Modula

1. When a dis­tin­guished but eld­erly sci­ent­ist states that some­thing is pos­sible, he is almost cer­tainly right. When he states that some­thing is impossible, he is prob­ably wrong.
2. The only way of dis­cov­er­ing the lim­its of the pos­sible is to ven­ture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any suf­fi­ciently advanced tech­no­logy is indis­tin­guish­able from magic.

by Arthur C. Clarke

We spent spent June on the road, tak­ing an East­ern Europe tour. Par­don our break in posting.

This clip is raw from Cam­era E-8 on the launch umbil­ical tower/mobile launch pro­gram of Apollo 11, July 16, 1969. This is an HD trans­fer from the 16mm original.

The cam­era is run­ning at 500 fps, mak­ing the total clip of over 8 minutes rep­res­ent just 30 seconds of actual time. Nar­ra­tion is provided by Mark Gray, Exec­ut­ive Pro­du­cer for Space­craft Films.

New York inva­sion by 8-bits creatures by Patrick Jean.

A good inter­face is meant to help users achieve their goals as eas­ily as pos­sible. But an “evil” inter­face is meant to trick users into doing things they don’t want to — mis­dir­ec­tion of brows­ing, forced view­ing of advert­ise­ments, mal­ware that mas­quer­ades as anti-virus soft­ware, and pre-checked check­boxes for unwanted “spe­cial offers”. Evil inter­faces are seen vir­tu­ally any­where profit is at stake.

There’s no doubt that bad user-interfaces can come from good inten­tions. Design is dif­fi­cult, and acci­dents do hap­pen. But when an acci­dent coin­cid­ent­ally bol­sters a company’s busi­ness model at the expense of its users’ rights, it begins to look sus­pi­cious. And when sim­ilar acci­dents hap­pen over and over again in the same com­pany, around the same issues, it’s more than just coin­cid­ence. It’s a sign something’s ser­i­ously wrong.

Evil Inter­faces: Viol­at­ing the User by Gregory Conti. From TheLastHOPE/Talks.