The mouseover problem isn't a flash-on-touchscreen problem, it's a touchscreen problem. Anyone who's used a touchscreen with fat fingers knows that touchscreens are flawed - they all suffer from a lack of focus awareness. But putting a cursor on the screen that you drag around with your finger is a step backward, not forward.
The cursor exists for two reasons: to give the computer an idea of what your eye is focused on, and give you an idea of what the computer thinks you're focused on. On a touchscreen, the machine has no information until you actually mash your finger in the general vicinity of several potential inputs - forcing it to do heuristic gymnastics to figure out which one you really meant. And if it gets it wrong, you are angry, because it didn't warn you that you were clicking the wrong thing.
The iphone keyboard tries to fix this in a sad and lonely way: it makes the button you're "clicking" bigger, as you're clicking on it. This slows typing to a crawl, but combined with auto-complete and auto-suggest it's a reasonable facsimile of an effective input method. But since there's no auto-complete when you're navigating a website (except googling the specific page, maybe), that's not going to solve the "flash problem".
On the bright side this will all be resolved just as soon as eye-tracking is solved. Whatever you're looking at will be "your focus" - dropping a focus indicator whenever you're looking at a clickable object (existing mouseover highlights would work fine). Then you tap it with your finger (because blinking is too hard to control and saying "click" makes you sound ridiculous) and presto: the computer knows where you're looking and you know where the computer thinks you're looking, and you've finally replicated the functionality of a 40-year-old technology, but on a touchscreen.
It might not be worth it for them to sue you, but pirating the show wouldn't automatically benefit them in the way you'd think. If they don't control the distribution, they don't know who they're actually reaching, which skews their marketing data.
If the experiment fails and the shows suck, then you have more evidence for the notion that sponsor control corrupts the medium. If it succeeds, it will do so by being genuinely entertaining - and we've essentially created a new medium for creative expression. I think that'd be a good way for big corps to spend more cash subsidizing the arts, even if only indirectly by giving more artists a day job that will give them the funds and experience to support and improve their real work.
So where's the downside? A generation of people who are emotionally invested in brands? We've already got that with the Apple crowd or the Coke vs. Pepsi debate. If this is dislike of legitimizing a long-form commercial, well, people claim to watch the Superbowl "just for the commercials". If it's entertaining, it's serving the same purpose as regular TV and popular commercials.
And it's not like you're being forced to watch these shows. The worst that can happen is that the sponsored shows don't really catch on, so they try it again by adding it to and ruining already popular shows. But then you people get angry and things go back to normal. Or, better, if it turns people off to TV, maybe they'll find something productive to do.
I don't supposed that inflation is just the perceived rate of expansion, looking faster in hindsight because it was occurring within a very tiny pocket of terrifically distended spacetime.
Then again, IANANuclearPhysicist.:)
If I may rebuke - the greatest stories ever told have been written and rewritten dozens if not hundreds of times throughout history. They contain characters, symbols, even verbatim descriptions or dialogue from everything and everyone the author has ever seen, heard, read, or felt. A novel's single writer belies the fact that it grew from an entire social network, not an isolated brain.
The fact that books tend to be solitary endeavors is more a function of the point of view and voice aspects that define a novel, but these are trappings that are largely independent of the story itself. In a movie, those are replaced by cinematography, music, and pacing. In a game, by control schemes, feedback loops, and a GUI.
The story doesn't get better or worse the more writers you have - one or 100, it's a question of the lead writer and editor's ability to synchronize themselves and their team with the framework of plot and theme that has been set down as "the story."
And yeah, Bioware isn't exactly writing Dostoevsky, but they're also clearly not building a platypus up there.
But they're not going to want to put one person against a pile of people - the killing blow would be way too random if the group won, and if the single player is successful, their whole team just got owned. That'd be way too frustrating.
Nah, they'll probably make the game be about you, as the single player, assisting some kind of an ongoing war that, without you, would be a slaughter by the enemy's overwhelming forces. Make the teams inherently unbalanced, and then put the combat monster on the weaker side.
I could see myself playing as a marine in Halo while someone else played as Master Chief, and we were all against a pile of people playing elites. That'd be fun. But I wouldn't want to be one of 30 little guys with needlers trying to avoid being routed by the crazy cyborg.
I for one won't become a troll so easily.
I plan to go cyborg, buying longer, stronger limbs, a cpu-augmented brain, and spinning eyes that hypnotise attractive women into letting my deprecated biology back into the gene pool.
I'm pretty bad at names, so I'm starting a pettion to call the new element Wunnayteenium.
