Anyone remember those cartoons and toys? Remember having to explain to your parents how Go-Bots were different than Transformers, and why you had to have both! =)
I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. We're still looking for that 'killer app' or that field in which using a 3D interface increases productivity 300%, or whatever.
Anyone remember all those cool 3D images the Pathfinder/Sojourner robots returned from Mars? My lab participated in a NASA field test for future Mars robotic explorers, trying to decide what tools should be included on the robot, command structures, how to do distributed science with a 24 hour turn around time, things like that. Turns out the geologists were MUCH more interested in the high-res, 2D pictures than in the interactive-immersive-photorealistic-insert buzzword VR environment created from the robot.
The technology was awesome. The computer churns for a couple hours, you put on your 3D goggles, or step into the Cave, and you can look around and see the remote environment from the vantage of the camera (in the field test, the camera was placed about average human eye height). I think distances/measurements were accurate to 5mm at 5m.
But the geologists only used the technology like 0.5% of the time. When the data first came back, they'd look at the VR and say, "whoa...cool!" but then go to do their 'real work' from the 2d images. The people who really did use it were the people that planned the path of the robot (how deep is that ridge? how far to that rock?).
I think there were a lot of factors that contributed to that. First, the resolution wasn't that great, or more accurately still light years from the resolution of the eye. We're a LONG way from telepresence, so the geologists weren't motivated to act like it was available. Second, there was a high learning curve to the user interface. Not to someone w/VR experience, but if you've never put on 3D goggles, or used a Magellan device, or thought about how to 'rotate the world' so you can see what you want, its hard. So they had to find someone to 'drive' the interface for them, and they weren't motivated to do that either.
I'm gonna hold out until there's network Madden... What I want is Madden tournament games...play thru a championship, then all the champions play each other, and so on until I've beaten everyone! =)
If they do that, though, they need to bring back the 'design your own play' option.
And what are they going to do with the voiceovers now that John and Pat aren't together? John and Al?
But AFAIK this guy is pretty Linux specific. It relies on Mozilla, GTK, etc...
They mentioned a Sash for Windows client, so you can write some cross-platform apps (and they showed an example), but I think this SashXB client allows access to some X based UI toolkits - GTK, Glade. So I think you're SOL if you want to write cross platform.
Now I did the little tour of SashXP - it looks like the end user has the option of accepting/denying access to local resources via a dialog box. So it seems like you could have the same kinds of problems you do with those email viruses - silly users blindly clicking "Ok, go ahead and erase all my local filez."
In any event, this seems like a pretty handy tool for doing development on trusted networks like corporate intranets. At least if your corporate end users have linux on their desktop.:/
Maybe too some enterprising college students will be able to do some cool things with it...
> Can anyone point to a coherent explaination of what > Sash can offer on Linux, and what it's parts are? >
This question is probably going to be asked a lot, so I guess we should start creating a FAQ somewhere.
Anyway. This is of course by no means an official position on anything; these are just my thoughts.
The Sash end-user gets: * Painless installation (no command line necessary -- straight from the browser to the [graphical] installer). * One-click uninstallation, with recursive dependency checking to prevent the removal of vital components. * A point and click interface for the execution and management of all of his weblications * Automatic updating of programs/extensions (this is in the works) * Tiny download sizes for native, fully functional weblications * Highly componentized infrastructure avoids bloatware -- a program only fetches and loads exactly what it needs to run. * Tight security controls every single thing a weblication tries to do
The Sash developer gets: [from a structural point of view] * Rapid deployment and easy management of programs * Powerful native functionality without having to learn a new skill set (provided that he already knows JavaScript and HTML)
[from a design point of view] * Ridiculously easy drag-and-drop design for his weblication's UI * Painless integration of UI with SashScript * A full-featured IDE which takes him from start to finish in creating a weblication, including:
- syntax highlighting
- syntax assistance (a la Microsoft's Intellisense)
- multiple document/multiple window interface
- Druids (wizards) which aid in the creation of any given action,
or in the creation of the weblication as a whole
I'm sure there are more features which I am missing right now.
Yeah, this sounds terribly hokey, but it's actually true. We've created a sample text editor, a web browser, even a simple Lotus Notes mail client (as demos), each in about an hour, start-to-finish.
