As the other response to your post explains, the evolution to work in 3D is not all that it is made out to be. In fact, most people are really bad in navigating in 3D, unless they have trained doing it in video games or as pilots. I attneded a conference once where the speaker was making that point. He asked the audience to point toward their hotel room (we were on the second floor of a hotel tower). Pretty much people were pointing all over the place, and these were graphics/UI people, who you'd expect to have some training in 3D.
There is another reason why 3D may not be all that great: what you actually see with your eyes is a 2D projection of the 3D world. If you lay out your information in 2D, you can make the best possible use of the screen area (so-called screen real estate). By contrast if you have a 3D display, some of your data will not be visible due to occlusion, and yet some of your screen real estate may be unused simply because of the way your current perspective projects geometry onto the screen. Hidden data is clearly a problem, as it potentially makes you overlook it, but also UI research has shown that good uses of screen real estate improves productivity for non-trivial tasks, so the wasted pixels in 3D representations are also problematic.
Expert user interfaces are poorly understood because it is exceedingly hard to do research on them. If you want to test a new interface for newbies, you just put together a prototype, grab some random people off the streat, and do a user study. If you wanted to do the same thing for experts, you would first have to to train them for weeks, possibly even months or years, and THEN do the study. Apart from this process being very expensive, you would be hard pressed to find subjects that are willing to put in that kind of time.
Personally, I find it quite likely that research will eventually confirm that keyboard interfaces are inherently more productive then window/mouse UIs for expert users: The bandwidth between user and machine is simply much higher than using the mouse. Yes, it requires a long training period, but in the end you can be much faster than with a GUI (except maybe for tasks that are inherently graphical).
So, if you want a unified novice/expert UI, it is going to be very difficult beyond just a GUI with keyboard shortcuts (and that approach does not utilize the full power of the keyboard).
And why should the customers be the ones to care about the GPL? It's the people who wrote the GPL'd code that has been stolen by ASUS that care. Because the GPL is designed to protect the customers' (i.e. users') rights, not the rights of the original authors. Specifically, under the GPL, Asus has no obligation to distribute the code to the original authors, UNLESS of course the authors are also customers having bought the eeePC.
Nonetheless, the article is stupid anyhow; "However, there are indications that eeePC fans probably don't care" is such a lame statement one has to wonder why they included it at all ("indications" and "probably" aren't exactly words that would help in a legal case).
That works alright, except for all the pages it is missing. What about pages where they have your initials rather than your full first name? Or pages with middle initials vs. without? Or maybe you are searching for a list, and the format is actually "Lastname, Firstname".
For added bonus, a people search mode could expand semantic information. For example, if there is a page with the text "Firstname Lastname (somebody@google.com)", the search engine know knows one of the email addresses of that person, and can include it in the search, so you find pages with only the email address rather than the name. Or if there is a personal home page on slashdot (or facebook etc.), which lists both real name and handle, all slashdot postings (facebook entries etc) should be included.
You can do this kind of stuff manually today, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
Oh, and before somebody complains about privacy: this is all very public info already. Somebody who knows what they are doing can already collect that data in a hour or two.
But on a more serious note, wouldn't it be great if one of the search engines finally did the firstname, lastname thing correctly? It can't be that difficult to figure that one out in a way that it is correct most of the time.
Right. Because naturally is impossible for the insurgents to buy new weapons.
In case you didn't know: Bin Laden himself has hundreds of millions of dollars he can throw at this war. Also, for whatever reason, the Bush administration has decided to transfer huge amounts of cash to Iraq (e.g. $2.4 BILLION in a single shipment of $100 bills http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0622-04.htm. The majority of this money has not reached its desired recipiants, and it is a fair assumption that corruption and mixed loyalties have resulted in the insurgants getting a fair portion of that cash.
At first glance this doesn't appear that bad for Microsoft -- so businesses wait, and then buy a different product from Microsoft; it delays income, but isn't that bad. Actually, if this happens, it will be VERY bad for Microsoft. Their OS business model is working on the assumption that almost everybody upgrades to all windows versions. I.e, they want you to upgrade to Vista AND later Windows 7 when it comes out. When you skip Vista, they loose money thay had planned on. Also, they made a huge investment in order to develop Vista, and if they can't recoup that they are in trouble (or at least some of the managers are).
