the ideal width of text lines is not as long as possible. The eyes have to scan too many times horizontally.
Agreed. The concept of user interface design did not begin at Xerox PARC in the 70s. It goes back to stuff like stone tools and papyrus manuscripts.
Ever wonder why magazines and newspapers break text up into columns rather than letting a paragraph run the entire width of the page? Hint: it's not because of adverts, or because their machines couldn't handle it. It's because they realized that eyes can't handle that much text all at once.
BTW, median screen resolution is 800x600, and it's likely to get smaller in the next few years. Think Palm.
Pointless game. One can never lose if he/she/it always chooses to compete.
Aha! You've fallen into the trap of deceptive simplicity. The point is when you play this game multiple times in a row -- the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma.
I did this once as a bonus problem with a roomfull of math kids. For points I used Skittles. I carefully explained the rules, divided the whole class into pairs and they played for 10 rounds.
Most of the class followed your strategy. If their opponent cooperated on the first round then defected the other nine, they got 14 Skittles and their "opponent" got 9. I asked the class "how do you win this game", and most of the replied "by getting more candy than your opponent". BZZT!
Exactly one pair of kids cooperated the entire way through. They each got 30 Skittles. I pointed this out, and figurative light bulbs flashed on all around the room. It was freaking perfect.
That's the law in the US. You only have to be 13 for them to collect personal data.
True. Note that Klerck is usually just a goat troll and his posts start at -1, but today he has posted an accurate and useful tidbit. If anyone has a spare mod point, please reward him.
I work in K12 distance education, so I deal with this issue all the time. The Children Online Privacy Protection Act specifies that internet sites are not allowed to collect personal information from anyone age 12 or less without parental permission (preferably in writing). The obvious flip side is that age 13 or older is fair game.
On both Mac & Windows, the Quicktime 3 movie player app is massively better than the QT 4 or 5 player in terms of usability. QT3 Player uses OS-native widgets instead of the "brushed chrome" monstrosity that ranks high in the user interface hall of shame.
And the important part is that QT4+ codecs work fine in the QT3 player.
Nah, it took 20 years to put man on the moon. It took 4000 years for man to figure out he wanted to go there.
Hey, if you're going to play that game, you'll have to go back to at least 1865, if not earlier. Don't you diss on my boy Jules Verne!
ObAI: I have trouble with most AI movies. They usually start with the premise that this is the first AI ever built, that it was built in secret by a small team, and that either it's in a perfectly human body, or we're attaching a whole lot of guns to it and we're sure it won't go berserk. That does bad things to my suspension of disbelief.
You can't blame the US (or other countries) for all the ills of an industrial economy without acknowledging the many benefits
Oh, I agree completely. Life in the US rocks, and everyone else would love to share the fun. I was narrowly criticizing the previous comment for sounding entirely too much like Marie Antoinette. People on the top often forget how rough the other 99% of the world has it.
If we don't do a whole lot more to reduce consumption, there are three possibilities:
We destroy the planet
China catches up to us, and their copycat consumption destroys the planet
Everyone else realizes we're about to destroy the planet, the revolution comes, and we lose our heads
i have a feeling that they generate much more pollution per capita than the united states
I have a feeling that you really Really REALLY ought to visit a 3rd world coutry some time. Let's compare the average US citizen to the average citizen of someplace like Kenya or even China:
Wake up in the morning? We use a clock radio, toothpaste (what do you do with the empty tube, by the way), hot shower, coffee maker, etc. They use a rooster and a water bucket.
Commute to work? We drive. They walk.
Day at the office? We use a laser printer, lead-filled CRT, metal & plastic furniture. They mainly farm or do textile work, and their median electric usage is zero.
Time to relax? We rent a DVD for our PSX2 in an air conditioned rec room. They play stickball.
Per capita, per annum, per anything, Americans are the monster fat pigs of the planet, bar none. Reduce/reuse/recycle is a very good idea, but we make 100x more mess to start with.
I have a big problem with the way that Hotmail tracks what links you click on within emails. You know how webmail services will parse the URLs in a text email and turn them into new window links? The simple and non-invasive way to do it is to just add a TARGET="new" to the link. Yahoo does this, for example.
Instead, Hotmail catalogs all of the links in the current message and stores them in a database server. When you click on a URL, Hotmail calls the server to say "user micromoog clicked on link X in email Y at time T". After a processing delay you get redirected to the actual link, unless you waited more than a couple minutes between opening the email and clicking the link, in which case your database entry has been timed out and you get a 404.
Isn't that wonderful? And the only plausible reason to do it that way is to perform intensive link tracking on personal emails.
