My Skoda Octavia's radio (which is the same as in Volkswagen and I guess Audi and Seat too) has a feature that it increases volume with speed. My former Nissan had this too, but the nice thing about VAG's implementation is that I can set the factor by which it increases the volume. The Nissan's implementation wasn't configurable and increased the volume too much for my taste.
I don't know about licenses bought from US, but in Europe, software is often licensed for use in EMEA-region (Europe Middle-East Asia), so software bought with this kind of license in Europe is not allowed to be used in US. If I remember correctly, our MS corporate licensing (OVS kind) covers only Europe, which according to MS does not include parts of Soviet Russia that are geographically in Europe.
I'm not a native English speaker and live in a non-English speaking country. I, too, rather use same programs in English, because when they are localised, the translations are often so artificial perhaps because my native language doesn't really have good translations for many actions. So I have to translate the menu-entries to English (and try to guess which localised verb would be closest to the action I want to perform) in my head before I can find the right action.
I haven't really used software in other languages besides English and my native language. Would be interesting to know if this is a common problem in other languages, too. Well, to be honest, I have had to guess a couple of actions in Swedish, Estonian and Spanish, and what annoys me is that in MS products, the entries in context menus are sometimes in different order in different localisations, so none of that choose the fourth entry from the top really works..
That's why when I did php coding we used to do it:
include "header.inc"; if ( $something ) {
include "morehtml.inc"; } else {
include "someotherhtml.inc"; } include "footer.inc";
This made it nice enough for coders to worry about the logic, the HTML-guys worry about the presentation and we could even reuse the html-bits elsewhere in the site when needed.
Another feature might be a slow-down signal that your car sends out to cars behind you in the event that you suddenly stop, like to avoid a deer or another accident. This might reduce pile-ups on the highway.
Also, the drunk who is coming at you should have an emergency braking system that kicks in to prevent him killing you (and maybe himself). Lots of people hit trees and this would help with that problem as well.
At least VAG cars and some other European cars (French ones, I think) have a system that if you break from a speed of more than 60km/h hard enough to deploy emergency brake assistant, it will automatically turn on the emergency signal lights (I don't know the correct terminology for this in English, sorry).
Some manufacturers' cruise controls also have systems to automatically keep enough distance to the car in front. This will also bring the car at least on MB to a complete halt if the car in front stops. I don't know, if this works when cruise control is off, though. Volvo has a crash warning system in S80 that signals a warning to the driver if the speed is fast enough that the system thinks you're going to crash.
In my experience the limit for the "sensor" bar that comes with the Wii is about 3 meters (this is also in the manual, which I have read, believe it or not), after which it starts to be bouncy. If yours stops working around 2 meters, then there might be something wrong with the sensor bar (dust) or some other IR sources that become visible for the WiiMotes.
I have heard that the battery operated "wireless sensor bar" (Which is actually 2 IR LEDs with batteries and does not have the power cord coming from the console) has a longer range due to brighter LEDs.
From European point of view your SMS charging seems very twisted. In Finland I don't use my mobile so much, so I chose not to pay any monthly fee. No use means no charge for me. I pay about EUR 0.06 (USD 0.10) per minute when I call or send an SMS. No charge for receiving calls or SMS when I'm in my own country. I also have unlimited 3G data (384kbps) for less than EUR 10 (USD 16).
We only pay for receiving calls when we are in another country.
Yes, I tried the windows menu and I'm quite proficient in using the window controls of my OS, both Linux and Windows. The main point is, that intuitiveness is relative to the mental models of the user. Mine nowadays being that I'm working with documents that are supposed to be windows (images in this case) and not with a program. None of the other programs I currently use use MDI. I also had trouble with some basic tools like cropping an image in Photoshop, because I had to do some clicks that were not really intuitive to me - probably are to someone who has been cropping images with Photoshop for years. So for me, Gimp works more like the other software I use and because of this reason is more intuitive. The control window is kind of strange concept, though, but I'm accustomed to that.
The mental model has changed through the years. In the 90's I ran a program and opened files within that program. Now I browse the file system and open files and work with files. I can't even put my finger on when the transition from program-centric to document-centric model happened for me, but Gimp certainly supports that model better than Photoshop.
A kind of strange exception to this 1 window - 1 document mental model seems to be web browsers, where I can't live without tabs, but maybe web browsing for me is more of a function like reading e-mail than working with HTML-documents. I do sometimes split different topics into different browser windows if I'm studying many things at once. Editing and just reading are different functions, though.
