I don't think that's possible when it comes to UI design.
Any project where it's possible that a large group of people will be using the software, you have to put in a huge amount of effort to make sure the interface can accommodate as large a range of preferences as possible. Everything from the background color to how many times you have to put your hand on the mouse can have a major impact on a user's productivity.
The downside to this is the only way to know for sure is to make the UI, get some people using it, and respond to the feedback.
It should be a very social process, and sending one guy off on his own to do the whole interface will win you nothing but an interface suited to his tastes alone.
Transportation isn't going away. It'll get more expensive, and at some point will no longer use fossil fuels, but it won't go away.
Just because people are acting all freaked out about expensive gas doesn't mean research in other areas has to stop. It wouldn't put us any closer to the mythical "100 mpg engine", and would hurt us in other ways.
Management is where people who are too incompetent for technical work go. No one gets fired, they get moved to different departments. As a last resort, they get assigned to 'special projects' for about a year in the hopes that everyone will forget what an imbecile they are, and will be safe to move back into the management structure.
As someone who's had to live with a bum set of genes for all of his life, I fully support genetic screening if the parents desire it.
Way I see it, the "we shouldn't play god!" argument breaks down really fast when the end result is a child who has to suffer a diminished quality of life. I couldn't imagine a more cruel thing to do than let myself reproduce and force a child to live with a disease that I was fully aware they could inherit.
Give me a test to filter out embryos that have asthma, down's, diabetes, migraines, or whatever defect you can name, and I'd do it in a second.
That may have been true 10 years ago, but now? It's the 21st century equivalent of the printing press or TV.
Obviously it's not a required service to survive, but the generation of kids in school right now are building their lives around the existence of the internet, and if those of us in power now don't think it's "necessary", I guarantee you their generation will.
May as well get a jump start on it and make my life easier as well.;)
I do burn-in testing on a lot of the machines we get at work, using hardware I can't personally afford.
My favorite test is to find scenes to render with a raytracer.. yafray is my favorite, runs on all major platforms. But not just any scene, it has to have all the details turned up to 11, contain extremely high detail (polygon counts drive up memory usage), and write out an absurdly large image.
Kind of whimsical but it's hard to not be impressed by an image 20,000 pixels square with perfectly accurate reflections. Who cares if I can only fit a fraction of it on my monitor.;)
Images, html, css, content, media.. all of that takes up space. Firefox has to hold it in memory so it can display it quickly when you click on the tab.
How much would you be complaining if you had to wait 5 seconds every time you switched tabs so it could swap in from disk?
I've had it explained that the real benefit ray tracing allows is that render time does not increase with geometry. It means you could model every little brick and bit of mortar, down to the tiniest scratch, and it wouldn't slow the game down (up to the limit of the number of vertices you can store in memory).
Image quality is a side effect.. except for reflections, you can get 90% of the image quality out of modern 3D engine tricks that you could out of a ray tracer.
Sure these days, it mostly revolves around making everything brown and slapping on some bloom, but that's more of a phase artists are going through than the limit of the technology.
But if you had widespread adoption it wouldn't take long to see a real drop in electricity usage. May not save an individual business money, but from a "save the planet!" perspective it could end up being economical for society.
At the simplest level, they could just plug it into a PC under their control and try to play a video. The way iTunes works, a DRM locked file won't play on an "unauthorized" PC. If the file does play, they could assume it's an illegal copy.
Obviously there's a good chance this won't be the case and such detection methods would be easy to defeat but this is what I imagine their thought process would be.
"If we can't prove they bought it, clearly they're guilty!"
Slashdotters should change theirs to 'Mozilla/1.1N' and intentionally answer all the questions wrong.. act surprised when it still scores above the WinNT group.
Eating out at work can have other benefits too.. such as escaping the office environment for some mental recovery. Complaining about the bureaucracy with co-workers can be very therapeutic.;)
It hasn't changed at all. It still follows its own design standard and there doesn't exist anywhere in the world another program that uses the same philosophy. It's not on iota more intuitive than it was 2 years ago.