Meanwhile, if you're looking for pure SSL email, try hushmail. I use my Yahoo account only for low priority personal stuff.
told I couldn't "because you're a girl". I helped our teacher learn to use an Apple2E Sexism is alive and well in many places.
Excuse me? An Apple IIe? You're talking about sexist events that happened 15 years ago. You can't use an anecdote that old to claim that this sort of thing is still happening now.
15 years ago (I was in high school then too) you could make all sorts of anti-gay, anti-jew, anti-whatever insults and get away with it. Today if a student does anything against any "disenfranchised" minority (not including nerds, of course) the whole school is at risk of hate crimes prosecution.
Certainly sexism still exists. It's alive and well right here on/. in the form of anonymous flamebait. It causes many girls to lose interest in the sciences during middle school. It kills thousands of women in strict Islamic nations. But it doesn't keep American girls out of shop class any more.
ObUnderground: I'd love to throw this book on my Palm, but all the Doc Readers I've ever seen are shareware and I prefer not to violate shareware any more. Links to freeware, anyone?
users of ASP and Cold Fusion tend to use templates to generate the html, and those templates tend to have netscape-breaking bugs
True. A more accurate translation: "I'm a lazy fuck of a web designer who would rather sear your retinas with K00L ActiveX widgets than close a standard tag". That attitude pisses me off every time, and the worst part is that it's so damn common.
For example, JHU uses an employee timecard form written in Perl. The designers recently added NEATO KEEN font coloring for vacation, sick leave, etc. But they didn't bother to/CLOSE most of the new tags in the script. So the result is that my browser of choice (the highly standards-compliant MSIE 5 for MacOS) chokes halfway down the page and says the rest can go to hell. Mozilla 6 also fails to load it.
I emailed the bastards and told them exactly how to fix the problem. Their reply was "Your Remedy ticket #HITS00000013578 has been Closed" which is TechSupport-ese for "fuck off". Too bad for them -- I still get my salary either way.
SUVs are safer than smaller cars. You can drive them over bad / nonexistant roads more easily.
I'm sure what you meant to say there was "SUVs are safer than smaller cars because you can drive them over other cars more easily". Although technically that's still wrong because SUVs are officially trucks. Also, here's a small collection of linksaboutSUVs.
It's perfectly fitting that this inefficient bloated monster should run Java onboard...
The easiest thing for most feeds to do is simply drop their alt.binaries.* groups
Agreed. alt.binaries.* is redundant and inefficient. Prune back problem groups and the rest work much better.
The problem with this simple and effective solution is that news providers (and ISPs in general) love to print group counts in their marketing. "Over 5 billion Usenet newsgroups! When you sign up for our service, we create a new group for you -- alt.cool.stuff.that.user.[foobar].likes !" etc.
For example, JHU has over 30,000 groups. They carry stuff like abg.* (Altenburg, Germany), uw.* (University of Waterloo), and realtynet.* (house selling). I know most of these groups have insignificant traffic, but it's symptomatic of the larger problem -- a willingness to carry every newsgroup ever created.
Too many groups is A BAD THING. For example, our feed has alt.education.*, k12.*, misc.education.*, and school.*, not to mention various local hierarchies and subgroups. If you have a pedagogy question, where the fuck do you post? If you want to hear other people's ideas, where do you read?
The clutter of excess groups make Usenet less valuable by segmenting the readership unnecessarily. Unfortunately the task of newsadmin is generally a minor duty tacked on to the schedule of a disinterested junior sysadmin who doesn't care about Usenet being actually usable.
This dosn't mean "We are making money from spam we just fain ignorence" but "We never bothered to learn what spam is"
That may be true for some real-world businesses who are taking their first dip on the web, but it's clearly not true in this case. All of the big players in online porn are fucking brilliantly net-savvy. They keep up with the bleeding edge of technology, and they know exactly what they're doing.
If you read between the lines you'll see that Cyber Entertainment set up the anti-spam policy as a weasel dodge. As long as they don't do the actual spamming, and "don't ask don't tell" about spam sent by their licensees, the devilish contract stays intact. AOL is working hard to prove that even without direct orders to spam, their "wink wink nudge nudge" is bad enough.
Personally, I'd love to see eBay shot down for the same exact thing. eBay knows damn well that their auctioneers spam the hell out of off-topic Usenet groups. Unfortunately, Usenet doesn't keep a pack of rabid lawyers on retainer...