No worries, the commercial competitor Photoshop is even more unintuitive. I had to use it for fixing some b/w photos the other day, but I can't even change between different images using alt+tab on Windows and I really can't use the UI either. For me it's not less pretty than Photoshop either, not slower, has the features I need, so it's very much not crappy.
My use is mostly pretty basic use fixing photos for a b/w magazine or doing some adjustments for photos for web or before I send my digital photos to be printed and it does that for me.
In my native language the word that can be translated to addiction has a meaning in addition to psychological or physiological addiction such as drug addiction that means roughly means being dependant on something. I am not sure of the English language, but I think what the addiction here refers to is not that people get withdrawal symptoms from getting separated from their gadgets.
I think the meaning is that the gadgets (and through them possibly the network) becomes part of you in a way your arms and legs are a part of you. When you lose your gadgets that have been extensions of yourself, you feel like some part of you has been amputated. The gadgets change the way we do things and when without them, we have to alter our behaviour to adapt to missing functionality.
Have you tried to solve problems without having access to google, lately?
Good products need advertising to make them known. I like and use Firefox, but I don't feel I have to push it to anyone even though I consider myself "technically clued-in". When people have problems with eg. malware after surfing in suspicious parts of the web, I tell them about problems with IE and if they ask for alternatives, I might direct them to Firefox. I don't push it to people that have no problems with IE and are not looking for alternatives.
Having ads in mainstream media makes a product more known and makes the product (in some cases at least) more credible to your average consumer. This might make a new population of people that realise that they have a choice and may become interested. For those I am willing to tell that in my experience it's actually a very functional browser.
Sure, but at the company where I worked at the time this was taken into account when budgeting the project that brought Oracle to the house. Sending a couple of people to DBA courses was pretty cheap in the cost of the whole project. Not training a couple of people was considered a way bigger risk than the cost of DBA courses.
Being beginner-friendly like MySQL can IMO promote false sense of security. I have also done my share of lightweight web development and met a lot of people who don't have a clue about MySQL's weaknesses.
My experience a couple of years ago working with 8i was that after Oracle DBA courses setting up and maintaining these things was really not very hard when you understand what's going on. I also found that documentation on OTN was very good.
In Finland there was a large scale phishing attack targeted at users of a major online bank. It had an url with a numeric IP address, was translated from an earlier English message by machine and was thus very bad Finnish. The earlier English message got wide publicity also in mainstream media. I got one of the messages and just out of curiosity checked out the website. The website was equally bad Finnish language and asked for username, PIN number and payment authorisation codes. Money was transferred from accounts of about 10 people to somewhere in Latvia. 8 transfers got cancelled by the bank, 2 accounts were already emptied on an ATM and about 20 thousand euros were stolen.
The bank has taken responsibility and promised to return the money of their customers, but a couple of days ago after this Finnish attack was still saying that the attacks are a scheme to undermine the trust of online banking, but maybe it was just a way to steal money from ignorant people?
I think this might be a good thing for web in general, because sites need to start supporting web browsers in general if they want to keep their mac users instead of assuming that mac users will want to install IE. Not that mac IE ever behaved like its windows counterpart..
In my country I see headlines like "SUV ran over a child" on a daily basis. I don't know if "A child got hit by an SUV" is any better. The reason for this is probably the limited space of the headline, so you tell the essential in a short form. If the type of the vehicle is less interesting than the driver, we see headlines like "Drunk driver ran over child" or "86-year old ran over child". So I could probably ask with what? Their feet?
Normally in my country stories like this spread so that I read them on Slashdot first, then I read them in a local IT news service a few hours later and the next day they may be in mainstream news.
This one I heard on the radio yesterday driving home from work!
I hate the fact that the UI still seems to encourage font changes and paragraph formatting instead of using styles. I see way too many problems with word processors when people just select texts and change the font and have to basically reformat the whole document paragraph by paragraph after doing some changes to content, when the same could be done very easily using styles. This is actually why I like OOo, the UI in 1.x seems to be more style oriented than in Office and I feel way more comfortable with it.
(And OOo doesn't nag every 20 seconds that this feature is not installed, please insert CD to install it now while I'm typing!)
I don't even understand why I would want to control sound volume with software when I have a very intuitive knob that I can turn to adjust sound volume. (What I would like to do, though, is to be able to disable sounds for good for some software, like Firefox and Flash unless I really really want to hear something from my web browser)
Slashdot Mirror
My Skoda Octavia's radio (which is the same as in Volkswagen and I guess Audi and Seat too) has a feature that it increases volume with speed. My former Nissan had this too, but the nice thing about VAG's implementation is that I can set the factor by which it increases the volume. The Nissan's implementation wasn't configurable and increased the volume too much for my taste.
