If you want to know why nobody is clamoring for this, go look up the term "false dichotomy". A forced choice between the lesser of two evils? SOPA, OPEN, it doesn't matter, they would both screw up the Internet as a forum for free and open communication.
Here, I'll give you a third option. To fit in with the other four letter words, let's call it NOPE. "No Online Piracy Enforcement." Let the big media companies continue their futile attempts to shut down the Internet, but the government should not lift a finger to help.
The student isn't paid to learn, the teacher is paid to teach. You have it backwards.
The professor is paid to present the information; the student pays for the opportunity to learn from an expert. As a student, it is your responsibility to study until you understand the material. University is about taking personal initiative in learning what the professors say is important. And while some of them are poor teachers, all professors were at one time undergraduates, and thus they tend to have a good idea about what you need to understand to be a master of a subject.
If you expect a professor to stuff your head with information without any effort on your part, then you do not understand how the learning process works. If you pay for a gym membership and personal instructor and then never do the exercises regularly and properly, you have no justification to whine that you didn't get your money's worth when you're still out of shape. Suck it up, and take initiative.
You could, right now, get on a bus and travel 3 states over, then jump on a train and go somewhere.
Tell that to someone from Hawaii or Alaska. I'm pretty sure both ship and airline passage require ID.
Regardless, my threshold of "starting to worry about police state" is when they start trying to stick cameras all over DC, or having permenant police checkpoints.
You haven't traveled on any interstate highways that happen to travel by the border with Mexico lately, have you. Try driving from Yuma to Los Angeles on I-8. You will encounter no less than TWO *permanent* US Border Patrol (DHS) checkpoints along the way, where you have to stop and provide identification in the form of a driver's license and submit to a search of your vehicle if they feel like it.
No, this isn't because the US-Mexico border magically moved north a few miles. You didn't cross an international border without realizing it. It's because DHS claims authority over areas 100 miles from all US borders, including sea borders. In this case, you must show papers to travel within the US... and it's not a small case, it's actually a very broadly applicable area.
Seriously man, are you trolling, or are you really THAT ignorant? The noose isn't getting any looser. Start worrying!
Well said. I don't envy your position. Progress can be slow in academia.
My own thesis advisor couldn't grok why I was using such an obscure tool, but when he requested I change citation formats with a week left and I delivered the change in half an hour I'd like to think he was impressed. Then I showed him how easy it was to create grant proposals that didn't look horrid. I probably didn't convert him from Word, but maybe he'll come around in a decade or so.
If it's any consolation, one of the senior faculty review members for my thesis was a LaTeX fan. He has enough clout that he can coerce his students into using it, and they all appreciate it once they get over that initial hump.
Actually I've found LaTeX better for collaborative documents than Word. I can use a version control system to do merges very easily if two people are working separately on changes to a tex document. Subversion and Git don't play nicely with (binary).doc files, and the document merge "feature" of Word always leaves me with hanging invisible style issues. It's inconsistent, it's opaque, and it looks ugly. WYSIWYG, but what you see isn't what's all there.
Tell your colleagues to give you a flat text file for their chapter or portion of the document. Use a substitution tool to change the quotation marks to TeX's admittedly awkward backtick and apostrophe notation, then \input the file into your main document. If they need to edit your text, the tex syntax is human-readable enough that they can ignore what they don't understand. Then demo for them how easy it is to switch between ACM and IEEE formats (or any format of your choice) by changing a single line at the top. LaTeX's learning curve is long, but it's not particularly steep; you can learn to do things like bold and italics and chapter headings as you need to. Citations are a little bit more advanced but most people quickly warm to the idea of never having to look up bibliography styles Ever Again.
Coder/geeks tend to appreciate the simplicity of getting output based ONLY on what's in the input file, but you can convince anyone who can appreciate the professional classiness of a consistent document style. I can't count the number of times I've tried to copy and paste from one Word doc to another (while retaining bold and italics) and royally screwed up the formatting somehow without being able to see and fix the problem. Of course if your coworkers regularly use Comic Sans then it's probably a lost cause.
