For several years in the '80s, I volunteered for an organization called Recording for the Blind, doing just what it said: recording the equivalent of audiobooks for blind "readers." Most books, at least then, didn't come in Braille editions, so RFB aimed to plug the gap. Although I'd imagined reading novels and poetry, because I had developer experience they put me to work recording textbooks and such on how to code.
NO ambiguity was acceptable; if I tried to fudge something, a staff member monitoring the process would stop me, and I'd have to go back and record it again, for later editing into the final product.
Some of the examples above would definitely have qualified as "fudging." For instance, I couldn't read shared_ptr as either "shared putter" or "shared pointer"; it would have to be something like "shared underscore pee tee arr." And if the text (and/or the language itself) made an issue of case-sensitivity, then Shared_Ptr would NOT be pronounced the same way as shared_ptr -- I'd have to distinguish the pronunciations by pointing out the upper/lowercase differences. Over time, we came up with conventions to simplify this -- like recording an intro explaining the conventions used by the particular text, so every single instance didn't need to be spelled out. But it was never "easy" or "unimportant"; on the other hand, while I derived satisfaction from my volunteer work, thanks to the RFB experience I can't say that I regretted eventually moving away from that geographic area.
Aside: I once took a course in developing queries for PeopleSoft, back before Oracle acquired them. One of the standard table names was "DEPT_TBL"; the instructor always pronounced this "department tibble" -- it drove me CRAZY until I figured out what the hell he was talking about.
what combination of factors makes a designer say "World War I fighter planes" or "A plumber running around in some fantasy world" or "You're the mayor of a city."
Sorry, no mod points to throw your way right now. But this strikes me as a very interesting idea -- in its own right, and considered in the context of a game designer who just happens to be a robot.
Note that the three ideas in your list have all been built into (hugely successful) games as digital representations of analog, human activities. Although "programmed" at some level by humans, and therefore its thinking would be shaped in accordance with their minds, a truly honest-to-God creative robot might very well be inspired to design a game based on robot experiences. What sorts of puzzles, adventures, thrills might these experiences include? Can a robot ever feel adventurous or thrilled in the first place? What kind of a game might a "Helen" (see Galatea 2.2) build?
I shudder to think how much fan-fold paper we wasted...
Oh gawd yes...
Even later, when I first signed on with Compuserve in the '80s and didn't have TAPCIS to help me organize all the "important" conversations on disk, I was still printing it all out. A huge cardboard box filled with those printouts has been following me around for 20 years, from mailing address to mailing address.
That's a good point -- that it's not just the physical format of books/magazines, but also the economics of the format. Far as I'm concerned, if they can get a readable e-reader to display just a single work, with no replacement of the content possible, and get it down to $5 a pop, then I don't care that it's glass or plastic or what-have-you instead of paper: I'm there in the checkout line.
Hmm. Wonder if anyone's working on such a thing? Even for $5.95 a pop? [g]
For many things, the dead tree format is obsolete.
Oh man, I can't tell you how off-base I think this is. Only thing that salvages it is the "for most things" qualifier. I've been reading stuff on-screen since the 1970s so don't have a knee-jerk Luddite aversion to it. But as others have said, there is just too much GOOD reading that won't be available -- electronically, conveniently, portably -- for a while.
Obsolescence is coming, no doubt. But it's no more here and now than, say, jacking in a la Neuromancer. Claims otherwise say more about the claimant's taste in reading than they do about the written word. Which isn't a personal criticism, with a value judgment intended; more along the lines of Will Sonnett's "no brag, just fact" disclaimer.
The book (out of print, published 1993) is currently available on Amazon for as little as a penny. Looks very cool (as do some of the other books which Amazon mentions on the same page, like the one called The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be.
Years ago I was doing a custom Dell configuration over the phone. I asked the tech/sales rep if I could get this "advertised special" machine without Office (wanted WordPerfect instead), and she kind of hesitated. "Well," I said, "how much does Office add to the price?" "We can't tell you that." "Oh. Hmm... Can you tell me how much the PC would cost if I didn't want any office products at all -- without EITHER Microsoft OR Corel's product, just bare bones?" She gave me a price; I subtracted that price from the advertised-special-with-Office price, and the difference was about 40 bucks. I burst out laughing and she laughed too. "That," she said, "is why we're not supposed to tell you."