I don't know about licenses bought from US, but in Europe, software is often licensed for use in EMEA-region (Europe Middle-East Asia), so software bought with this kind of license in Europe is not allowed to be used in US. If I remember correctly, our MS corporate licensing (OVS kind) covers only Europe, which according to MS does not include parts of Soviet Russia that are geographically in Europe.
I'm not a native English speaker and live in a non-English speaking country. I, too, rather use same programs in English, because when they are localised, the translations are often so artificial perhaps because my native language doesn't really have good translations for many actions. So I have to translate the menu-entries to English (and try to guess which localised verb would be closest to the action I want to perform) in my head before I can find the right action.
I haven't really used software in other languages besides English and my native language. Would be interesting to know if this is a common problem in other languages, too. Well, to be honest, I have had to guess a couple of actions in Swedish, Estonian and Spanish, and what annoys me is that in MS products, the entries in context menus are sometimes in different order in different localisations, so none of that choose the fourth entry from the top really works..
Dogbert invented no-click shopping ages ago.
You'd better click something or he has to ship you some books.
Which reminds me, I want to be able to undo when I accidentally close the wrong tab.
That's why when I did php coding we used to do it:
include "header.inc";
if ( $something ) {
include "morehtml.inc";
} else {
include "someotherhtml.inc";
}
include "footer.inc";
This made it nice enough for coders to worry about the logic, the HTML-guys worry about the presentation and we could even reuse the html-bits elsewhere in the site when needed.
Another feature might be a slow-down signal that your car sends out to cars behind you in the event that you suddenly stop, like to avoid a deer or another accident. This might reduce pile-ups on the highway. Also, the drunk who is coming at you should have an emergency braking system that kicks in to prevent him killing you (and maybe himself). Lots of people hit trees and this would help with that problem as well.
At least VAG cars and some other European cars (French ones, I think) have a system that if you break from a speed of more than 60km/h hard enough to deploy emergency brake assistant, it will automatically turn on the emergency signal lights (I don't know the correct terminology for this in English, sorry).
Some manufacturers' cruise controls also have systems to automatically keep enough distance to the car in front. This will also bring the car at least on MB to a complete halt if the car in front stops. I don't know, if this works when cruise control is off, though. Volvo has a crash warning system in S80 that signals a warning to the driver if the speed is fast enough that the system thinks you're going to crash.
In my experience the limit for the "sensor" bar that comes with the Wii is about 3 meters (this is also in the manual, which I have read, believe it or not), after which it starts to be bouncy. If yours stops working around 2 meters, then there might be something wrong with the sensor bar (dust) or some other IR sources that become visible for the WiiMotes.
I have heard that the battery operated "wireless sensor bar" (Which is actually 2 IR LEDs with batteries and does not have the power cord coming from the console) has a longer range due to brighter LEDs.
Just imagine what will happen when a soccer mom runs over this thing with an SUV (or someone else with any other proper size car)! Aboslute deathtrap!
(And I live in a country where Toyota Corolla is a proper size family car)
From European point of view your SMS charging seems very twisted. In Finland I don't use my mobile so much, so I chose not to pay any monthly fee. No use means no charge for me. I pay about EUR 0.06 (USD 0.10) per minute when I call or send an SMS. No charge for receiving calls or SMS when I'm in my own country. I also have unlimited 3G data (384kbps) for less than EUR 10 (USD 16).
We only pay for receiving calls when we are in another country.
Now that's sexual content!
Yes, I tried the windows menu and I'm quite proficient in using the window controls of my OS, both Linux and Windows. The main point is, that intuitiveness is relative to the mental models of the user. Mine nowadays being that I'm working with documents that are supposed to be windows (images in this case) and not with a program. None of the other programs I currently use use MDI. I also had trouble with some basic tools like cropping an image in Photoshop, because I had to do some clicks that were not really intuitive to me - probably are to someone who has been cropping images with Photoshop for years. So for me, Gimp works more like the other software I use and because of this reason is more intuitive. The control window is kind of strange concept, though, but I'm accustomed to that.
The mental model has changed through the years. In the 90's I ran a program and opened files within that program. Now I browse the file system and open files and work with files. I can't even put my finger on when the transition from program-centric to document-centric model happened for me, but Gimp certainly supports that model better than Photoshop.
A kind of strange exception to this 1 window - 1 document mental model seems to be web browsers, where I can't live without tabs, but maybe web browsing for me is more of a function like reading e-mail than working with HTML-documents. I do sometimes split different topics into different browser windows if I'm studying many things at once. Editing and just reading are different functions, though.
