The most important principle I can think of is to make sure that every major UI element corresponds to a user's desired end result. If I truly care how something is done, then I have no problem going to the advanced options. Otherwise, I probably want a big button that just gets me to the result, in whatever way it thinks is best, while I go make a sandwich.
Along those lines, any required interaction on my part should all be at the beginning whenever possible. I don't want to come back from making my sandwich and find that the program has been idle for several minutes because I wasn't there to click "Next".
Short answers: They're not "researchers", but Entertainment Technology grad students designing an interactive experience. Quasi has an operator behind a curtain somewhere offscreen, using his microphone and camera to hear and see the audience, and controlling Quasi's responses with a voice-modulating microphone and custom software to handle emotive state and movement. Quasi is a very impressive feat of robotics, audience interaction, and development tools, but there's no AI involved.
are supported and easily programmed under GNU/Linux, since we'd like to later release our software as open source
I'm wondering, if you're intending to release later as open source, then why does that necessarily mean that it must be supported under GNU/Linux? Seriously, open source can be for any operating system. Just pick the OS or vision API that makes camera interfacing the easiest, and write your code for that, while keeping the main parts as portable as possible. Open source shouldn't automatically imply either Linux as the system or GPL as the license (I am simply inferring GPL from context clues).
I'll jump on the bandwagon when we can get rid of the power cable. When is power over wireless coming to computer peripherals?
A few years ago I read about a technology that does intend to get rid of the power cables. It's a mat you can plug in and then place on the desk. Any compatible device placed on top of the mat is then able to draw power directly from that. The interesting thing is that you can place several devices on it at once, each one draws the appropriate voltage and current for its operation, and the whole thing is safe for you to put your hands on. The last I heard, there was already a small version for sale (maybe 12x12 inches) and you could also get simple conversion kits for devices like phones and music players, so that you could charge them up by just placing them on the mat.
Ah ha! I found it, the MobileWise Wire-Free Electric Power:
ABC news story, another link, and one more. The company's website (mobilewise.com) appears to be something else entirely now, though.
The real problem with most writing is not grammar and spelling; anybody can (but obviously doesn't) learn those rules by reading some books and charts. The real problem is the organization of ideas, which includes paragraphs, sentence order, amount of crap to include in each sentence, etc. The most important writing process I have is making an outline. My software of choice for this is OmniOutliner, but the process works just as well with just a piece of paper.
Making a complete multi-level outline of a piece of writing before it's written will almost always ensure that its clarity is much higher than just attacking it head-on in prose form. For example, my work requires me to write software, write design documents about the software, and give presentations about the software to completely non-technical people who need to understand the technical issues. The only way I can accomplish this well is by creating outlines before I ever start writing code, paragraphs, or presentation slides. I'm convinced that my work comes out several times better than it would without a similar preparation and organization method.
Essentially, your students should learn to write an entire paper as just an outline first. If the outline is complete enough, then the paper will make sense before it's even written. If it's not quite there yet, modifying an outline is much easier than modifying a bunch of text. Once somebody's outline is all ready, he can then turn it into paragraphs and start worrying about grammar and spelling. This final step will be fairly straightforward, thanks to all the support that the outline will provide.
Some other posts mentioned Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style". Yes. And as also posted elsewhere, it's available online for free: http://www.bartleby.com/141/
It's no longer called procedural. He's calling it generative art and animation. Seriously, we voted on it at the keynote, because people have complained that every third word from him mouth was "procedural".
I play that game! I did the "Bigelow and Birmingham Bridge" level a few nights ago. But usually I just do the "Oakland Vertical Challenge" to and from work.
Why not take a look at BFS (or BeFS, depending who you ask)? It supports several petabytes of data, and it is specifically designed to handle large media files. Journaling is built in, as well as the handy metadata database (like Spotlight), if your OS can support that feature.
Of course, I can't guarantee there's a filesystem driver available for whatever OS you may be running, though the internet shows many hits for "bfs linux". You may be able to find something about that from haiku-os.org, or elsewhere on the internet.
He clearly says that he has no clue wether features like spotlight were originally intended, or came from microsoft? [...] I doubt that they said "hey that sounds cool, we'll do it too".
I'm sure it's got something to do with Apple hiring Dominic Giampolo to work on HFS+ after Be folded. The filesystem (BFS) he designed for BeOS was doing searches similar to Spotlight, almost 10 years ago.
I switched to Dvorak many years ago because of some RSI problems. The way I learned to type with it was by writing college application essays. I kept an image of the keymap onscreen while I wrote, and after only a few paragraphs I was able to get most of the letters correct. Soon, I stopped needing the cheatsheet image, and I used Dvorak for AIM conversations as well, and then programming once I switched full-time to Dvorak. All told, it was only about three weeks before I was really comfortable with the new keymap.
