheless, there are some common sense guidelines and evaluation is king.
Reading about cognitive psychology opens you up to the bigger picture than what most HCI books can deal with. Unfortunately, cognitive psychology is not the kind of material that the techies like to read, the programming kind anyway.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
I don't think you understood what I stated. The whole point of generating a UNIQUE RANDOM number on the receipt was so that it was de-identified. The printing of a receipt can always be made optional by a voter if he think he is under threat by carrying one or for any other reason. In any case, no one showed any interest in this idea. So there isn't any point discussing it further.
In other words, voter privacy is compromised and I did consider that factor. Disclosure happens only if fraud has happened and only by the voter's choice. And only a small portion of the fraud has to come to light for the elections to be repeated. I can imagine this to be a problem in small populations but not in general election sizes. And if the situation has reached a point where the US civilians already fear retribution for such reporting, much has already been lost. I don't think the current situation is that bad.
Disclaimer: I am not a US voter. I don't have a clue of actual practices here. And it's my bedtime. But here is an idea which I think has all the benefits of the electronic system and more security than simple paper vote. Comment.
1. Voter gets assigned a unique random number upon vote. Receipt is printed with actual vote and assigned random number. 2. A spreadsheet with all the votes (shuffled for privacy) is put online for public download. Everyone gets to check how their vote got registered without the system knowing who is checking it. If there is a discrepancy, voter can contest with the receipt as proof.
Benefits: 1. Instant tally like an electronic system. 2. Paper trail is decentralized with voters, not in a central location where there is still potential for abuse.
I probably missed something obvious. But this is Slashdot and I get to suggest the impractical now and then.
The challenge is not technical. Devs need to change their mindsets while about thinking about web applications. I am not talking about putting an occasional AJAX widget. The change is from synchronous to asynchronous web applications. That's about as big a change as writing distributed applications for someone who mostly wrote 1-tier applications. Design is different as is debugging.
1. They already doubled production. 2. The whole business model of the consoles is based on creating a large user base for their closed product rather than profit from sales. Reaching that target slower is counter profitable. Wii still has to take over PS2's base. 3. They are pulling their TV ads because they are unable to meet demand. http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Wii_TV_Ads_Canceled_In_UK_11531.html
Pulling ads is not something a company that wants to create artificial demand does.
Slashdot Mirror
Now isn't that ironic. I generally love "fringe" presidential candidates since they tend to be more candid and spent time listening to what he had to say. He came off as a libertarian conservative. I am rather surprised now.
Huh? You are phrasing it as a "don't do drugs" message. Rather, it is a "how to cross the street safely" lesson.
I don't see how this is possibly a bad thing as long as they are only communicating established facts. And a spyware course (and other Internet common sense education) is much more relevant today than a baking course in today's world, in my opinion.
I am not sure why this is tagged "thinkofthechildren". While technically a correct tag, it is used on Slashdot to refer to unreasonable legislations that involve holy cow arguments involving children. That is not the case here.
You are confusing dementia with mania.
Since when did Crysis become the official representative of PC games? Crysis shows what can be done with the currently available, albeit still expensive technology. YOU CHOOSE the cost of playing Crysis. It plays fine on my $80 overclocked 7900 GS at medium at standard desktop resolutions and still looks better than any console game I have seen. And my cheap card manages just about every other game on high, say UT3 and COD4 at 1680x1050, my native resolution. There will always be a PC game that pushes the envelope. That doesn't mean that I am REQUIRED to upgrade.
Believe it or not, I choose PC gaming because it is cheaper - for me. I need a semi-decent computer anyway (that is not the case for an average PC user) and slapping in a mid-range card is the cheaper route than buying a full console that I can't use for other things.
What's there to disagree? As parent suggested, that IS what FireBug does and MORE. Parent is not saying viewing source is not important. He is saying that the "View Source" function in FireFox is not relavant anymore since substantially better tools are available. But I agree, it is curious that they chose to reload the page for this.
> But, what were good design decisions for a Windows program are problematic for other people to implement. Boo hoo. And what assholes everyone was to the Microsoft poster, btw.
