Jeez, that's a weird writeup. Anyway, Maya already works really well with two handed input: it was designed that way. I remember watching a technical demonstration video back when Maya was still going to be the next version of Sketch, and they were shewing off the chording and hotkey systems that survive to this day. Really a fabulously efficient program... lots of opportunities for constructive muscle memory, which isn't the sort of thing that comes up a lot in software beyond learning to touchtype.
I would much rather keep one hand on my (wacom tablet) three button mouse and another on the keyboard where all my hotkeys are than only have another three buttons under my left hand.
Actually, part of the video had someone -- Mr. Marking Menus himself, Bill Buxton -- demonstrating simultaneous 16-button puck and stylus input on a graphics tablet, using chording on the puck to manipulate the view and call up menus. That looked awesome. Just like holding a piece of paper with your left hand while drawing with your right.
I don't see this as "IBM Giving Up Hard Drives Forever", not at all. Imation is more closely tied to 3M than this new company is to IBM, but it's certainly not as vaprous and useless as, say, Taligent.
-sn
I would suspect that ST:TNG falls under the category you describe as etc.. Seriously, though, I don't think using region incoding on a television series invalidates the MPAA's argument - it doesn't stop people from still using the encoding to "protect" movies.
This should not be viewed as an endorsement of idiotic abuses of media rights.
*n
I think it's interesting that Prof. Buxton, one of the most innovative researchers into human interfaces, is one of the people cited in this article. He's responsible for some very interesting work... er, that I can't properly cite because I'm not sure where to cite it from. But he's done very good work in making, say, Alias | Wavefront's software be very usable by artists. Technically minded artists, to be sure, but there is a level of intuitive access to the program that just isn't found in a lot of other packages.
Just wondering what this is going to do in terms of upper-atmosphere pollution.
I mean, commercial jets are bad enough. Maybe we need to put the restriction back as an environmental law. Maybe we need to make strict emission quota laws for the booster rockets and suchlike that will be used.
Maybe through competition and public outrage combined, the private companies will develop not-as-bad methods of propulsion (slingshots!).
Probably not.
*sn U is a Burmese apellation equivalent to Mister. Nix is latin for snow. UNIX means Mister Snow.
My main concern is - how many mana slots are there? Are they linked? What's the AP growth like? 'Cause unless these are really great, I'm holding onto my Ragnarok.
I think my favorite thing about this book that I haven't started reading yet is that if you read it online you agree to:
Feel free to read, save, print, copy and share among your friends in the format as it appears here on screen. When you purchase the printed book, you will find the format much nicer and easier to read. By proceeding, you are agreeing to these terms.
If I don't find it easier to read do I have to... I don't know, give it back?!
Everything I said above, I believe. But it should not be taken to mean that these diseases do not have physical origins. Depression is a chemical imbalance, yes. Sadly, and rather ineffectively, the current vogue is to medicate. Previously, and as I hinted, it was to lobotomize. I can only hope that the next "fad" treatment will be something more... useful.
I have several dear friends who are crippled by either depression or by the anti-depression drugs they take. But as far as I can tell, their misery is mostly through having been convinced by the medical establishment that there is no hope for them except for drugs. One said "I've only got a few more kinds of drugs left before they put me on electroshock." How can depression be an accurate diagnosis if none of the treatments work? So much wasted potential. This system perpetrates crimes without the slightest concern for its victims - those who live near the edge.
Anyway, I wanted to say this in the pinkerton article comments - what students should be doing is pressing charges of assault. There is no way they can lose these cases (except maybe the first few... which is an awful thought), and if enough people start dragging it into court, the schools will recognize that this culture of tolerated violence is badly fucked.
I'm still suprised I managed to get away with things like leaping on the principal from a high-up window well, or singing loudly during math class... but then again, Canada is "more enlightened"... for now.
*Nick Wolfe I am weeping because this stupid planet sucks. AT LEAST THEY'RE NOT STILL LOBOTOMIZING US.
I'm wondering how much this is a product of SGI's recent fixation on linux support, trickling down to A|W, or if this is perhaps the result of those huge petitions to get A|W to port ANYTHING of Maya to linux?