Actually this isn't as important as you think. You can make ale with a lager yeast and lager with an ale yeast, it will just take longer and probably won't taste right. The temperature, however, is very important, because different yeasts prefer different temperatures. As it was explained to me, if the wrong temperature for the yeast is chosen either they won't multiply quickly enough and bacteria will overwhelm them, or they will start to consume the wrong sugars and produce bad things like fusel alcohols. (Random trivia: the name "fusel" comes from the German word for a bad brew.)
Grandparent's post is accurate because certain simple sugars settle to either the top or bottom of a fermentation vessel. The yeasts will tend to congregate where the food is, and the food depends on the temperature. Ales multiply quickly and ferment in the top of the vessel, while lagers go nuts at the bottom. Interestingly enough, most major beers nowadays labeled "lager" are actually ales. My guess is that since the sugars are completely homogeneous in space, assuming you can keep the bacteria out you might wind up with a very smooth beer as everything ferments evenly... but it will take longer to brew. Or you might end up with a completely awful beer.
To answer the GP's question, I guess this means that if it ferments further toward the enemy's gate, it's a lager?
I can understand that copy editing is a lot of work, and GOOD copy editing is somewhat expensive. But "preparation costs?" Completehorseshit. Typesetting is essentially free unless you need to make physical copies, and it's a job that should be done by the copy editor, not a separate engraver. This isn't the 20th century anymore.
(Of course that particular free typesetter only creates a PDF or Postscript file. I'm sure the excessive DRM schemes and platform-specific obfuscation cost several million dollars to create and apply.)
Promotion is a burden that's essentially already borne by Amazon et al. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for a book anywhere. Where the hell does that advertising budget go? My guess is the publishers are mainly competing with each other for "prime estate" on the front page, but many people-- specifically college students-- are more interested in finding a specific book than whatever is being promoted most heavily. Even private purchasers are loath to pay $5 for a book they may not enjoy at all; most purchases are via word of mouth or because the reader enjoyed reading previous works by that author. The search infrastructure allowing specific purchases is already there, if immature. A Pandora-style associative advertising system probably isn't far off. I don't see where the publishers fit into either of these cases.
So remind me again where the money is going, aside from lobbying against copyright reform?
I would think (and hope) that customers aren't asking for it because they're not aware of the risks, not because they don't care. Like when people stop using debit cards everywhere only after their card gets duplicated.
This.
Two things are necessary for privacy to really become important to the number crunchers. The first is a direct, measurable impact on individual privacy, which is arguably already happening. Whereas there was an implicit agreement of trust before, you now have essentially no privacy on social networking sites. The second is transparency, the wide exposure and dissemination that sleazy advertising companies have full access to YOUR stuff, and have no compunctions about sharing it.
You can tell who is on your side in this matter not by the first, but by the second metric. Everyone is swapping personal data like mad because there are no economic disincentives to do so-- in fact, there is a LOT of money in selling who your friends are and what things they like. The companies that want privacy to be taken seriously, like Google, are exposing the breaches themselves and letting loose the shitstorm, with the expectation that users will demand a reasonable privacy standard. The companies that don't give a flying monkey's butt, like Facebook, do their best to obscure what data is being shared and with whom. If you want to know which companies are really evil, look at who is trying to keep information from you.
There's one other good reason to use an electric car. Pure performance. Electric motors have more torque than any ICE of comparable weight. For people who drive cars for fun, not just utility, electric cars are the way to go.
You say it's better torque for comparable weight-- does that count the batteries? Didn't think so. That better torque curve is offset by significantly higher weight from the battery packs (translating to poor handling in corners). Electric cars also typically fit narrow economy tires (trading grip for higher efficiency) because they're supposed to be "green" and efficient and all that. You wind up with a car that wallows and lurches through a corner like a Buick.
I like the idea of electric motors, but the reality is not all rainbows and butterflies. Otherwise they'd be switching to pure electric engines for Le Mans.
Fairly intuitive??? It took me about 20 minutes just to figure out where the fucking bookmarks were. The minimalist interface implied quite firmly that there was simply no bookmark functionality. Oh I have to hit Ctrl-B to show them? What the hell is this, emacs? How is that intuitive?
