Fingers crossed, I'm not on Windows, just set up a machine for someone recently, so I only saw what's included. I guess the 1/16 scale refers to area, i.e. 1/4 edge length? Either way it's still a fairly tight distribution.
> Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor
These incredibly shallow, self-serving afterthoughts, which don't show coherency with anything else, make me disappointed. It's not even that the 'sleek' little lamp effect looks bad (which it does) or that it's useless (which it is).
The little lamp effect is not diegetic, that's the problem. It is the shallowest possible thing to do on a UI. It is an after-effect, implemented poorly. After decades of UX research, the population gets a stupid, incoherent glow, that's it. When I was a kid, using 8 bit computers, I didn't expect the rapid pace of hardware development, but I didn't expect how broken, bankrupt, degraded and degenerate some of mainstream software 'advances' would become.
The whole desktop thing started as a set of metaphors, with the desktop (duh), documents (for some reason called 'windows'), icons, pointer, etc. Then it got a bit more skeuomorphic with ever more realistic looking Folders cabinets, trashcans and whatnot. There was also an era of pseudo-3D, with drop shadows, bevels and color gradient effects. Then Apple came out with the Lycoris translucent glassy things, which removed a bit from the metaphor (blurs etc. made things a bit more abstract) but also added skeuomorphisms, mimicking - in incredibly shallow ways - the effect of translucency, matte and glossy semitransparent materials, Z-index etc.
Try this: hover the mouse over a taskbar button. The weird little lamp effect will NOT actually follow the mouse up and down, only sideways. The reflections etc. even have a shape, alluding to some optically more complex environment, but it's just an after-effects mask. It adds information where none exists. IOW it adds puzzling noise.
Now move it from one taskbar button to the next. At the boundary, it will not transition as you'd expect. It only casts light on the button over which the tip of the mouse pointer lies. Then you move a couple of pixels away, and suddenly, only the other button gets the light. So obviously both have some Lambertian reflectance, and they apparently lie on the same plane, right next to one another, underneath the magically radiating cursor, and the metaphor breaks. It breaks all reasonable expectations, it surprises the user who looks, in a negative way. It's annoying. The light doesn't appear over anything else, not even built-in window bars or IE browser buttons. It's just a 'visual touch'.
Probably it's meant to be beneficial, for example, disambiguating for the user as to which button he is hovering over. But then why the weird lamp effect, rather than some straightforward effect on the entire button, e.g. a slightly more impactful visual styling? The little lamp is there for some stuff, but it's haphazard and doesn't relate to either the buttons or the mouse cursor, or anything else. It's just someone's brainfart which a management committee just didn't veto.
And more importantly, why is it that we as users get so many inferior features, when there are actually smart people in the industry? Maybe the Windows gravy train is still a near-monopoly on the desktop.
The internal world and visuals of a single computer game show more consistency and cohesion than the series of Windows (and KDE and Gnome) abominations, though a game developer's task is arguably more difficult. There aren't a million things going on on a desktop, unlike in a game, and also, there is no expectation to follow constraints of the game world itself.
So I suggest we set up a museum for Windows versions, or people who are interested in awkwardness, or idiosyncratic icons of an era post the 'peak desktop monopoly', can download such skins with after-effects, but please hire UX experts for the design of an operating system's UI, and what wouldn't pass in other software meant for 'experience' (game, video player etc.) or 'productivity' shouldn't be included in the mother of all UIs, the uncircumventable OS desktop.
I think that tiles wouldn't be bad, and the emphasis on typography doesn't have to be bad either.
But the execution, as with pretty much anything Microsoft, is botched. All the colors are overly bright and flashy, and when everything competes for your attention through dense, opaque colors, and large, fairly uniform tile sizes, then your attention isn't properly directed. Also, with the emphasis on bold background colors and typography, the rest of the presentation, i.e. icons, pictorials, graphs, take a backseat, so it looks half-baked and prototypey.
Sometimes I think they should hire some UX expert, but to be fair, Google's web application interfaces are also horrible, and even Apple has lots of faults, starting with keychords that would make an emacs user choke (e.g. the four-key chords for a screen snapshot), or the fact that in certain basic views in the Folder, it's impossible to create a new directory, you have to switch to another view for the 'New folder' button to appear.
Maybe HotSpot / V8 type of optimizations would work well, as in running code, the actual patterns emerge. This is a great talk on the cost of virtual memory, the future of JS and more:-) https://www.destroyallsoftware...