As for the softi/maya wars, there's a reason Final Fantasy the Movie is being done in Maya...
*snicker (ps i want to work for A|W! They get Aeron chairs!) (pps i'd add links but i'm LAZY today)
I bet given time we could come up with marginally reasonable algorithms to transform the cypher into, say, the receipt for Toklas Brownies , the Book of the Subgenius, my home phone number... after all, it could be compressed as well as encrypted. Without any idea of what the plaintext could even BE (what language? what alphabet?) how can we expect to know we have the right answer when we get one?
Now there's an idea for an encryption algorithm, one that yields a false plaintext if an incorrect key is used...
Hey, and does anyone care about Negroponte's challenge from the Being Digital hardcover? (Oooh triple encrypted! It's probably just "Yay! Digital!" over and over...)
What a dreadful thought! Let's all pretend I didn't mention that. I don't want to be part of something so easily quantifiable. Mismeasure of Geek, I suppose...
While University will get you credentials, you've got to do things... on your own.
Well, I do agree with that quite a bit - I'm not really at university for the credentials. I'm here because it's a very good opportunity to talk to people in the field, in person anyway. (/. is a good place for that too, but different) Mostly I'm interested in university because I like being given assignments, ha. As far as "delving" goes, I am doing that - but because I don't have any concrete results (other than a working computer?) I assumed that the effects were not sufficient.
On reflection, I suspect that this apprehension of mine was inappropriate - perhaps I am more of a geek than I thought I was? That is certainly a flattering thought. (I do have a wearable Pilot!) Perhaps what I need, in this university mentality (ugh) is some sort of test to see if I can "hack" it as a geek...
Any suggestions? Maybe this would make a good "Ask Slashdot"
*N and if worst comes to worst, I'd make an excellent, though expensive, reference manual...
At what point am I going to stop just reading about the culture and the people (else) and all the neat toys and actually become a geek myself? This sort of work depresses me in a big way - I have nothing to show for all the effort I put into learning the systems and languages. Sure, I'm only 2nd year university, and I never even thought much about writing software before last year (except in vague fantasies)! At the same time, though, I think reading things like this extensively before even starting any of my planned projects (and I've been planning and planning!) will ultimately help me do the right thing in all the things I do. One can hope, anyway!
The Mac OS has always been for me a tool of maximum efficiency - it's about as clean and fast a GUI as one could hope for, mostly thanks to its carefully thought out placement of icons, menus, buttons and so forth. Linux - tho' I've not been working on it for too long - is efficient as any unixesque system through the CLI (and I'm sure enjoying Enlightenment!)
I've been working on macs almost my whole life, and love them. But because the sort of work I do has been changing, I've found a text-based interface more efficient. My mac advocacy hasn't slackened though!
I thought the Salon article made a good point, though - that (and I am paraphrasing cruelly to make my point) people become advocates of the system they find the most efficient. Personally I wish that Alias | Wavefront would write a window manager - Maya is simply the best ``OS'' I've ever used. Irix is fun, too. *N
What this reminds me of, which scares me...
on
Jesux is a Bad Pun
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure of the overall notoriety of this work, but I must admit that it has thoroughly scared the dickens out of me several times - and it gives a much more ``plausible'' justification for the UN*X nomenclature than the Jesux site. The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre
Congratulations, I have become totally paranoid. The last few dozen ``hey come look at this'' stories seem to have been drawn directly from my browser cache, not to mention that I was going through grouse the other day and was terrified at how many of those things I already had bookmarked. Oh well, at least my links page on my website (coming soon) can be a bit shorter then.
