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Comment Re: Umm... (Score 1) 98

I recently played a few games on them, and it's not the same experience. Maybe the lane I was on was poorly maintained or just hexed, but pin 7 would always get stuck in the setter, then drop. Sometimes the system would catch the error, sometimes not. But if the pin stayed stuck, you had no chance at a strike. I was with a bunch of kids who were under 10 so it really didn't affect scores all that much. But I can see this being a big problem in a competition setting.

Comment Business MGNT defines the requirements... (Score 2) 154

Technical management evaluates the options based on the requirements, and makes recommendations. BizMGNT shit-cans the recommendation in favor of whatever buzz-word technology is in vogue. Engineers implement the technologies chosen scratching their collective heads as to how this meets any of the initial requirements;. AND they have to engineer supporting infrastructure with no budget, and even less time to make pager-duty tolerable. At least that's how it's worked in my experience. Someone who doesnt have to answer the phone at 2am gets to decide.

Comment Obfuscation of the systems from the users. (Score 1) 564

I have noticed this trend in OSs, Windows/OSX hide file extensions. Windows hides filesystem structure in "Libraries" (Complete Bullshit by the way. I went through and removed them from the registry, only to have them reappear after an update). Windows hides system files. Web browsers hide the protocol info. HTTP:\\ or FTP:\\ I do not like it.

Comment 5th amendment doesn't apply outside of court. (Score 1) 871

If the 5th amendment applied during interrogation, then no one could confess. Every case would go to trial. You can refuse to talk to police. Miranda rights apply when talking to police, AFTER GETTING ARRESTED. The summary is that there is nothing that you can say to help yourself until you get to court. By saying nothing there is nothing that the prosecution can hold against you.
Privacy

Submission + - No passport for Britons refusing mass-surveillance

UpnAtom writes: "From the And you thought Sweden was bad dept:

People who refuse to give up their bank records, tax records & details of any benefits they've claimed and the records of their car movements for the last year, or refuse to submit to an interrogation on whether they are the same person that this mountain of data belongs to will be denied passports from March 26th.

The Blair Govt has already admitted that this and other data will be cross-linked so that the Home Office and other officials can spy on the everyday lives of innocent Britons.

Britons were already the most spied upon nation in Western Europe. Data-mining through this unprecedented level of mass-surveillance allows any future British govt to leapfrog even countries like China and North Korea."
Software

Submission + - Improving software help (and user's lives)

develinflex writes: There are generally two kinds of questions a user might have while seeking help on a software application.

1. "What does something do? What is something?" type of questions.

2. "How can something be accomplished?" type of questions.

Providing information 1 is trivial — you just need to iterate through all menus, widgets and components on the screen, and describe them one by one. You can also have things like tooltips, whatsthis widgets, etc. that can be associated with every displayed widget.

How does one give a systematic list of the second type of questions? The problem is tricky because the keywords users might use to search for help might not be the exact technical terms used in the manual. For example, users may "know" that they need to use a text-box, but may not know that the thing to be used is called a text-box.

How would you, as a developer, arrange information in a way that is easy to discover for end users who know only their functional requirements? What other techniques can you use to speed up (I'm extremely sorry...) "software-usage knowledge discovery"?

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The solution of this problem is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader.

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