Re:Interesting applications
on
The Mouse Vanishes
·
· Score: 4, Informative
You mean like the Minority Report interface. Well, guess what, Spielbergs science advisor for the movie, John Underkoffler of MIT's Media Lab actually further developed the idea.
The interesting thing is (besides the tech being real), that they also extended the concept of a network, so all the displays are connected by real space. But checkout the links yourself.
Yahoo!'s (and most of the other search engines) problems was, that they tried to promote most of the auxiliary services through the main site. Though Yahoo! isn't exactly loosing, they just did not get the majority of the search market, but for instance in Japan they are highly popular.. they are also the forth most visited site on the Internet, I wouldn't call that exactly loosing.
Google is doing a lot of stuff too, but most of it is standing alone (i.e. youtube) and is self-promoting.
They could clean up the start page a bit (or at least make it more customizable), but generally they are doing search + ads as primary business and the other stuff is loosely connected.
As for checkout.. well, PayPal was the first major popular global Internet payment option, but they are causing a lot of grief lately and will loose importance.
What will succeed them? My best bet is Amazon Payments, as they have attractive payment conditions (the nearest I have seen so far to micro-payments) and they have an established customer base with access to bank account data and _some_ trust of the users.
Google has no business where people regularly spend money from their account. They will have a hard time to make people set up payment account on their site, but it's not impossible.
The N770, N800, N810 and N900 were/are development projects, mostly with technical people as target audience. They tried out different technologies and seem to consolidate slowly.
I think they bought Qt, because they think it has the best potential to bridge the gap between Symbian and other Platforms. By porting it to Symbian, they can avoid a compatibility breach when they switch (a challenging task).
I don't know if it will work out, but the approach seems sane to me.
As I don't live in NYC, I just checked out their website for the first site. The "about us" section describes how they make $13 billion revenue.. And still, the site I'm presented with looks like this: http://j.imagehost.org/view/0334/Untitled_8 in my browser. Checking out the sources it seems this masterpiece is coded in classic ASP.
Now don't get me wrong, but why does a company with such a high profile present the world such a peace of misery? I mean, this is one of the most important interfaces they have to the world, and it's garbage. Should I assume that all their services have this quality, especially those which I don't directly see? Just asking..
I'm sorry, but reading the page behind the link you provided does not convince me that the guy that wrote it has much backbone (or clue, for that matter).
Basically you are right in your statement, but you are missing most of the context.
Nokia bought the company behind the FOSS toolkit Qt because they are going to keep up with the market. That also means to move to a more future proof platform and system.
Unlike other companies that just abandon their old products, Nokia is going a different path: they fully support the Symbian system with the Qt framework (too much for my taste actually) and improve the development tools for it.. in parallel with the newer, more reasonable platform.
The higher level products will be phased out after the N8 model, that's right. But the applications built on the Nokia Qt framework will work on the new platform (MeeGo).
The midrange phones will also retain the Symbian system for the time being, so the phase out will take some time, if it ever occurs.
Now don't get me wrong, Nokia is not unfailing (I have an N800, I know that).. Still, they are presenting me with the most sane approach of a platform change I ever saw.
As for serious Symbian interested people: Symbian is released under the Eclipse Public License. It's not going away any time soon in form of preinstalled OS on consumer devices (think of years), but even when it will ultimately does that, your apps will run on the next gen OS + you'll be able to run Symbian on any flashable mobile phones if you like to.
Ah, sorry, wrong wording. Actually, I just wanted to expand your comment. In my experience (and I spent quite some time on it) much of the usefulness of compiz is a matter of configuration.
So I'd rephrase my leading comment to "the desktop cube is useless to me". But that's what I like about being able to adopt compiz to my bidding. People are different, and I can adopt compiz to my preferences while not bothering you.:)
People should be aware of how the work and see how they can adopt the tools to make the process more efficient. And in the content of the comment I tried to show a method, well my method of how I did this.
Context: I'm a horribly lazy person. That's why I spend a lot of time optimizing things. I learned Dvorak SDK and VIM for that reason, and did the same for compiz for exactly the same reason. I admit, the customizations that I did are not really obvious.
I have to agree that the cube is useless (and I don't use it).
There are a number of plugins that increase productivity a lot though, namely the scale, desktop wall, expo, app switcher and zoom plugin. Problem is: the default configuration is not designed to be useful, but to be easy.
While installing new systems, I install the CompizConfig Settings Manager, and then set up the plugins for efficiency: I basically map common window functionality to screen edge/corner clicks with the mouse.