Man, I really do sound like a salesman;).
As for parts, perhaps that's for another email. There are two main parts: the runtime, which runs the weblications, and the WDE (development environment) which aids developers in writing weblications. For more info, check out the README.* files in the source tree...
And just a general DVD rant...is anyone else sick of the interactive menus? I like them the first time I watch a movie, but after that I don't want to wait for the ship to fly by or the building to drop away and rise again just so I can get to the next menu.
I retract my statement on getting rid of cash. I believe that was another novel (Left Behind, I think. There are a ton a implications from THAT novel that might be discussed, but I thought I'd get flamed enough for this one =) ).
Anyway...that's the hard part about discussing this - especially on a BB. What I was attempting to do was to imply possible parallels between Big Brother in the novel 1984, and the propensity the current administration is showing in curtailing some of the few freedoms we currently have. So I'm trying not to express paranoia, but that we, as people that are possibly more educated on this issue than the people making the decision, should exercise our democratic responsibility to make those in charge aware of the path in which anti-privacy legislation could lead.
Let's use Big Brother as the negative end of the scale. If we ended up like a society in Big Brother, that would be Bad (tm). And we don't want that.
Now, we know our current society is not Good (tm), but I think we would all agree its not totally Bad. Probably they will not enact legislation that will make our society Bad in the near future. But every time they pass a law and take a way a few freedoms, people grumble but eventually get used to it, and then they do it again and again. And given the assumption that we don't want it to get Worse, I'm saying that we want to discourage laws and actions that move us farther down the Bad/Good scale.
Is that more clear?
Perhaps I'm not giving enough credit to our democratic process; our administrations are definitely cyclic (50's were extreme conservative, 60's-70's we loosened up, 80's were conservative, 90's we got freaky again). So maybe we're tightening up now, and we'll relax again in 10 years or so.
It's hard for me to talk about this issue and not sound like an alarmist, or sound like I'm coming out of an ultra-leftwing camp spouting X-Files/Orwellean warnings. But that's really what we're talking about here.
Digitally tracing cash? How bout we just get rid of cash and everyone use credit cards? That's what George Orwell wrote about in 1984...
A "new type of war" where one country is the enemy one day and our friend the next, and the American people are supposed to go along with whatever way the winds of war blow that particular day? Again, straight out of 1984...
How about we give the government access to all our personal information? Worked for Big Brother...
Again, I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but these are extremely important, fundamental issues that are going to be raised in the next few days.
Everyone has said this, but as the tech-literate, educated people we are on/., I think we sort of have a responsibility to inform those less tech literate, less educated (including our politicians and policy makers) to understand the issues and ramifications of their actions.
Today I plan on calling my Senators and Representatives, and writing letters (snail mail). I think it would be prudent for all of us here to show that, even in times of trial, democracy still can work. Make your voices heard and inform the policy makers of your views!!
There are actually quite a few uses for this type of technology (see my Master's thesis for references ). The AI community has been looking at swarm intelligence and multi-agent systems for years. NASA has sponsored research on using ant-like behavior in multiple robots to explore Mars (advantages in redundancy, system memory, command and control, etc...).
Also, check out The Swarm Development Group - you can download some software to play with alife sims, visualize really efficient search patterns, etc...
IBM uses Notes enterprise wide, of course, as does 3M (I've been employed by both). When I left 3M, they were doing some interesting things in Notes like document translation on the fly - and this was in 1997. My sources tell me Accenture is also transitioning to Notes (but don't quote me on that).
Notes has good points and bad. As an email client or PDA software, its not gonna compete. Mostly, I think because it forces a database approach on these decidedly not database type tasks. But I think you'll be hard pressed to find an enterprise wide document revision/archiving system with the same support for Knowledge Management as Lotus.
I think that, originally, FIRST had good goals - trying to get high school students excited about engineering/science/tech the same way they get excited about sports. So they provided an arena for friendly competition, and an atmosphere that would appeal to tournament style play. For those that haven't been, there are like 10K kids running around, loud music pumping, several rounds going on at a time, so there is a tournament like atmosphere.
