Now you make me wish I hadn't sent it back, but trying to make the adjustment was literally hurting my brain. I did love the chord idea and have it somewhere on my (nearly infinite) to-do list to find a way to define your own chords on any keyboard.
I tried a Touchstream for a while, but never got even close to efficient with it. Even the manufacturer admitted that most fast touch-typists would never achieve the same speed with it that they got with a normal keyboard. But the main issue for me was that it messed with my muscle memory. All of the dozen or so passwords I use every day are committed to muscle memory -- I probably couldn't write one down to save my life. Not only could I not enter them with my Touchstream, but after a few tries, I'd gotten myself so messed up that I couldn't enter them when I put back my regular keyboard. I had to drive home to get my password store.
Uh, no. Show me anywhere in those articles where someone from Microsoft called it a "feature." From what I can see, Computerworld put that word in Microsoft's mouth, because Microsoft calling bugs features is a tried-and-true anecdote that always gets some cheers from the Microsoft antifanboys. The people who come out of this looking worst is Computerworld -- they need to seriously hire an editor with some concept of journalism.
Microsoft never said it's a feature or denied it's a bug. Their only contention is that it's not a security risk, and they back that up pretty well. Please stop diluting the force of my well-targeted anti-Microsoft rants with these mindless assaults on straw men.
I'll buy brand X. Or Y. But not Thompson. They're not selling to you. At least not directly. From the article: "Thomson sells its gateways and STBs to network operators-- one of its biggest customers is Orange, the Internet access subsidiary of France Telecom...."
So Thompson is betting on access providers being in bed with content producers, which is probably a good bet.
Disclaimer: couldn't stand to read the whole article since it starts spewing complete bullshit from paragraph two.
First of all, the most atheistic among us do not cross our fingers during turbulence. That's the kind of unprovable truism that these religion-obsessed researchers always trot out. I have been in a few life-threatening situations in my time, and I have never been overcome by some sudden wave of belief. And to take people's hesitation to put their hand into a box that they've been warned destroys things as evidence of latent religion is really, really reaching. I mean, the guy who tells you that the box knows your sentiments towards religion is obviously a nut -- who's gonna put their hand in his destroy-o-box?
The whole premise of this article is deeply flawed: "When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation," it says, but the spectrum of belief is so wide that characterizing it as a single thing, a "universal trait" is just nonsense. When Europeans came to America, they called the people they found there devil worshippers, because they could only see those people's beliefs in terms of their own. This is just more of the same. I refuse to put my hand in Dr. Crazy's box, and he chalks it up as proof that I share some ridiculous belief of his.
Some people just can't stand the idea that the human mind works fine without gods. Sorry, folks, but it does.
because at this point we need to figure out how to raise decent kids despite in-depth exposure to sex and violence. Let's face it, a signficant number of parents are going to give their kids unfettered internet access, and that renders any TV rules moot.
I just happened to think: Do you suppose it would be possible to refactor the Windows graph to make it look less tangled...? Yes. The easiest way would be to throw out the Windows code base and start over with a set of competent programmers, then regenerate the graph.
... a malicious Java application or applet (which still has to be run, of course)... If I understand, before the patch this did not require a signed applet, which means it did not "have to be run" -- it would run automatically when the page loaded.
Evolution of new ecosystems does not happen on a human time scale. When you have a disrupted landscape, it doesn't immediately refill with a new diverse biosphere -- it gets taken over by weed species. That's why a vacant lot is neither as pretty nor as useful as a forest meadow. Don't bother pointing out that that's a value judgment -- of course it is, and it's one that most people would stand by. Maybe you'd like to live in a world full of nothing but crabgrass and cockroaches, but most of us would not.
You continue to insist that all changes are neutral, or at least equally good and bad. That's just nonsense. Crashing fish stocks do not have an upside. Massive loss of topsoil does not have an upside. Salinization of formerly fertile land does not have an upside. I could go on. People I know have no affection for the status quo, but they have justifiable fears of things getting significantly worse. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be scared enough.