I always wondered how much longer she continued to work there.
Actually, I think what might be going on here is that Dell is desperate to calm down the SEC's financial investigations along these lines:
No, really, we don't collude with the likes of Microsoft! All our revenues are real revenues!
They've already back-pedaled on Intel chips in favor of AMD, and (whatever we might argue otherwise here) I don't believe any of this has half so much to do with technological or marketing/sales issues, as it has to do with accounting and finance.
Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?
48% said the scientific theory of evolution IS well-supported. This is diametrically opposed to the/. editor's summary, "Given the straightforward question, 'Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?', some 48% of Americans said 'No.'"
The gods were in no sense 'figments of the imagination' of anyone. They were man's volition... Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard today by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.
I don't want to say this is old news -- would much rather just assert, for those to whom it's news, that it may be something worth another look.
I'm not saying that CSS isn't frustrating to work with, even for simple tasks. I've done my share of jumping through hoops to make a page look the way I thought it should look.
What saved my frustration at such times was asking the question, "Well... does the page REALLY need to look EXACTLY like that?" Maybe compromising my "design principles" means I'm not a real designer. But I just don't think the limitations of CSS are nearly as fatal to the usability or the look-and-feel of a page as they're sometimes made out to be.
Again, I'm not a professional designer -- so am probably talking through my hat about matters I can't possibly understand. Just saying it helps to relax: it's good enough for now. And likely to get better later.
That's as much to do with CSS's failures as the browsers: designers are forced into contortions which push the edges of the implementations.
I've never understood this. Who (besides their clients) is forcing designers to do anything?
Designers deciding that they "must" "push the envelope" because they "must" get this pixel aligned with that one -- or whatever the silly issue -- seem analogous, now that I think of it, to browser builders who decide they "must" (for the most inconsequential reasons) include Feature X, Y, or Z. Maybe we need a new term, Design Bloat or something like it.
Actually, I wonder if we could take this question even further -- discarding the notion of "work" -- to ask, simply, what the best sitting posture is, period. (Assuming it's a given that "best"="healthiest" or some reasonable facsimile thereof.) The problem with the "work" concept is that there are so many forms of seated work: tasks involving reaching, vs. those simply requiring laying one's fingertips on a keyboard; tasks in which the relationship of the seat to the work surface is user-adjustable, vs. those in which it is not; and (as you hint at) work in the first-world economy vs. those in the third.
Slashdot Mirror
...of this issue:
For several years in the '80s, I volunteered for an organization called Recording for the Blind, doing just what it said: recording the equivalent of audiobooks for blind "readers." Most books, at least then, didn't come in Braille editions, so RFB aimed to plug the gap. Although I'd imagined reading novels and poetry, because I had developer experience they put me to work recording textbooks and such on how to code.
NO ambiguity was acceptable; if I tried to fudge something, a staff member monitoring the process would stop me, and I'd have to go back and record it again, for later editing into the final product.
Some of the examples above would definitely have qualified as "fudging." For instance, I couldn't read shared_ptr as either "shared putter" or "shared pointer"; it would have to be something like "shared underscore pee tee arr." And if the text (and/or the language itself) made an issue of case-sensitivity, then Shared_Ptr would NOT be pronounced the same way as shared_ptr -- I'd have to distinguish the pronunciations by pointing out the upper/lowercase differences. Over time, we came up with conventions to simplify this -- like recording an intro explaining the conventions used by the particular text, so every single instance didn't need to be spelled out. But it was never "easy" or "unimportant"; on the other hand, while I derived satisfaction from my volunteer work, thanks to the RFB experience I can't say that I regretted eventually moving away from that geographic area.
Aside: I once took a course in developing queries for PeopleSoft, back before Oracle acquired them. One of the standard table names was "DEPT_TBL"; the instructor always pronounced this "department tibble" -- it drove me CRAZY until I figured out what the hell he was talking about.
Exactly. That's the heart of the product's success and that's the heart of the shortage, those six* words right there.
* Or five, I never did figure out how to count hyphenated constructions.
Sorry, no mod points to throw your way right now. But this strikes me as a very interesting idea -- in its own right, and considered in the context of a game designer who just happens to be a robot.
