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Comment Psychology plays an important role (Score 1) 736

There has actually been a lot of research into how to make progress bars "feel" right -- it turns out that certain psychological tricks can help with that, too. Roughly speaking, it tends to be better to be conservative at the start (i.e. give a worst case estimate) and then improve it over time, than the other way around. Hence a simple trick to improve the user experience is to take whatever you think will be an accurate value for the progress, but then apply a scale to it to make it appear slower at the beginning, and faster at the end. This is studied and discussed in depth in the paper "Rethinking the Progress Bar": http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/progressbars/ProgBarHarrison.pdf

For example, if x is the progress ranging from 0.0 to 1.0, then instead of using x directly, use f(x) = (x+(1-x)/2)^8 to calculate the progress estimate you are going to display to the user.

The key observation here is that if I am told something will be finished in 1 minute, but then it turns out to take 2 minutes, I am upset; if instead I am told it will take 2 minutes, but then it finishes already after 1 minute, I'll be happy. Of course this has limits, and one needs to strike a delicate balance: if the original estimate is too far off and bad, the negative reaction to the initial bad estimate and how far it is away from reality will create a strong negative reaction on its own (what would you think if you were regularly told "performing this operation will take ~2 days" when it ends up needing only 1 minute each time...)

There are other tricks to make the UI feel "faster" when it comes to progress bars, see e.g. http://uxmovement.com/buttons/how-to-make-progress-bars-feel-faster-to-users/

Comment Re:i will do you a favor (Score 1) 128

what a stupid question. it's a wide open internet, not one company server

look:

do you understand why the music industry is dying because of the internet?

Last I looked, they actually weren't doing that badly, after learning some hard lessons... but that's besides the point.

now apply that understanding to your proposal, because you are asking for the same damn unenforceable impossible thing

This akin to arguing that theft should not be illegal; after all, a law cannot stop somebody from stealing, and clearly thefts still happens every day, too, so what is the point in forbidding it in the first place?

Yet it seems a majority of people think that outlawing theft is a good idea anyway, and that social contracts (which laws are, in the end) in general have a reason to exist.

Go figure...

Apple

Submission + - Apple founder fears patent war fallout (afr.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple and other tech companies' patent hoarding could prevent entrepreneurs doing the same thing that he and Steve Jobs did in starting a computer company in a garage. Woz also says the jury is still out on Tim Cook as the right CEO to lead Apple forward after Steve Jobs.
Botnet

Submission + - Apple Snubs Security Firm That Spotted Mac Botnet (forbes.com) 1

Sparrowvsrevolution writes: Now that it's being increasingly targeted by botnet herders, Apple has a thing or two to learn about cooperating with friendly security researchers.

Boris Sharov, the CEO of Dr. Web, the Russian security company that first reported that more than half a million Macs were infected with Flashback malware last week, says that when his company alerted Apple to the botnet, it never responded to him. Worse yet, on Monday Apple asked a Russian registrar to take down a domain that it said was being used to host a command and control server for Flashback, but in fact was a "sinkhole" that Dr. Web had set up to observe and analyze the botnet. Sharov describes that lack of communication and cooperation as a symptom of a company that has never before had to work closely with the security industry. "For Microsoft, we have all the security response team’s addresses,” he says. “We don’t know the antivirus group inside Apple.”

Space

Submission + - BOSS: The Universe's Most Precise Measurement? 13.5 Billion Years Old (discovery.com)

Cazekiel writes: Observing the primordial sound waves created 30,000 years after the Big Bang, physicists on the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) have determined our universe's most precise measurements: 13.5 billion years old.

This article detailing the study reports:

“We’ve made precision measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe five to seven billion years ago – the best measure yet of the size of anything outside the Milky Way,” says David Schlegel of the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), BOSS’s principal investigator. “We’re pushing out to the distances when dark energy turned on, where we can start to do experiments to find out what’s causing accelerating expansion.”

Comment Re:Impenetrable (Score 1) 307

I also dislike the fact that they but a huge video on there. Instead of putting up bigger links to e.g. their guided tour https://www.dropbox.com/tour (which also contains a video, but one doesn't have to view it to follow the tour). Or the features page -- both links are the bottom.

So, while I agree that they should be a lot bigger and more prominent, I'd like to point out that these are not *that* hard to find ;)

Comment Re:Crashes a lot ? (Score 1) 308

Deleted all cookies, it still crashes. Best way to trigger it is to go to that site, and then follow internal links, and scroll a lot, while they are loading. I.e. click on a link and start wildly to scroll up and down (works nicely using my MacBook Pro's touchpad). Last crash involved WebCore::BitmapImage::draw.

Comment Re:Crashes a lot ? (Score 1) 308

No extensions installed at all! Yes, I do have some math fonts (used by jsMath) installed. However, no such problems occur with Firefox and Chrome. So while I of course can't exclude the possibility that a font is corrupt, it seems strange that Chrome (which also uses Webkit) is not affected... Also weird is that I get quite some different stack traces. But several of them seem to be related to cookie storage (stack trace contains among other things MemoryCookies::~MemoryCookies and DiskCookieStorage::syncStorageLocked). I'll try deleting all cookies. Weird.

Comment Crashes a lot ? (Score 1) 308

I was quite excited when I saw this and went to get it. Now I have it for half an hour and already regret it -- it already crashes over a dozen times on me -- albeit always on the same page, just at different points (and with different crash stack backtraces, too). Specifically, http://terrytao.wordpress.com/ is where I see those. Anybody else having similar problems?

Comment Re:Well.. (Score 1) 37

I don't do the books, so I don't know the revenue numbers, but I know we're profitable, and so far profit is always turned around into more growth -- generally developers or support.

As for our prices, we don't charge for software licenses at all, so we're infinitely less expensive than the big guys in that regard. ;)

When it comes to support, ours is insanely cheap compared to HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, or any of the other big players we compete with, especially when you scale up. Of course, you can't comparison shop because HP and IBM and their like hide their (per-node) licensing and support prices behind channel partners and "have a salesperson call you," generally billing small customers with no clout a multiple per license what they charge for large customers for "volume discounts," despite the fact that it doesn't matter to the software itself how many nodes there are.

If you don't need support, OpenNMS is free, and always will be. Many people don't need it; there's a healthy community who can help. But the people who work for the .com side of things have been in network management for years, and if you want help on how to solve a particular monitoring problem, or want someone to call for help if something goes wrong, that's how we continue to be able to pay people full-time to make OpenNMS better.

Comment Re:Well.. (Score 4, Informative) 37

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the OpenNMS developers.)

Depends on what you do in your enterprise. OpenNMS does a lot of useful stuff out of the box, but is a platform first, and an application second. OpenNMS's biggest strength is the breadth of ways to integrate it with other tools, and huge scalability (we have installations collecting millions of data points every 5 minutes, and monitoring devices with 50k interfaces each without breaking a sweat, replacing failing OpenView installations in large telcos). New features are new features, and we're pretty conservative in the scope of features that get put into the even (stable) releases. If you're running unstable, well, they're new features, and sometimes there are bugs... All a part of developing in the fish bowl.

And you don't need an account manager at the other end to yell at when you can get immediate support from someone with intimate knowledge of the system, that's how we've survived as a company while remaining true to being 100% open source software. No BS, just support which is all "level 3." Not that we typically have things that just cease to function without provocation, but without a bug report it's hard to answer that particular comment. ;)

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