CONRO isn't quite there yet, but it's definitely a step in the right direction (with the goal of replacing inefficient human forms with superior robotic life, of course). :-)
Self-replicating constructs are sometimes called von Neumann machines. It's a pretty cool idea that the popular media invariably links to Terminator (in the same way that all news stories about comic books must include Bam! Pow! or Holy [foo], Batman! in the title).
Also, here's a link to legal issues about artificial self-replication in case anyone was worried.
If I have these right:
USB maxes out at 1.5 meg a second.
Firewire tops out at 40 meg a second.
Not quite. USB1 is 1.5MBps and Firewire (1394a) is 50MBps. Newly arrived USB2 can do 60MBps, and IEEE-1394b starts at 100MBps and will go up to 400MBps in a couple years.
And of course, 1394 supports up to 63 devices per bus, hot-swappable, networkable, yadda yadda yadda. But my favorite Firewire trick (target disk mode) is Mac only. Let's see IDE match that.
After a few months of intensive class, I had students sniffing my POP mail and cracking my SMB password
Dang, why do other teachers get all the bright ones? I spent a year teaching computers at a middle school and when I arrived none of them could write a web page or "Hello World". (A few of them could by the end of the year). It was kind of disappointing; I was hoping for an apprentice jedi or two.
That's great, but this thread was talking about Folding@Home. They're not so friendly to Macs.
One problem with Seti is that you only get a couple days to turn in a completed unit before they give up on you and send the same unit to someone else. So if your machine is only idle for an hour or so a day, the work is wasted.
I'd love to, but running their client inside of SoftWindows wouldn't be very efficient.
I agree that Seti isn't likely to succeed, but cracking ever-larger math puzzles has diminishing returns for me. I'd rather devote my cycles to something likely to help humankind.
Right now the only choice I've found is Popular Power, but their client runs in Java, so it's possibly even less efficient than a Windows emulator. Ugh. It uses less memory at least. Anyone else know a worthy cause that runs natively on MacOS?
The main candidates out there are carbon/water life vaguely similar to stuff on Earth, perhaps carbon/ammonia (or other simple solvent) in a colder environment, and possibly machine intelligence (previously built by carbon folk).
careful not to push him too hard, to give him a good social experience,
Agreed. Let the kid progress at his own rate, and follow the interests that he puts forward. Another essential thing to remember is that you don't have to go it alone.
Oh, I remember it vividly. They hit every newsgroup. Even the moderated ones! They (gasp!) forged the approval header. I remember purposefully causing huge (almost a megabyte!) core dumps so I could the files to indirect.com multiple times a day for the rest of the week.
Angry Usenetters put that company out of business for a LONG time because of a single Usenet spam incident. Today the same thing isn't even worth a second of thought, and that is exactly why we were so upset. We all knew exactly what the internet was going to look like in a few years, and it hurt.
p.s. I just realized what I want for Xmas -- an original Joel Furr "Green Card Lawyers" t-shirt, to match my Serdar Argic / Zumabot t-shirt.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. The concept of user interface design did not begin at Xerox PARC in the 70s. It goes back to stuff like stone tools and papyrus manuscripts.
Ever wonder why magazines and newspapers break text up into columns rather than letting a paragraph run the entire width of the page? Hint: it's not because of adverts, or because their machines couldn't handle it. It's because they realized that eyes can't handle that much text all at once.
BTW, median screen resolution is 800x600, and it's likely to get smaller in the next few years. Think Palm.
Aha! You've fallen into the trap of deceptive simplicity. The point is when you play this game multiple times in a row -- the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma.
I did this once as a bonus problem with a roomfull of math kids. For points I used Skittles. I carefully explained the rules, divided the whole class into pairs and they played for 10 rounds.
Most of the class followed your strategy. If their opponent cooperated on the first round then defected the other nine, they got 14 Skittles and their "opponent" got 9. I asked the class "how do you win this game", and most of the replied "by getting more candy than your opponent". BZZT!
Exactly one pair of kids cooperated the entire way through. They each got 30 Skittles. I pointed this out, and figurative light bulbs flashed on all around the room. It was freaking perfect.
True. Note that Klerck is usually just a goat troll and his posts start at -1, but today he has posted an accurate and useful tidbit. If anyone has a spare mod point, please reward him.
I work in K12 distance education, so I deal with this issue all the time. The Children Online Privacy Protection Act specifies that internet sites are not allowed to collect personal information from anyone age 12 or less without parental permission (preferably in writing). The obvious flip side is that age 13 or older is fair game.
Smart thinking.
On both Mac & Windows, the Quicktime 3 movie player app is massively better than the QT 4 or 5 player in terms of usability. QT3 Player uses OS-native widgets instead of the "brushed chrome" monstrosity that ranks high in the user interface hall of shame.