Yes. MS had good business reasons to do all that. Likewise, they got an edge when they dropped security and stability in favor of performance, when machines were slower. Problem is... they now want to call all that legacy "documentation" (an incomplete one at that) of their system, a standard. The whole point of this particular standard is to make alternate implementations possible and prevent vendor lock in. Who cares what historically justifiable reasons MS had. None of those reasons matter for applications NOW.
I am not sure I understand. How is this different from any of the ones listed here(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization). What makes your library any more of an XML alternative than them?
I just am adding finishing touches for a several year long project where I was bitten by XML (My problems were with schema namespace support in libraries at the time). I had to resort to non-standard hacks.
While I share your disdain (and I agree with everyone of your points), the question is this - What other *standard* way do we have to describe a format that has *moderate to high* level of complexity. JSON is great when I don't need to apply any constraints on the data. I would gladly choose it (along with YAML and other choices) for all my simpler needs. But we need some format that is more general purpose.
Binary formats are efficient on the wire. I will gladly take CORBA over SOAP. But if I was to define a binary protocol for my own purposes, do you think I can? The effort required to model, inspect, migrate, provide language support and describe for others to understand is huge without the kind of tools that we have with XML today. We need some/any standard means to do this and whether you and I like it are not, XML is the only choice now. Hopefully, we will see better ways of representing information. But till then, XML, warts and all, is here to stay.
> What about introducing spelling and grammatical errors?
:-)? Most IR algorithms don't place much weight on grammar (if at all) to begin with. Many just consider sentences to be a bag of words. Some interpret basic rules. An error there won't change results much.
Ever typed a query into Google with a spelling mistake
I don't know if that is multi-tasking, but it seems to be more a case ambidexterity.
> whoosh!
> Java + Rails = Jails
No whoosh! The GP's joke was not a perfect match. Grails is a *Groovy* framework. Jails, as a joke, is better applied for something like Trails, which is a Java clone of Rails.
So now Perl Jokes are obfuscated too?
I think people here are missing the target of his proposed kindness. He isn't trying to be kind to his competitors, but rather people in poverty. He has a decent track record there, although as the summary points out, looking for profits in the process rather than as charity may be an object of interest as well as concern.
> its possible that the demo was just put together inefficiently on a slow computer
Highly doubtful. The objects move just fine after he has successfully targeted them. I think it has more to do with human performance. The issue is simply with the low motor resolution of the arm muscles compared to the more dexterous fingers. It can also be more fatiguing to hold them up in air since larger muscle groups are needed. MS Surface and Minority Report UI use large muscle groups to roughly locate the object but use the fingers to actually interact. Having a combined visual, motor and partial tactile point of reference also helps at least in learnability but we can get used to that part like we did with Mice.
> I have no doubt that this could lead to an extremely well-polished and affordable interface in the not-so-distant future.
These types of interfaces are nothing new and have been studied for decades as multi-modal interfaces. What is nice however, about this one is that it has been put together using commodity hardware (Wii). It will help geeks play with such interfaces and by sheer numbers can help drive innovation since till now the technology has been limited to usability researchers.
> A 3-d RTS in which you can actually move around on the battlefield by changing position relative to the screen?
Now games are a different thing. They don't need efficient interfaces, just fun and cool ones... kind of like the Wiimote.
> Why would you want to store a scientist in a database?
So that these geeks can have normal relationships.
Great. The problem still is that we don't have infinite money for infinite uncommon scenarios that suicidal idiots with determination can come up with. The question is... would air travelers be willing to foot the bill as part of their fare instead than through taxes where they have no say.
> Luckily, I don't generally have to prove God's existence or my husband's love for me to anyone else. That's my POINT. An individual person (even a scientist) can believe something to be true even if they can't prove it to someone else, and that doesn't make them an idiot.
It generally makes them idiots only when they try to push that belief (or its outcomes) onto someone ELSE who does not share those conclusions without furnishing logical arguments. Secondly, extra-ordinary claims demand extra-ordinary proof. If someone says, their spouse loves them, this rather ordinary claim requires no special proof. But if someone asked me to believe in their relationship with an entity that originated and controls the universe of size at least 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kms (pardon my quick math) in diameter - they better bring a lot more compelling reasons than "I know in my heart its true" or "you just have to experience it" or "because they say he can walk on fire/water/space". If "An individual person (even a scientist)" believes TODAY against all evidence that the earth is flat and can't prove it to others, it DOES make him/her an idiot. Not being an idiot is not about being right. It is about drawing reasonable conclusions from known information. For someone with no access or awareness of proper astronomical data in pre-Copernican times, it was perfectly intelligible to say that the earth was flat.