But corporations have taken over FIRST just like they've taken over everything else. The finals are on ESPN, so they invest gobs of money/effort into the projects. I think the worst part is that, you look around the pit area, and you see adults hovered around the robot, and the kids that are supposed to be learning and getting involved are off screwing around in Disney World!
Even worse, it seems the corporations pay the kids to be loud and obnoxious and show of the company logo. One group I remember from Chicago marched around the area yelling, screaming, waving Motorola flags and chanting "Team Motorola!" Another group passed out flyers to everyone in the stands that said "Check out the FIRST finals at your local GM dealer." And I think FIRST likes the money its generating, so they're not gonna put a stop to it. I just thought it was sad how the kids were getting used.
When I was at the Univ. of Iowa, I helped the local high school do FIRST for the first time. The students are given a $250 budget (which they're not supposed to exceed). So its a great engineering project - get a task done with a limited budget. And our kids got so much out of it! But they had no chance of actually being competative. How are we supposed to compete against JPL engineers, for cryin out loud? The motto we adopted was, "Early elimination = more time in Disney World."
If you've got a project due, you want to use the tools that help you complete the project in the shortest amount of time. I like IDEs cause they help you do a lot of the little things that make coding go quicker - auto indenting, parens matching, debugging, etc.
Granted, Visual Studio may not be the best tool to learn C++, for example. But it would be a major pain in the ass to write a decent windoze app with notepad.
Of course, there is a compromise between a lightweight text editor and an IDE -- its called Emacs. Never leave home without it.
There are of course many metaphors for human-computer interfaces; one could probably argue the Desktop is the leading metaphor today. Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, in her book Language and communication : essential concepts for user interface and documentation design, offers a better definition. She basically compares learning an interface for a new program to learning a new (spoken) language. The book delves deeply into comparing language constructs to interface constructs, but I think its more important to remember that when you design an interface, you're asking a user to learn a new way of communicating with your system.
So when you look at the subject that way, its a bit easier to see why Windows has been so prevalent. Granted, it may not be as {cool, fun, stable,...} as linux, but the language you use to communicate with windows is pretty easy to learn. Additionally, most windows programs look pretty similar, so you don't have to learn a whole new language to use them - more you have to learn a new dialect. I think with Linux, you don't get that standardization, so learning each program can be tougher.
So if you look at it with this perspective, the key aspect is that the user is able to effectively communicate their desired command in a form which the system can also understand. So the whole interface issue is one of translation. The only key ingredients to an interface is that the human and the computer can understand each other, and that each party in the conversation can effectively say "yes, I can do that" or "no, I can't do that" or "what the hell are you talking about?"
I'm almost surprised this question made it as an "Ask Slashdot." I mean, there at least 3 separate courses at the University of Iowa on interface design. I'm sure its similar at other Universities. And there are countless books on interfaces, whatever. This is a pretty broad f'n questions - how are we supposed to generate any real insight on it here?
Some people at Carnegie Mellon University are also investigating the social consequences of net usage ( check out the HomeNet project here). They have also concluded that Internet usage leads to less interpersonal physical contact. They also observed that interpersonal communication is a stronger driver for internet usage than than entertainment or information searching.
I think at some point linux gamers will reach some critical mass point, and companies will almost have to start pumping resources into developing for linux. Hell, its only been relatively recently that video card makers have started releasing linux/XFree86 drivers, or even better open sourcing them.
I think that linux gaming is now where PC gaming was in the late 80's/early 90's - B.W95 (Before Windows 95). Too many different computers, graphics possiblities, etc. Microsoft came and established a standard API for graphics, sound, and PC games took off. I think SGI open sourcing OpenGL will really help establish a graphics standard for linux games.
I was a linux newbie when I set up my 3c905...it was a pain in the ass! The number of people asking similar questions on dejanews seem to concur. I got it to work after an evening of netsearching for answers. I haven't been terribly impressed with its performance. Downloading large files (eg q3arena) always caused it to choke up - I ended up rebooting the machine several times because of this. Don't know if it was a net card problem or a netscape problem. I can't really make any strong suggestions about whats better...but I wanted to share my experience. Another card might give you a better OOB experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember those cartoons and toys? Remember having to explain to your parents how Go-Bots were different than Transformers, and why you had to have both! =)
I think you've really hit the nail on the head here. We're still looking for that 'killer app' or that field in which using a 3D interface increases productivity 300%, or whatever.