And the important part is that QT4+ codecs work fine in the QT3 player.
Hey, if you're going to play that game, you'll have to go back to at least 1865, if not earlier. Don't you diss on my boy Jules Verne !
ObAI: I have trouble with most AI movies. They usually start with the premise that this is the first AI ever built, that it was built in secret by a small team, and that either it's in a perfectly human body, or we're attaching a whole lot of guns to it and we're sure it won't go berserk. That does bad things to my suspension of disbelief.
Oh, I agree completely. Life in the US rocks, and everyone else would love to share the fun. I was narrowly criticizing the previous comment for sounding entirely too much like Marie Antoinette . People on the top often forget how rough the other 99% of the world has it.
If we don't do a whole lot more to reduce consumption, there are three possibilities:
The obvious way to have software that doesn't suck is to use BBEdit .
I have a feeling that you really Really REALLY ought to visit a 3rd world coutry some time. Let's compare the average US citizen to the average citizen of someplace like Kenya or even China:
Per capita, per annum, per anything, Americans are the monster fat pigs of the planet, bar none. Reduce/reuse/recycle is a very good idea, but we make 100x more mess to start with.
I have a big problem with the way that Hotmail tracks what links you click on within emails. You know how webmail services will parse the URLs in a text email and turn them into new window links? The simple and non-invasive way to do it is to just add a TARGET="new" to the link. Yahoo does this, for example.
Instead, Hotmail catalogs all of the links in the current message and stores them in a database server. When you click on a URL, Hotmail calls the server to say "user micromoog clicked on link X in email Y at time T". After a processing delay you get redirected to the actual link, unless you waited more than a couple minutes between opening the email and clicking the link, in which case your database entry has been timed out and you get a 404.
Isn't that wonderful? And the only plausible reason to do it that way is to perform intensive link tracking on personal emails.
Meanwhile, if you're looking for pure SSL email, try hushmail. I use my Yahoo account only for low priority personal stuff.
I helped our teacher learn to use an Apple2E
Sexism is alive and well in many places.
Excuse me? An Apple IIe? You're talking about sexist events that happened 15 years ago. You can't use an anecdote that old to claim that this sort of thing is still happening now.
15 years ago (I was in high school then too) you could make all sorts of anti-gay, anti-jew, anti-whatever insults and get away with it. Today if a student does anything against any "disenfranchised" minority (not including nerds, of course) the whole school is at risk of hate crimes prosecution.
Certainly sexism still exists. It's alive and well right here on /. in the form of anonymous flamebait. It causes many girls to lose interest in the sciences during middle school. It kills thousands of women in strict Islamic nations. But it doesn't keep American girls out of shop class any more.
ObUnderground: I'd love to throw this book on my Palm, but all the Doc Readers I've ever seen are shareware and I prefer not to violate shareware any more. Links to freeware, anyone?True. A more accurate translation: "I'm a lazy fuck of a web designer who would rather sear your retinas with K00L ActiveX widgets than close a standard tag". That attitude pisses me off every time, and the worst part is that it's so damn common.
For example, JHU uses an employee timecard form written in Perl. The designers recently added NEATO KEEN font coloring for vacation, sick leave, etc. But they didn't bother to /CLOSE most of the new tags in the script. So the result is that my browser of choice (the highly standards-compliant MSIE 5 for MacOS) chokes halfway down the page and says the rest can go to hell. Mozilla 6 also fails to load it.
I emailed the bastards and told them exactly how to fix the problem. Their reply was "Your Remedy ticket #HITS00000013578 has been Closed" which is TechSupport-ese for "fuck off". Too bad for them -- I still get my salary either way.
Don't suppose you could provide a link to those studies, Bluedemon? Otherwise it's just your word against common sense.
Thought not.I'm sure what you meant to say there was "SUVs are safer than smaller cars because you can drive them over other cars more easily". Although technically that's still wrong because SUVs are officially trucks. Also, here's a small collection of links about SUVs.
It's perfectly fitting that this inefficient bloated monster should run Java onboard...
Agreed. alt.binaries.* is redundant and inefficient. Prune back problem groups and the rest work much better.
The problem with this simple and effective solution is that news providers (and ISPs in general) love to print group counts in their marketing. "Over 5 billion Usenet newsgroups! When you sign up for our service, we create a new group for you -- alt.cool.stuff.that.user.[foobar].likes !" etc.
For example, JHU has over 30,000 groups. They carry stuff like abg.* (Altenburg, Germany), uw.* (University of Waterloo), and realtynet.* (house selling). I know most of these groups have insignificant traffic, but it's symptomatic of the larger problem -- a willingness to carry every newsgroup ever created.