The price does make it an attractive consideration, though I don't have the hardware available to try distributed rendering.
I think if you can get around the interface hurdles (much as I love the Blender interface, I'm sympathetic to people's complaints, it took me months to get comfortable) it's well worth considering. If you can't, maybe you could jerry-rig a system by importing scenes from modelers you're more comfortable with.
Depends on what your complaints with the interface were.
If the whole "tab to switch to vertex mode" or "don't use the menus dummy, use hotkeys" mindsets were what threw you off 2 years ago, they'll still throw you off today.
Most of the improvements are technology related (and are big ones at that), the basic UI is unchanged.
It doesn't force them to consider Linux at all, there's no law on the books that says "if Windows is a pain in the ass, you must offer Linux."
What it will do is encourage the companies to not force bundled software. Either they'll make a point of selling bare-bones PC's, or they'll start honoring refund requests. If their licensing with Microsoft prevents that, then maybe they'll consider another operating system (which Microsoft would never allow to happen, Microsoft will just lower the price of licensing to make sure sales continue).
Nothing says it'd have to be Linux, it could be joe schmoes Perl-based OS if that's what Asus thought was a good deal for customers.
... to make copyright reform a central issue in the US elections? When it's front page news?
As dismal as the copyright situation is, it's still an issue easily ignored by the majority. There's a hundred things ahead in line that a politician would prefer to earn attention with.
It really is an excellent store. Lived in Portland for a few years and made regular trips to the place, they never once failed to have a book in stock that I wanted. From service manuals for 30 year old cars to a specific reprint of LoTR (I wanted my covers to match!), they had it all. They even carried Slackware back when people were still trying to figure out what the proper pronunciation of Linux was.
Beyond that, the place is so big you can lose a day wandering the aisles and seeing what's available. Place has a great atmosphere.
Even though I've long since moved away I still go to them when I need something obscure.
There's pretty good motion detecting software out there already.. a bit of time with google should solve that problem.
I've solved the security camera problem with a $50 webcam, but I was only monitoring a desk in a cubicle that had a bad habit of things going missing. Worked pretty well, though lighting wasn't an issue in that case. Neither was cable length, because the camera only had to be a couple feet from the host PC.
Maybe one could rig up something like that, get a couple Fit-PC's (they run around $300 each) and a couple webcams and go from there.
Not sure how to solve low light situations.. but it's a long shot cheaper than $1000 if you can live without it.
We did this at my employer, one of the departments decided they wanted to maintain their own desktops as a group. As no self-respecting admin actually enjoys taking care of desktops, we let them do it.
It wasn't a total break, they're still subject to the site's security policies and their home directories still mount from an nfs server we maintain, but no one in our group has had to install a machine or fix a dead hard drive in 5 years. They understand their needs far better than I ever could, so it really was a win-win situation.
It's worked surprisingly well, the admins are all volunteers from within the group, and they even maintain a batch system that all the workstations use for running jobs.
If any company has a group of people willing to take on that kind of responsibility, I'd say it deserves serious consideration.
The Aleutians are not the best route. Russia and Alaska are much closer together at the Bering Strait.. as little as 1.5 miles if you count two islands out there that are owned by the two countries. The mainlands are about 40 miles apart, a trivial distance for undersea cabling. The Aleutian chain is a bit over 1000 miles long.
Incidentally this is the same gap that Ted Stevens' been pushing to have a bridge built over for much of his career.
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I don't think that's possible when it comes to UI design.
Any project where it's possible that a large group of people will be using the software, you have to put in a huge amount of effort to make sure the interface can accommodate as large a range of preferences as possible. Everything from the background color to how many times you have to put your hand on the mouse can have a major impact on a user's productivity.
The downside to this is the only way to know for sure is to make the UI, get some people using it, and respond to the feedback.