Anyone remember all those cool 3D images the Pathfinder/Sojourner robots returned from Mars? My lab participated in a NASA field test for future Mars robotic explorers, trying to decide what tools should be included on the robot, command structures, how to do distributed science with a 24 hour turn around time, things like that. Turns out the geologists were MUCH more interested in the high-res, 2D pictures than in the interactive-immersive-photorealistic-insert buzzword VR environment created from the robot.
The technology was awesome. The computer churns for a couple hours, you put on your 3D goggles, or step into the Cave, and you can look around and see the remote environment from the vantage of the camera (in the field test, the camera was placed about average human eye height). I think distances/measurements were accurate to 5mm at 5m.
But the geologists only used the technology like 0.5% of the time. When the data first came back, they'd look at the VR and say, "whoa...cool!" but then go to do their 'real work' from the 2d images. The people who really did use it were the people that planned the path of the robot (how deep is that ridge? how far to that rock?).
I think there were a lot of factors that contributed to that. First, the resolution wasn't that great, or more accurately still light years from the resolution of the eye. We're a LONG way from telepresence, so the geologists weren't motivated to act like it was available. Second, there was a high learning curve to the user interface. Not to someone w/VR experience, but if you've never put on 3D goggles, or used a Magellan device, or thought about how to 'rotate the world' so you can see what you want, its hard. So they had to find someone to 'drive' the interface for them, and they weren't motivated to do that either.
I'm gonna hold out until there's network Madden... What I want is Madden tournament games...play thru a championship, then all the champions play each other, and so on until I've beaten everyone! =)
If they do that, though, they need to bring back the 'design your own play' option.
And what are they going to do with the voiceovers now that John and Pat aren't together? John and Al?
But AFAIK this guy is pretty Linux specific. It relies on Mozilla, GTK, etc...
They mentioned a Sash for Windows client, so you can write some cross-platform apps (and they showed an example), but I think this SashXB client allows access to some X based UI toolkits - GTK, Glade. So I think you're SOL if you want to write cross platform.
Now I did the little tour of SashXP - it looks like the end user has the option of accepting/denying access to local resources via a dialog box. So it seems like you could have the same kinds of problems you do with those email viruses - silly users blindly clicking "Ok, go ahead and erase all my local filez."
:/
In any event, this seems like a pretty handy tool for doing development on trusted networks like corporate intranets. At least if your corporate end users have linux on their desktop.
Maybe too some enterprising college students will be able to do some cool things with it...
I figure we're all going to be asking what this is about...
;).
This is a reprint of text from MartinG from the old thread:
> Can anyone point to a coherent explaination of what
> Sash can offer on Linux, and what it's parts are?
>
This question is probably going to be asked a lot, so I guess we should
start creating a FAQ somewhere.
Anyway. This is of course by no means an official position on anything;
these are just my thoughts.
The Sash end-user gets:
* Painless installation (no command line necessary -- straight from the
browser to the [graphical] installer).
* One-click uninstallation, with recursive dependency checking to prevent
the removal of vital components.
* A point and click interface for the execution and management of all of
his weblications
* Automatic updating of programs/extensions (this is in the works)
* Tiny download sizes for native, fully functional weblications
* Highly componentized infrastructure avoids bloatware -- a program only
fetches and loads exactly what it needs to run.
* Tight security controls every single thing a weblication tries to do
The Sash developer gets:
[from a structural point of view]
* Rapid deployment and easy management of programs
* Powerful native functionality without having to learn a new skill set
(provided that he already knows JavaScript and HTML)
[from a design point of view]
* Ridiculously easy drag-and-drop design for his weblication's UI
* Painless integration of UI with SashScript
* A full-featured IDE which takes him from start to finish in creating a
weblication, including:
- syntax highlighting
- syntax assistance (a la Microsoft's Intellisense)
- multiple document/multiple window interface
- Druids (wizards) which aid in the creation of any given action,
or in the creation of the weblication as a whole
I'm sure there are more features which I am missing right now.