It's an ancient greek word meaning "russian and american collaboration to create new element 118"
The greeks had words for pretty much everything...
Sorry about that download only thing, I bought Uplink a few weeks ago and said "I don't really want the CD, so don't send it unless it'd be a big deal not to." And they never sent it.
I imagine that sparked a huge internal debate with one side finally saying "If they don't want the CDs we work so damn hard for, then FINE! They can't HAVE the CDs!"
A futuristic world where coppertone sunblock protects us from the killer rays of the sun. All kneel before the benevolent copper-toned god.
Smoka-Bowla Soft Drinks Inc. puts addictive drugs in their products, and only a lowly Pepsi delivery man can stop them with the new Pepsi-based detox.
But why just FPS? Gatorade Sports could give EA's NFL monopoly a run for its money - toss the league and sign the players independently through Gatorade.
Or a Red Bull brand bullfighting game. (See Mike Tyson's Punch Out)
It's not all fun and games, though. FTS players are up in arms with the release of new Folgers Crystals mod for Age of Empires. "I thought I was paying to avoid banner ads - but now the enemies go so much faster than my guys" cried one gamer who foolishly paid full price for the decaffeinated version.
But this is a political goldmine too! We could instantaneously stop the debate about games by just calling them commercials instead. No way the government is going to agree to ban commercials.
It's not novel. Any net-connected game system is just a new platform for any of the @home projects. They can build a client for download via xbox live or the wii as well.
The only really good reason for this (besides curing cancer;) ) is that sony's finally found an app that can effectively exploit the parallel nature of the cell processor. So if clients are released for the other systems, it will look like the ps3 has technological superiority.
Wait, but if they're losing money on the consoles, does that mean the patent holder is entitled to negative cash? I wonder if Microsoft takes Paypal...
wait for the real fallout
on
Halving Half Lives
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Prove this process and in less than a year the anti-evolutionists will be using it to discredit carbon dating.
Slashdot Mirror
50% of the population didn't want to report their religion because they are secretly Sith.
I picked Sirius. Soon I will have all of "the hottest cheat codes."
The mouseover problem isn't a flash-on-touchscreen problem, it's a touchscreen problem. Anyone who's used a touchscreen with fat fingers knows that touchscreens are flawed - they all suffer from a lack of focus awareness. But putting a cursor on the screen that you drag around with your finger is a step backward, not forward.
The cursor exists for two reasons: to give the computer an idea of what your eye is focused on, and give you an idea of what the computer thinks you're focused on. On a touchscreen, the machine has no information until you actually mash your finger in the general vicinity of several potential inputs - forcing it to do heuristic gymnastics to figure out which one you really meant. And if it gets it wrong, you are angry, because it didn't warn you that you were clicking the wrong thing.
The iphone keyboard tries to fix this in a sad and lonely way: it makes the button you're "clicking" bigger, as you're clicking on it. This slows typing to a crawl, but combined with auto-complete and auto-suggest it's a reasonable facsimile of an effective input method. But since there's no auto-complete when you're navigating a website (except googling the specific page, maybe), that's not going to solve the "flash problem".
On the bright side this will all be resolved just as soon as eye-tracking is solved. Whatever you're looking at will be "your focus" - dropping a focus indicator whenever you're looking at a clickable object (existing mouseover highlights would work fine). Then you tap it with your finger (because blinking is too hard to control and saying "click" makes you sound ridiculous) and presto: the computer knows where you're looking and you know where the computer thinks you're looking, and you've finally replicated the functionality of a 40-year-old technology, but on a touchscreen.
Maybe they should add a "mining bot" entity to the game world, then. Since players seem to find it too boring to do themselves.
I feel like we could come up with inappropriate acronyms for most 3-letter combinations. Then we go back to numbers-only?
It's a setback for creationists, sure, but imagine how happy the spontaneous generationists are.
Hey neat, we're making our own Balrog.
It might not be worth it for them to sue you, but pirating the show wouldn't automatically benefit them in the way you'd think. If they don't control the distribution, they don't know who they're actually reaching, which skews their marketing data.
If the experiment fails and the shows suck, then you have more evidence for the notion that sponsor control corrupts the medium. If it succeeds, it will do so by being genuinely entertaining - and we've essentially created a new medium for creative expression. I think that'd be a good way for big corps to spend more cash subsidizing the arts, even if only indirectly by giving more artists a day job that will give them the funds and experience to support and improve their real work.
So where's the downside? A generation of people who are emotionally invested in brands? We've already got that with the Apple crowd or the Coke vs. Pepsi debate. If this is dislike of legitimizing a long-form commercial, well, people claim to watch the Superbowl "just for the commercials". If it's entertaining, it's serving the same purpose as regular TV and popular commercials.
