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Comment Accessibility != Scalability (Score 4, Insightful) 757

by PAPPP (#29533357) Attached to: Shuttleworth Suggests 1-Way Valve For User Experience Testing
The idea that an interface can be entirely judged by how well a user handles it in the first few minutes of exposure is, in my opinion, one of the bigger *problems* with UI design of late. A quality interface should both be immediately accessible, and SCALE WELL TO MORE ADVANCED USE CASES. In my experience, Gnome, OS X, and the bundled native applications that come with each currently fail miserably at the latter. The former head of Apple's UI team makes a pretty good case for this being a problem here, although the article focuses specifically on a facet of the OS X design philosophy which causes scalability issues, rather than the problem in general. To borrow a line from the article: "The beginner today will be the expert of tomorrow. The user with 200 photos today will be the user with 2000 a year from now. The user with 10 songs today will be the user with 100 songs six months from now. The user with one or two extra apps on the iPhone will be the user with 100 apps three months from now."

Comment Re:Problems with Chrom in the x64 version (Score 3, Interesting) 785

by PAPPP (#26426061) Attached to: In-Depth With the Windows 7 Public Beta
I didn't have any luck with daemon tools under Windows 7 (32bit), but SlySoft Virtual Clonedrive (free, http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html ) works fine for me. On a more general note, Windows 7 is making it not a chore to leave my usual Linux/XFCE environment, so they must have done something right.
Transportation

Submission + - Football field-sized kite powers latest freighter (networkworld.com) 2

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "A kite the size of a football field will provide most of the power for a German heavy freight ship set to launch in December. The Beluga shipping company that owns the 460-foot Beluga said it expects the kites to decrease fuel consumption by up to 50% in optimal cases as well as a cutback of the emission of greenhouse gases on sea by 10 to 20%. Interestingly, the ship will be hauling windmills from Esbjerg, Denmark to Houston, Texas. The company that makes the kite for the German transport, SkySails, has made kites for large yachts but is targeting commercial ships with new, larger kites. And it has the ambitious goal of equipping 1,500 ships with kites by 2015. http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22225"
Media

Submission + - NYTimes Editorial Says Science Is a Religion (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by jeffporcaro
jeffporcaro writes: Paul Davies writes a guest editorial in the NYTimes (sorry, but that's where it is) in which he shares his opinion that science is no better/no different than religion, since it forces its adherents to take items on faith. Examples he gives of faith-based science include our belief that the laws of physics will not change tomorrow and the idea that there are multiple universes — both are non-falsifiable and therefore no better than religious faith. Similarly, the fact that fundamental concepts are not fully explained (Why are the laws that regulate motion the way that they are? Who/what made them that way?) proves to him that science is based on a faulty, "deeply anti-rational" foundation. See here for full story.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - RIAA hires DJ's, then sends in the SWAT team

Submitted by
cancan
cancan writes: "The NY times is carrying an article about how the RIAA is hiring hip hop artists to make mix tapes, and then helping the police raid their studios. In the case of DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon (myspace warning), they were raided by SWAT teams with their guns drawn. The local police chief said later that they were "prepared for the worst." Men in RIAA jackets helped cart away "evidence"."
Businesses

Submission + - You aren't allowed off this plane

Submitted by logoszoe
logoszoe writes: Airlines are not required to let you off the plane, even if it has been sitting on the runway for hours.

Whatever happened to someone deciding it was time to leave, and just getting off the plane? Obviously, if it's in the air, that is not an option. But on the ground, come on!

It seems that those in the airline industry have forgotten that they are paid to transport people. Consideration is only given for the almighty dollar, not customer satisfaction.
Television

Submission + - Where are all the hdtv tuners?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today I read about rabbit ears making a comeback with OTA HTDV. I want to purchase a standalone ATSC HDTV tuner to go with my projector, but I am having a very hard time finding one. The big-box stores seem to only stock one or two models and are frequently sold out. Searching online yields similar results. It would seem that there would be ever increasing demand for these tuners given that many HDTVs were sold without internal tuners in years past and these tuners will be necessary for all old NTSC TVs after the February, 2009 shutdown of analog broadcasts. Where should I look to buy one of these devices? Of the currently available models, which are the best? Will the standalone HDTV tuner become a ubiquitous item as the 2009 deadline approaches?
Television

Submission + - BSG Renewed For 4th Season?