> If you can't separate your research/work from the rest of your life, you've got some problems. Being logical in my work doesn't mean that I have to logically work out, say, what I want for dinner tonight. Sometimes I think about the costs and benefits of various options, yes. Sometimes I say "Fuck it, I want a pizza."
Logic is an acquired skill and can be cognitively expensive as well as a slow process. We value philosophers just for that. It is not expected to be applied to every minute of life, just for making significant choices.
Human natural logical capabilities are limited. We tend to instinctively draw causal inferences between co-occurring events. If a person says "I prayed to this deity and it came to be true, therefore I think prayer to this deity works. Since I now accept that this deity is real, everything else this deity supposedly said must also be true and I therefore understand the purpose of this ~14 billion year old universe" and if that person happens to be incidentally a functioning scientist, I would say that the said scientist knows the rules of logic enough to apply them in a job but has not internalized them. I would recommend readings on the history of the elusive scientific method all the way from the logic used in the witch trials.
P.S: If you think an occasional pizza is not fitting your cost benefit analysis, it could be that you are not considering all the variables. I would consider an infrequent/occational indulgence quite high on the happiness scale to balance out the costs (saturated fat?).
I recommend all of Norman's lay literature. He is a Cognitive Psychologist who can write well for non-technical audience. This brings up another point. HCI should ideally be always grounded in Cognitive Psychology. It should simply be the application of the theories of cognition to tool interfaces. The problem is that we don't understand human cognition well enough to create structured and comprehensive rule sets of how interfaces need to be. So HCI is still a bit of an art. Nevertheless, there are some common sense guidelines and evaluation is king.
Reading about cognitive psychology opens you up to the bigger picture than what most HCI books can deal with. Unfortunately, cognitive psychology is not the kind of material that the techies like to read, the programming kind anyway.
Yeah. So unfair. Why is it that dogs get to walk around naked while humans aren't allowed to. They secretly run the world, I tell you.
"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
Herbert Simon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Simon
I don't think you understood what I stated. The whole point of generating a UNIQUE RANDOM number on the receipt was so that it was de-identified. The printing of a receipt can always be made optional by a voter if he think he is under threat by carrying one or for any other reason. In any case, no one showed any interest in this idea. So there isn't any point discussing it further.
In other words, voter privacy is compromised and I did consider that factor. Disclosure happens only if fraud has happened and only by the voter's choice. And only a small portion of the fraud has to come to light for the elections to be repeated. I can imagine this to be a problem in small populations but not in general election sizes. And if the situation has reached a point where the US civilians already fear retribution for such reporting, much has already been lost. I don't think the current situation is that bad.
Disclaimer: I am not a US voter. I don't have a clue of actual practices here. And it's my bedtime.
But here is an idea which I think has all the benefits of the electronic system and more security than simple paper vote. Comment.
1. Voter gets assigned a unique random number upon vote. Receipt is printed with actual vote and assigned random number.
2. A spreadsheet with all the votes (shuffled for privacy) is put online for public download. Everyone gets to check how their vote got registered without the system knowing who is checking it. If there is a discrepancy, voter can contest with the receipt as proof.
Benefits:
1. Instant tally like an electronic system.
2. Paper trail is decentralized with voters, not in a central location where there is still potential for abuse.
I probably missed something obvious. But this is Slashdot and I get to suggest the impractical now and then.
The challenge is not technical. Devs need to change their mindsets while about thinking about web applications. I am not talking about putting an occasional AJAX widget. The change is from synchronous to asynchronous web applications. That's about as big a change as writing distributed applications for someone who mostly wrote 1-tier applications. Design is different as is debugging.
1. They already doubled production.
2. The whole business model of the consoles is based on creating a large user base for their closed product rather than profit from sales. Reaching that target slower is counter profitable. Wii still has to take over PS2's base.
3. They are pulling their TV ads because they are unable to meet demand.
http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Wii_TV_Ads_Canceled_In_UK_11531.html
Pulling ads is not something a company that wants to create artificial demand does.