I also like it as a security measure. If your friends and teachers are the kind who like to use someone else's nearby laptop without asking, or with only a spoken afterthought of "let me use your laptop", then they will quickly find that your laptop is literally not one they can use without permission.
The only downside is when "professionals" need to use my computer for some reason. At the office, it's sometimes necessary for someone else to use my computer. And when my laptop came back from the shop recently, I received a phone call alerting me that it was ready, but for some unknown reason the typed keys were not the keys that showed up, and they wanted to make sure I was aware of the issue. I had to inform them "it's not an issue; that's how I type".
Why just get the Excitebike theme stuck in your head when you could be playing it? Print out a few copies of the sheet music and get half a marching band together.
If you're using this equipment to play emulator games, chances are that you downloaded them off the internet and they're illegal. Shame on you! Why not get some good homebrew games or, better yet, make your own games?
I started using (okay, pirated) Productive for BeOS with versions 1.0 and 1.5, and I bought version 2.0. It is an absolutely wonderful piece of software, and could actually replace MS Office entirely for most people. StarOffice, on the other hand, I found to be very clunky and nowhere near as good as what it was trying to be. Gobe Productive is the sort of thing that I would give to my mother to replace MS Office for her. The only feature that I ever missed from it was equation editing, which of course could now be added. Overall though, for those of you who haven't tried it, the inline sub-document capabilities (through document frames) are simply amazing and very intuitive. I haven't seen anything comparable to it in other software.
"Customers who purchase a qualifying new Macintosh computer on or after July 17, 2002, that does not have Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" included can upgrade to Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" for US$19.95."
great, so that means that just because i bought my powerbook a month ago instead of today, i've got to either pay 130 bucks or "borrow" it from somewhere else? they really should push that cutoff date back a few months.
I'm hoping that multiple GPUs will mean the ability to smoothly handle multiple GL contexts. This is the main thing that still separates consumer level cards from the professional quality ones, like the various 3DLabs offerings. If you've ever tried to run multiple OpenGL applications at once, or possibly multiple D3D apps as well, you've probably suffered severe 3D slowdown due to the overhead required by the context switching.
instead of relying on a stylesheet, you can stop your computer from even being able to access the site. this will protect you from goatse links on web pages, emails, AIM, etc. just add the line
127.0.0.1 goatse.cx
to your hosts file. this will make any attempted accesses to the goatse man attempt to resolve to your local machine, and thus fail. the hosts file is in varying locations, depending on your OS. it's present in windows and UNIX based OSes.
i guess i'll go ahead and respond to these negative comments about my post.
the "prose": IE dropped my text formatting, since plain text apparently doesn't honor carriage returns. i assure you my grammar skills are adequate. if formulating my thoughts in an attempt to convey useful information is "pretentious", then i have no problem with it.
the printer driver:
i use the postscript file driver for the network printers. it works fine for me.
let me first state that i have been a consistent beos user since 1998
we in the be community, meaning some of the more ]knowledgeable and attuned of us as far as usage of the OS goes, tend to think that sony is the most likely buyer, mostly because of the recent launch of the e Villa IA and all the support sony gave to be to get it launched. we in general feel that just about any of the most likely buyers would be a boon for the future of the OS, since it would likely get further developed. in the case of sony, they would use it to support their IA, and they might even use it to launch an all-out VAIO/BeOS attack on the windows monopoly, which would guarantee that sony put effort towards continuing OS development. palm would also likely do good for the system, since running practically the same environment on both desktop and next-gen palmtops would greatly extend the usefulness of their devices and aid developers.
however, in the event that the buying company decides to trash the OS, many of us in the beos community will continue to use the OS simply because we have found it to be so enjoyable to use, and though we may not have direct support in that case from the creator, we can still extend its life and usefulness through our own development, much like the amiga community has kept its own machine alive enough to be resurrected.
i used the Foley book in both of my graphics classes. it's not the best for telling how to actually program graphics, but for getting a good understanding of how the computer itself interacts with the graphics subsystem and how the algorithms behind the graphics work, it's an exceptional book. after all, the point of computer books in a public library should not be to give the details of a particular API for the seven programmers who would need to read it. the library should provide books that are conceptually accessible to the general public, and i think foley's book accomplishes this very well, giving both an overview of graphics techniques, as well as the nitty-gritty of implementation, without relying on a specific OS or programming environment that's going to change in the next two years.
Slashdot Mirror
The most important principle I can think of is to make sure that every major UI element corresponds to a user's desired end result. If I truly care how something is done, then I have no problem going to the advanced options. Otherwise, I probably want a big button that just gets me to the result, in whatever way it thinks is best, while I go make a sandwich.
