esdweb · HackerTrans

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

Ha! I love it. The Internet TV enthusiast's revenge. Cable companies seeing their hold on viewers/subscribers falling to Roku and Hula. Of course, they are so hidebound in their profitory mindset that they won't let the a la carte method go cheap. They'll make it ridiculously expensive per channel, and thus lose the customer to the Internet anyway. If they were really smart, they'd figure out how to adapt and adopt the Netflix method. You can have that DVD forever for a modest price (remember late fees at the video store)? But you won't get the next one until you return the one you have. Maybe cable could go American Chinese a la Netflix: 2 from column A and 1 from column B, but you can't watch any other channels until you are finished with those in a 24-hr period. Well, just a thought.

esdweb

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

This is fascinating. Although "rules of thumb" for appealing and usable design are included, what is more interesting to me are points further down (both in the presentation and in the depths of perception) such as "Unconscious Processes" that have things like "the system uses food, sex, and danger messages to grab users' attention" and "the system matches the user's mental model". The mental model thing is so subtle and so universally applicable.

esdweb

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

This article could be the press release (or footnotes to it) that Jobs never wrote or would write. What I mean is, when Steve Jobs announced a couple of years ago that Apple would go HTML5 instead of Flash, there was great oohing and ahhing but no concise explanation for those of us lesser mortals as to why HTML5 is the better path. And this article does it in a couple of hundred words.Specifically: 1) From iPhone to desktop, it's one and the same document; 2) Document files are smaller and load faster; 3) SEMANTIC WEB accessible. Our poor semantic web, so visionary and so non-starter. Perhaps the growth of HTML5 will save it.

esdweb

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

I like "human interest" pieces and I like Steve Jobs. Ergo ...I liked this article. I don't have a problem with someone who is so famous and big that he doesn't have to pander and sell himself or his company, and that's the realm Jobs is in. He's not political -- end of story, next question. Apple's products are no less green than the competitors' -- what part of that answer didn't you understand, reporter? How does it feel to beat cancer and be back in control? Are you kidding me, impudent m'fer? You didn't get the memo about me and my personal life. Next question. One of the comments (at the posting site) said the reporter imposed his own psychobabble slant on the article. I don't have a problem with that. It was a good portrait photograph of Jobs done by a professional.

esdweb

vor 15 Jahrendiscuss

I loved this -- and don't skip the video. British ingenuity. It reminded me of Orville and Wilbur making airplanes from bicycle parts. Sadly, we don't do this kind of stuff anymore in the U.S. The other thing it reminded me of is that British reality game show in the '90s -- Robot Wars or something. I used to love to watch that. I think the huge problem is the tremendously high heat in a small footprint. It's similar to the issues of the early natural gas powered vehicles -- they are basically a terrorist's wet dream, an explosive on wheels. Mind your hands, dear. Make sure you put on your asbestos gloves before you go out for a spin. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the video.) Pictures speak a thousand words and that dragon fire plume spewing from the fender definitely gave one pause. But all that said, I think this is something worth developing. The issue is how to generate a thousand-plus degrees of heat in a very small space in a safe and green way. The last time we went about this we came up with the atomic bomb. Hmmm. They make mini-reactors for the inter-planetary satellites -- perhaps you could adapt one of those?