Interesting you mentioned CSP. When I read up on your architecture, its close relative, Functional Reactive Programming (well... inspired by FRP...) came to mind. Leads to easy programming and relatively straightforward, direct mapping of the FRP nodes to cores, and event streams to communication among cores. Very good isolation.
Of course I haven't yet RTFA but it must be some really smart experimental setup:
1. Given the approximately logarithmic relationship between the number of neurons and capabilities, it's a wonder that scaling from 200 million cells to 800 million brain cells was even detectable... 2.... especially given that the interface must have been incredibly narrow band, noisy, and in general inferior interconnect among the brains.
Thank you for the explanation, as an FP user I didn't have an issue with the concept of anonymous function vs. closure, so let's forget about closures - e.g. assume that there is no variable capture and all functions are pure - and let's stick to the meaning of anonymous functions as defined by the cited wiki page.
If I have functions f and g, and have a higher order function C, which, for example, composes two functions, then C(f, g) is a definitely a function. Also, it is a function that has no programmer assigned name.
While I don't know if such a function is most properly named 'anonymous function' or just 'function', in my opinion it makes sense to not conflate two different concepts in a way the wikipedia article did.
One of the concepts is how we _denote_ a function (e.g. through a literal directly in the source code, vs. via a series of function calls involving compose, currying etc. sprinkled around in the code base, which is pretty customary in FP).
Another, orthogonal concept is whether capture is involved or not.
There can be named functions which do capture, or which don't capture; and there can be unnamed (anonymous) functions which capture, or don't capture. So I think the cited wiki article poses a false dichotomy, possibly arising from the fact that in certain programming languages, functions have not traditionally been first-class objects, and aspects of FP filtered in gradually.
Isn't it true that when you need a lot of performance, in particular, on parallelizable tasks, then the workload in question is typically number crunching? If this is the case, then it is useful that web workers allow us to pass typed numeric arrays back and forth via reference. It is not a fully general solution to parallelism, but what are the use cases when it's insufficient?
Yes, it's interesting how often the newly introduced ES6 etc. elements are slower than what they replace, even though the ES6 version is typically saner and more conducive to optimization. For example, Maps are probably still slower than the current string based objects. But we don't have to go that far. A couple of years ago there were bug reports about the performance of typed arrays. The very point of typed arrays is that they can be made faster (and of course WebGL support through number type representation). But by that time, probably enough time went into optimizing untyped arrays that implementations probably already stored homogenous arrays (e.g. numbers only) as typed arrays internally, while the JavaScript typed array implementations were newer, less used and probably less heavily optimized.
So you could speed up number crunching by switching from a typed array to an untyped array!
It has robust performance for a scripting language, running circles around Python, R (not including NumPy / BLAS / ATLAS), Ruby etc. dynamic languages; faster than most JVM based (non-Java) language implementations, and - for example, from my profiling on number crunching tasks - around as fast as Java.
Also, there are not a lot of recent reports that start with: 'Due to a vulnerability found in JavaScript, millions of credit card details were exposed'
> If the drone was operating between 800 and 900 feet off the ground, it was well out of any potential collision zone.
Why, these thingies are nailed on the sky, they can't change altitude, e.g. when someone who's already asshole enough to risk lives is also clueless about the range of the device (flying out of range may cause an altitude shift), the powered time, or proper flight safety?
Also, wouldn't a firefighting plane pull up aggressively if it came a bit too close to the ground, objects or the fire, or if it encountered something unusual?
The drone pilot attempted manslaughter and caused both monetary and fire damage, and he should get the proportionate penalty.
> Catch the guy who flew the fucking drone and charge him with attempted murder. After all, that's what he was trying to do by making the fire spread.... and more directly, trying to kill the pilots, and those folks on whom the aircraft would have landed.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's an argumentum ad Microflaccidum because the evil air-supply choking convicted monopolist Computer Associates wannabe is involved.
Fingers crossed, I'm not on Windows, just set up a machine for someone recently, so I only saw what's included. I guess the 1/16 scale refers to area, i.e. 1/4 edge length? Either way it's still a fairly tight distribution.
What you write is a dead giveaway that what you work on has actual users. It's the only type of scenario where I saw the above phenomenon at play.
> Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor
These incredibly shallow, self-serving afterthoughts, which don't show coherency with anything else, make me disappointed. It's not even that the 'sleek' little lamp effect looks bad (which it does) or that it's useless (which it is).
The little lamp effect is not diegetic, that's the problem. It is the shallowest possible thing to do on a UI. It is an after-effect, implemented poorly. After decades of UX research, the population gets a stupid, incoherent glow, that's it. When I was a kid, using 8 bit computers, I didn't expect the rapid pace of hardware development, but I didn't expect how broken, bankrupt, degraded and degenerate some of mainstream software 'advances' would become.
The whole desktop thing started as a set of metaphors, with the desktop (duh), documents (for some reason called 'windows'), icons, pointer, etc. Then it got a bit more skeuomorphic with ever more realistic looking Folders cabinets, trashcans and whatnot. There was also an era of pseudo-3D, with drop shadows, bevels and color gradient effects. Then Apple came out with the Lycoris translucent glassy things, which removed a bit from the metaphor (blurs etc. made things a bit more abstract) but also added skeuomorphisms, mimicking - in incredibly shallow ways - the effect of translucency, matte and glossy semitransparent materials, Z-index etc.
Try this: hover the mouse over a taskbar button. The weird little lamp effect will NOT actually follow the mouse up and down, only sideways. The reflections etc. even have a shape, alluding to some optically more complex environment, but it's just an after-effects mask. It adds information where none exists. IOW it adds puzzling noise.
Now move it from one taskbar button to the next. At the boundary, it will not transition as you'd expect. It only casts light on the button over which the tip of the mouse pointer lies. Then you move a couple of pixels away, and suddenly, only the other button gets the light. So obviously both have some Lambertian reflectance, and they apparently lie on the same plane, right next to one another, underneath the magically radiating cursor, and the metaphor breaks. It breaks all reasonable expectations, it surprises the user who looks, in a negative way. It's annoying. The light doesn't appear over anything else, not even built-in window bars or IE browser buttons. It's just a 'visual touch'.
Probably it's meant to be beneficial, for example, disambiguating for the user as to which button he is hovering over. But then why the weird lamp effect, rather than some straightforward effect on the entire button, e.g. a slightly more impactful visual styling? The little lamp is there for some stuff, but it's haphazard and doesn't relate to either the buttons or the mouse cursor, or anything else. It's just someone's brainfart which a management committee just didn't veto.
And more importantly, why is it that we as users get so many inferior features, when there are actually smart people in the industry? Maybe the Windows gravy train is still a near-monopoly on the desktop.
The internal world and visuals of a single computer game show more consistency and cohesion than the series of Windows (and KDE and Gnome) abominations, though a game developer's task is arguably more difficult. There aren't a million things going on on a desktop, unlike in a game, and also, there is no expectation to follow constraints of the game world itself.
So I suggest we set up a museum for Windows versions, or people who are interested in awkwardness, or idiosyncratic icons of an era post the 'peak desktop monopoly', can download such skins with after-effects, but please hire UX experts for the design of an operating system's UI, and what wouldn't pass in other software meant for 'experience' (game, video player etc.) or 'productivity' shouldn't be included in the mother of all UIs, the uncircumventable OS desktop.
I think that tiles wouldn't be bad, and the emphasis on typography doesn't have to be bad either.
But the execution, as with pretty much anything Microsoft, is botched. All the colors are overly bright and flashy, and when everything competes for your attention through dense, opaque colors, and large, fairly uniform tile sizes, then your attention isn't properly directed. Also, with the emphasis on bold background colors and typography, the rest of the presentation, i.e. icons, pictorials, graphs, take a backseat, so it looks half-baked and prototypey.
Sometimes I think they should hire some UX expert, but to be fair, Google's web application interfaces are also horrible, and even Apple has lots of faults, starting with keychords that would make an emacs user choke (e.g. the four-key chords for a screen snapshot), or the fact that in certain basic views in the Folder, it's impossible to create a new directory, you have to switch to another view for the 'New folder' button to appear.
Wouldn't it imply that it tried hard and (at least partially) failed?
"Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly"
vs
"Microsoft fought hard to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly"
Maybe HotSpot / V8 type of optimizations would work well, as in running code, the actual patterns emerge. This is a great talk on the cost of virtual memory, the future of JS and more :-) https://www.destroyallsoftware...