And it's not like you're being forced to watch these shows. The worst that can happen is that the sponsored shows don't really catch on, so they try it again by adding it to and ruining already popular shows. But then you people get angry and things go back to normal. Or, better, if it turns people off to TV, maybe they'll find something productive to do.
Is no one else going to make a Mootrix joke?
I don't supposed that inflation is just the perceived rate of expansion, looking faster in hindsight because it was occurring within a very tiny pocket of terrifically distended spacetime. Then again, IANANuclearPhysicist. :)
If I may rebuke - the greatest stories ever told have been written and rewritten dozens if not hundreds of times throughout history. They contain characters, symbols, even verbatim descriptions or dialogue from everything and everyone the author has ever seen, heard, read, or felt. A novel's single writer belies the fact that it grew from an entire social network, not an isolated brain.
The fact that books tend to be solitary endeavors is more a function of the point of view and voice aspects that define a novel, but these are trappings that are largely independent of the story itself. In a movie, those are replaced by cinematography, music, and pacing. In a game, by control schemes, feedback loops, and a GUI.
The story doesn't get better or worse the more writers you have - one or 100, it's a question of the lead writer and editor's ability to synchronize themselves and their team with the framework of plot and theme that has been set down as "the story."
And yeah, Bioware isn't exactly writing Dostoevsky, but they're also clearly not building a platypus up there.
Maybe one will magically appear if torturing simulated animals causes a giant simulated dinosaur to wander by and start torturing simulated-you.
Oh cool, then we can stop worrying about destroying ourselves. We have a backup plan.
EU gmail should change its name to GUmail.
But they're not going to want to put one person against a pile of people - the killing blow would be way too random if the group won, and if the single player is successful, their whole team just got owned. That'd be way too frustrating.
Nah, they'll probably make the game be about you, as the single player, assisting some kind of an ongoing war that, without you, would be a slaughter by the enemy's overwhelming forces. Make the teams inherently unbalanced, and then put the combat monster on the weaker side.
I could see myself playing as a marine in Halo while someone else played as Master Chief, and we were all against a pile of people playing elites. That'd be fun. But I wouldn't want to be one of 30 little guys with needlers trying to avoid being routed by the crazy cyborg.
Actually, hey Bungie, I have an idea for you...
Did anyone else think they were talking about actual animal mice? Grading their performance in, I don't know, tests or something?
I for one won't become a troll so easily.
I plan to go cyborg, buying longer, stronger limbs, a cpu-augmented brain, and spinning eyes that hypnotise attractive women into letting my deprecated biology back into the gene pool.
I'm pretty bad at names, so I'm starting a pettion to call the new element Wunnayteenium.
It's an ancient greek word meaning "russian and american collaboration to create new element 118"
The greeks had words for pretty much everything...
The only way to win is to convince everyone else not to play!
Sorry about that download only thing, I bought Uplink a few weeks ago and said "I don't really want the CD, so don't send it unless it'd be a big deal not to." And they never sent it.
I imagine that sparked a huge internal debate with one side finally saying "If they don't want the CDs we work so damn hard for, then FINE! They can't HAVE the CDs!"
Smoka-Bowla Soft Drinks Inc. puts addictive drugs in their products, and only a lowly Pepsi delivery man can stop them with the new Pepsi-based detox.
But why just FPS? Gatorade Sports could give EA's NFL monopoly a run for its money - toss the league and sign the players independently through Gatorade.
Or a Red Bull brand bullfighting game. (See Mike Tyson's Punch Out)
It's not all fun and games, though. FTS players are up in arms with the release of new Folgers Crystals mod for Age of Empires. "I thought I was paying to avoid banner ads - but now the enemies go so much faster than my guys" cried one gamer who foolishly paid full price for the decaffeinated version.
But this is a political goldmine too! We could instantaneously stop the debate about games by just calling them commercials instead. No way the government is going to agree to ban commercials.
It's not novel. Any net-connected game system is just a new platform for any of the @home projects. They can build a client for download via xbox live or the wii as well.
;) ) is that sony's finally found an app that can effectively exploit the parallel nature of the cell processor. So if clients are released for the other systems, it will look like the ps3 has technological superiority.
The only really good reason for this (besides curing cancer
Wait, but if they're losing money on the consoles, does that mean the patent holder is entitled to negative cash? I wonder if Microsoft takes Paypal...
Prove this process and in less than a year the anti-evolutionists will be using it to discredit carbon dating.