If VehicleString =! "HorseCart" then DelayTime#=DelayTime# +1 Else Endif
(Including the lack of sanity check on deincrementing the waitstate. The "incremented delay timer" is implemented with physical latency of the neuronal circuit itself. The circuit doesn't get magically shorter if the first part of the iterative process completes faster, and the delay then becomes onerous. The circuit simply takes forever!)
Nature makes "good enough" solutions, not perfect, unbreakable ones.:D unraveling biological intelligence is like porting 1950s analog spaghetti programming for a one-off in-house app, with obfuscation in effect, a complete lack of documentation, and the author is dead and buried.
Figuring out the mess is the first step in a proper code audit, and modernized rebuild.
Since I do industrial CAD, my hands spend more time on the mouse, and the left side of the keyboard than does a programmer, (Who sends comparatively more time on the homerow.) Or a data entry person (who spends time on the numeric keypad.)
The same would be true of a computer graphic artist, or a casual websurfer.
It is decidedly NOT faster for my use case to use winkey + letters, since it requires physically moving my right hand off the mouse, onto the homerow, locating the bump, then performing the key combo, then returning to the mouse.
This is why it is important for a general use OS's UI to have flexible and configurable options, so that workflow is only minimally disrupted.
Essentially, I am saying "winkey + keystrokes" is better, for you. that does not make it necessarily better for me, and certainly does not mean that all users should be forced to do only one.
(I apologise if I am sounding like a douche here.)
For me, it is demonstrably faster and less disruptive to just flick the mouse I am already holding and click the start button once, and the frequently used program directly after than it is to use winkey + keystrokes. (Which as stated, requires me to release the mouse, and home position my right hand first, and requires me to then return to the mouse afterward.)
This is exactly the same argument you make FOR using this approach, just from the opposite side of the fence.
For either of us to bitch and moan about how our way is the only true way(tm), is arrogant, and selfish. It doesn't bother me at all that the winkey+text method exists. Why does the existence of the start button, which occupies perhaps 200 total pixels when not active, and 20 or so when on autohide, bother you so much by existing?
I wouldn't have a beef against win8 if I could customize it for my workflow. The UI designers who built it arrogantly assert the "one true use case" falsehood, and left no such options.
That, and its severe shortcomings for quickly passing metadata to the operator that I mentioned previously, really torque me off about it. If I could disable metro's obtuse behaviors, I wouldn't have an issue.
Its been my experience that (at least the implementation running on my meaty hardware) human intelligence actually makes more use of data-deduplication and semantic cross linking to cull as much information as possible, while leaving metadata cues to reconstruct the data on the fly.
This is why people misremember things, and why odd and spurrious sensory stimuli can cause a memory to surface.
Humans dont store data losslessly, and make lossy heuristic decisions instead.
the kind of intelligence you are referring to does not exist in nature, and has no direct analog. I am not saying it is impossible, just that it is a form of intelligence radically different from any existing kind, and which would require considerably more hardware to perform simple tasks, simply because of the branching predictions it has to do to deal with arbitrary inputs in an efficient and reliably compact manner.
To me, "Artificial Intelligence" is a very broad umbrella, under which many different kinds of AI exist. A letter sorting machine is an AI. I somehow doubt that it would ever have philosophical introspections about the letters it sorts, and its place in the universe though, or that it could self-repurpose itself if it ran out of mail to sort. An artificial fruitfly made through slavish modeling of a real fly's nervous system is also an AI, and clearly wouldnt use lossless data compression at all.
That is to say, the kind of AI mentioned here is only one kind of AI. Not all AI needs to be able to do this. Combining the two kinds of AI together into a hybrid would solve a lot of problems with both actually.
Use a virtual lossy decision matrix AI with a virtual lossless data storage AI, with some kind of matrix array to coordinate transactions between them. You end up with the speed and fault tolerance of the former, and the steel trap memory of the latter.
Focusing exclusively on either as "The goal" is shortsighted.
When I see metro, I see win311's program manager on maximize, with Main, Accessories, and Applications groups open and tiled in the window, but with the program icons rendered in 32bit color, and enlarged to the size of annoying banner advertisements, and on a shiny blue background instead of a drab white one.
I see it as a retro restyling, in other words. Not a fashionably new thing at all. I see it as everything bad about the old one, with Tammy Faye levels of makeup on.
Trust me, my distaste and dislike for the metro UI has nothing to do with being "Afraid of", or "Resistant to" change, or that I want to live in the past. On the contrary. I view metro as being RETRO, it *IS* the past. 20 years in the past, to be exact, with a shiny new coat of paint. It is something I am VERY familiar with, and I dont like it. I didnt like program manager then, and I dont like it now either.
But by all means, make up fairy stories to make yourself feel better and morally superior by sewing up strawmen about me and all the other people that just dont like metro, and how we are all luddites afraid of change. It speaks volumes about the arrogance of which I speak.
I was meaning, that with a passive click on the start button, and a few seconds of hovering, I can learn a great deal about the user's workstation I am sitting at.
I don't actually have to launch anything, and when I am done, the taskbar autohides again. No need for an arcane keystroke combo, or putting myself through actually launching an applet.
The "all programs" side of the start page is a toggle. I prefer the transience of a quick menu fan.
