Whenever I read about studies of which advertising method is more effective than such-and-such, I can't help but remember that day my parents dropped me off at a place doing market research so they could shop or something. (*at the time I was pissed that my sister got dropped off at the booth that was trying out new flavors of teddy grahams)
Now, I couldnt have been more than.. well, I barely know how old I am now, so let's make up the age "six" and pretend I just mean to say "quite young". I was shown a few ads for things like Slip'n Slide or Nerf or one of those products whose name recognition is currently high enough for me to throw them out as random though probably wildly inaccurate examples. They showed me all the ads at once, then came in to ask me questions about them. Questions like "did you like the toy in the first ad? Do you think it would be fun? And the second ad? Did you like that one?"
I was "six". I can see now that the people doing this research couldnt possibly have been familiar with this demographic, as at the time I was quite incapable of remembering any but the most recent brightly-colored moving whatever which was placed in front of me, let alone what happened fourteen commercials ago. Of course, this may have been their goal all along.
And this is why I have no trust in market research.
More to the point, actually asking someone how they felt about something is a pretty crappy way of getting their opinion of advertising. If they wanted a good sampling of how the advertising effected people (with the note that this is still wildly bad/wrong/inaccurate as the first exposure to advertising for any product leaves very little impression, especially immediately afterwards), they should have thrown a free gaming session and provided refreshments. Still ask them what they thought about the ads as far as whether they'd actually pay for a game that they had to pay for every time they played by viewing ads goes, but get your actual data about effectiveness of adds from which refreshments they chose.
Oh no! His post seems like an opinion but he didnt explicitely state it!
- An uglier, less-functional prefrences screen which hides more options at a time - New, non-standard "flat" look for the menus (presumably trying to emulate MS-office in windows XP) - Extension interface broken once again, so no 1.5 support for some extensions - new "Hey look, we're pretending to be IE!"-style error pages (less-intrusive than error popups, I'm mixed on this one.) - Some of the more-important functions of tabbrowser extensions seem to be included, but I'm not going to bother to disable tbe to find out if it's "good enough" - http://www.yzzerdd.com/, http://www.snopes.com/ no longer seem to succeed at opening popups (Yes I'm against ad blocking, No I'm not against blocking browser-hijacking.) - Still seems to have whatever bug makes it sometimes simply "stop responding to all links", but now seems to recover from it after a long delay, rather than requiring browser restart. - No obvious improvements to the bookmarks panel - The incredibly stupid favorite-icon bug is still there. I dont know what idiocy causes this, but it certainly/looks/ a lot like something being left uninitialized or simply an offbyone error. Seriously, what is wrong that you havent fixed this by now?
So, verdict for the moment: Less fun to look at, more good.
I havent tried it yet, but from reading the site it seems to actually be exactly what is wanted. Or at least, close enough that it can be latched on to as a good place to start wild schemes.
Just adds more evidence to the theory that "Anything I could come up with really is such an obvious idea that there's no reason to expect somebody else hasnt already accomplished it", hence the phrasing of my original post.
Now where's that Instantaneous Floppy Drive and Vertically-Oriented Arbitrarily Groupable Timeline Creator?
(the following uses segments taken from the San Andreas review, but a quick browse through any other review will show the pattern exists elsewhere)
When listing "Profanity details", some words are not censored, others use "fill-in-the-blank" censoring, while others are viewed as so horrid as to be referred to only by their first letter:
I also note that though not listed in the profanity section, the "sex details" section additionally lists "tits" and "wanking"
I'm not sure what exactly this means, but I do find it fascinating. Does anyone have enough understanding of how the minds of these people work as to be able to explain this behavior?
Hmm.. I do wonder if the lameness filter will let those quotes through:)
I do think it would take a long time to train, a very long time, probably. But this isnt about instant gratification, it's about aving something better than mere shuffle. Something which, eventually, performs a little better than mere random selection would. Everyone throws around the word "evolve" in computer science today, well that's somewhat what I'm talking about. It's not a perfect thing, but it evolves a database of how songs relate to eachother.