Along those lines, any required interaction on my part should all be at the beginning whenever possible. I don't want to come back from making my sandwich and find that the program has been idle for several minutes because I wasn't there to click "Next".
This is what you want:
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/ibi/
http://www.interbots.com/
Short answers: They're not "researchers", but Entertainment Technology grad students designing an interactive experience. Quasi has an operator behind a curtain somewhere offscreen, using his microphone and camera to hear and see the audience, and controlling Quasi's responses with a voice-modulating microphone and custom software to handle emotive state and movement. Quasi is a very impressive feat of robotics, audience interaction, and development tools, but there's no AI involved.
are supported and easily programmed under GNU/Linux, since we'd like to later release our software as open source
I'm wondering, if you're intending to release later as open source, then why does that necessarily mean that it must be supported under GNU/Linux? Seriously, open source can be for any operating system. Just pick the OS or vision API that makes camera interfacing the easiest, and write your code for that, while keeping the main parts as portable as possible. Open source shouldn't automatically imply either Linux as the system or GPL as the license (I am simply inferring GPL from context clues).
I'll jump on the bandwagon when we can get rid of the power cable. When is power over wireless coming to computer peripherals?
A few years ago I read about a technology that does intend to get rid of the power cables. It's a mat you can plug in and then place on the desk. Any compatible device placed on top of the mat is then able to draw power directly from that. The interesting thing is that you can place several devices on it at once, each one draws the appropriate voltage and current for its operation, and the whole thing is safe for you to put your hands on. The last I heard, there was already a small version for sale (maybe 12x12 inches) and you could also get simple conversion kits for devices like phones and music players, so that you could charge them up by just placing them on the mat.
Ah ha! I found it, the MobileWise Wire-Free Electric Power: ABC news story, another link, and one more. The company's website (mobilewise.com) appears to be something else entirely now, though.
No, I'm still not sure what an "alot" is.
The real problem with most writing is not grammar and spelling; anybody can (but obviously doesn't) learn those rules by reading some books and charts. The real problem is the organization of ideas, which includes paragraphs, sentence order, amount of crap to include in each sentence, etc. The most important writing process I have is making an outline. My software of choice for this is OmniOutliner, but the process works just as well with just a piece of paper.
Making a complete multi-level outline of a piece of writing before it's written will almost always ensure that its clarity is much higher than just attacking it head-on in prose form. For example, my work requires me to write software, write design documents about the software, and give presentations about the software to completely non-technical people who need to understand the technical issues. The only way I can accomplish this well is by creating outlines before I ever start writing code, paragraphs, or presentation slides. I'm convinced that my work comes out several times better than it would without a similar preparation and organization method.
Essentially, your students should learn to write an entire paper as just an outline first. If the outline is complete enough, then the paper will make sense before it's even written. If it's not quite there yet, modifying an outline is much easier than modifying a bunch of text. Once somebody's outline is all ready, he can then turn it into paragraphs and start worrying about grammar and spelling. This final step will be fairly straightforward, thanks to all the support that the outline will provide.
Some other posts mentioned Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style". Yes. And as also posted elsewhere, it's available online for free: http://www.bartleby.com/141/
It's no longer called procedural. He's calling it generative art and animation. Seriously, we voted on it at the keynote, because people have complained that every third word from him mouth was "procedural".
I play that game! I did the "Bigelow and Birmingham Bridge" level a few nights ago. But usually I just do the "Oakland Vertical Challenge" to and from work.
Why not take a look at BFS (or BeFS, depending who you ask)? It supports several petabytes of data, and it is specifically designed to handle large media files. Journaling is built in, as well as the handy metadata database (like Spotlight), if your OS can support that feature.
Of course, I can't guarantee there's a filesystem driver available for whatever OS you may be running, though the internet shows many hits for "bfs linux". You may be able to find something about that from haiku-os.org, or elsewhere on the internet.
He clearly says that he has no clue wether features like spotlight were originally intended, or came from microsoft? [...] I doubt that they said "hey that sounds cool, we'll do it too".
I'm sure it's got something to do with Apple hiring Dominic Giampolo to work on HFS+ after Be folded. The filesystem (BFS) he designed for BeOS was doing searches similar to Spotlight, almost 10 years ago.
I switched to Dvorak many years ago because of some RSI problems. The way I learned to type with it was by writing college application essays. I kept an image of the keymap onscreen while I wrote, and after only a few paragraphs I was able to get most of the letters correct. Soon, I stopped needing the cheatsheet image, and I used Dvorak for AIM conversations as well, and then programming once I switched full-time to Dvorak. All told, it was only about three weeks before I was really comfortable with the new keymap.
