Agreed about Photoshop and GIMP - if either was an Apple product, it would have one button that did the most common thing that their research says people do with the software, and anybody who needs to do something with more control would be directed to the Adobe download in the Apple store.
In 1991, there was a text editor in DOS called Brief, by a company named Underware. It was fast, it was powerful, nobody has done "block copy and paste" (where you can select a rectangle of text and insert it anywhere in the middle of lines) since then in a way that was so easy to use - it was all done with one modifier key commands like Alt-G Ctrl-V etc. Newer interfaces are using more and more modifier keys, and combining it with mouse manipulation and they just suck by comparison.
I used to work in customized environments (text editors, Autocad, etc.) and it did make my work faster - on my desk.
Thing is, I don't only work on my desk, I also work with other people on their desks, especially when they are working with my code/designs/documents/whatever. So, in those environments, it's nice to have the same interface as them so you can tell them quickly and easily how to get around in your stuff - otherwise you stand there like a moron mumbling "if I were back on my machine I could do this in half a second..."
Isn't Unity a fairly styled / stylish environment? Or, is it still "ugly" because it hasn't completely transformed itself into a tablet full of quivering icons yet?
More and more of them are driving their designs with "big data" often gathered "in the cloud" - they'll still read their feng-shui training manuals under the covers with an (oh so stylish) itty bitty book light, but they'll be in your face with pie charts, graphs, and statistics to back up their arbitrary decrees.
A lot of "new UI/UX people" seem to be following wherever a tiny number of people from very famous tech firms lead.
This is the world of fashion in general - trend spotters, hoping to be able to call out "the next big thing" before it hits often enough to make a name for themselves.
It really has no place in UX, unless you're designing a trendy product like Candy Crush.
What this adds is that when some moron pilots a drone approximately matching the description of yours into traffic on the interstate near your house causing a fatality accident, they'll be knocking on your door, and you'd better hope you've got an airtight alibi.
I flew Paris to TelAviv in the late 90s, El Al security exceeded anything I've ever experienced. They were very polite and professional, and they operated at my convenience, came to sit with me in the lounge while I waited for the plane to arrive - two of them cross-examined me for about 5 minutes, it was grueling after flying trans-atlantic, my personal clock was at about 3 or 4AM. They certainly weren't the asshats that I've met in US TSA, but they were definitely doing intensive psych profiling.
Plus, I'm not jewish, so.... I eventually terminated the interview with a "visible breaking point" where I pointed over at my jewish boss and his wife and said "I'm with them..."
Sounds like he answered the bomb accusation with a joke, which anyone who has cleared airport TSA in the last 20 years knows is a detainable offence.
72 hours, for a 12 year old making a joke, I doubt any of the perps in this case will do time, but I do see a large settlement in the family's future - complete with a gag order and empty promises to expunge the event from the record.
It's funny how that affects some people and not others. My grandmother was a hairdresser for 50 years, owned her own shop and was still giving "permanent waves" the year she retired (aged 75), she lived on to 96 years old and the main problem she had from the hairdressing was bursitis in the shoulders.
Of course, her mother also lived into her late '90s and chewed tobacco all her life.
The point where you probably should have stopped drinking from your well was probably a few months after the first pesticide use started.
In Florida, there's a huge difference between shallow wells and the deep aquifers. In the 1950s, when my father was growing up, all you had to do was dig a hole 12" deep and most days there would be clean drinking water there. When I was growing up in the 1970s, the shallow water table had dropped from just below the surface to 10 to 20' down, but you wouldn't drink shallow water anymore because it was all so polluted by then. If you were going to drink well water, you wanted to taste the sulfur in it to be sure it was coming from the deep (160'+) aquifer.
Now, there's talk of "recharging" the deep aquifers with river water - what could possibly go wrong with that scheme?
Replace socks with toe ring, or any other wearable item that would be in view when you're watching Netflix.
Essentially, they've made an easy to use keep-alive remote control - I watch on a PC that has a VNC server, so I can VNC in through my phone and tap the "I'm still watching" prompts without leaving my chair, but that's a PITA - even though it only happens every episode or two. By making the accelerometer much easier to use than launching and manipulating a VNC client, they can increase the frequency of "are you there?" prompts. I suppose this could also be done in a cellphone - an app that flashes the alert LED bright red after 5 minutes without motion, then after 1 minute of flashing sends a command to Netflix to pause playback.