The "test" for this (I hate calling something a "proof of concept" when it only shows a little bit of the concept) would be the simplest form: Songs are only allowed one classification, no automatic grouping, just rate everything against everything in an N^2 database, and see if groups of songs which/always/ go together tend to play together.
I'm sick of things that rely on external classifications. (aka: "My TiVo thinks I'm a gay child molestor").
Going by Genre rather than Song (assuming you are still generating "moods" which contain multiple genres), would (unless I misunderstand you) save only in proccessing time and database size. The algori,,,[god damn I hate that word] would still be the same, wouldnt they?
Also mildly noteable, listening "all the way through" is somewhat arbitrary. Would need to be scaled based on how long the song is ("just because I couldnt hit skip fast enough doesnt mean I like it") and how much I listened to. I might be okay with half a song but just not really feel like listening to the/whole thing/. For even more complexity, try to come up with a way to play only the parts of the song I most like. But then I'm probably the only one who occasionally listens to a 2-second loop for four hours.
huge database, probably. As for derandomizing shuffle, that's why rather than saying "Okay, he liked this song last time, I'll pick this one next" it merely weights the song in relation to another. There would always be a chance of picking something completely random. Someone else said "It would take forever to train", and this relates to that: Yes, it would take forever to train, but the idea isnt to instantly have a perfect MP3 player. Right now, you have a non-learning shuffle. I like the idea of things getting better over time. I've been using the same MP3 player for years, shouldnt it know by now that I don't like "Ave Maria" right next to "Baby Got Back"?
Trying to avoid a db of (N^2)/2 size would be nice, something would need to be worked out where after a certain number of interrelated songs is noticed, it gets noted and an auto-generated grouping is formed instead. (Oh, all of these songs have a relation of >arbitrary, let's call them group A) Of course that leads to ((Songs^2)/2)*Groups..:)
The problem of course being "And how do we keep track of newly-formed classifications?" (such as a group of songs which fits into two different groups, without actually combining all three groups involved)
Ah, forgive me, I forgot that there does exist something which allows you to set "moods" for a song and then pick a "mood". What I was suggesting was rather the idea of moods being auto-classified, and then rather than saying specifically "I'm in a relaxed mood", you'd pick a song which you like when relaxed, and then the next randomly-selected song would be more likely to be one which you have not previously skipped after recently hearing the song you have just selected. So it's similar to what you said, but operates by grouping songs with other songs, rather than grouping songs into specific catagories.
I've never looked at ObjectTypeA + ObjectTypeA to be the same thing as ObjectTypeB + ObjectTypeB, so to say "+ has multiple uses" seems wrong.. To say that though it looks similar, its function is completely different, seems more accurate, and that's what I took "Overloading" to mean. In OOP, for example, if you overload a function in a class which inherits from another class, often you still want to do the same thing as te parent-class's function, but either have a different way of going about it or want to do something additional as well. So while they still achieve the same goals, they are not directly related (though one may call the other). So what seemed to be said was: [something like] "The stop button is no longer a stop button, it now stops displaying the page, but keeps caching in the background". That would be, as I understand it, an example of "overloading" the stop button.
You know, because if you meant "combined the functionality" you could have said "combined the stop/reload buttons" instead of "overloaded the stop/reload buttons":)
(that was not an attack, I just like talking about varying interpretations of things)
I've played around with weighing ratings based on how often the raters agree wih your own ratings, but I'm pretty certain it won't scale at all. prototype here: http://www.the-h.net/opinion/
and now that I know C a little, maybe I'll try out making a plugin or something.. I have lots of MP3s. I like most of them. However, I'm not always in the mood for all of them. There is very little music I've dismissed completely as bad, so "Thumbs up" || "Thumbs down" is pretty lame (,stupid, closed-minded, moronic, a horrible basis for anything, encouraging of the already prevailent general-dumbness of people whose music I tend not to be in the mood for, etc)
What I've wanted is a system by which music can be automatically catagorized based not on whether or not I like it, but rather based on whether or not I'm likely to enjoy it/right now/.