I also like it as a security measure. If your friends and teachers are the kind who like to use someone else's nearby laptop without asking, or with only a spoken afterthought of "let me use your laptop", then they will quickly find that your laptop is literally not one they can use without permission.
The only downside is when "professionals" need to use my computer for some reason. At the office, it's sometimes necessary for someone else to use my computer. And when my laptop came back from the shop recently, I received a phone call alerting me that it was ready, but for some unknown reason the typed keys were not the keys that showed up, and they wanted to make sure I was aware of the issue. I had to inform them "it's not an issue; that's how I type".
Personally, I would want my car to have the least amount of breaking possible.
Why just get the Excitebike theme stuck in your head when you could be playing it? Print out a few copies of the sheet music and get half a marching band together.
If you're using this equipment to play emulator games, chances are that you downloaded them off the internet and they're illegal. Shame on you! Why not get some good homebrew games or, better yet, make your own games?
I started using (okay, pirated) Productive for BeOS with versions 1.0 and 1.5, and I bought version 2.0. It is an absolutely wonderful piece of software, and could actually replace MS Office entirely for most people. StarOffice, on the other hand, I found to be very clunky and nowhere near as good as what it was trying to be. Gobe Productive is the sort of thing that I would give to my mother to replace MS Office for her. The only feature that I ever missed from it was equation editing, which of course could now be added. Overall though, for those of you who haven't tried it, the inline sub-document capabilities (through document frames) are simply amazing and very intuitive. I haven't seen anything comparable to it in other software.
from apple's jaguar ugrade page:
"Customers who purchase a qualifying new Macintosh computer on or after July 17, 2002, that does not have Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" included can upgrade to Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" for US$19.95."
great, so that means that just because i bought my powerbook a month ago instead of today, i've got to either pay 130 bucks or "borrow" it from somewhere else? they really should push that cutoff date back a few months.
I'm hoping that multiple GPUs will mean the ability to smoothly handle multiple GL contexts. This is the main thing that still separates consumer level cards from the professional quality ones, like the various 3DLabs offerings. If you've ever tried to run multiple OpenGL applications at once, or possibly multiple D3D apps as well, you've probably suffered severe 3D slowdown due to the overhead required by the context switching.
i recently saw Osamu Tezuka's "Metropolis" at the Inwood Theater in Dallas. they show lots of foreign films, with the occasional anime feature.
instead of relying on a stylesheet, you can stop your computer from even being able to access the site. this will protect you from goatse links on web pages, emails, AIM, etc. just add the line
127.0.0.1 goatse.cx
to your hosts file. this will make any attempted accesses to the goatse man attempt to resolve to your local machine, and thus fail. the hosts file is in varying locations, depending on your OS. it's present in windows and UNIX based OSes.
c:\windows\hosts (win9x)
c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (w2k)
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (XP)
/boot/etc/hosts (BeOS)
/etc/hosts (various UNIX)
i guess i'll go ahead and respond to these negative comments about my post. the "prose": IE dropped my text formatting, since plain text apparently doesn't honor carriage returns. i assure you my grammar skills are adequate. if formulating my thoughts in an attempt to convey useful information is "pretentious", then i have no problem with it. the printer driver: i use the postscript file driver for the network printers. it works fine for me.
let me first state that i have been a consistent beos user since 1998 we in the be community, meaning some of the more ]knowledgeable and attuned of us as far as usage of the OS goes, tend to think that sony is the most likely buyer, mostly because of the recent launch of the e Villa IA and all the support sony gave to be to get it launched. we in general feel that just about any of the most likely buyers would be a boon for the future of the OS, since it would likely get further developed. in the case of sony, they would use it to support their IA, and they might even use it to launch an all-out VAIO/BeOS attack on the windows monopoly, which would guarantee that sony put effort towards continuing OS development. palm would also likely do good for the system, since running practically the same environment on both desktop and next-gen palmtops would greatly extend the usefulness of their devices and aid developers. however, in the event that the buying company decides to trash the OS, many of us in the beos community will continue to use the OS simply because we have found it to be so enjoyable to use, and though we may not have direct support in that case from the creator, we can still extend its life and usefulness through our own development, much like the amiga community has kept its own machine alive enough to be resurrected.
i used the Foley book in both of my graphics classes. it's not the best for telling how to actually program graphics, but for getting a good understanding of how the computer itself interacts with the graphics subsystem and how the algorithms behind the graphics work, it's an exceptional book. after all, the point of computer books in a public library should not be to give the details of a particular API for the seven programmers who would need to read it. the library should provide books that are conceptually accessible to the general public, and i think foley's book accomplishes this very well, giving both an overview of graphics techniques, as well as the nitty-gritty of implementation, without relying on a specific OS or programming environment that's going to change in the next two years.