Base setup is 6 (2x3) desktops. I move between these desktops by clicking one of the edges (depending on which direction I want to go - up/down/left/right) of my screen with the right mouse button.. See the overview (expo) with right click to the top-right edge. Alt-tab/Alt-shift-tab with mouse button clicks to the top left edge (app switcher), and see open window overview with right/left clicks to the bottom-left corner of the screen (scale).
This (combined with select - emulated middle button pasting) effectively enables me to do all activity you'd normally need mouse+keyboard to do with keyboard only.. and that very fast and instinctively.
Guess what you wanted to say is: the default configuration could use some tuning. Problem is: though this improves baseline productivity and is very fun when being used to it, it violates the common desktop paradigm that every desktop function has to be an icon, or context menu. In other words, setting it up in a useful manner involves thinking and learning a bit, which most folks seem to avoid by all means. (no offense).
You got it wrong. This time Linux runs circles around Windows. Though Windows losses it's selling point, as existing x86 binary applications don't run on this thing (if it is ARM), existing Linux apps can just be recompiled and run just fine on ARM.
I don't really know what benefits CDN could give me.
Anyway, I solved the sluggish ISP DNS problem with simply installing bind9 and be done with it. Setting up a DNS server on a modern system is really child's play, no need for the openDNS stuff.
(install bind9; remove DNS IP. Done - around 1 minute)
That's not very far fetched. Moon rocks (regolth) contains a vast amount of He3, so the idea for building a robotic moon base is probably to send back minerals sooner or later.
I doubt they will use a railgun for that purpose though. It needs too much energy and the propellant has to have specific physical attributes (has to be conductive?).
I think they will opt for rockets, or something like that, though the railgun version would be admittedly much cooler.
The problem isn't the tedium part. F/OSS people do a lot of tedious tasks too.
The problem is, that the whole thing needs a basis which makes people interested to improve on. F/OSS people are not very good at putting together a comprehensive seed for a healthy game, as this is a quite complex task (you really need a development team with project coordinators, artists, programmers and other staff to get this done).
In the first instance, the commercial game (Transport and Tycoon Deluxe) first inspired some extensive modding (ttd patch) and then a complete rewrite of the engine (openttd project) including graphics and sound. Overall very tedious tasks, and the project is doing better than ever (they just released version 1.0). They are also improving the game with new features that improve gameplay a lot. Runs on Linux, OS X and Win.
The other one, Warzone 2100 was GPL'd by the original developer studio some years ago (2004). In this case, the engine was improved a lot too, and development is active with roadmap and good progress - fully playable stable versions are available for all major platforms as well.
The problem with OSS games is really, that they need a mature seed to take off, like releasing an old codebase. That's very rarely happening though. Game studios don't want to compete against OSS games, which is why they virtually never release sources for old games. And game developers give up any kind of right on their code as soon as they sign a contract, so they can't do much to prevent their codebase from getting murdered.
I hope someone will surprise us all one day, and show how to plant such seeds in F/OSS word. There is nothing on the horizon that I'm aware of so far though.
Seriously, the whole patent system has to be scrapped and recreated from scratch. It's terminally broken, far beyond any hope of salvation by reformation.
Really, ten years ago, vista was a cool word. Reminded you to the phrase "hasta la vista, baby" from a certain great move. Now you just think of a peace of shit.
Also explorer. Half a century ago you associated with Vasco da Gamma and Christopher Columbus. Now only a crappy shell remains.
Not to mention Windows and Word..
They deserve eternal damnation just for these crimes.
I agree, or at least use some substitutes for it. Not like they would be rare:
* frak - from Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries seems to establish same meaning as "fuck") * frell - from Farscape; same meaning as "fuck" * grapple - from Firefly; same meaning as the "fuck", as in sexual intercourse * zark - from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; seems to have the same meaning as "fuck"
No, Moore's is still valid. It proposes that transistor count on IC double around 18 months. Dose not impose anything on clock rate or core count on a single die.
Moore's law is also unrelated to mass storage.
Technically, hard drives are a very different problem domain.
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You mean like the Minority Report interface. Well, guess what, Spielbergs science advisor for the movie, John Underkoffler of MIT's Media Lab actually further developed the idea.
The current state of technology is best seen in his practical presentation.
There is also an article about it.
The interesting thing is (besides the tech being real), that they also extended the concept of a network, so all the displays are connected by real space. But checkout the links yourself.
Yahoo!'s (and most of the other search engines) problems was, that they tried to promote most of the auxiliary services through the main site. Though Yahoo! isn't exactly loosing, they just did not get the majority of the search market, but for instance in Japan they are highly popular.. they are also the forth most visited site on the Internet, I wouldn't call that exactly loosing.
Google is doing a lot of stuff too, but most of it is standing alone (i.e. youtube) and is self-promoting.
They could clean up the start page a bit (or at least make it more customizable), but generally they are doing search + ads as primary business and the other stuff is loosely connected.