How this would work: Start with the standard "Shuffle", picking at random any song. Then, if I hit "next" right after a song starts, decide "This song doesnt go well with this other song right now", and instead try selecting one which my lack of hitting "next" in the past has indicated/would/ go well. (various probability weighting schemes, decreased weight as we move on, requiring much use before it really knows you, blah blah blah...)
The closest I've seen has been plugins which weight the shuffle based on a rating you choose, which doesnt ever fluxuate.
Point: Playlists should be quaint by now. Why should I need to choose in advance what I'm in the mood to listen to an hour from now?
Given that you've just made up a new term, how about explaining what it is you mean? On the general idea of "what about reload and stop buttons do I sometimes not like in other browsers", I can make a wild guess, but it's a wild guess.
Please note that whatever horrible ugly useless thing IE does, Firefox will copy it. (I assume on the grounds of "Well, our way/seems/ much more useable, smart, efficient, whatever, but Microsoft actually pays people to come up with their shit, so I guess they know what they're doing better than we do..[*COPY*])
It's as if you want the GIMP developers to take into account some basic usability considerations.. but that can't be right, because from your post it seems you have previously used the GIMP, and so would know that the developers are strongly opposed to sensibility.
Slashdot Mirror
in the interest of balance, where's the list of EFF defeats?
Whenever I read about studies of which advertising method is more effective than such-and-such, I can't help but remember that day my parents dropped me off at a place doing market research so they could shop or something. (*at the time I was pissed that my sister got dropped off at the booth that was trying out new flavors of teddy grahams)
Now, I couldnt have been more than.. well, I barely know how old I am now, so let's make up the age "six" and pretend I just mean to say "quite young".
I was shown a few ads for things like Slip'n Slide or Nerf or one of those products whose name recognition is currently high enough for me to throw them out as random though probably wildly inaccurate examples.
They showed me all the ads at once, then came in to ask me questions about them. Questions like "did you like the toy in the first ad? Do you think it would be fun? And the second ad? Did you like that one?"
I was "six". I can see now that the people doing this research couldnt possibly have been familiar with this demographic, as at the time I was quite incapable of remembering any but the most recent brightly-colored moving whatever which was placed in front of me, let alone what happened fourteen commercials ago. Of course, this may have been their goal all along.
And this is why I have no trust in market research.
More to the point, actually asking someone how they felt about something is a pretty crappy way of getting their opinion of advertising. If they wanted a good sampling of how the advertising effected people (with the note that this is still wildly bad/wrong/inaccurate as the first exposure to advertising for any product leaves very little impression, especially immediately afterwards), they should have thrown a free gaming session and provided refreshments. Still ask them what they thought about the ads as far as whether they'd actually pay for a game that they had to pay for every time they played by viewing ads goes, but get your actual data about effectiveness of adds from which refreshments they chose.
Oh no! His post seems like an opinion but he didnt explicitely state it!
yes.
Gee, that was easy.
anywhere between 0 and 65536, there's no way to be sure.
now /that/ was unexpected. +3 points.
Not moderator points, I have none of those, these are just Awesome points.
I assume since the bugs still exist, the bug listings still exist.
- An uglier, less-functional prefrences screen which hides more options at a time /looks/ a lot like something being left uninitialized or simply an offbyone error. Seriously, what is wrong that you havent fixed this by now?
- New, non-standard "flat" look for the menus (presumably trying to emulate MS-office in windows XP)
- Extension interface broken once again, so no 1.5 support for some extensions
- new "Hey look, we're pretending to be IE!"-style error pages (less-intrusive than error popups, I'm mixed on this one.)
- Some of the more-important functions of tabbrowser extensions seem to be included, but I'm not going to bother to disable tbe to find out if it's "good enough"
- http://www.yzzerdd.com/, http://www.snopes.com/ no longer seem to succeed at opening popups (Yes I'm against ad blocking, No I'm not against blocking browser-hijacking.)