I can do this in under 3 seconds, and get a pretty firm grasp of what somebody does at that workstation, what tools are installed, and how to proceed further.
At work, I make use of win7's "frequently used applications" pins in its start menu, for launching notepad, mspaint, paint.net, and calculator when I need them, without pinning 4 items to my quicklaunch bar. I prefer an uncluttered task tray.
I use the start button quite a lot, and do take it personally when told that I am simply "wrong" for doing so. It's functionality I use to do my job, win 8's UI paradigm to make all native apps full screen abominations makes using several instances of calculator at once nightmarish, constant task switching to the start page is onerously distracting for little productive benefit, and I find it aesthetically abhorrent to boot.
In short, I don't like it, and it gets in the way. Everything a UI should not do.
Clearly, I am not alone.
And you didn't answer my question, why is Winkey + letters better than 2 clicks for a frequently accessed program?
Actually, I found the win95 (actually NT4) UI to be very useful, and empowering.
I did dislike the trend away from high information density and no-nonsense design that came with subsequent iterations, but this was mostly just cosmetic, and thus, while an irritation, not a game breaker.
When you go 180 degrees from your business tagline, "where do you want to go today?", and instead assert forcefully that "You will go HERE today", ignoring all protests and requests to let them off the buss, then there is a major problem.
Saying "users don't really know where the want to go, so we decide for them" is specious, and arrogant.
I am just as tired of that arrogance as you clearly are with the complaints.
Eg, "hindsight is always 20-20.", while accurately predicting the future is pure fantasy.
A developer building an internal app uses conventions and tools that are relavent at the time of production. This developer is not clairvoyant. They can't put the sourcecode against their head johnny carson style and predict that in 5 years that say, activeX is going to be a major pariah, and that the core framework they are making will become totally unworkable.
Likewise, everyone and his brother wants to "innovate" the internet, resulting in a constrant stream of often incompatible technologies vying for dominance, with very little standardization. Futurproofing internal applications then becomes next to impossible unless you can pull a johnny carson.
The best a developer could possibly do is to use as vanilla, boring, and feature deprived base to work from as possible, and implement all the fancy bells and whistles themselves using this base, so that the work they do will withstand uprades of that base. EG, using only the most basic, feature deprived aspects available to them. This is about the only way to overcome this, but results in byzantine, hard to debug, painful to write, and painfully slow software. Developers rightly don't want to do this, because it is inefficient with their time and resource allocations.
Even something MEANT to have "run anywhere" functionality can and does break from major revisions. We are still using java 6 at my work, because the updated runtimes break the class loaders of software we use. (Commercial software no less.)
The asymmetry cannot be fixed. The problem it causes cannot be fixed.
I could give a number of clearly unsubstantiated, but seemingly reasonable answers here.
1) the assertion that because living neurons have deficits compared against an arbitrary and artificial standard of efficiency (it takes a whole 500ms for a neuron to cycle?! My diamond based crystal oscillator can drive 3 orders of magnitude faster!, et al.)that they are "faulted" is not substantiated: as pointed out earlier in the thread, no high level intelligence built using said "superior" crystal oscillators exists. Thus the "superior" offering is actually the inferior offering when researching an emergent phenomenon.
2) artificially excluding these principles (signal crosstalk, propogation delays, potentiation thresholds of organic systems, et al) completely *IGNORES* scientifically verified features of complex cognitative behaviors, like the role of mylein, and the mechanisms behind dentrite migration/culling.
In other words, asserting something foolish like "organic neurons are bulky, slow, and have a host of computationally costly habbits" wit the intent that "this makes them undesirable as a model for emergent high level intelligence" ignores a lot of verified information in biology, that shows that these "bad" behaviors directly contribute to intelligent behaviors.
Did you know that signal DELAY is essential in organic brains? That whole hosts of disorders with debilitating effects come from signals arriving too early? Did you stop to consider that thse faults may actually be features that are essential?
If you don't accurately model the biological reference sample, how can you riggorously identify which is which?
We have a sample implementation, with features we find dubious. Only buy building a faithful simulation that works, then experimentally removing the modeled faults do we really systematically break down the real requirements for self directed intelligences.
That is why modeling accurate neurons that faithfully smulate organic behavior is called for, and desirable. At least for now.
"Users should be using the winkey and the first few letters.."
Why?
I have a counter to this logic. Namely, how do you quickly determine what software packages have been installed on an unfamiliar workstation in a quick and painless fashion using this method? Repeated attempts at the winkey + initial letter combos?
Perhaps going all the way into the control pannel, and into the add/remove programs applet?
*a LOT* of contextual information can be efficiently passed to the user about the current status and capabilities of a workstation via the contextual hierarchal menu that you seem overly eager to axe.
One of the major benefits in a multiuser environment, is that a user can quickly and efficiently get this information, even if they can't quite articulate that with words more sophisticated than "I want the start menu back."
Microsoft's assertions that "Users rarely use that contextual menu, so we don't want to purpetuate it, and don't understand why people are so pissed about that" (paraphrased) discount that users only need this information infrequently, but DO need the functionality to persist.
Call it a legacy feature if you must, but it does need to be preserved.
I may be misinterpreting or missing the intent here, but humans are demonstrably NOT lossless storage mediums.