Every bad aspect of global warming has a corresponding good one. Change always results in both.
So what would be the good aspect of all our coral reefs dieing off? That you can come up with a couple of possible good effects does not mean that the bad exactly counterbalances the good. Sure, we might luck out, but there's no reason to assume that some cosmic law of karma will give with one hand while it takes away with the other.
1. We foolishly believed the global warming nutcases, so we invested a lot in cutting down our pollution, reforesting the planet, breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, and generally investigating a sustainable approach to living on this earth. On the way, we created entire new industries and learned a lot about coordinating economic activity among countries.
2. We foolishly failed to believe the global warming scientists, so we squandered fossil fuels, filled the skies with pollution, cut down the remaining trees, watched the glaciers melt, and encouraged a massive biodiversity crash -- but at least the same old corrupt governments collected all the profits while they lasted, and spent most of the money on weapons as usual, so now we're all armed to the teeth to fight for what's left.
I suppose this could be viewed as evidence that life-supporting planets tend to go through catastrophes that would be likely to kill off intelligent species. You may be optimistic enough to think that human society could survive the earth freezing over if it started now, but we sure as hell wouldn't have made it if the deep freeze hit even a couple of centuries ago. So it's just one more factor that would thin out the density of civilizations. If you wanted to pretend that this Fermi nonsense is anything more than wanton speculation...
What do you mean by "out there"? Who do you expect to make that effort? I'm no expert on the subject, but it seems to me that a lot of breast cancer survivors have been very vocal in trying to raise awareness, whereas prostate cancer survivors tend not to be overly eager to talk about it. Let's face it, men choose to suffer in silence because our macho image is more important to us than our health. And if some guy tries to get me to wear a ribbon or buy a teddy bear in support of prostates everywhere, I'm just not going to be very receptive.
The problem is that's not how humans work. We (and I'm speaking in terms of populations more than particular people) are selfish, needy, dishonest and mean.
Sometimes. And you can argue the extent, but it's clear that environment and education have a good deal to do with how selfish, needy, dishonest, and mean we are. If we really want to improve things, we need to figure out how to raise people to be more generous, self-sufficient, honest, and self-sacrificing. We'll never make people perfect, but think what a 1% increase in human generosity would mean.
To blindly trust businesses is folly at best and suicide at worst. The only time businesses care about you is when you spend your money on their products and services. Never forget that.
And here we can seriously do better. Corporations exist entirely on paper; we can reshape them any way we can imagine. Unfortunately we've ceded so much to them that people actually believe corporate nature is rooted in natural rather than human law: they can't even imagine fixing them. There's nothing preventing us from passing a law making it illegal for corporations to interfere with anyone's first-amendment rights, for instance. There's nothing preventing us from ruling that corporations are not themselves entitled to first-amendment rights, and therefore cannot lobby politicians. There's nothing preventing us from requiring transparent management and reasonable wage scales.
There seem to be (at least) three obstacles that stop us from taking any action:
People believe the propoganda that says the way corporations ream us is actually the best of all possible worlds. They worship some weirdly oversimplified version of economic theory -- Newt Gingrich's Market Economics in Words of One Syllable.
Relatedly, people believe that tampering with corporations will cause massive economic hardship. As if business people couldn't possibly figure out any way to make a profit if they were required not to pollute so much, for instance.
People identify more with CEOs than with people of their own economic class. Sadly, we're so used to watching the rich on TV and movies, that deep down, we feel like rich people. We share their disdain for people like... us. We don't really want a world where everyone has enough -- we prefer to have concentration of wealth because on some irrational level, we all believe we'll someday be the one with the money and power
It is far moire likely that designers have studied and understand interface design than for a programmer to have done so given that it is the very thing we do.
Note that, I didn't say "designers" -- I think that term's too imprecise to work with -- I said "graphic and layout artists." Both interface programming and digital art overlap with interface design. It's quite likely that an experienced interface programmer understands many aspects of interface design. But I think we usually learn it mostly through eating our own dog food, rather than intentional study (although many books on GUI toolkits include some advice on making things usable). This often leaves us completely blind to some aspects of the field. I had worked on a lot of interfaces before I happened on the book "The Design of Everyday Things," which changed a lot of my thinking on the subject. It also gave me a perspective that I realized all of my coworkers lacked, including the "artist."