As for checkout.. well, PayPal was the first major popular global Internet payment option, but they are causing a lot of grief lately and will loose importance.
What will succeed them? My best bet is Amazon Payments, as they have attractive payment conditions (the nearest I have seen so far to micro-payments) and they have an established customer base with access to bank account data and _some_ trust of the users.
Google has no business where people regularly spend money from their account. They will have a hard time to make people set up payment account on their site, but it's not impossible.
The N770, N800, N810 and N900 were/are development projects, mostly with technical people as target audience. They tried out different technologies and seem to consolidate slowly.
I think they bought Qt, because they think it has the best potential to bridge the gap between Symbian and other Platforms. By porting it to Symbian, they can avoid a compatibility breach when they switch (a challenging task).
I don't know if it will work out, but the approach seems sane to me.
As I don't live in NYC, I just checked out their website for the first site. The "about us" section describes how they make $13 billion revenue.. And still, the site I'm presented with looks like this: http://j.imagehost.org/view/0334/Untitled_8 in my browser. Checking out the sources it seems this masterpiece is coded in classic ASP.
Now don't get me wrong, but why does a company with such a high profile present the world such a peace of misery? I mean, this is one of the most important interfaces they have to the world, and it's garbage. Should I assume that all their services have this quality, especially those which I don't directly see? Just asking..
I'm sorry, but reading the page behind the link you provided does not convince me that the guy that wrote it has much backbone (or clue, for that matter).
Basically you are right in your statement, but you are missing most of the context.
Nokia bought the company behind the FOSS toolkit Qt because they are going to keep up with the market. That also means to move to a more future proof platform and system.
Unlike other companies that just abandon their old products, Nokia is going a different path: they fully support the Symbian system with the Qt framework (too much for my taste actually) and improve the development tools for it.. in parallel with the newer, more reasonable platform.
The higher level products will be phased out after the N8 model, that's right. But the applications built on the Nokia Qt framework will work on the new platform (MeeGo).
The midrange phones will also retain the Symbian system for the time being, so the phase out will take some time, if it ever occurs.
Now don't get me wrong, Nokia is not unfailing (I have an N800, I know that).. Still, they are presenting me with the most sane approach of a platform change I ever saw.
As for serious Symbian interested people: Symbian is released under the Eclipse Public License. It's not going away any time soon in form of preinstalled OS on consumer devices (think of years), but even when it will ultimately does that, your apps will run on the next gen OS + you'll be able to run Symbian on any flashable mobile phones if you like to.
Ah, sorry, wrong wording. Actually, I just wanted to expand your comment. In my experience (and I spent quite some time on it) much of the usefulness of compiz is a matter of configuration.
So I'd rephrase my leading comment to "the desktop cube is useless to me". But that's what I like about being able to adopt compiz to my bidding. People are different, and I can adopt compiz to my preferences while not bothering you. :)
People should be aware of how the work and see how they can adopt the tools to make the process more efficient. And in the content of the comment I tried to show a method, well my method of how I did this.
Context: I'm a horribly lazy person. That's why I spend a lot of time optimizing things. I learned Dvorak SDK and VIM for that reason, and did the same for compiz for exactly the same reason. I admit, the customizations that I did are not really obvious.
oops..
I meant to do mouse+keyboard activity with either mouse or keyboard, but not both at the same time.
I have to agree that the cube is useless (and I don't use it).
There are a number of plugins that increase productivity a lot though, namely the scale, desktop wall, expo, app switcher and zoom plugin. Problem is: the default configuration is not designed to be useful, but to be easy.
While installing new systems, I install the CompizConfig Settings Manager, and then set up the plugins for efficiency: I basically map common window functionality to screen edge/corner clicks with the mouse.
Base setup is 6 (2x3) desktops. I move between these desktops by clicking one of the edges (depending on which direction I want to go - up/down/left/right) of my screen with the right mouse button.. See the overview (expo) with right click to the top-right edge. Alt-tab/Alt-shift-tab with mouse button clicks to the top left edge (app switcher), and see open window overview with right/left clicks to the bottom-left corner of the screen (scale).
This (combined with select - emulated middle button pasting) effectively enables me to do all activity you'd normally need mouse+keyboard to do with keyboard only.. and that very fast and instinctively.
Guess what you wanted to say is: the default configuration could use some tuning. Problem is: though this improves baseline productivity and is very fun when being used to it, it violates the common desktop paradigm that every desktop function has to be an icon, or context menu. In other words, setting it up in a useful manner involves thinking and learning a bit, which most folks seem to avoid by all means. (no offense).