Interesting you mentioned CSP. When I read up on your architecture, its close relative, Functional Reactive Programming (well... inspired by FRP...) came to mind. Leads to easy programming and relatively straightforward, direct mapping of the FRP nodes to cores, and event streams to communication among cores. Very good isolation.
Why not? The tubing wouldn't even be needed for most of the distance.
Since it's JavaScript, you probably meant assembly?
Of course I haven't yet RTFA but it must be some really smart experimental setup:
1. Given the approximately logarithmic relationship between the number of neurons and capabilities, it's a wonder that scaling from 200 million cells to 800 million brain cells was even detectable... ... especially given that the interface must have been incredibly narrow band, noisy, and in general inferior interconnect among the brains.
2.
Thank you for the explanation, as an FP user I didn't have an issue with the concept of anonymous function vs. closure, so let's forget about closures - e.g. assume that there is no variable capture and all functions are pure - and let's stick to the meaning of anonymous functions as defined by the cited wiki page.
If I have functions f and g, and have a higher order function C, which, for example, composes two functions, then C(f, g) is a definitely a function. Also, it is a function that has no programmer assigned name.
While I don't know if such a function is most properly named 'anonymous function' or just 'function', in my opinion it makes sense to not conflate two different concepts in a way the wikipedia article did.
One of the concepts is how we _denote_ a function (e.g. through a literal directly in the source code, vs. via a series of function calls involving compose, currying etc. sprinkled around in the code base, which is pretty customary in FP).
Another, orthogonal concept is whether capture is involved or not.
There can be named functions which do capture, or which don't capture; and there can be unnamed (anonymous) functions which capture, or don't capture. So I think the cited wiki article poses a false dichotomy, possibly arising from the fact that in certain programming languages, functions have not traditionally been first-class objects, and aspects of FP filtered in gradually.
Why would an anonymous function need to be a function literal? What if it's the result of a compose, or some other higher level function?
Isn't it true that when you need a lot of performance, in particular, on parallelizable tasks, then the workload in question is typically number crunching? If this is the case, then it is useful that web workers allow us to pass typed numeric arrays back and forth via reference. It is not a fully general solution to parallelism, but what are the use cases when it's insufficient?
Yes, it's interesting how often the newly introduced ES6 etc. elements are slower than what they replace, even though the ES6 version is typically saner and more conducive to optimization. For example, Maps are probably still slower than the current string based objects. But we don't have to go that far. A couple of years ago there were bug reports about the performance of typed arrays. The very point of typed arrays is that they can be made faster (and of course WebGL support through number type representation). But by that time, probably enough time went into optimizing untyped arrays that implementations probably already stored homogenous arrays (e.g. numbers only) as typed arrays internally, while the JavaScript typed array implementations were newer, less used and probably less heavily optimized.
So you could speed up number crunching by switching from a typed array to an untyped array!
It has robust performance for a scripting language, running circles around Python, R (not including NumPy / BLAS / ATLAS), Ruby etc. dynamic languages; faster than most JVM based (non-Java) language implementations, and - for example, from my profiling on number crunching tasks - around as fast as Java.
Also, there are not a lot of recent reports that start with: 'Due to a vulnerability found in JavaScript, millions of credit card details were exposed'
There were a few mentions of (P)NaCl in this interview: https://medium.com/javascript-...
tl;dr Brendan Eich suggests (P)NaCl becomes irrelevant over time (or it has already) and WebAssembly is the future.
Get some help, man.
What's wrong with memputer?
or some kind of journalists?
> If the drone was operating between 800 and 900 feet off the ground, it was well out of any potential collision zone.
Why, these thingies are nailed on the sky, they can't change altitude, e.g. when someone who's already asshole enough to risk lives is also clueless about the range of the device (flying out of range may cause an altitude shift), the powered time, or proper flight safety?
Also, wouldn't a firefighting plane pull up aggressively if it came a bit too close to the ground, objects or the fire, or if it encountered something unusual?
The drone pilot attempted manslaughter and caused both monetary and fire damage, and he should get the proportionate penalty.
Yes, for example, by dumping flame retartant to the controller.
FD dumps fire retardant on drone pilot, problem solved.
> Catch the guy who flew the fucking drone and charge him with attempted murder. After all, that's what he was trying to do by making the fire spread. ... and more directly, trying to kill the pilots, and those folks on whom the aircraft would have landed.
We'd see a huge, circular dirt road on the moon if it were the case.