Yeah, this sounds terribly hokey, but it's actually true. We've created a
sample text editor, a web browser, even a simple Lotus Notes mail client
(as demos), each in about an hour, start-to-finish.
Man, I really do sound like a salesman
As for parts, perhaps that's for another email. There are two main parts:
the runtime, which runs the weblications, and the WDE (development
environment) which aids developers in writing weblications. For more info,
check out the README.* files in the source tree...
AJ
And just a general DVD rant...is anyone else sick of the interactive menus? I like them the first time I watch a movie, but after that I don't want to wait for the ship to fly by or the building to drop away and rise again just so I can get to the next menu.
I wish there was some way to turn that off.
When was that campaign out...late 99-00? I find it difficult to believe that a 2 yr old campaign is seriously affect today's marketplace.
Someone teach Eisner what an ANOVA is, have him check to see if it really WAS a significant factor, and then talk to the Senate...
Dude...watching TV is social interaction...haven't you played The Sims? You get way more social points when you have a big phatty TV! =)
I retract my statement on getting rid of cash. I believe that was another novel (Left Behind, I think. There are a ton a implications from THAT novel that might be discussed, but I thought I'd get flamed enough for this one =) ).
Anyway...that's the hard part about discussing this - especially on a BB. What I was attempting to do was to imply possible parallels between Big Brother in the novel 1984, and the propensity the current administration is showing in curtailing some of the few freedoms we currently have. So I'm trying not to express paranoia, but that we, as people that are possibly more educated on this issue than the people making the decision, should exercise our democratic responsibility to make those in charge aware of the path in which anti-privacy legislation could lead.
Let's use Big Brother as the negative end of the scale. If we ended up like a society in Big Brother, that would be Bad (tm). And we don't want that.
Now, we know our current society is not Good (tm), but I think we would all agree its not totally Bad. Probably they will not enact legislation that will make our society Bad in the near future. But every time they pass a law and take a way a few freedoms, people grumble but eventually get used to it, and then they do it again and again. And given the assumption that we don't want it to get Worse, I'm saying that we want to discourage laws and actions that move us farther down the Bad/Good scale.
Is that more clear?
Perhaps I'm not giving enough credit to our democratic process; our administrations are definitely cyclic (50's were extreme conservative, 60's-70's we loosened up, 80's were conservative, 90's we got freaky again). So maybe we're tightening up now, and we'll relax again in 10 years or so.
It's hard for me to talk about this issue and not sound like an alarmist, or sound like I'm coming out of an ultra-leftwing camp spouting X-Files/Orwellean warnings. But that's really what we're talking about here.
/., I think we sort of have a responsibility to inform those less tech literate, less educated (including our politicians and policy makers) to understand the issues and ramifications of their actions.
Digitally tracing cash? How bout we just get rid of cash and everyone use credit cards? That's what George Orwell wrote about in 1984...
A "new type of war" where one country is the enemy one day and our friend the next, and the American people are supposed to go along with whatever way the winds of war blow that particular day? Again, straight out of 1984...
How about we give the government access to all our personal information? Worked for Big Brother...
Again, I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but these are extremely important, fundamental issues that are going to be raised in the next few days.
Everyone has said this, but as the tech-literate, educated people we are on
Today I plan on calling my Senators and Representatives, and writing letters (snail mail). I think it would be prudent for all of us here to show that, even in times of trial, democracy still can work. Make your voices heard and inform the policy makers of your views!!
There are actually quite a few uses for this type of technology (see my Master's thesis for references ). The AI community has been looking at swarm intelligence and multi-agent systems for years. NASA has sponsored research on using ant-like behavior in multiple robots to explore Mars (advantages in redundancy, system memory, command and control, etc...).
Also, check out The Swarm Development Group - you can download some software to play with alife sims, visualize really efficient search patterns, etc...
IBM uses Notes enterprise wide, of course, as does 3M (I've been employed by both). When I left 3M, they were doing some interesting things in Notes like document translation on the fly - and this was in 1997. My sources tell me Accenture is also transitioning to Notes (but don't quote me on that).