HUGE amounts of data are lost, simply between your eyeballs and your visual cortex. That's kinda the point that the summary makes about neural net based vision systems. They take a raw flood of data, and pick it apart into contextually useful elements of artificial origin, which then get strung together to build a high level experience.
Lossless storange of human knowledge is strictly speaking, a complete 180 from the way organic data processing works in humans.
Change for the sake of change is not a rational nor beneficial paradigm.
Know what else hasn't changed much over the aeons? Bacteria. Sure, they have a chemical arms race with each other, but the basic package? Been basically the same for hundreds of millions of years, because it is the best at what the germs need to survive.
Simply because something "has been around forever!" Does not mean it should be abandoned.
Perhaps a different quote is needed? "If it isn't broke, don't fix it." For MANY users, the start menu is NOT broken. There is no need to "fix" it, outside of the arrogance of self important design idiots, who feel that UIs should change like yearly fashion trends, and for the same reasons.
Newsflash. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it is the wrong tool for the job, nor does it mean holding onto it is wrong.
Just take the CLI out of a mainstream linux, and force the GUI experience 100% for all tasks, and state blithely that "some people just can't let go of the command line". Watch your userbase run for the hills.
For a company who's tagline is "where do you want to go today?", they sure have a strange way of listening to the answer to that question.
The userbase has clearly and definitively spoken on the issue. Asserting that the userbase is wrong/afraid of change/some other canard is completely wrongheaded.
Either give your customers what they want, or they will find somebody else who will.
Personally, I prefer my UI to treat me like my age is greater than a single digit. Simplicity can be a good thing, in moderation. This is not in moderation, was forced, unwanted, and hurtful to their brand and reputation.
3D printing *could* play a useful research role for the biosciences community, but they wouldn't be printing with thermoplastics.
Rather, there was the recent research with producing lipid bilayer coated water droplets as tissue matricies, and there is the work with 3d printing whole organ systems using stemcells.
Doing that kind of thing would be fully synergistic (I hate that word..) with the hackerspace geeks they share premesis with, and would make their work both usefl and unlikey to spawn a massive public health scare.
I don't want to wish ill on these kids, but I see a very different reprisal as the death stroke.
Namely, this is a biolab. Biological research requires making, using, and experimenting on living tissue, and many cutting edge research branches in the bio/lifesciences fields require the production of chimeric cultures, and transgenic cell lines.
I am not saying this is ethically wrong. I am saying this is how it is, and that there is a very boistrous and angry demographic that is "very opposed" to such things, believing that it violates the sanctity of gods creations or somesuch.
In short, unless these kids stick to "science fair" grade science, they are doomed, because the zelot idiots will picket, pull political strings, and conspire to shut them down.
Heaven forbid that they use lab animals either. Then the peta morons would get in on it.
That would be close to running on pure unobtanium. (Energy costs would become untenable to maintain the quantum states of many thousands of entangled particles, and keep them cold.) Also, quantum computing can only efficiently serve a subset of parallelized tasks, and are a poor fit for general parallelism as is. (Improvements may fix this in time however.)
The brick walls that I see looming are:
Energy requirements VS what can feasibly be delivered Thermal waste generation rate VS rate of removal Computational gain from parallelism VS loss from computational overhead
The first one has a snag: even a super conductor cannot conduct unlimited energy flow rates. Clenching happens, and when it does, things go very bad. Further, there are limits to what can rationally be sustained as an energy source. There is a looming restriction where we simply won't be able to provide the energy needed to continue performance increases.
The second one is related: as energy needs increase, the amount of thermal waste generated also increases, and the need to eliminate it efficiently increases. Materials lose valuable electrical and structural properties as they heat up, and rates of thermal exchange are not infinite. There is a fundemental limit where our computer produces heat faster than we can ever safely/reliably remove it.
The third I already explained.
Quantum computing eliminates obstacle 3 (for some applications) but rushes headfirst into the second two. The more qubits you use, the more energy needed to sustain entanglement, and the more aggressively it has to be cooled. This implies that there is a finite possible number of qubits one can string together before it becomes impossible to sustain more, (unless you discover a way to pull a Maxwell's Demon, and escape the second law.)
Other factors: based on the parallelism model used, and the current state of electronics, what is the maximum number of cores that can be included before performance degrades from additional nodes?
(Eg, it takes x time to transmit data over a bus (any bus). How may cores, before the time penalty for transmitting the data over the bus to the allocated processor becomes greater than the penalty for just waiting for a processor to become free?)
There *must* be an upper bound on parallel computing potential before we need pure unobtanium semiconductors.
I am curious what that limit is, and how close we are to it.
Corn syrup and HFCS are not really the same thing. You can get normal corn syrup in large containers under the Karo brand, in at least the USA. Karo syrup does not contain HFCS.
Specifically, compare Karo corn syrup with HFCS: Karo is straight corn syrup, with minimal processing and some vanilla flavoring. According to Karo's website, it contains about 20% dextrose, and contains a wide variety of other natural sugars. (It is derived from starches, so likely contains maltose, amylose, and pals.)