No real Adblock Plus. (The Chrome plugin doesn't actually block anything, just hides it. And no, I don't want to roll my own hosts file. It's a pain in the ass, and not nearly as versatile.) No CookieCuller. The tabs bar doesn't even scroll, it just makes existing tabs smaller and smaller as you add more. Unfortunately Google doesn't seem to care about fixing any of the things people have complained about.
Quite often the write-once nature of optical disks is a positive. Burn an OS install disc once, finalize the disc, and run a verification on a separate computer. You can be reasonably certain the install is "clean", and it can't really be tampered with. But if you instead put that installer on flash media, what's to keep compromised software from later rewriting the bootloader or modifying the installer in some way?
Systems do get rooted, and sometimes reinstalls from known clean media are necessary. If you reinstall from compromised media, you are actually worse off, because you get a false sense of security. Unfortunately most USB drives still don't have a read/write physical switch. Even if they did, I'd be reluctant to use them in some CYA environments; I can prove that my burned DVD of Ubuntu LTS could not have been modified after the disc was finalized. Can you say the same for your USB media? Same goes for backups. I love USB flash for its convenience, but it is actually a disadvantage in this situation.
If you're going to do that, then you might as well just make an intelligent crypto token that generates a sequence of numbers according to some known algorithm. The device should have a set of buttons (akin to a small PIN pad) where the user enters a known sequence of buttons on the device itself. Online bank software either queries the device directly as USB (which may introduce other security issues) or has the user enter a set of numbers from an onboard display, in addition to their username and password. A single PIN entry allows a single login session. For extra security have the user press a "confirm" button on the device and perform another verification every time money is transferred or other sensitive operations take place.
Prevents access via software keyloggers, because the buttons are on the device itself. Provides two-factor authentication, making phishing attacks a little bit tougher if done correctly. Should be reasonably cheap. And it's a lot more convenient than booting into another OS to do your banking.
> 1. You say each LED is not collimated or directional but then you mention a microlens system. What does this microlens do, if not collimate?
Think. Why are lasers of such importance? Why can't we just use LEDs with mirrors and lenses to accomplish the same thing as lasers in optical drives? The reasons here are very similar. There will be leakage, there will be diffraction, and the light won't focus cleanly on a single region of the retina.
> 2. Contact lenses move with the eye.
That's exactly the problem. When your eyes move the patterns from the outside world "move" across the retina, and the visual-optical response system can function properly. This set of lights is stuck to the front of your eyeball, so the light emitted by the LED array does not move. The way to solve this is to have some very intelligent circuitry that can pan the LED patterns on the display along with the eye movements.
Normal contact lenses do not produce light. They act as a surface to modify the shape of the cornea in order to fix aberrations in the lens system. (The lens inside your eye is one source of refraction, but the boundary of your cornea with air is the other major one. This is why refractive eye surgery can correct your vision.)
There are several difficulties with this type of system that have prevented it from becoming a reality. Here are a few:
1. This is too close to the eye to be able to resolve focus in most situations. The light isn't collimated or directional (it appears to be focused with some sort of "microlens" system), so one LED turned on can spread out to stimulate a wide patch of retinal cells. With any regular LED system you'd just see a big blur. For information requiring a single light this isn't a problem (flash an LED on/off under certain conditions, or change the color) but anything more will require something which can project cleanly onto the retina. This is not a trivial problem. 2. The detail-oriented part of your retina is near the center, in a part called the fovea. While you think your vision is equally clear across a wide range, this is actually a trick of your brain. Your eyes are quite sensitive to rapid movement (low latency) on the edges, and more sensitive to detail in the center. When observing fine detail such as text, your eye actually "scans" an area and forms a larger, detailed image from the composite. Even if you could project the light cleanly 1:1 onto the retina, for any textual/HUD information you'd have to track eye motion very precisely and provide the information that the brain "expects" to see at each point. And again, the light has to be projected onto a very small part of the retina. 3. Retinal cells can get easily overstimulated, much like the burn-in on old CRTs. Even when looking at one object of normal intensity for any period of time longer than a few seconds, your eye will "jitter" back and forth. This involuntary movement is called nystagmus, and your brain compensates for it. (The rhythm changes when alcohol or drugs are ingested, which is why nystagmus tests are part of a DUI test.) Lab tests have shown that when the eye is physically restrained from moving in this way, objects effectively become invisible to the subject. So any 1:1 projection would also have to track nystagmus and then "jitter" in the same way as the eye, or the conveyed information would also become invisible.