It should be a very social process, and sending one guy off on his own to do the whole interface will win you nothing but an interface suited to his tastes alone.
Transportation isn't going away. It'll get more expensive, and at some point will no longer use fossil fuels, but it won't go away.
Just because people are acting all freaked out about expensive gas doesn't mean research in other areas has to stop. It wouldn't put us any closer to the mythical "100 mpg engine", and would hurt us in other ways.
Never worked for the government, have you? ;)
Management is where people who are too incompetent for technical work go. No one gets fired, they get moved to different departments. As a last resort, they get assigned to 'special projects' for about a year in the hopes that everyone will forget what an imbecile they are, and will be safe to move back into the management structure.
As someone who's had to live with a bum set of genes for all of his life, I fully support genetic screening if the parents desire it.
Way I see it, the "we shouldn't play god!" argument breaks down really fast when the end result is a child who has to suffer a diminished quality of life. I couldn't imagine a more cruel thing to do than let myself reproduce and force a child to live with a disease that I was fully aware they could inherit.
Give me a test to filter out embryos that have asthma, down's, diabetes, migraines, or whatever defect you can name, and I'd do it in a second.
That may have been true 10 years ago, but now? It's the 21st century equivalent of the printing press or TV.
Obviously it's not a required service to survive, but the generation of kids in school right now are building their lives around the existence of the internet, and if those of us in power now don't think it's "necessary", I guarantee you their generation will.
May as well get a jump start on it and make my life easier as well. ;)
This is America, no one's responsible for themselves anymore.
If something doesn't have oversight set up to protect you from yourself, it's only a matter of time before it does.
In case of what? Nuclear war?
Because I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that could make a model M stop working.
In defense against such an event, I recommend offsite backup for your spares. Something with lots of lead, under a mountain.
I do burn-in testing on a lot of the machines we get at work, using hardware I can't personally afford.
My favorite test is to find scenes to render with a raytracer.. yafray is my favorite, runs on all major platforms. But not just any scene, it has to have all the details turned up to 11, contain extremely high detail (polygon counts drive up memory usage), and write out an absurdly large image.
Kind of whimsical but it's hard to not be impressed by an image 20,000 pixels square with perfectly accurate reflections. Who cares if I can only fit a fraction of it on my monitor. ;)
That's a PEBCAK error, not a fault with Firefox.
Images, html, css, content, media.. all of that takes up space. Firefox has to hold it in memory so it can display it quickly when you click on the tab.
How much would you be complaining if you had to wait 5 seconds every time you switched tabs so it could swap in from disk?
I've had it explained that the real benefit ray tracing allows is that render time does not increase with geometry. It means you could model every little brick and bit of mortar, down to the tiniest scratch, and it wouldn't slow the game down (up to the limit of the number of vertices you can store in memory).
Image quality is a side effect.. except for reflections, you can get 90% of the image quality out of modern 3D engine tricks that you could out of a ray tracer.
Sure these days, it mostly revolves around making everything brown and slapping on some bloom, but that's more of a phase artists are going through than the limit of the technology.
What amuses me is how closely the NASA's color scheme matches the LEGO mars mission color scheme. ;)
http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=7690
Which came first I wonder?
But if you had widespread adoption it wouldn't take long to see a real drop in electricity usage. May not save an individual business money, but from a "save the planet!" perspective it could end up being economical for society.
If you use two fingers on the mousepad on a Mac, it will function as a scroll wheel.
Doesn't work on older macbooks, but there's a driver floating around that will give you the feature.
At the simplest level, they could just plug it into a PC under their control and try to play a video. The way iTunes works, a DRM locked file won't play on an "unauthorized" PC. If the file does play, they could assume it's an illegal copy.
Obviously there's a good chance this won't be the case and such detection methods would be easy to defeat but this is what I imagine their thought process would be.
"If we can't prove they bought it, clearly they're guilty!"
Slashdotters should change theirs to 'Mozilla/1.1N' and intentionally answer all the questions wrong.. act surprised when it still scores above the WinNT group.