HFCS on the other hand is sweeter, because it is 50% glucose, and 50% fructose, and contains no other sugars. (Though it may contain chemical residues from the manufacturing process.) This is intentional, because it is made to compete with sucrose sugar from refined sugarcane, which is a fructose and a glucose bound together with an ether bond. The higher fructose content makes it sweeter than normal corn syrups, which have larger saccharides, and lower binding potentials to tastebuds, or which break down into larger monosaccharides with lower binding potentials. (The ether bond in sucrose is broken almost as soon as it enters the mouth by the enzymes in saliva. This is why sucrose tastes very sweet while being a larger saccharide. Other disaccharides like lactose and maltose, break down into larger monosaccharides than fructose. Artificial sweeteners are largish molecules (still smaller than polysaccharides though) as well, but have more hydroxyl groups, or more bound oxygen atoms serving as functional groups. This causes them to bind more aggressively with the sweetness receptors on tastebuds.) The fructose monosaccharide is the major culprit in the alledged health risks associated with HFCS (and also sucrose), since it is metabolized quite differently from glucose, and produces many harmful metabolic biproducts of that metabolic pathway. Others are the chemical residues often remaining in the syrup. In nearly every way, HFCS is metabolically identical to sucrose consumption, and much cheaper.
Normal corn syrup contains significantly less fructose than HFCS, and considerably more glucose, and glucose producing disaccharides. It is therefore considerably "less bad" than HFCS or white table sugar. (Really, you shouldn't be eating high glycemic food products anyway, and they really can't be called "good for you". Instead, this mixture is just "less bad".)
Which then totally fails at what they claimed to want to achieve; namely, hold a MIRROR up to pirates. Since the game ramps up piracy in the simulator to 100% over time, to ENSURE bankruptcy, it is NOT a "mirror". It's a photoshopped 'fatbooth' type pic in a mirror's frame.
Putting valid piracy statistics rates in from noteworthy logistics firms, and using that instead of a bullshit log scale would have provided an actual mirror. That wasn't what they wanted. They wanted to shut down the pirates, and feel morally superior about it, by performing a false equivilency.
I would play a game dev simulator with piracy as a feature, if the piracy model was accurate. No, a log scale over time is not accurate.
Disapearing wax mould with sacrificial investment. Basically, 3d print the knob. Submerge it into plaster. Leave it there.
*optionally, heat the mould gently and pour out the plastic goop
Pour hot metal into the plaster investment. Spin for good cast. Let stand until firm. Smash the investment, and soak in weak acid to remove remaining investment. Rinse, clean, polish Done.
... give me a point cloud, and I can make you a model in under an hour.
Sometimes less is more when it comes to cloud points. Get me several overlapping clouds, and I can make just about anything. You just need somebody who knows what they are doing. Surprise, there are people on the internet that do, and may even do volunteer work.
Uhm... it's quite easy to digitize a flat part like a gasket. Really.
Here's how I do it when building waterjet flowpaths for aerospace sheetmetal parts from ancient PCM masters from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s:
Get yourself a consumer grade flatbed scanner. Legal size or larger preferred. In one corner, tape down a pair of machinist's scales so they form a 90deg angle at the bottom. We will use this to measure the distortion of the scanner, so we can adjust for it.
Put the gasket down on the scanner, and cover it with white paper. Weight it down with whatever's handy.
Make a 300dpi scan, greyscale.
*instructions CATIA specific, may work for DELMIA or SolidWorks as well.
Fire up the drafting workbench. Draw a 90 deg scale with 1 inch increments. Fix the geometry in place. (Select it all, right click, choose 'fix') switch to the sheet background. (Edit, sheet background) insert the scan image. (Insert, image) tweak the image's proportions until the scanned scales and the virtual lineart ones you just created perfectly match. Return to working view. (Edit, working views) Trace out the gasket, hide the scale.
Select all the traced geometry and copy it to the clipboard. Switch to part design workbench. Place a new sketch on the XY plane. Paste the geometry, then fix it together. Constrain the geometry to the axis system. Measure the thickness of the gasket with calipers. Make a pad from the sketch using that thickness. Save.
*now to test. If you lack a precision plotter, color laserjets are often good enough to be within +/-.03 inches. Often better! Especially photograde ones.
Make a new drafting sheet. Make a front view of the digitized part. Add a 4x4 inch square to the print. Print it with scaling turned off. Measure the square with calipers to ensure good print. Put the original gasket on top of the print, and check for defects in your trace job. Correct as needed.
I have done this many many times. It works, and is inexpensive. (Other than the catia seat, that is. That's $$$, but my employer pays for that.) SolidWorks and Delmia are similar packages with nearly identical functionality that are much cheaper.
I can usually do 4 to 5 PCM conversions in a night. (Includes creating flowpaths, and setup sheets.)
Rubber gaskets should be more forgiving than metal brackets.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I can make a clap with only one hand (and nothing else but that hand.), it's just kinda faint.
Certainly not impossible.
Its more like this...
[Parallel executed block]
DoOnce
VehicleString=VehicleString+ "Horse"
EndDo
DoOnce
Sleep DelayTime#
VehicleString=VehicleString + "Cart"
EndDo
[End parallel block]
If VehicleString =! "HorseCart" then
DelayTime#=DelayTime# +1
Else
Endif
(Including the lack of sanity check on deincrementing the waitstate. The "incremented delay timer" is implemented with physical latency of the neuronal circuit itself. The circuit doesn't get magically shorter if the first part of the iterative process completes faster, and the delay then becomes onerous. The circuit simply takes forever!)
