We're actually very social. My immediate department, and a number of other friends in our group, go out for lunch every Friday. I also play soccer once or twice a week with about 20 other software designers during lunch. Sure, if you take longer lunches, you end up staying at work for an extra hour or so, but it's no big deal.
We also go out after work sometimes for movies, dinner, drinking, etc.
Where do I work? Well, let's just say it's a very large and "traditional" company that does some software development.
Anyone remeber The Lost Vikings? I want to see *that* as a 3D first-person game.
Umm, how exactly would the lost vikings work as a 3D game? IIRC, Olaf's shield went either up or forward. in a 3D world, monsters would simply attack from the sides, making the shield useless.
Not to mention other things.
Besides, the game's emphasis was on goofy problem solving. That wouldn't translate well to a 3D FP environment.
These two are the most important things, for me at least.
The interface must be efficient - this means things like minimizing mouse movements, allowing autocompletion for text fields, and using a good set of keyboard shortcuts for many tasks.
Consistency is also important - this means standards that are strictly adhered to for things like keyboard shortcuts, widget sets, standard placement for OK / Cancel buttons, etc. The idea behind this is to give the user an efficient and predictable user environment so they can focus on doing their work, not on how to do their work.
The actual look and feel should be customizable, but there should be handy (familliar) defaults for users migrating from elsewhere (windows, mac, whatever). The actual look and feel aren't as important, so long as I can change them, and the defaults are decent and unintrusive.
The article suggests that fun couldn't be the sole motivating factor.
For me, I would have to say it is.
The reason I'm paying massive amounts of money for university tuition to pursue a computer science degree is that I think school is fun, and I think computer science is fun.
Working on software projects is also something I enjoy. And there's nothing quite as gratifying as seeing your hard work produce an amazingly cool piece of software in the end.
So yeah, I do it for fun. Money doesn't really motivate me - as long as I can pay the bills and buy a cool toy every once in a while, I'm not concerned.
I suspect I'm not alone among slashdotters, either.
I think one of the most valuable skills as a web designer is actual design training / skills. Even though someone with design sense may not know exactly how to get what they want using HTML, many geeks who know HTML inside and out can't come up with elegant designs for their sites.
When I look at a website, I want fast, simple, clean, and content driven. I want to read what I want. I want to find it easily. I want it now.
What I don't want (and what I see more often than I'd like) is ugly, hard to read, , etc. Not to mention that I often have trouble finding what I want on a site. Good HTML skills are useless if you don't design the site well to begin.
Design sense is easily the most important ingredient in a good website after content.
From reading the article, a proposal could involve something fairly simple: If you can come up with a way to reduce the stress on the human body when moving while carrying a load, it would qualify. I'm sure a very basic exoskeleton that simply augments carrying ability (reduces strain on the human skeleton) is easily feasible given today's technology. Interesting they have $50M to throw at this sort of problem.
Too bad I don't have a background in biomechanics or mechanical engineering...
Interesting - I attend the University of Calgary and very frequently we are not allowed any calculator whatsoever during quizzes and exams in math courses, especially first and second year ones. If you don't know how to integrate without your trusty TI or HP, you have no hope of passing first year calculus. Those courses which do allow calculators almost always stipulate they must be non-graphing and non-programmable.
Quite frankly , I feel this is probably better. I actually know how to integrate and know how to find expected values of multivariate probability distributions without electronic means. This ultimately means that I know what these things are, how they work, and what to do when I encounter them in a novel setting.
The protocol that Napster uses to communicate to the server is anyone's guess - probably based on IRC in concept. As for the protocol used to share the files, it's just plain old http. Though it's not on port 80, Napster uses ports in the high 6000's, IIRC.
Seems to me what the stories are actually about slashdot.
None really discuss the FoF in any detail, they simply survey comments of slashdot posters. It may seem pointless to slashdot readers, but it is more evidence that the media is actually paying attention to us. Through slashdot, we have at least some influence on what the media reports. Slashdot is probably the only 'place' on the planet where a community executed an analysis and wide-ranging discussion of the FoF in mere hours.
The articles didn't come out and say that, but I see them as a sort of 'recognition' of the true power of slashdot.
Not that they realize the full potential of that power, but they at least see that the power does exist.