Too many groups is A BAD THING. For example, our feed has alt.education.*, k12.*, misc.education.*, and school.*, not to mention various local hierarchies and subgroups. If you have a pedagogy question, where the fuck do you post? If you want to hear other people's ideas, where do you read?
The clutter of excess groups make Usenet less valuable by segmenting the readership unnecessarily. Unfortunately the task of newsadmin is generally a minor duty tacked on to the schedule of a disinterested junior sysadmin who doesn't care about Usenet being actually usable.
Agreed, Joel Furr made some damn fine stuff. But the RSA shirt is on geekt, BTW.
I still wear my Serdar Argic shirt in my standard rotation. I'll scan it tonight when I get home.
Hmm... would other Usenet shirts qualify as Geek T's? For example, Suicide Squid from rec.arts.comics.* ?
p.s. If anyone has a Green Card Lawyer shirt they don't wear, I want to buy it! (L or XL, clean, wearable, no holes) Anyone?
You didn't understand his question. Here's the full version:
That may be true for some real-world businesses who are taking their first dip on the web, but it's clearly not true in this case. All of the big players in online porn are fucking brilliantly net-savvy. They keep up with the bleeding edge of technology, and they know exactly what they're doing.
If you read between the lines you'll see that Cyber Entertainment set up the anti-spam policy as a weasel dodge. As long as they don't do the actual spamming, and "don't ask don't tell" about spam sent by their licensees, the devilish contract stays intact. AOL is working hard to prove that even without direct orders to spam, their "wink wink nudge nudge" is bad enough.
Personally, I'd love to see eBay shot down for the same exact thing. eBay knows damn well that their auctioneers spam the hell out of off-topic Usenet groups. Unfortunately, Usenet doesn't keep a pack of rabid lawyers on retainer...
Self-replicating constructs are sometimes called von Neumann machines. It's a pretty cool idea that the popular media invariably links to Terminator (in the same way that all news stories about comic books must include Bam! Pow! or Holy [foo], Batman! in the title).
Also, here's a link to legal issues about artificial self-replication in case anyone was worried.Not quite. USB1 is 1.5MBps and Firewire (1394a) is 50MBps. Newly arrived USB2 can do 60MBps, and IEEE-1394b starts at 100MBps and will go up to 400MBps in a couple years.
And of course, 1394 supports up to 63 devices per bus, hot-swappable, networkable, yadda yadda yadda. But my favorite Firewire trick (target disk mode) is Mac only. Let's see IDE match that.
Dang, why do other teachers get all the bright ones? I spent a year teaching computers at a middle school and when I arrived none of them could write a web page or "Hello World". (A few of them could by the end of the year). It was kind of disappointing; I was hoping for an apprentice jedi or two.
That's great, but this thread was talking about Folding@Home. They're not so friendly to Macs.
One problem with Seti is that you only get a couple days to turn in a completed unit before they give up on you and send the same unit to someone else. So if your machine is only idle for an hour or so a day, the work is wasted.
I'd love to, but running their client inside of SoftWindows wouldn't be very efficient.
I agree that Seti isn't likely to succeed, but cracking ever-larger math puzzles has diminishing returns for me. I'd rather devote my cycles to something likely to help humankind.
Right now the only choice I've found is Popular Power, but their client runs in Java, so it's possibly even less efficient than a Windows emulator. Ugh. It uses less memory at least. Anyone else know a worthy cause that runs natively on MacOS?
Time to reprise my post from a previous space life article: silicon won't work as a basis for organic life.
The main candidates out there are carbon/water life vaguely similar to stuff on Earth, perhaps carbon/ammonia (or other simple solvent) in a colder environment, and possibly machine intelligence (previously built by carbon folk).
Agreed. Let the kid progress at his own rate, and follow the interests that he puts forward. Another essential thing to remember is that you don't have to go it alone.
Oh, I remember it vividly. They hit every newsgroup. Even the moderated ones! They (gasp!) forged the approval header. I remember purposefully causing huge (almost a megabyte!) core dumps so I could the files to indirect.com multiple times a day for the rest of the week.
Angry Usenetters put that company out of business for a LONG time because of a single Usenet spam incident. Today the same thing isn't even worth a second of thought, and that is exactly why we were so upset. We all knew exactly what the internet was going to look like in a few years, and it hurt.
p.s. I just realized what I want for Xmas -- an original Joel Furr "Green Card Lawyers" t-shirt, to match my Serdar Argic / Zumabot t-shirt.