That said, I am not yet convinced that companies will skip Vista entirely. As time passes, more and more new hardware will no longer be fully supported under XP. It is already starting with the DirectX 10 GPUs, wait for it to happen with CPUs and chipsets. As a result more and more new machines in every company will be running Vista, and at some point, possibly after one or two more service packs, companies may make the decision to upgrade older machines to homogenize their computing environment. If that happens, it iwll indedd only be a delay of income , which Microsoft can live with more easily than a complete skip Vista.
Who said it was "too complicated"? TFA just said "dedicated hardware", i.e. different.
One issue was that Multics was running on hardware that didn't have bytes but 36 bit words. Since performance was critical with the low compute power of the day, somebody somewhere is bound to have relied on sepcific bit trickery that assumes exactly that word size. Moreover, I would gess that certain performance critical of the OS parts were written in assembly to begin with, and obviously there is no special hardware out there today that has the same machine language.
But the answer will almost always be zero as the patents would be owned by whoever was paying you when you came up with the idea. It is true that patents are usually assigned to the employer (i.e. the employer holds the IP rights), but the names on the patents are still those of the individual(s) that invented the work. As such, you can list patents on you CV, and as the GP points out, quite a few employers now look at patent authoring as evidence of creativity and thus value it highly.
You are probably trolling, but just in case you actually mean it...
Have you looked at the oil price lately? Even if you are irrational enough to ignore the mountain of evidence for human caused global warming, you might still want to cut down on your energy bill and/or make the remaining oil on this planet last a little longer.
OK, so let me get this straight: on the one hand we have the sun, a fusion reactor with a mass of about 2 * 10^30 kg (about a million times the mass of the whole earth). On the other hand, we have a fusion device with a mass of merely 27 tonnes, i.e. 3 * 10^4 kg, or 26 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE lighter.
I have a hard time believing that the energy output of the latter was anywhere close to 1% of the former, except maybe by some really bogus metric (only counting certain wavelengths of radiation, for example).
A number of EU countries have laws that require accepting local currency as legal tender in business transactions. Not sure if the UK is one of theose countries, though.
Well, you DO import construction materials (most notably lumber) from Canada; probably other places.
Also, heating (and/or air conditioning, depending on where you live) is a fairly big part of the housing cost. Transportation costs (i.e gas) are a fair part of construction costs. For now, most energy is traded in US dollars, so you don't see a decline in purchasing power in that area, yet. That will change if the dollar continues to be weak for a few years, in which case energy trade will shift from the US$ to other currencies such as the Euro. If you haven't noticed yet: it is a seller's market for energy out there, and that will only get worse.
You don't need camera optics for this application, since you are not interested in objects that are far away anyhow. Just sprinkle the backside of the device with a hundred or so individual photodiodes, and you get a (low res, but good enough) idea of where the fingers are (the resolution may seem low, but it will be enough if you make use of anatomical properties such as there are 4 fingers on each side, and their shadows extend more or less in a straight line from the boundaries).
Look, I like GPU hacks as much as the next guy, but your "the video ram is free anyways" argumentation is a typical geek phallacy. Yes, the hardware has is free, but if the guy seriously counted the value of his own time to make this "solution" "work" (I am using both terms in the loosest possible sense), then he would easily discover that this approach is both more expensive and less reliable than just going out and buying some new hardware.
This is a nice hobbyist project, and you can probably learn a lot doing it, but he is trying to run an e-commerce site, for crying out loud.
First of all, in his jury instructions, the judge in this case directly contradicted your assessment. Since he has a law degree, and you presumably don't, I am tempted to believe him more easily than you.
Secondly, if I download GPL code and make it available to others without giving them access to source code, then, as you point out, I copied the code illegally, and made it (illegally) available to others. She did the same thing: she illegally copied the songs to kazaa, and thus made them (illegally) available to others. No difference.
That is an interesting argument. Because, if you are right, then what business does GPL3 have to use copyright to place restrictions on distribution and "making available"?
Either copyright covers distribution both here and in the case of GPL, or it does NOT cover it in both cases. You can't have it both ways.