Slashdot Mirror
Jeez, that's a weird writeup. Anyway, Maya already works really well with two handed input: it was designed that way. I remember watching a technical demonstration video back when Maya was still going to be the next version of Sketch, and they were shewing off the chording and hotkey systems that survive to this day. Really a fabulously efficient program... lots of opportunities for constructive muscle memory, which isn't the sort of thing that comes up a lot in software beyond learning to touchtype. I would much rather keep one hand on my (wacom tablet) three button mouse and another on the keyboard where all my hotkeys are than only have another three buttons under my left hand. Actually, part of the video had someone -- Mr. Marking Menus himself, Bill Buxton -- demonstrating simultaneous 16-button puck and stylus input on a graphics tablet, using chording on the puck to manipulate the view and call up menus. That looked awesome. Just like holding a piece of paper with your left hand while drawing with your right.
Try using a better ColorSync profile -- it helped me a lot.
By "oni/halo" category, do you mean "Bungie game"?
Stanislaw Lem's "The Chain of Chance" deals with just about this very sort of thing, actually. Emergent properties of large populations, more, though.
*nick
I don't see this as "IBM Giving Up Hard Drives Forever", not at all. Imation is more closely tied to 3M than this new company is to IBM, but it's certainly not as vaprous and useless as, say, Taligent.
-sn
Oh please tell me that was on purpose! I'm going to split in two from laughing.
*n
ps you're probably right.
I would suspect that ST:TNG falls under the category you describe as etc.. Seriously, though, I don't think using region incoding on a television series invalidates the MPAA's argument - it doesn't stop people from still using the encoding to "protect" movies.
This should not be viewed as an endorsement of idiotic abuses of media rights.
*n
How about Wolfram i.e. tungsten?
on topic: tweakbox is a good canuckian supplier for things like the Lian Li cases.
I think it's interesting that Prof. Buxton, one of the most innovative researchers into human interfaces, is one of the people cited in this article. He's responsible for some very interesting work... er, that I can't properly cite because I'm not sure where to cite it from.
But he's done very good work in making, say, Alias | Wavefront's software be very usable by artists. Technically minded artists, to be sure, but there is a level of intuitive access to the program that just isn't found in a lot of other packages.
*n
"I've got to go shit into the webserver to fix some shit."
"Here, let me shit onto your desktop and try some shit out."
*sn
ro da poi ratcu zo'u da pensi zmado do
I mean, commercial jets are bad enough. Maybe we need to put the restriction back as an environmental law. Maybe we need to make strict emission quota laws for the booster rockets and suchlike that will be used.
Maybe through competition and public outrage combined, the private companies will develop not-as-bad methods of propulsion (slingshots!).
Probably not.
*sn
U is a Burmese apellation equivalent to Mister.
Nix is latin for snow.
UNIX means Mister Snow.
My main concern is - how many mana slots are there? Are they linked? What's the AP growth like? 'Cause unless these are really great, I'm holding onto my Ragnarok.
*N
If I don't find it easier to read do I have to... I don't know, give it back?!
*Nick
But it should not be taken to mean that these diseases do not have physical origins. Depression is a chemical imbalance, yes. Sadly, and rather ineffectively, the current vogue is to medicate. Previously, and as I hinted, it was to lobotomize. I can only hope that the next "fad" treatment will be something more... useful.
Anyone read Greg Egan's short story Reasons to be Cheerful? Hm.
Maybe we should call it "brain error".
*Nick Wolfe
dry eyes now, but still a heavy heart.
and no, I don't want to talk about my mental history, thankyou.
I have several dear friends who are crippled by either depression or by the anti-depression drugs they take. But as far as I can tell, their misery is mostly through having been convinced by the medical establishment that there is no hope for them except for drugs. One said "I've only got a few more kinds of drugs left before they put me on electroshock." How can depression be an accurate diagnosis if none of the treatments work?
So much wasted potential. This system perpetrates crimes without the slightest concern for its victims - those who live near the edge.
Anyway, I wanted to say this in the pinkerton article comments - what students should be doing is pressing charges of assault. There is no way they can lose these cases (except maybe the first few... which is an awful thought), and if enough people start dragging it into court, the schools will recognize that this culture of tolerated violence is badly fucked.
I'm still suprised I managed to get away with things like leaping on the principal from a high-up window well, or singing loudly during math class... but then again, Canada is "more enlightened"... for now.
*Nick Wolfe
I am weeping because this stupid planet sucks.