- Still seems to have whatever bug makes it sometimes simply "stop responding to all links", but now seems to recover from it after a long delay, rather than requiring browser restart.
- No obvious improvements to the bookmarks panel
- The incredibly stupid favorite-icon bug is still there. I dont know what idiocy causes this, but it certainly
So, verdict for the moment: Less fun to look at, more good.
I havent tried it yet, but from reading the site it seems to actually be exactly what is wanted. Or at least, close enough that it can be latched on to as a good place to start wild schemes.
Just adds more evidence to the theory that "Anything I could come up with really is such an obvious idea that there's no reason to expect somebody else hasnt already accomplished it", hence the phrasing of my original post.
Now where's that Instantaneous Floppy Drive and Vertically-Oriented Arbitrarily Groupable Timeline Creator?
(note: Link seemed to be broken when I clicked it, here is google result: http://www.luminal.org/wiki/index.php/IMMS/IMMS )
is that sig a double-layered joke, or does someone need to hit you? :)
(the following uses segments taken from the San Andreas review, but a quick browse through any other review will show the pattern exists elsewhere)
:)
When listing "Profanity details", some words are not censored, others use "fill-in-the-blank" censoring, while others are viewed as so horrid as to be referred to only by their first letter:
"F-Word, C-word, A*s, A*shole, Balls, B*stard, B*tch, Christ, C*ck, Crap, C*m, Damn, D*ck, God Damn, Hell, Jesus, N*gger, Piss, Pr*ck, P*ssy, Screw, Sh*t, Tw*t"
I also note that though not listed in the profanity section, the "sex details" section additionally lists "tits" and "wanking"
I'm not sure what exactly this means, but I do find it fascinating. Does anyone have enough understanding of how the minds of these people work as to be able to explain this behavior?
Hmm.. I do wonder if the lameness filter will let those quotes through
That's just Firefox crashing as it does normally, unrelated to this issue ;)
I think I fucked with XMMS in Perl once but couldnt find an interface to the "next song selection" part. (My brain could be making that up, though)
I think QuodLibet may be what I was referring to in another reply in this thread.
I do think it would take a long time to train, a very long time, probably. But this isnt about instant gratification, it's about aving something better than mere shuffle. Something which, eventually, performs a little better than mere random selection would.
/always/ go together tend to play together.
Everyone throws around the word "evolve" in computer science today, well that's somewhat what I'm talking about. It's not a perfect thing, but it evolves a database of how songs relate to eachother.
The "test" for this (I hate calling something a "proof of concept" when it only shows a little bit of the concept) would be the simplest form: Songs are only allowed one classification, no automatic grouping, just rate everything against everything in an N^2 database, and see if groups of songs which
I'm sick of things that rely on external classifications. (aka: "My TiVo thinks I'm a gay child molestor").
/whole thing/. For even more complexity, try to come up with a way to play only the parts of the song I most like. But then I'm probably the only one who occasionally listens to a 2-second loop for four hours.
Going by Genre rather than Song (assuming you are still generating "moods" which contain multiple genres), would (unless I misunderstand you) save only in proccessing time and database size. The algori,,,[god damn I hate that word] would still be the same, wouldnt they?
Also mildly noteable, listening "all the way through" is somewhat arbitrary. Would need to be scaled based on how long the song is ("just because I couldnt hit skip fast enough doesnt mean I like it") and how much I listened to. I might be okay with half a song but just not really feel like listening to the
huge database, probably. As for derandomizing shuffle, that's why rather than saying "Okay, he liked this song last time, I'll pick this one next" it merely weights the song in relation to another. There would always be a chance of picking something completely random.
:)
Someone else said "It would take forever to train", and this relates to that:
Yes, it would take forever to train, but the idea isnt to instantly have a perfect MP3 player. Right now, you have a non-learning shuffle. I like the idea of things getting better over time. I've been using the same MP3 player for years, shouldnt it know by now that I don't like "Ave Maria" right next to "Baby Got Back"?