Submitted by BiteMyShinyMetalAss
BiteMyShinyMetalAss writes: According to the LA Times (reg required, SPOILER ALERT), the Sci Fi Channel is expected to announce on February 13th that Battlestar Galactica's 4th season will premiere in January 2008. Also of interest is discussion about the role of DVRs in calcuating viewship and advertising revenue:

[Mark Stern, head of programming for Sci Fi] also pointed out that 510,000 additional viewers in the 18-to-49 demographic are watching the show on digital video recorders. They bring the total demographic average closer to 1.6 million, the show's highest numbers since Season 1.
Advertisers, however, do not yet pay for the playback ratings because the general assumption is that viewers watching recorded programs fast-forward through the commercials. It could be a crucial point for the channel, and Stern is hopeful that the business model is shifting.

"Who knows? This upfront season you might find that we can monetize that DVR usage," he said. "The important thing is when you add in the DVR numbers, the audience is there."


Yay! I don't feel so guilty anymore :)
Security

Submission + - "Hacking" a Fake Snow Day

Submitted by
Class Act Dynamo
Class Act Dynamo writes: "Two students in Trenton, Ohio face expulsion from their school and possibly some time in juvie for posting a fake snow-related announcement on the school district website. According to the article, there was no hacking involved. The girls somehow must have gotten the password. It will be interesting to find out how that happened. We'll probably find out next week that it was on a post-it note on the principle's desk."
Education

Submission + - Sex-ed the Tex-ed way

Submitted by zoltamatron
zoltamatron writes: The SF Chronicle is running a story about the Bush administration's abstinence only sex-ed program and how there is no evidence to show that it works any better than the comprehensive education it replaces. Still, California is one of only three states that does not participate in the program that pushes the Texas born curriculum. From the article:

"California took a very progressive approach," [Douglas Kirby] said. "Texas pushed abstinence and made it a little more difficult for teens to receive contraceptives. Pregnancy did go down between 1991 and 2004, but Texas had the second-lowest decline of all states, 19 percent. California had the second-greatest decrease, 46 percent."
The article says there is more than $1 billion in federal money going to these programs.
Education

Submission + - Engineering school grads, tradesmen or thinkers?

Submitted by
El Cubano
El Cubano writes: "ITworld is carrying a story (sorry, no printable version) saying that John Seely Brown (former chief scientist at Xerox and director of PARC, currently teaching at the University of Southern California) is encouraging engineering schools to change the way they educate. From the article:
"Training someone for a career makes no sense. At best, you can train someone for a career trajectory," said John Seely Brown.
What do slashdotters think? Should engineering schools be producing tradesmen (i.e., like an apprenticeship program) or should they be producing "thinkers" (i.e., people who can cope with a wide variety of problem inside and outside their area of expertise)?"
PlayStation (Games)

Submission + - The Dark Side of HDCP, or, Why Is My PS3 Blinking?

Submitted by FloatsomNJetsom
FloatsomNJetsom writes: High Definition Content Protection is supposed to make sure you're not playing pirated content, but sometimes your devices screw up the HDCP "handshake" (over an HDMI cable) and nothing works. This happens with some regularity with the PS3, and Popular Mechanics investigated and found a quick and dirty workaround. From the article:
We then checked with Leslie Chard, president of HDMI Licensing, which owns the rights to the standard, who told us that HDCP is one component of HDMI that has been plagued with interoperability issues. HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) is designed to prevent the interception of data — specifically copyrighted Hollywood movies — between an output component and a display. As Steve Balough, the president of Digital Content Protection, the licensing company for HDCP explains, the two pieces of hardware must exchange a "key," a sort of certificate of authenticity unique to each individual device, to verify a secure connection.
The problem isn't limited to the PS3 — many HDTV cable boxes and have the same problem. The fix there? Unplugging the power cable.
Businesses

Submission + - Fujitsu could be sued for backup disaster

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: According to leaked internal documents, a large utility company in Australia is scrambling to recover business critical data missing for several months. What makes this really hilarious is neither the company (Energy Australia) nor its contractor Fujitsu realised how bad things were until a few months later. Seemed like some mysterious software glitch was screwing up the backup process. Will Fujitsu get sued? Energy Australia's answer was interesting: "EnergyAustralia is still investigating this matter so that is not something we are looking at, at this stage".
AMD/OSTG

Vendor AMD Unveils ATI Game Development Tools

Submitted by OSTG Marketing
AMD has details on their latest development tools, GPU PerfStudio and GPU ShaderAnalyzer , both of which are designed to make graphics development easier and more productive. "According to AMD officials, these developer tools allow for rapid bottleneck detection, advanced rendering techniques and interactive tuning of shaders, resulting in real-time performance improvements and greater shader accuracy. Specifically,

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