Nature makes "good enough" solutions, not perfect, unbreakable ones. :D unraveling biological intelligence is like porting 1950s analog spaghetti programming for a one-off in-house app, with obfuscation in effect, a complete lack of documentation, and the author is dead and buried.
Figuring out the mess is the first step in a proper code audit, and modernized rebuild.
Since I do industrial CAD, my hands spend more time on the mouse, and the left side of the keyboard than does a programmer, (Who sends comparatively more time on the homerow.) Or a data entry person (who spends time on the numeric keypad.)
The same would be true of a computer graphic artist, or a casual websurfer.
It is decidedly NOT faster for my use case to use winkey + letters, since it requires physically moving my right hand off the mouse, onto the homerow, locating the bump, then performing the key combo, then returning to the mouse.
This is why it is important for a general use OS's UI to have flexible and configurable options, so that workflow is only minimally disrupted.
Essentially, I am saying "winkey + keystrokes" is better, for you. that does not make it necessarily better for me, and certainly does not mean that all users should be forced to do only one.
(I apologise if I am sounding like a douche here.)
For me, it is demonstrably faster and less disruptive to just flick the mouse I am already holding and click the start button once, and the frequently used program directly after than it is to use winkey + keystrokes. (Which as stated, requires me to release the mouse, and home position my right hand first, and requires me to then return to the mouse afterward.)
This is exactly the same argument you make FOR using this approach, just from the opposite side of the fence.
For either of us to bitch and moan about how our way is the only true way(tm), is arrogant, and selfish. It doesn't bother me at all that the winkey+text method exists. Why does the existence of the start button, which occupies perhaps 200 total pixels when not active, and 20 or so when on autohide, bother you so much by existing?
I wouldn't have a beef against win8 if I could customize it for my workflow. The UI designers who built it arrogantly assert the "one true use case" falsehood, and left no such options.
That, and its severe shortcomings for quickly passing metadata to the operator that I mentioned previously, really torque me off about it. If I could disable metro's obtuse behaviors, I wouldn't have an issue.
Its been my experience that (at least the implementation running on my meaty hardware) human intelligence actually makes more use of data-deduplication and semantic cross linking to cull as much information as possible, while leaving metadata cues to reconstruct the data on the fly.
This is why people misremember things, and why odd and spurrious sensory stimuli can cause a memory to surface.
Humans dont store data losslessly, and make lossy heuristic decisions instead.
the kind of intelligence you are referring to does not exist in nature, and has no direct analog. I am not saying it is impossible, just that it is a form of intelligence radically different from any existing kind, and which would require considerably more hardware to perform simple tasks, simply because of the branching predictions it has to do to deal with arbitrary inputs in an efficient and reliably compact manner.
To me, "Artificial Intelligence" is a very broad umbrella, under which many different kinds of AI exist. A letter sorting machine is an AI. I somehow doubt that it would ever have philosophical introspections about the letters it sorts, and its place in the universe though, or that it could self-repurpose itself if it ran out of mail to sort. An artificial fruitfly made through slavish modeling of a real fly's nervous system is also an AI, and clearly wouldnt use lossless data compression at all.
That is to say, the kind of AI mentioned here is only one kind of AI. Not all AI needs to be able to do this. Combining the two kinds of AI together into a hybrid would solve a lot of problems with both actually.
Use a virtual lossy decision matrix AI with a virtual lossless data storage AI, with some kind of matrix array to coordinate transactions between them. You end up with the speed and fault tolerance of the former, and the steel trap memory of the latter.
Focusing exclusively on either as "The goal" is shortsighted.
Nice strawman there bud.
When I see metro, I see win311's program manager on maximize, with Main, Accessories, and Applications groups open and tiled in the window, but with the program icons rendered in 32bit color, and enlarged to the size of annoying banner advertisements, and on a shiny blue background instead of a drab white one.
I see it as a retro restyling, in other words. Not a fashionably new thing at all. I see it as everything bad about the old one, with Tammy Faye levels of makeup on.
Trust me, my distaste and dislike for the metro UI has nothing to do with being "Afraid of", or "Resistant to" change, or that I want to live in the past. On the contrary. I view metro as being RETRO, it *IS* the past. 20 years in the past, to be exact, with a shiny new coat of paint. It is something I am VERY familiar with, and I dont like it. I didnt like program manager then, and I dont like it now either.
But by all means, make up fairy stories to make yourself feel better and morally superior by sewing up strawmen about me and all the other people that just dont like metro, and how we are all luddites afraid of change. It speaks volumes about the arrogance of which I speak.
I was meaning, that with a passive click on the start button, and a few seconds of hovering, I can learn a great deal about the user's workstation I am sitting at.
I don't actually have to launch anything, and when I am done, the taskbar autohides again. No need for an arcane keystroke combo, or putting myself through actually launching an applet.
The "all programs" side of the start page is a toggle. I prefer the transience of a quick menu fan.
I can do this in under 3 seconds, and get a pretty firm grasp of what somebody does at that workstation, what tools are installed, and how to proceed further.