There is something in what you say: a lot of artists do study human factors more than programmers. Nonetheless, all the artists I've worked with have been uniformly terrible at designing a computer interface.
Interface design is its own field, and ideally you would get someone who specializes in it. If that's not possible, my experience tells me you should let the programmers put together the interface, and then let the artists decorate it -- but most importantly you should get a lot of feedback from the intended users (and anyone else available) at every stage of the process.
It remains the only effective means of convincing some developers that they are *NOT* designers in the first place.
And, I might add, the same applies to graphic and layout artists. Just because you can draw pretty doesn't mean you know a thing about human/computer interaction.
This is the company that gave us the 50-pound computer that tilts my entire house toward my wife's desk, plus needs jet-engine size (and loudness) fans to stay mostly within operating temperature.
The original imac was not only hideous but also ripped off from a vacuum cleaner.
Aqua is exactly like Arkanoid -- except Arkanoid was fun.
Find me an interview with Apple's PR department -- they're responsible for Apple's reputation for good design, not the designers.
A lot of the rights we have now, we have only because several thousand angry people on the street puts some righteous fear into the powers that be. If the government had had reliable nonlethal crowdbusting weapons during the heyday of the labor movement, an "eight hour day" would still be a utopian fantasy (instead of something our parents enjoyed and that we're voluntarily ceding out of sheer stupidity).
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Now you make me wish I hadn't sent it back, but trying to make the adjustment was literally hurting my brain. I did love the chord idea and have it somewhere on my (nearly infinite) to-do list to find a way to define your own chords on any keyboard.
I tried a Touchstream for a while, but never got even close to efficient with it. Even the manufacturer admitted that most fast touch-typists would never achieve the same speed with it that they got with a normal keyboard. But the main issue for me was that it messed with my muscle memory. All of the dozen or so passwords I use every day are committed to muscle memory -- I probably couldn't write one down to save my life. Not only could I not enter them with my Touchstream, but after a few tries, I'd gotten myself so messed up that I couldn't enter them when I put back my regular keyboard. I had to drive home to get my password store.
Uh, no. Show me anywhere in those articles where someone from Microsoft called it a "feature." From what I can see, Computerworld put that word in Microsoft's mouth, because Microsoft calling bugs features is a tried-and-true anecdote that always gets some cheers from the Microsoft antifanboys. The people who come out of this looking worst is Computerworld -- they need to seriously hire an editor with some concept of journalism.
Microsoft never said it's a feature or denied it's a bug. Their only contention is that it's not a security risk, and they back that up pretty well. Please stop diluting the force of my well-targeted anti-Microsoft rants with these mindless assaults on straw men.
You call them "roughly as cool as people who still think it's cleaver to in their sig."
First of all, the most atheistic among us do not cross our fingers during turbulence. That's the kind of unprovable truism that these religion-obsessed researchers always trot out. I have been in a few life-threatening situations in my time, and I have never been overcome by some sudden wave of belief. And to take people's hesitation to put their hand into a box that they've been warned destroys things as evidence of latent religion is really, really reaching. I mean, the guy who tells you that the box knows your sentiments towards religion is obviously a nut -- who's gonna put their hand in his destroy-o-box?
The whole premise of this article is deeply flawed: "When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation," it says, but the spectrum of belief is so wide that characterizing it as a single thing, a "universal trait" is just nonsense. When Europeans came to America, they called the people they found there devil worshippers, because they could only see those people's beliefs in terms of their own. This is just more of the same. I refuse to put my hand in Dr. Crazy's box, and he chalks it up as proof that I share some ridiculous belief of his.