Slashdot Mirror
We're actually very social. My immediate department, and a number of other friends in our group, go out for lunch every Friday. I also play soccer once or twice a week with about 20 other software designers during lunch. Sure, if you take longer lunches, you end up staying at work for an extra hour or so, but it's no big deal.
We also go out after work sometimes for movies, dinner, drinking, etc.
Where do I work? Well, let's just say it's a very large and "traditional" company that does some software development.
Anyone remeber The Lost Vikings? I want to see *that* as a 3D first-person game.
Umm, how exactly would the lost vikings work as a 3D game? IIRC, Olaf's shield went either up or forward. in a 3D world, monsters would simply attack from the sides, making the shield useless.
Not to mention other things.
Besides, the game's emphasis was on goofy problem solving. That wouldn't translate well to a 3D FP environment.
These two are the most important things, for me at least.
The interface must be efficient - this means things like minimizing mouse movements, allowing autocompletion for text fields, and using a good set of keyboard shortcuts for many tasks.
Consistency is also important - this means standards that are strictly adhered to for things like keyboard shortcuts, widget sets, standard placement for OK / Cancel buttons, etc. The idea behind this is to give the user an efficient and predictable user environment so they can focus on doing their work, not on how to do their work.
The actual look and feel should be customizable, but there should be handy (familliar) defaults for users migrating from elsewhere (windows, mac, whatever). The actual look and feel aren't as important, so long as I can change them, and the defaults are decent and unintrusive.
The article suggests that fun couldn't be the sole motivating factor.
For me, I would have to say it is.
The reason I'm paying massive amounts of money for university tuition to pursue a computer science degree is that I think school is fun, and I think computer science is fun.
Working on software projects is also something I enjoy. And there's nothing quite as gratifying as seeing your hard work produce an amazingly cool piece of software in the end.
So yeah, I do it for fun. Money doesn't really motivate me - as long as I can pay the bills and buy a cool toy every once in a while, I'm not concerned.
I suspect I'm not alone among slashdotters, either.
I think one of the most valuable skills as a web designer is actual design training / skills. Even though someone with design sense may not know exactly how to get what they want using HTML, many geeks who know HTML inside and out can't come up with elegant designs for their sites.
When I look at a website, I want fast, simple, clean, and content driven. I want to read what I want. I want to find it easily. I want it now.
What I don't want (and what I see more often than I'd like) is ugly, hard to read, , etc. Not to mention that I often have trouble finding what I want on a site. Good HTML skills are useless if you don't design the site well to begin.
Design sense is easily the most important ingredient in a good website after content.
From reading the article, a proposal could involve something fairly simple: If you can come up with a way to reduce the stress on the human body when moving while carrying a load, it would qualify. I'm sure a very basic exoskeleton that simply augments carrying ability (reduces strain on the human skeleton) is easily feasible given today's technology. Interesting they have $50M to throw at this sort of problem.
Too bad I don't have a background in biomechanics or mechanical engineering...
Interesting - I attend the University of Calgary and very frequently we are not allowed any calculator whatsoever during quizzes and exams in math courses, especially first and second year ones. If you don't know how to integrate without your trusty TI or HP, you have no hope of passing first year calculus. Those courses which do allow calculators almost always stipulate they must be non-graphing and non-programmable.
Quite frankly , I feel this is probably better. I actually know how to integrate and know how to find expected values of multivariate probability distributions without electronic means. This ultimately means that I know what these things are, how they work, and what to do when I encounter them in a novel setting.
Kind of the point of education, isn't it?
The protocol that Napster uses to communicate to the server is anyone's guess - probably based on IRC in concept. As for the protocol used to share the files, it's just plain old http. Though it's not on port 80, Napster uses ports in the high 6000's, IIRC.
Seems to me what the stories are actually about slashdot.
None really discuss the FoF in any detail, they simply survey comments of slashdot posters. It may seem pointless to slashdot readers, but it is more evidence that the media is actually paying attention to us. Through slashdot, we have at least some influence on what the media reports. Slashdot is probably the only 'place' on the planet where a community executed an analysis and wide-ranging discussion of the FoF in mere hours.
The articles didn't come out and say that, but I see them as a sort of 'recognition' of the true power of slashdot.
Not that they realize the full potential of that power, but they at least see that the power does exist.