Eating out at work can have other benefits too.. such as escaping the office environment for some mental recovery. Complaining about the bureaucracy with co-workers can be very therapeutic. ;)
It hasn't changed at all. It still follows its own design standard and there doesn't exist anywhere in the world another program that uses the same philosophy. It's not on iota more intuitive than it was 2 years ago.
The price does make it an attractive consideration, though I don't have the hardware available to try distributed rendering.
I think if you can get around the interface hurdles (much as I love the Blender interface, I'm sympathetic to people's complaints, it took me months to get comfortable) it's well worth considering. If you can't, maybe you could jerry-rig a system by importing scenes from modelers you're more comfortable with.
Depends on what your complaints with the interface were.
If the whole "tab to switch to vertex mode" or "don't use the menus dummy, use hotkeys" mindsets were what threw you off 2 years ago, they'll still throw you off today.
Most of the improvements are technology related (and are big ones at that), the basic UI is unchanged.
It doesn't force them to consider Linux at all, there's no law on the books that says "if Windows is a pain in the ass, you must offer Linux."
What it will do is encourage the companies to not force bundled software. Either they'll make a point of selling bare-bones PC's, or they'll start honoring refund requests. If their licensing with Microsoft prevents that, then maybe they'll consider another operating system (which Microsoft would never allow to happen, Microsoft will just lower the price of licensing to make sure sales continue).
Nothing says it'd have to be Linux, it could be joe schmoes Perl-based OS if that's what Asus thought was a good deal for customers.
... to make copyright reform a central issue in the US elections? When it's front page news?As dismal as the copyright situation is, it's still an issue easily ignored by the majority. There's a hundred things ahead in line that a politician would prefer to earn attention with.
In its defense, I've seen stuff like this used to get around firewall or web filtering limitations. ;)
Gestapo blocking jpegs? Get someone to convert it to an ascii format and render it in the browser.
It really is an excellent store. Lived in Portland for a few years and made regular trips to the place, they never once failed to have a book in stock that I wanted. From service manuals for 30 year old cars to a specific reprint of LoTR (I wanted my covers to match!), they had it all. They even carried Slackware back when people were still trying to figure out what the proper pronunciation of Linux was.
Beyond that, the place is so big you can lose a day wandering the aisles and seeing what's available. Place has a great atmosphere.
Even though I've long since moved away I still go to them when I need something obscure.
There's pretty good motion detecting software out there already.. a bit of time with google should solve that problem.
I've solved the security camera problem with a $50 webcam, but I was only monitoring a desk in a cubicle that had a bad habit of things going missing. Worked pretty well, though lighting wasn't an issue in that case. Neither was cable length, because the camera only had to be a couple feet from the host PC.
Maybe one could rig up something like that, get a couple Fit-PC's (they run around $300 each) and a couple webcams and go from there.
Not sure how to solve low light situations.. but it's a long shot cheaper than $1000 if you can live without it.
We did this at my employer, one of the departments decided they wanted to maintain their own desktops as a group. As no self-respecting admin actually enjoys taking care of desktops, we let them do it.
It wasn't a total break, they're still subject to the site's security policies and their home directories still mount from an nfs server we maintain, but no one in our group has had to install a machine or fix a dead hard drive in 5 years. They understand their needs far better than I ever could, so it really was a win-win situation.
It's worked surprisingly well, the admins are all volunteers from within the group, and they even maintain a batch system that all the workstations use for running jobs.
If any company has a group of people willing to take on that kind of responsibility, I'd say it deserves serious consideration.
The Aleutians are not the best route. Russia and Alaska are much closer together at the Bering Strait.. as little as 1.5 miles if you count two islands out there that are owned by the two countries. The mainlands are about 40 miles apart, a trivial distance for undersea cabling. The Aleutian chain is a bit over 1000 miles long.
Incidentally this is the same gap that Ted Stevens' been pushing to have a bridge built over for much of his career.