AT LEAST THEY'RE NOT STILL LOBOTOMIZING US.
I mean, after dropping the # of satellites from 77 to 66, they really should have been calling it Dysprosium. But would they listen to me? NO.
I have no idea why that bothers me so much.
*snicker
(sour grapes maybe?)
I'm wondering how much this is a product of SGI's recent fixation on linux support, trickling down to A|W, or if this is perhaps the result of those huge petitions to get A|W to port ANYTHING of Maya to linux?
As for the softi/maya wars, there's a reason Final Fantasy the Movie is being done in Maya...
*snicker
(ps i want to work for A|W! They get Aeron chairs!)
(pps i'd add links but i'm LAZY today)
I bet given time we could come up with marginally reasonable algorithms to transform the cypher into, say, the receipt for Toklas Brownies , the Book of the Subgenius, my home phone number... after all, it could be compressed as well as encrypted. Without any idea of what the plaintext could even BE (what language? what alphabet?) how can we expect to know we have the right answer when we get one?
Now there's an idea for an encryption algorithm, one that yields a false plaintext if an incorrect key is used...
Hey, and does anyone care about Negroponte's challenge from the Being Digital hardcover? (Oooh triple encrypted! It's probably just "Yay! Digital!" over and over...)
yeah, ok. back to work
*snicker
What a dreadful thought! Let's all pretend I didn't mention that. I don't want to be part of something so easily quantifiable.
Mismeasure of Geek, I suppose...
*N
While University will get you credentials, you've got to do things... on your own.
Well, I do agree with that quite a bit - I'm not really at university for the credentials. I'm here because it's a very good opportunity to talk to people in the field, in person anyway. (/. is a good place for that too, but different)
Mostly I'm interested in university because I like being given assignments, ha.
As far as "delving" goes, I am doing that - but because I don't have any concrete results (other than a working computer?) I assumed that the effects were not sufficient.
On reflection, I suspect that this apprehension of mine was inappropriate - perhaps I am more of a geek than I thought I was? That is certainly a flattering thought. (I do have a wearable Pilot!)
Perhaps what I need, in this university mentality (ugh) is some sort of test to see if I can "hack" it as a geek...
Any suggestions? Maybe this would make a good "Ask Slashdot"
*N
and if worst comes to worst, I'd make an excellent, though expensive, reference manual...
At what point am I going to stop just reading about the culture and the people (else) and all the neat toys and actually become a geek myself? This sort of work depresses me in a big way - I have nothing to show for all the effort I put into learning the systems and languages. Sure, I'm only 2nd year university, and I never even thought much about writing software before last year (except in vague fantasies)!
At the same time, though, I think reading things like this extensively before even starting any of my planned projects (and I've been planning and planning!) will ultimately help me do the right thing in all the things I do.
One can hope, anyway!
*N
The Mac OS has always been for me a tool of maximum efficiency - it's about as clean and fast a GUI as one could hope for, mostly thanks to its carefully thought out placement of icons, menus, buttons and so forth. Linux - tho' I've not been working on it for too long - is efficient as any unixesque system through the CLI (and I'm sure enjoying Enlightenment!)
I've been working on macs almost my whole life, and love them. But because the sort of work I do has been changing, I've found a text-based interface more efficient. My mac advocacy hasn't slackened though!
I thought the Salon article made a good point, though - that (and I am paraphrasing cruelly to make my point) people become advocates of the system they find the most efficient. Personally I wish that Alias | Wavefront would write a window manager - Maya is simply the best ``OS'' I've ever used. Irix is fun, too.
*N
I'm not sure of the overall notoriety of this work, but I must admit that it has thoroughly scared the dickens out of me several times - and it gives a much more ``plausible'' justification for the UN*X nomenclature than the Jesux site.
The Xenix Chainsaw Massacre
*N
Congratulations, I have become totally paranoid. The last few dozen ``hey come look at this'' stories seem to have been drawn directly from my browser cache, not to mention that I was going through grouse the other day and was terrified at how many of those things I already had bookmarked.
Oh well, at least my links page on my website (coming soon) can be a bit shorter then.