Yup. The first thing I usually do when installing Ubuntu now a days is:
sudo aptitude purge mono-gac libmono2.0-cil -y
This also removes F-Spot, Tomboy and Gbrainy, none of which I particularly miss.
I was wondering about that too. It's probably both, same as "smupid", like smart and stupid at the same time.
You got it wrong. This time Linux runs circles around Windows. Though Windows losses it's selling point, as existing x86 binary applications don't run on this thing (if it is ARM), existing Linux apps can just be recompiled and run just fine on ARM.
You basically have the inverse situation here.
I don't really know what benefits CDN could give me.
Anyway, I solved the sluggish ISP DNS problem with simply installing bind9 and be done with it. Setting up a DNS server on a modern system is really child's play, no need for the openDNS stuff.
(install bind9; remove DNS IP. Done - around 1 minute)
That's not very far fetched. Moon rocks (regolth) contains a vast amount of He3, so the idea for building a robotic moon base is probably to send back minerals sooner or later.
I doubt they will use a railgun for that purpose though. It needs too much energy and the propellant has to have specific physical attributes (has to be conductive?).
I think they will opt for rockets, or something like that, though the railgun version would be admittedly much cooler.
The article you point to writes about 1994 Dollars. Based on the CPI (consumer price index), that would be equivalent of 3,179,729.73 today's dollars.
Dividing the 100M by this amount yields around 31.45 fatalities. Still better than the Manson family, I guess..
Ogg is a container format, not a video codec, you dimwit!
I don't get why people are still making so much fuss about CD/DVD's. They are already obsolete.
Seriously, I only played very few optical media in the past year, and burned maybe one or two.
USB drives have replaced DVD's some time ago already. We are beating a dead dog here. Why?
The problem isn't the tedium part. F/OSS people do a lot of tedious tasks too.
The problem is, that the whole thing needs a basis which makes people interested to improve on. F/OSS people are not very good at putting together a comprehensive seed for a healthy game, as this is a quite complex task (you really need a development team with project coordinators, artists, programmers and other staff to get this done).
Two examples of successful F/OSS games originating in commercial seeds are OpenTTD http://www.openttd.org/en and the Warzone 2100 project http://wz2100.net./
In the first instance, the commercial game (Transport and Tycoon Deluxe) first inspired some extensive modding (ttd patch) and then a complete rewrite of the engine (openttd project) including graphics and sound. Overall very tedious tasks, and the project is doing better than ever (they just released version 1.0). They are also improving the game with new features that improve gameplay a lot. Runs on Linux, OS X and Win.
The other one, Warzone 2100 was GPL'd by the original developer studio some years ago (2004). In this case, the engine was improved a lot too, and development is active with roadmap and good progress - fully playable stable versions are available for all major platforms as well.
The problem with OSS games is really, that they need a mature seed to take off, like releasing an old codebase. That's very rarely happening though. Game studios don't want to compete against OSS games, which is why they virtually never release sources for old games. And game developers give up any kind of right on their code as soon as they sign a contract, so they can't do much to prevent their codebase from getting murdered.
I hope someone will surprise us all one day, and show how to plant such seeds in F/OSS word. There is nothing on the horizon that I'm aware of so far though.
Reminds me of the guy who patented the wheel, er.. I mean a "circular transportation facilitation device": http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1418165.stm
Seriously, the whole patent system has to be scrapped and recreated from scratch. It's terminally broken, far beyond any hope of salvation by reformation.
shit, I think I have to puke now.
..for their products.
Really, ten years ago, vista was a cool word. Reminded you to the phrase "hasta la vista, baby" from a certain great move. Now you just think of a peace of shit.
Also explorer. Half a century ago you associated with Vasco da Gamma and Christopher Columbus. Now only a crappy shell remains.
Not to mention Windows and Word..
They deserve eternal damnation just for these crimes.
Use the word 'fuck' in your tweet/post. This way the profanity filter will block your message/post before it ever gets to the irony filter..
I agree, or at least use some substitutes for it. Not like they would be rare:
* frak - from Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries seems to establish same meaning as "fuck")
* frell - from Farscape; same meaning as "fuck"
* grapple - from Firefly; same meaning as the "fuck", as in sexual intercourse
* zark - from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; seems to have the same meaning as "fuck"
more: http://www.indopedia.org/List_of_fictional_curse_words.html ..
You want to suggest, that this thread will have a much higher ratio of posts with the word FUCK in them, the average /. thread?
How can you?..
Seriously, http://www.techdirt.com./ Mike Masnick is blogging on this topic since forever. But most of you probably know this already.
No, Moore's is still valid. It proposes that transistor count on IC double around 18 months. Dose not impose anything on clock rate or core count on a single die.
Moore's law is also unrelated to mass storage.
Technically, hard drives are a very different problem domain.