They would do far better to let us, the intellectual free spirits of our time, make the choices and guide the society. After that diatribe, you still call yourself an "intellectual free spirit"? Now that is funny.
Out of curiosity, though: how do people deal with the gigantic memory footprint of typical matlap apps? I frequently use matlab for prototyping, but once I load a few images, I find you start swapping even on a high end machine with 2+GB of RAM. The thought of piping large amounts of sensor data through it just makes me shudder.
Slashdot Mirror
As the other response to your post explains, the evolution to work in 3D is not all that it is made out to be. In fact, most people are really bad in navigating in 3D, unless they have trained doing it in video games or as pilots. I attneded a conference once where the speaker was making that point. He asked the audience to point toward their hotel room (we were on the second floor of a hotel tower). Pretty much people were pointing all over the place, and these were graphics/UI people, who you'd expect to have some training in 3D.
There is another reason why 3D may not be all that great: what you actually see with your eyes is a 2D projection of the 3D world. If you lay out your information in 2D, you can make the best possible use of the screen area (so-called screen real estate). By contrast if you have a 3D display, some of your data will not be visible due to occlusion, and yet some of your screen real estate may be unused simply because of the way your current perspective projects geometry onto the screen. Hidden data is clearly a problem, as it potentially makes you overlook it, but also UI research has shown that good uses of screen real estate improves productivity for non-trivial tasks, so the wasted pixels in 3D representations are also problematic.
Expert user interfaces are poorly understood because it is exceedingly hard to do research on them. If you want to test a new interface for newbies, you just put together a prototype, grab some random people off the streat, and do a user study. If you wanted to do the same thing for experts, you would first have to to train them for weeks, possibly even months or years, and THEN do the study. Apart from this process being very expensive, you would be hard pressed to find subjects that are willing to put in that kind of time.
Personally, I find it quite likely that research will eventually confirm that keyboard interfaces are inherently more productive then window/mouse UIs for expert users: The bandwidth between user and machine is simply much higher than using the mouse. Yes, it requires a long training period, but in the end you can be much faster than with a GUI (except maybe for tasks that are inherently graphical).
So, if you want a unified novice/expert UI, it is going to be very difficult beyond just a GUI with keyboard shortcuts (and that approach does not utilize the full power of the keyboard).
Nonetheless, the article is stupid anyhow; "However, there are indications that eeePC fans probably don't care" is such a lame statement one has to wonder why they included it at all ("indications" and "probably" aren't exactly words that would help in a legal case).
That works alright, except for all the pages it is missing. What about pages where they have your initials rather than your full first name? Or pages with middle initials vs. without? Or maybe you are searching for a list, and the format is actually "Lastname, Firstname".
For added bonus, a people search mode could expand semantic information. For example, if there is a page with the text "Firstname Lastname (somebody@google.com)", the search engine know knows one of the email addresses of that person, and can include it in the search, so you find pages with only the email address rather than the name. Or if there is a personal home page on slashdot (or facebook etc.), which lists both real name and handle, all slashdot postings (facebook entries etc) should be included.
You can do this kind of stuff manually today, but it takes a lot of time and effort.
Oh, and before somebody complains about privacy: this is all very public info already. Somebody who knows what they are doing can already collect that data in a hour or two.
Clearly you should sue google for damages ;-)
But on a more serious note, wouldn't it be great if one of the search engines finally did the firstname, lastname thing correctly? It can't be that difficult to figure that one out in a way that it is correct most of the time.
In case you didn't know: Bin Laden himself has hundreds of millions of dollars he can throw at this war. Also, for whatever reason, the Bush administration has decided to transfer huge amounts of cash to Iraq (e.g. $2.4 BILLION in a single shipment of $100 bills http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0622-04.htm. The majority of this money has not reached its desired recipiants, and it is a fair assumption that corruption and mixed loyalties have resulted in the insurgants getting a fair portion of that cash.
I see you are a proponent of Intelligent Rocket Design (TM).
More importantly the variation in gravitational pull of other celestial bodies, which depends heavily on the current configuration of planets.