Yeah, especially at continental shelf depth, cause who doesn't like either a) breathing a heli-ox mixture, or b) living inside a pressure vessel that could violently implode from the smallest leak.
Pretty sure you'd need, or at least want, some Earth supplied support - at least occasionally. Running a slave colony would be a quick way to be sanctioned into isolation.
Even in desert and Antartica, you've got meddling politicians telling you what you can and cannot do, hundreds of years of tradition, laws, sacred this and that, not to mention all the wonderful endangered species that everyone is always trying to protect.
Killjoy... actually, in a practical sense, we've got fission reactors that work just fine, even in space based applications - it's more of a political thing why they're not used more often.
As posted above, the loop doesn't have to be planet-circling, can be a series of smaller, MRI like super-conducting magnets.
Makes good sense, just not as grand as a planet girdling loop. Would definitely make dealing with trenches and mountains easier, and brings superconductors back into the realm of practicality. For that matter, we could just start manufacturing MRI magnets and juice them up one at a time - no current required, just environmental maintenance on the superconductor - I think most new ones work using liquid nitrogen only now (most used to use liquid Helium, I think - quite a bit more complex.)
The main thing that's wrong with the Earth is all the people - those pesky creatures with "equal rights" to your own.
Mars would offer plenty of living space with little competition from "equal righted" neighbors, but I think I'd want to work on the biosphere for a few hundred years, at least, before staying there year round.
A functioning Stellarator or any other working fusion system would cure most of the radiation problem (make your own magnetic field).
I've been wondering about the practicality of laying a planet-circling coil, superconducting would be nice too, for the purposes of covering the whole planet with a sufficient field. Would be easier to try on the Moon first.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed about Photoshop and GIMP - if either was an Apple product, it would have one button that did the most common thing that their research says people do with the software, and anybody who needs to do something with more control would be directed to the Adobe download in the Apple store.
In 1991, there was a text editor in DOS called Brief, by a company named Underware. It was fast, it was powerful, nobody has done "block copy and paste" (where you can select a rectangle of text and insert it anywhere in the middle of lines) since then in a way that was so easy to use - it was all done with one modifier key commands like Alt-G Ctrl-V etc. Newer interfaces are using more and more modifier keys, and combining it with mouse manipulation and they just suck by comparison.
I used to work in customized environments (text editors, Autocad, etc.) and it did make my work faster - on my desk.
Thing is, I don't only work on my desk, I also work with other people on their desks, especially when they are working with my code/designs/documents/whatever. So, in those environments, it's nice to have the same interface as them so you can tell them quickly and easily how to get around in your stuff - otherwise you stand there like a moron mumbling "if I were back on my machine I could do this in half a second..."
Isn't Unity a fairly styled / stylish environment? Or, is it still "ugly" because it hasn't completely transformed itself into a tablet full of quivering icons yet?
More and more of them are driving their designs with "big data" often gathered "in the cloud" - they'll still read their feng-shui training manuals under the covers with an (oh so stylish) itty bitty book light, but they'll be in your face with pie charts, graphs, and statistics to back up their arbitrary decrees.
Sorry, you could replace "Millennials" with people of that age from any generation and your rant still works.
Wheel keeps a turnin' . . .
A lot of "new UI/UX people" seem to be following wherever a tiny number of people from very famous tech firms lead.
This is the world of fashion in general - trend spotters, hoping to be able to call out "the next big thing" before it hits often enough to make a name for themselves.
It really has no place in UX, unless you're designing a trendy product like Candy Crush.
What this adds is that when some moron pilots a drone approximately matching the description of yours into traffic on the interstate near your house causing a fatality accident, they'll be knocking on your door, and you'd better hope you've got an airtight alibi.
I flew Paris to TelAviv in the late 90s, El Al security exceeded anything I've ever experienced. They were very polite and professional, and they operated at my convenience, came to sit with me in the lounge while I waited for the plane to arrive - two of them cross-examined me for about 5 minutes, it was grueling after flying trans-atlantic, my personal clock was at about 3 or 4AM. They certainly weren't the asshats that I've met in US TSA, but they were definitely doing intensive psych profiling.
