The Next Big IT Projects From the University Labs (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: From unstructured data mining to visual microphones, academic labs are bringing future breakthrough possibilities to light, writes InfoWorld's Peter Wayner in his overview of nine university projects that could have lasting impact on IT. 'Open source programmers can usually build better code faster, often because they have bosses who pay them to build something that will pay off next quarter, not next century. Yet good computer science departments still manage to punch above — sometimes well above — their weight. While a good part of the research is devoted to arcane topics like the philosophical limits of computation, some of it can be tremendously useful for the world at large. What follows are nine projects currently under development at university labs that [could] have a broad impact on the world of computing.'

Comments

Know your strengths and weaknesses

[Tablizer]

I don't believe universities are very good at delivering "finished" products. Those with their heads deep in the arcane theory and bits often forget or don't know how to think about how regular users interact with products. Good UI's and feature packaging is hard to get right.

But, creating new algorithms or code libraries for those outside with a better "product sense" is certainly something universities can and have done well.

Re:Know your strengths and weaknesses

[Tablizer]

All such opinions are subjective, until the point we can directly examine customer neurons in action, or at least have objective surveys. If my opinion is to be deleted because it's subjective, as you appear to request, then so should yours, and there would be no opinions nor objective info in existence either way. Nor does Slashdot preclude anecdotal and subjective evidence. It's not an academic research publication. Your complaint is baseless.

That being said, "corporate" software tends to have better UI's in my observation than most open-source projects and university projects.

I believe this is because a corporation MUST make the software somewhat usable or they die. In OSS and research projects, you have more room to fail, in terms of popularity of project.

Thus, corporate software generally ranges from C- to A in "usability", whereas the others can range from F to A. D's and F's are weeded out quickly in corporate land because the producers of such go bankrupt if they keep it up (or down).

Blender, Gimp, and Open Office Base (OOB) are examples of some OSS products which have/had horrid UI's, in my opinion.

Take OOB, for example. It took me forever to find the set-primary-key setting. I compared it to MS-Access, and although MS-Access's UI is messy, they gave at least 3 different ways to set (open) the primary-key setting tool. They probably did some user tests, and after learning users had a hard time finding the key setter, stuck it in multiple places. It's a messy work-around, but better than OOB's.

Reads like a google translation.

[dmomo]

Did anyone else have trouble following the quoted text in this summary? I hesitantly clicked through, but couldn't bear to even make myself scroll through to see what the click-bait list items were. InfoWorld is like the Buzzfeed of tech, only without the proofreading.

Re:RIP Slashdot

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

"Closed-source programmers usually have to build code faster, even though it's barely compiling, because their bosses pay them to build something that will go on sale next quarter even if it's not ready to ship and will require monthly patches for years after that."