Trying to avoid a db of (N^2)/2 size would be nice, something would need to be worked out where after a certain number of interrelated songs is noticed, it gets noted and an auto-generated grouping is formed instead. (Oh, all of these songs have a relation of >arbitrary, let's call them group A) Of course that leads to ((Songs^2)/2)*Groups..
The problem of course being "And how do we keep track of newly-formed classifications?" (such as a group of songs which fits into two different groups, without actually combining all three groups involved)
Ah, forgive me, I forgot that there does exist something which allows you to set "moods" for a song and then pick a "mood". What I was suggesting was rather the idea of moods being auto-classified, and then rather than saying specifically "I'm in a relaxed mood", you'd pick a song which you like when relaxed, and then the next randomly-selected song would be more likely to be one which you have not previously skipped after recently hearing the song you have just selected.
So it's similar to what you said, but operates by grouping songs with other songs, rather than grouping songs into specific catagories.
Well that's just no fun, now how am I supposed to waste time? ;)
[warning: wild tangent ahead]
:)
I've never looked at ObjectTypeA + ObjectTypeA to be the same thing as ObjectTypeB + ObjectTypeB, so to say "+ has multiple uses" seems wrong.. To say that though it looks similar, its function is completely different, seems more accurate, and that's what I took "Overloading" to mean. In OOP, for example, if you overload a function in a class which inherits from another class, often you still want to do the same thing as te parent-class's function, but either have a different way of going about it or want to do something additional as well. So while they still achieve the same goals, they are not directly related (though one may call the other).
So what seemed to be said was: [something like] "The stop button is no longer a stop button, it now stops displaying the page, but keeps caching in the background". That would be, as I understand it, an example of "overloading" the stop button.
You know, because if you meant "combined the functionality" you could have said "combined the stop/reload buttons" instead of "overloaded the stop/reload buttons"
(that was not an attack, I just like talking about varying interpretations of things)
I've played around with weighing ratings based on how often the raters agree wih your own ratings, but I'm pretty certain it won't scale at all.
prototype here:
http://www.the-h.net/opinion/
and now that I know C a little, maybe I'll try out making a plugin or something..
/right now/.
/would/ go well. (various probability weighting schemes, decreased weight as we move on, requiring much use before it really knows you, blah blah blah...)
I have lots of MP3s. I like most of them. However, I'm not always in the mood for all of them. There is very little music I've dismissed completely as bad, so "Thumbs up" || "Thumbs down" is pretty lame (,stupid, closed-minded, moronic, a horrible basis for anything, encouraging of the already prevailent general-dumbness of people whose music I tend not to be in the mood for, etc)
What I've wanted is a system by which music can be automatically catagorized based not on whether or not I like it, but rather based on whether or not I'm likely to enjoy it
How this would work: Start with the standard "Shuffle", picking at random any song. Then, if I hit "next" right after a song starts, decide "This song doesnt go well with this other song right now", and instead try selecting one which my lack of hitting "next" in the past has indicated
The closest I've seen has been plugins which weight the shuffle based on a rating you choose, which doesnt ever fluxuate.
Point: Playlists should be quaint by now. Why should I need to choose in advance what I'm in the mood to listen to an hour from now?
Given that you've just made up a new term, how about explaining what it is you mean? On the general idea of "what about reload and stop buttons do I sometimes not like in other browsers", I can make a wild guess, but it's a wild guess.
/seems/ much more useable, smart, efficient, whatever, but Microsoft actually pays people to come up with their shit, so I guess they know what they're doing better than we do..[*COPY*])
Please note that whatever horrible ugly useless thing IE does, Firefox will copy it. (I assume on the grounds of "Well, our way
^H^H^H? Since when did Microsoft start using xterms?
It's as if you want the GIMP developers to take into account some basic usability considerations.. but that can't be right, because from your post it seems you have previously used the GIMP, and so would know that the developers are strongly opposed to sensibility.
I will sell you one for $450
It measures Quantum States without effecting them, it's obviously a Heisenberg compensator.