At work, I make use of win7's "frequently used applications" pins in its start menu, for launching notepad, mspaint, paint.net, and calculator when I need them, without pinning 4 items to my quicklaunch bar. I prefer an uncluttered task tray.
I use the start button quite a lot, and do take it personally when told that I am simply "wrong" for doing so. It's functionality I use to do my job, win 8's UI paradigm to make all native apps full screen abominations makes using several instances of calculator at once nightmarish, constant task switching to the start page is onerously distracting for little productive benefit, and I find it aesthetically abhorrent to boot.
In short, I don't like it, and it gets in the way. Everything a UI should not do.
Clearly, I am not alone.
And you didn't answer my question, why is Winkey + letters better than 2 clicks for a frequently accessed program?
Actually, I found the win95 (actually NT4) UI to be very useful, and empowering.
I did dislike the trend away from high information density and no-nonsense design that came with subsequent iterations, but this was mostly just cosmetic, and thus, while an irritation, not a game breaker.
When you go 180 degrees from your business tagline, "where do you want to go today?", and instead assert forcefully that "You will go HERE today", ignoring all protests and requests to let them off the buss, then there is a major problem.
Saying "users don't really know where the want to go, so we decide for them" is specious, and arrogant.
I am just as tired of that arrogance as you clearly are with the complaints.
Fancy that. 2 sides to every coin.
Asymmetries are to blame.
Eg, "hindsight is always 20-20.", while accurately predicting the future is pure fantasy.
A developer building an internal app uses conventions and tools that are relavent at the time of production. This developer is not clairvoyant. They can't put the sourcecode against their head johnny carson style and predict that in 5 years that say, activeX is going to be a major pariah, and that the core framework they are making will become totally unworkable.
Likewise, everyone and his brother wants to "innovate" the internet, resulting in a constrant stream of often incompatible technologies vying for dominance, with very little standardization. Futurproofing internal applications then becomes next to impossible unless you can pull a johnny carson.
The best a developer could possibly do is to use as vanilla, boring, and feature deprived base to work from as possible, and implement all the fancy bells and whistles themselves using this base, so that the work they do will withstand uprades of that base. EG, using only the most basic, feature deprived aspects available to them. This is about the only way to overcome this, but results in byzantine, hard to debug, painful to write, and painfully slow software. Developers rightly don't want to do this, because it is inefficient with their time and resource allocations.
Even something MEANT to have "run anywhere" functionality can and does break from major revisions. We are still using java 6 at my work, because the updated runtimes break the class loaders of software we use. (Commercial software no less.)
The asymmetry cannot be fixed. The problem it causes cannot be fixed.
I could give a number of clearly unsubstantiated, but seemingly reasonable answers here.
1) the assertion that because living neurons have deficits compared against an arbitrary and artificial standard of efficiency (it takes a whole 500ms for a neuron to cycle?! My diamond based crystal oscillator can drive 3 orders of magnitude faster!, et al.)that they are "faulted" is not substantiated: as pointed out earlier in the thread, no high level intelligence built using said "superior" crystal oscillators exists. Thus the "superior" offering is actually the inferior offering when researching an emergent phenomenon.
2) artificially excluding these principles (signal crosstalk, propogation delays, potentiation thresholds of organic systems, et al) completely *IGNORES* scientifically verified features of complex cognitative behaviors, like the role of mylein, and the mechanisms behind dentrite migration/culling.
In other words, asserting something foolish like "organic neurons are bulky, slow, and have a host of computationally costly habbits" wit the intent that "this makes them undesirable as a model for emergent high level intelligence" ignores a lot of verified information in biology, that shows that these "bad" behaviors directly contribute to intelligent behaviors.
Did you know that signal DELAY is essential in organic brains? That whole hosts of disorders with debilitating effects come from signals arriving too early? Did you stop to consider that thse faults may actually be features that are essential?
If you don't accurately model the biological reference sample, how can you riggorously identify which is which?
We have a sample implementation, with features we find dubious. Only buy building a faithful simulation that works, then experimentally removing the modeled faults do we really systematically break down the real requirements for self directed intelligences.
That is why modeling accurate neurons that faithfully smulate organic behavior is called for, and desirable. At least for now.
Why?
I have a counter to this logic. Namely, how do you quickly determine what software packages have been installed on an unfamiliar workstation in a quick and painless fashion using this method? Repeated attempts at the winkey + initial letter combos?
Perhaps going all the way into the control pannel, and into the add/remove programs applet?
*a LOT* of contextual information can be efficiently passed to the user about the current status and capabilities of a workstation via the contextual hierarchal menu that you seem overly eager to axe.
One of the major benefits in a multiuser environment, is that a user can quickly and efficiently get this information, even if they can't quite articulate that with words more sophisticated than "I want the start menu back."
Microsoft's assertions that "Users rarely use that contextual menu, so we don't want to purpetuate it, and don't understand why people are so pissed about that" (paraphrased) discount that users only need this information infrequently, but DO need the functionality to persist.
Call it a legacy feature if you must, but it does need to be preserved.
I may be misinterpreting or missing the intent here, but humans are demonstrably NOT lossless storage mediums.
HUGE amounts of data are lost, simply between your eyeballs and your visual cortex. That's kinda the point that the summary makes about neural net based vision systems. They take a raw flood of data, and pick it apart into contextually useful elements of artificial origin, which then get strung together to build a high level experience.