Some people just can't stand the idea that the human mind works fine without gods. Sorry, folks, but it does.
because at this point we need to figure out how to raise decent kids despite in-depth exposure to sex and violence. Let's face it, a signficant number of parents are going to give their kids unfettered internet access, and that renders any TV rules moot.
... for the makers of Arkanoid to sue Apple for ripping off their icon theme and calling it "Aqua."
... a malicious Java application or applet (which still has to be run, of course)... If I understand, before the patch this did not require a signed applet, which means it did not "have to be run" -- it would run automatically when the page loaded.1. We foolishly believed the global warming nutcases, so we invested a lot in cutting down our pollution, reforesting the planet, breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, and generally investigating a sustainable approach to living on this earth. On the way, we created entire new industries and learned a lot about coordinating economic activity among countries. 2. We foolishly failed to believe the global warming scientists, so we squandered fossil fuels, filled the skies with pollution, cut down the remaining trees, watched the glaciers melt, and encouraged a massive biodiversity crash -- but at least the same old corrupt governments collected all the profits while they lasted, and spent most of the money on weapons as usual, so now we're all armed to the teeth to fight for what's left.
I suppose this could be viewed as evidence that life-supporting planets tend to go through catastrophes that would be likely to kill off intelligent species. You may be optimistic enough to think that human society could survive the earth freezing over if it started now, but we sure as hell wouldn't have made it if the deep freeze hit even a couple of centuries ago. So it's just one more factor that would thin out the density of civilizations. If you wanted to pretend that this Fermi nonsense is anything more than wanton speculation...
What do you mean by "out there"? Who do you expect to make that effort? I'm no expert on the subject, but it seems to me that a lot of breast cancer survivors have been very vocal in trying to raise awareness, whereas prostate cancer survivors tend not to be overly eager to talk about it. Let's face it, men choose to suffer in silence because our macho image is more important to us than our health. And if some guy tries to get me to wear a ribbon or buy a teddy bear in support of prostates everywhere, I'm just not going to be very receptive.
There seem to be (at least) three obstacles that stop us from taking any action:
I stand corrected.
Xtreme Programming: Never have so many invested so much on a proposition backed by so little evidence.
Diebold voting machines stampede out of polling places, throw themselves at the feet of passersby, and beg to be tampered with.
Note that, I didn't say "designers" -- I think that term's too imprecise to work with -- I said "graphic and layout artists." Both interface programming and digital art overlap with interface design. It's quite likely that an experienced interface programmer understands many aspects of interface design. But I think we usually learn it mostly through eating our own dog food, rather than intentional study (although many books on GUI toolkits include some advice on making things usable). This often leaves us completely blind to some aspects of the field. I had worked on a lot of interfaces before I happened on the book "The Design of Everyday Things," which changed a lot of my thinking on the subject. It also gave me a perspective that I realized all of my coworkers lacked, including the "artist."
There is something in what you say: a lot of artists do study human factors more than programmers. Nonetheless, all the artists I've worked with have been uniformly terrible at designing a computer interface.
Interface design is its own field, and ideally you would get someone who specializes in it. If that's not possible, my experience tells me you should let the programmers put together the interface, and then let the artists decorate it -- but most importantly you should get a lot of feedback from the intended users (and anyone else available) at every stage of the process.
And, I might add, the same applies to graphic and layout artists. Just because you can draw pretty doesn't mean you know a thing about human/computer interaction.
This is the company that gave us the 50-pound computer that tilts my entire house toward my wife's desk, plus needs jet-engine size (and loudness) fans to stay mostly within operating temperature.
The original imac was not only hideous but also ripped off from a vacuum cleaner.
Aqua is exactly like Arkanoid -- except Arkanoid was fun.
Find me an interview with Apple's PR department -- they're responsible for Apple's reputation for good design, not the designers.
A lot of the rights we have now, we have only because several thousand angry people on the street puts some righteous fear into the powers that be. If the government had had reliable nonlethal crowdbusting weapons during the heyday of the labor movement, an "eight hour day" would still be a utopian fantasy (instead of something our parents enjoyed and that we're voluntarily ceding out of sheer stupidity).