Note that the three ideas in your list have all been built into (hugely successful) games as digital representations of analog, human activities. Although "programmed" at some level by humans, and therefore its thinking would be shaped in accordance with their minds, a truly honest-to-God creative robot might very well be inspired to design a game based on robot experiences. What sorts of puzzles, adventures, thrills might these experiences include? Can a robot ever feel adventurous or thrilled in the first place? What kind of a game might a "Helen" (see Galatea 2.2 ) build?
<woolgathering_mode_off/>
Oh gawd yes...
Even later, when I first signed on with Compuserve in the '80s and didn't have TAPCIS to help me organize all the "important" conversations on disk, I was still printing it all out. A huge cardboard box filled with those printouts has been following me around for 20 years, from mailing address to mailing address.
That's a good point -- that it's not just the physical format of books/magazines, but also the economics of the format. Far as I'm concerned, if they can get a readable e-reader to display just a single work, with no replacement of the content possible, and get it down to $5 a pop, then I don't care that it's glass or plastic or what-have-you instead of paper: I'm there in the checkout line.
Hmm. Wonder if anyone's working on such a thing? Even for $5.95 a pop? [g]
Oh man, I can't tell you how off-base I think this is. Only thing that salvages it is the "for most things" qualifier. I've been reading stuff on-screen since the 1970s so don't have a knee-jerk Luddite aversion to it. But as others have said, there is just too much GOOD reading that won't be available -- electronically, conveniently, portably -- for a while.
Obsolescence is coming, no doubt. But it's no more here and now than, say, jacking in a la Neuromancer. Claims otherwise say more about the claimant's taste in reading than they do about the written word. Which isn't a personal criticism, with a value judgment intended; more along the lines of Will Sonnett's "no brag, just fact" disclaimer.
The book (out of print, published 1993) is currently available on Amazon for as little as a penny. Looks very cool (as do some of the other books which Amazon mentions on the same page, like the one called The Big Splat, or How Our Moon Came to Be.
Thanks for the recommendation.
6b. ???
7. Profit!
Funny.
Years ago I was doing a custom Dell configuration over the phone. I asked the tech/sales rep if I could get this "advertised special" machine without Office (wanted WordPerfect instead), and she kind of hesitated. "Well," I said, "how much does Office add to the price?" "We can't tell you that." "Oh. Hmm... Can you tell me how much the PC would cost if I didn't want any office products at all -- without EITHER Microsoft OR Corel's product, just bare bones?" She gave me a price; I subtracted that price from the advertised-special-with-Office price, and the difference was about 40 bucks. I burst out laughing and she laughed too. "That," she said, "is why we're not supposed to tell you."
I always wondered how much longer she continued to work there.
48% said the scientific theory of evolution IS well-supported. This is diametrically opposed to the /. editor's summary, "Given the straightforward question, 'Is evolution well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?', some 48% of Americans said 'No.'"
Am I missing something here?
Concur. I started with AT&T in 1979 -- never heard it called anything other than "et cetera" until setting foot outside the castle walls in 1990.
I'm not saying that CSS isn't frustrating to work with, even for simple tasks. I've done my share of jumping through hoops to make a page look the way I thought it should look.
What saved my frustration at such times was asking the question, "Well... does the page REALLY need to look EXACTLY like that?" Maybe compromising my "design principles" means I'm not a real designer. But I just don't think the limitations of CSS are nearly as fatal to the usability or the look-and-feel of a page as they're sometimes made out to be.
Again, I'm not a professional designer -- so am probably talking through my hat about matters I can't possibly understand. Just saying it helps to relax: it's good enough for now. And likely to get better later.
No, you would asplode.
No, for social security problems that would be AARP poisoning.
Actually, I wonder if we could take this question even further -- discarding the notion of "work" -- to ask, simply, what the best sitting posture is, period. (Assuming it's a given that "best"="healthiest" or some reasonable facsimile thereof.) The problem with the "work" concept is that there are so many forms of seated work: tasks involving reaching, vs. those simply requiring laying one's fingertips on a keyboard; tasks in which the relationship of the seat to the work surface is user-adjustable, vs. those in which it is not; and (as you hint at) work in the first-world economy vs. those in the third.
Jeez, give the guy a break. You couldn't see him hovering his cursor over his desktop icons? You must not be using feature-rich IE7, man.
Godel (simplified) borne out in practice: to understand a system fully, you must step outside it.