Lossless storange of human knowledge is strictly speaking, a complete 180 from the way organic data processing works in humans.
Change for the sake of change is not a rational nor beneficial paradigm.
Know what else hasn't changed much over the aeons? Bacteria. Sure, they have a chemical arms race with each other, but the basic package? Been basically the same for hundreds of millions of years, because it is the best at what the germs need to survive.
Simply because something "has been around forever!" Does not mean it should be abandoned.
Perhaps a different quote is needed? "If it isn't broke, don't fix it." For MANY users, the start menu is NOT broken. There is no need to "fix" it, outside of the arrogance of self important design idiots, who feel that UIs should change like yearly fashion trends, and for the same reasons.
Newsflash. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it is the wrong tool for the job, nor does it mean holding onto it is wrong.
Just take the CLI out of a mainstream linux, and force the GUI experience 100% for all tasks, and state blithely that "some people just can't let go of the command line". Watch your userbase run for the hills.
For a company who's tagline is "where do you want to go today?", they sure have a strange way of listening to the answer to that question.
The userbase has clearly and definitively spoken on the issue.
Asserting that the userbase is wrong/afraid of change/some other canard is completely wrongheaded.
Either give your customers what they want, or they will find somebody else who will.
No, it's sesame street UI.
Here, compare:
sesamestreet.org's muppets page
And
The UI formerly known as Metro
Personally, I prefer my UI to treat me like my age is greater than a single digit. Simplicity can be a good thing, in moderation. This is not in moderation, was forced, unwanted, and hurtful to their brand and reputation.
Sesamestreet UI is a nonstarter on a desktop.
3D printing *could* play a useful research role for the biosciences community, but they wouldn't be printing with thermoplastics.
Rather, there was the recent research with producing lipid bilayer coated water droplets as tissue matricies, and there is the work with 3d printing whole organ systems using stemcells.
Doing that kind of thing would be fully synergistic (I hate that word..) with the hackerspace geeks they share premesis with, and would make their work both usefl and unlikey to spawn a massive public health scare.
You forgot 4 and 5.
4) Local fundies discover that "atheist science!" Is done there, and conspire to shut it down.
5) PETA poopers show up to "liberate" the lab animals, causing a potential public health panic.
I don't want to wish ill on these kids, but I see a very different reprisal as the death stroke.
Namely, this is a biolab. Biological research requires making, using, and experimenting on living tissue, and many cutting edge research branches in the bio/lifesciences fields require the production of chimeric cultures, and transgenic cell lines.
I am not saying this is ethically wrong. I am saying this is how it is, and that there is a very boistrous and angry demographic that is "very opposed" to such things, believing that it violates the sanctity of gods creations or somesuch.
In short, unless these kids stick to "science fair" grade science, they are doomed, because the zelot idiots will picket, pull political strings, and conspire to shut them down.
Heaven forbid that they use lab animals either. Then the peta morons would get in on it.
Personally, when I see Metro, I see this:
Seriously, the design parallels are shocking.
Just replace "Facebook!" for "Big Bird!", and you have a nearly dead ringer.
Microsoft can keep its Fischer Price UI all to itself, thanks.
That would be close to running on pure unobtanium. (Energy costs would become untenable to maintain the quantum states of many thousands of entangled particles, and keep them cold.) Also, quantum computing can only efficiently serve a subset of parallelized tasks, and are a poor fit for general parallelism as is. (Improvements may fix this in time however.)
The brick walls that I see looming are:
Energy requirements VS what can feasibly be delivered
Thermal waste generation rate VS rate of removal
Computational gain from parallelism VS loss from computational overhead
The first one has a snag: even a super conductor cannot conduct unlimited energy flow rates. Clenching happens, and when it does, things go very bad. Further, there are limits to what can rationally be sustained as an energy source. There is a looming restriction where we simply won't be able to provide the energy needed to continue performance increases.
The second one is related: as energy needs increase, the amount of thermal waste generated also increases, and the need to eliminate it efficiently increases. Materials lose valuable electrical and structural properties as they heat up, and rates of thermal exchange are not infinite. There is a fundemental limit where our computer produces heat faster than we can ever safely/reliably remove it.
The third I already explained.
Quantum computing eliminates obstacle 3 (for some applications) but rushes headfirst into the second two. The more qubits you use, the more energy needed to sustain entanglement, and the more aggressively it has to be cooled. This implies that there is a finite possible number of qubits one can string together before it becomes impossible to sustain more, (unless you discover a way to pull a Maxwell's Demon, and escape the second law.)
Other factors: based on the parallelism model used, and the current state of electronics, what is the maximum number of cores that can be included before performance degrades from additional nodes?
(Eg, it takes x time to transmit data over a bus (any bus). How may cores, before the time penalty for transmitting the data over the bus to the allocated processor becomes greater than the penalty for just waiting for a processor to become free?)
There *must* be an upper bound on parallel computing potential before we need pure unobtanium semiconductors.
I am curious what that limit is, and how close we are to it.
Unless the game supports community content, like say, skyrim.
Then you drop in a high poly, high res pack, and play at 4k native all day long.
Corn syrup and HFCS are not really the same thing. You can get normal corn syrup in large containers under the Karo brand, in at least the USA. Karo syrup does not contain HFCS.