That said, I am not yet convinced that companies will skip Vista entirely. As time passes, more and more new hardware will no longer be fully supported under XP. It is already starting with the DirectX 10 GPUs, wait for it to happen with CPUs and chipsets. As a result more and more new machines in every company will be running Vista, and at some point, possibly after one or two more service packs, companies may make the decision to upgrade older machines to homogenize their computing environment. If that happens, it iwll indedd only be a delay of income , which Microsoft can live with more easily than a complete skip Vista.
Chuck Norris?? You are showing your age, man. ;-)
Who said it was "too complicated"? TFA just said "dedicated hardware", i.e. different.
One issue was that Multics was running on hardware that didn't have bytes but 36 bit words. Since performance was critical with the low compute power of the day, somebody somewhere is bound to have relied on sepcific bit trickery that assumes exactly that word size. Moreover, I would gess that certain performance critical of the OS parts were written in assembly to begin with, and obviously there is no special hardware out there today that has the same machine language.
Im confused, its 2007 isn't it?
You are probably trolling, but just in case you actually mean it...
Have you looked at the oil price lately? Even if you are irrational enough to ignore the mountain of evidence for human caused global warming, you might still want to cut down on your energy bill and/or make the remaining oil on this planet last a little longer.
Windows and Mac. So yes, PP is multiplatform, and probably covers >99% of laptops out there.
OK, so let me get this straight: on the one hand we have the sun, a fusion reactor with a mass of about 2 * 10^30 kg (about a million times the mass of the whole earth). On the other hand, we have a fusion device with a mass of merely 27 tonnes, i.e. 3 * 10^4 kg, or 26 ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE lighter.
I have a hard time believing that the energy output of the latter was anywhere close to 1% of the former, except maybe by some really bogus metric (only counting certain wavelengths of radiation, for example).
A number of EU countries have laws that require accepting local currency as legal tender in business transactions. Not sure if the UK is one of theose countries, though.
Well, you DO import construction materials (most notably lumber) from Canada; probably other places.
Also, heating (and/or air conditioning, depending on where you live) is a fairly big part of the housing cost. Transportation costs (i.e gas) are a fair part of construction costs. For now, most energy is traded in US dollars, so you don't see a decline in purchasing power in that area, yet. That will change if the dollar continues to be weak for a few years, in which case energy trade will shift from the US$ to other currencies such as the Euro. If you haven't noticed yet: it is a seller's market for energy out there, and that will only get worse.
You don't need camera optics for this application, since you are not interested in objects that are far away anyhow. Just sprinkle the backside of the device with a hundred or so individual photodiodes, and you get a (low res, but good enough) idea of where the fingers are (the resolution may seem low, but it will be enough if you make use of anatomical properties such as there are 4 fingers on each side, and their shadows extend more or less in a straight line from the boundaries).
Look, I like GPU hacks as much as the next guy, but your "the video ram is free anyways" argumentation is a typical geek phallacy. Yes, the hardware has is free, but if the guy seriously counted the value of his own time to make this "solution" "work" (I am using both terms in the loosest possible sense), then he would easily discover that this approach is both more expensive and less reliable than just going out and buying some new hardware.
This is a nice hobbyist project, and you can probably learn a lot doing it, but he is trying to run an e-commerce site, for crying out loud.
First of all, in his jury instructions, the judge in this case directly contradicted your assessment. Since he has a law degree, and you presumably don't, I am tempted to believe him more easily than you.
Secondly, if I download GPL code and make it available to others without giving them access to source code, then, as you point out, I copied the code illegally, and made it (illegally) available to others. She did the same thing: she illegally copied the songs to kazaa, and thus made them (illegally) available to others. No difference.
That is an interesting argument. Because, if you are right, then what business does GPL3 have to use copyright to place restrictions on distribution and "making available"?
Either copyright covers distribution both here and in the case of GPL, or it does NOT cover it in both cases. You can't have it both ways.
No, but she made the songs available to all of them, and that is what she got punished for.
I guess I stand corrected.
Out of curiosity, though: how do people deal with the gigantic memory footprint of typical matlap apps? I frequently use matlab for prototyping, but once I load a few images, I find you start swapping even on a high end machine with 2+GB of RAM. The thought of piping large amounts of sensor data through it just makes me shudder.