Plus, I'm not jewish, so.... I eventually terminated the interview with a "visible breaking point" where I pointed over at my jewish boss and his wife and said "I'm with them..."
I hope you realize that by perps, I mean the fine upstanding, overzealous racist officers and judicial officials who did this.
Sounds like he answered the bomb accusation with a joke, which anyone who has cleared airport TSA in the last 20 years knows is a detainable offence.
72 hours, for a 12 year old making a joke, I doubt any of the perps in this case will do time, but I do see a large settlement in the family's future - complete with a gag order and empty promises to expunge the event from the record.
It's funny how that affects some people and not others. My grandmother was a hairdresser for 50 years, owned her own shop and was still giving "permanent waves" the year she retired (aged 75), she lived on to 96 years old and the main problem she had from the hairdressing was bursitis in the shoulders.
Of course, her mother also lived into her late '90s and chewed tobacco all her life.
The point where you probably should have stopped drinking from your well was probably a few months after the first pesticide use started.
In Florida, there's a huge difference between shallow wells and the deep aquifers. In the 1950s, when my father was growing up, all you had to do was dig a hole 12" deep and most days there would be clean drinking water there. When I was growing up in the 1970s, the shallow water table had dropped from just below the surface to 10 to 20' down, but you wouldn't drink shallow water anymore because it was all so polluted by then. If you were going to drink well water, you wanted to taste the sulfur in it to be sure it was coming from the deep (160'+) aquifer.
Now, there's talk of "recharging" the deep aquifers with river water - what could possibly go wrong with that scheme?
Try Raspbian instead of Ubuntu on the Pi - then add systemd for even faster boot times.
Alternatively, try putting Ubuntu on the Apple watch and report back how fast it is then.
I can imagine being jarred awake by the sudden cessation of audio...
Then reverse the algorithm. If you behave randomly at all times, there's a cell waiting for you at local lockup - I think they have Netflix there too.
Replace socks with toe ring, or any other wearable item that would be in view when you're watching Netflix.
Essentially, they've made an easy to use keep-alive remote control - I watch on a PC that has a VNC server, so I can VNC in through my phone and tap the "I'm still watching" prompts without leaving my chair, but that's a PITA - even though it only happens every episode or two. By making the accelerometer much easier to use than launching and manipulating a VNC client, they can increase the frequency of "are you there?" prompts. I suppose this could also be done in a cellphone - an app that flashes the alert LED bright red after 5 minutes without motion, then after 1 minute of flashing sends a command to Netflix to pause playback.
But, accelerometers on socks are much nerdier.
Yeah, especially at continental shelf depth, cause who doesn't like either a) breathing a heli-ox mixture, or b) living inside a pressure vessel that could violently implode from the smallest leak.
Pretty sure you'd need, or at least want, some Earth supplied support - at least occasionally. Running a slave colony would be a quick way to be sanctioned into isolation.
Even in desert and Antartica, you've got meddling politicians telling you what you can and cannot do, hundreds of years of tradition, laws, sacred this and that, not to mention all the wonderful endangered species that everyone is always trying to protect.
Killjoy... actually, in a practical sense, we've got fission reactors that work just fine, even in space based applications - it's more of a political thing why they're not used more often.
As posted above, the loop doesn't have to be planet-circling, can be a series of smaller, MRI like super-conducting magnets.
Makes good sense, just not as grand as a planet girdling loop. Would definitely make dealing with trenches and mountains easier, and brings superconductors back into the realm of practicality. For that matter, we could just start manufacturing MRI magnets and juice them up one at a time - no current required, just environmental maintenance on the superconductor - I think most new ones work using liquid nitrogen only now (most used to use liquid Helium, I think - quite a bit more complex.)
The main thing that's wrong with the Earth is all the people - those pesky creatures with "equal rights" to your own.
Mars would offer plenty of living space with little competition from "equal righted" neighbors, but I think I'd want to work on the biosphere for a few hundred years, at least, before staying there year round.
Well said, Fred.
A functioning Stellarator or any other working fusion system would cure most of the radiation problem (make your own magnetic field).
I've been wondering about the practicality of laying a planet-circling coil, superconducting would be nice too, for the purposes of covering the whole planet with a sufficient field. Would be easier to try on the Moon first.