Notes has good points and bad. As an email client or PDA software, its not gonna compete. Mostly, I think because it forces a database approach on these decidedly not database type tasks. But I think you'll be hard pressed to find an enterprise wide document revision/archiving system with the same support for Knowledge Management as Lotus.
I think that, originally, FIRST had good goals - trying to get high school students excited about engineering/science/tech the same way they get excited about sports. So they provided an arena for friendly competition, and an atmosphere that would appeal to tournament style play. For those that haven't been, there are like 10K kids running around, loud music pumping, several rounds going on at a time, so there is a tournament like atmosphere.
But corporations have taken over FIRST just like they've taken over everything else. The finals are on ESPN, so they invest gobs of money/effort into the projects. I think the worst part is that, you look around the pit area, and you see adults hovered around the robot, and the kids that are supposed to be learning and getting involved are off screwing around in Disney World!
Even worse, it seems the corporations pay the kids to be loud and obnoxious and show of the company logo. One group I remember from Chicago marched around the area yelling, screaming, waving Motorola flags and chanting "Team Motorola!" Another group passed out flyers to everyone in the stands that said "Check out the FIRST finals at your local GM dealer." And I think FIRST likes the money its generating, so they're not gonna put a stop to it. I just thought it was sad how the kids were getting used.
When I was at the Univ. of Iowa, I helped the local high school do FIRST for the first time. The students are given a $250 budget (which they're not supposed to exceed). So its a great engineering project - get a task done with a limited budget. And our kids got so much out of it! But they had no chance of actually being competative. How are we supposed to compete against JPL engineers, for cryin out loud? The motto we adopted was, "Early elimination = more time in Disney World."
If you've got a project due, you want to use the tools that help you complete the project in the shortest amount of time. I like IDEs cause they help you do a lot of the little things that make coding go quicker - auto indenting, parens matching, debugging, etc.
Granted, Visual Studio may not be the best tool to learn C++, for example. But it would be a major pain in the ass to write a decent windoze app with notepad.
Of course, there is a compromise between a lightweight text editor and an IDE -- its called Emacs. Never leave home without it.
So when you look at the subject that way, its a bit easier to see why Windows has been so prevalent. Granted, it may not be as {cool, fun, stable,...} as linux, but the language you use to communicate with windows is pretty easy to learn. Additionally, most windows programs look pretty similar, so you don't have to learn a whole new language to use them - more you have to learn a new dialect. I think with Linux, you don't get that standardization, so learning each program can be tougher.
Suck.com basically said as much in this article. Here's the slashdot reference.
So if you look at it with this perspective, the key aspect is that the user is able to effectively communicate their desired command in a form which the system can also understand. So the whole interface issue is one of translation. The only key ingredients to an interface is that the human and the computer can understand each other, and that each party in the conversation can effectively say "yes, I can do that" or "no, I can't do that" or "what the hell are you talking about?"
I'm almost surprised this question made it as an "Ask Slashdot." I mean, there at least 3 separate courses at the University of Iowa on interface design. I'm sure its similar at other Universities. And there are countless books on interfaces, whatever. This is a pretty broad f'n questions - how are we supposed to generate any real insight on it here?
Some people at Carnegie Mellon University are also investigating the social consequences of net usage ( check out the HomeNet project here). They have also concluded that Internet usage leads to less interpersonal physical contact. They also observed that interpersonal communication is a stronger driver for internet usage than than entertainment or information searching.
I think that linux gaming is now where PC gaming was in the late 80's/early 90's - B.W95 (Before Windows 95). Too many different computers, graphics possiblities, etc. Microsoft came and established a standard API for graphics, sound, and PC games took off. I think SGI open sourcing OpenGL will really help establish a graphics standard for linux games.
Just give it time...
I was a linux newbie when I set up my 3c905...it was a pain in the ass! The number of people asking similar questions on dejanews seem to concur. I got it to work after an evening of netsearching for answers. I haven't been terribly impressed with its performance. Downloading large files (eg q3arena) always caused it to choke up - I ended up rebooting the machine several times because of this. Don't know if it was a net card problem or a netscape problem. I can't really make any strong suggestions about whats better...but I wanted to share my experience. Another card might give you a better OOB experience.