Specifically, compare Karo corn syrup with HFCS:
Karo is straight corn syrup, with minimal processing and some vanilla flavoring. According to Karo's website, it contains about 20% dextrose, and contains a wide variety of other natural sugars. (It is derived from starches, so likely contains maltose, amylose, and pals.)
HFCS on the other hand is sweeter, because it is 50% glucose, and 50% fructose, and contains no other sugars. (Though it may contain chemical residues from the manufacturing process.) This is intentional, because it is made to compete with sucrose sugar from refined sugarcane, which is a fructose and a glucose bound together with an ether bond. The higher fructose content makes it sweeter than normal corn syrups, which have larger saccharides, and lower binding potentials to tastebuds, or which break down into larger monosaccharides with lower binding potentials. (The ether bond in sucrose is broken almost as soon as it enters the mouth by the enzymes in saliva. This is why sucrose tastes very sweet while being a larger saccharide. Other disaccharides like lactose and maltose, break down into larger monosaccharides than fructose. Artificial sweeteners are largish molecules (still smaller than polysaccharides though) as well, but have more hydroxyl groups, or more bound oxygen atoms serving as functional groups. This causes them to bind more aggressively with the sweetness receptors on tastebuds.) The fructose monosaccharide is the major culprit in the alledged health risks associated with HFCS (and also sucrose), since it is metabolized quite differently from glucose, and produces many harmful metabolic biproducts of that metabolic pathway. Others are the chemical residues often remaining in the syrup. In nearly every way, HFCS is metabolically identical to sucrose consumption, and much cheaper.
Normal corn syrup contains significantly less fructose than HFCS, and considerably more glucose, and glucose producing disaccharides. It is therefore considerably "less bad" than HFCS or white table sugar. (Really, you shouldn't be eating high glycemic food products anyway, and they really can't be called "good for you". Instead, this mixture is just "less bad".)
Which then totally fails at what they claimed to want to achieve; namely, hold a MIRROR up to pirates. Since the game ramps up piracy in the simulator to 100% over time, to ENSURE bankruptcy, it is NOT a "mirror". It's a photoshopped 'fatbooth' type pic in a mirror's frame.
Putting valid piracy statistics rates in from noteworthy logistics firms, and using that instead of a bullshit log scale would have provided an actual mirror. That wasn't what they wanted. They wanted to shut down the pirates, and feel morally superior about it, by performing a false equivilency.
I would play a game dev simulator with piracy as a feature, if the piracy model was accurate. No, a log scale over time is not accurate.
Disapearing wax mould with sacrificial investment. Basically, 3d print the knob. Submerge it into plaster. Leave it there.
*optionally, heat the mould gently and pour out the plastic goop
Pour hot metal into the plaster investment. Spin for good cast.
Let stand until firm.
Smash the investment, and soak in weak acid to remove remaining investment.
Rinse, clean, polish
Done.
... give me a point cloud, and I can make you a model in under an hour.
Sometimes less is more when it comes to cloud points. Get me several overlapping clouds, and I can make just about anything. You just need somebody who knows what they are doing. Surprise, there are people on the internet that do, and may even do volunteer work.
Uhm... it's quite easy to digitize a flat part like a gasket. Really.
Here's how I do it when building waterjet flowpaths for aerospace sheetmetal parts from ancient PCM masters from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s:
Get yourself a consumer grade flatbed scanner. Legal size or larger preferred. In one corner, tape down a pair of machinist's scales so they form a 90deg angle at the bottom. We will use this to measure the distortion of the scanner, so we can adjust for it.
Put the gasket down on the scanner, and cover it with white paper. Weight it down with whatever's handy.
Make a 300dpi scan, greyscale.
*instructions CATIA specific, may work for DELMIA or SolidWorks as well.
Fire up the drafting workbench. Draw a 90 deg scale with 1 inch increments. Fix the geometry in place. (Select it all, right click, choose 'fix') switch to the sheet background. (Edit, sheet background) insert the scan image. (Insert, image) tweak the image's proportions until the scanned scales and the virtual lineart ones you just created perfectly match. Return to working view. (Edit, working views) Trace out the gasket, hide the scale.
Select all the traced geometry and copy it to the clipboard.
Switch to part design workbench.
Place a new sketch on the XY plane.
Paste the geometry, then fix it together.
Constrain the geometry to the axis system.
Measure the thickness of the gasket with calipers.
Make a pad from the sketch using that thickness.
Save.
*now to test. If you lack a precision plotter, color laserjets are often good enough to be within +/- .03 inches. Often better! Especially photograde ones.
Make a new drafting sheet.
Make a front view of the digitized part.
Add a 4x4 inch square to the print.
Print it with scaling turned off.
Measure the square with calipers to ensure good print.
Put the original gasket on top of the print, and check for defects in your trace job. Correct as needed.
I have done this many many times. It works, and is inexpensive. (Other than the catia seat, that is. That's $$$, but my employer pays for that.) SolidWorks and Delmia are similar packages with nearly identical functionality that are much cheaper.
I can usually do 4 to 5 PCM conversions in a night. (Includes creating flowpaths, and setup sheets.)
Rubber gaskets should be more forgiving than metal brackets.