No worries, the commercial competitor Photoshop is even more unintuitive. I had to use it for fixing some b/w photos the other day, but I can't even change between different images using alt+tab on Windows and I really can't use the UI either. For me it's not less pretty than Photoshop either, not slower, has the features I need, so it's very much not crappy.
My use is mostly pretty basic use fixing photos for a b/w magazine or doing some adjustments for photos for web or before I send my digital photos to be printed and it does that for me.
According to F-Secures weblog they really didn't have to open the file, it was enough that Google Desktop Search indexed the file..
In my native language the word that can be translated to addiction has a meaning in addition to psychological or physiological addiction such as drug addiction that means roughly means being dependant on something. I am not sure of the English language, but I think what the addiction here refers to is not that people get withdrawal symptoms from getting separated from their gadgets.
I think the meaning is that the gadgets (and through them possibly the network) becomes part of you in a way your arms and legs are a part of you. When you lose your gadgets that have been extensions of yourself, you feel like some part of you has been amputated. The gadgets change the way we do things and when without them, we have to alter our behaviour to adapt to missing functionality.
Have you tried to solve problems without having access to google, lately?
Good products need advertising to make them known. I like and use Firefox, but I don't feel I have to push it to anyone even though I consider myself "technically clued-in". When people have problems with eg. malware after surfing in suspicious parts of the web, I tell them about problems with IE and if they ask for alternatives, I might direct them to Firefox. I don't push it to people that have no problems with IE and are not looking for alternatives.
Having ads in mainstream media makes a product more known and makes the product (in some cases at least) more credible to your average consumer. This might make a new population of people that realise that they have a choice and may become interested. For those I am willing to tell that in my experience it's actually a very functional browser.
Sure, but at the company where I worked at the time this was taken into account when budgeting the project that brought Oracle to the house. Sending a couple of people to DBA courses was pretty cheap in the cost of the whole project. Not training a couple of people was considered a way bigger risk than the cost of DBA courses.
Being beginner-friendly like MySQL can IMO promote false sense of security. I have also done my share of lightweight web development and met a lot of people who don't have a clue about MySQL's weaknesses.
My experience a couple of years ago working with 8i was that after Oracle DBA courses setting up and maintaining these things was really not very hard when you understand what's going on. I also found that documentation on OTN was very good.
In Finland there was a large scale phishing attack targeted at users of a major online bank. It had an url with a numeric IP address, was translated from an earlier English message by machine and was thus very bad Finnish. The earlier English message got wide publicity also in mainstream media. I got one of the messages and just out of curiosity checked out the website. The website was equally bad Finnish language and asked for username, PIN number and payment authorisation codes. Money was transferred from accounts of about 10 people to somewhere in Latvia. 8 transfers got cancelled by the bank, 2 accounts were already emptied on an ATM and about 20 thousand euros were stolen.
The bank has taken responsibility and promised to return the money of their customers, but a couple of days ago after this Finnish attack was still saying that the attacks are a scheme to undermine the trust of online banking, but maybe it was just a way to steal money from ignorant people?
I think this might be a good thing for web in general, because sites need to start supporting web browsers in general if they want to keep their mac users instead of assuming that mac users will want to install IE. Not that mac IE ever behaved like its windows counterpart..
In my country I see headlines like "SUV ran over a child" on a daily basis. I don't know if "A child got hit by an SUV" is any better. The reason for this is probably the limited space of the headline, so you tell the essential in a short form. If the type of the vehicle is less interesting than the driver, we see headlines like "Drunk driver ran over child" or "86-year old ran over child". So I could probably ask with what? Their feet?
Normally in my country stories like this spread so that I read them on Slashdot first, then I read them in a local IT news service a few hours later and the next day they may be in mainstream news.
This one I heard on the radio yesterday driving home from work!
I hate the fact that the UI still seems to encourage font changes and paragraph formatting instead of using styles. I see way too many problems with word processors when people just select texts and change the font and have to basically reformat the whole document paragraph by paragraph after doing some changes to content, when the same could be done very easily using styles. This is actually why I like OOo, the UI in 1.x seems to be more style oriented than in Office and I feel way more comfortable with it.
(And OOo doesn't nag every 20 seconds that this feature is not installed, please insert CD to install it now while I'm typing!)
I don't even understand why I would want to control sound volume with software when I have a very intuitive knob that I can turn to adjust sound volume. (What I would like to do, though, is to be able to disable sounds for good for some software, like Firefox and Flash unless I really really want to hear something from my web browser)
...we can use SETI@home to find intelligent life in the Internet?