Is it only me that I care for functionality and not decoration?
Two points: 1. You're not the average user. 2. Good UI design exposes functionality unobtrusively; it's not about airbrushed icons, and it's not just aesthetic.
Icon choice is only one minor facet of UI design. When you do File->Open in a native Windows application, it will probably look like this. The appearance may vary slightly, but for a given operating system revision the buttons are always the same size and in the same place. That is to say, the open file dialog is consistent across all applications, and a user familiar with the OS immediately recognizes it. Familiarity encourages your users by giving them a successful outcome essentially for free. "OK, I can do this." GTK+ on Windows ignores these conventions, giving the user something like this, or something like this. Though you might think they are stupid, 9 out of 10 users will be utterly baffled by the disparity here. They expect to see a Windows file open dialog, and they see... something completely new. They don't hate it because it doesn't look pretty, though I'm sure at some level that comes into play. More importantly they're thinking, "Oh crap, new interface! Man, if even opening a file takes this much thought and effort I hate to think what the rest of it is like." If they don't give up on the program outright, they'll have to spend an extra minute or two learning something they should already know how to do. Those are minutes they could have spent learning your program! Sit those same people in front of the same dialog in an Ubuntu context and they will chug right through it, mostly because they expect there to be a bit of a learning curve. But something as simple and ubiquitous as an open file dialog shouldn't present any learning curve. Do you see why?
If you're the only person using it, then you can design it using whatever interface you want. By definition you become familiar with it as you code it, and your interface will be designed around your logical conception of how the program works. I write most of my internal tools for CLI, just because it's easier. But if you ever expect non-programmers to use it, don't be surprised when they hate your program (and you) for making them jump through unnecessary hoops. "Why didn't the developers spend the time to do it right?" Things like whether or not the menus function as expected can make or break a project, and even an introductory UI and usability textbook should make this clear. Learning a proper cross platform kit takes a few hours at most, and makes everything feel loads more polished. And it will make your programs look a lot more professional if you ever decide to port them.
I'm struggling to think of a car analogy, but GTK+ applications under Windows remind me of a beat up car with primer gray doors, except that the seat belts pull up from the waist and buckle at the shoulder, and the ignition key turns the opposite direction. This is a trend we desperately need to change. The question isn't, "Does it function?" The question is, "Can the user operate it with minimal effort?"
Slashdot Mirror
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems." --Jamie Zawinski
If you want to know why nobody is clamoring for this, go look up the term "false dichotomy". A forced choice between the lesser of two evils? SOPA, OPEN, it doesn't matter, they would both screw up the Internet as a forum for free and open communication.
Here, I'll give you a third option. To fit in with the other four letter words, let's call it NOPE. "No Online Piracy Enforcement." Let the big media companies continue their futile attempts to shut down the Internet, but the government should not lift a finger to help.
The professor is paid to present the information; the student pays for the opportunity to learn from an expert. As a student, it is your responsibility to study until you understand the material. University is about taking personal initiative in learning what the professors say is important. And while some of them are poor teachers, all professors were at one time undergraduates, and thus they tend to have a good idea about what you need to understand to be a master of a subject.
If you expect a professor to stuff your head with information without any effort on your part, then you do not understand how the learning process works. If you pay for a gym membership and personal instructor and then never do the exercises regularly and properly, you have no justification to whine that you didn't get your money's worth when you're still out of shape. Suck it up, and take initiative.
But what do you do if the computer is headless?
Tell that to someone from Hawaii or Alaska. I'm pretty sure both ship and airline passage require ID.
You haven't traveled on any interstate highways that happen to travel by the border with Mexico lately, have you. Try driving from Yuma to Los Angeles on I-8. You will encounter no less than TWO *permanent* US Border Patrol (DHS) checkpoints along the way, where you have to stop and provide identification in the form of a driver's license and submit to a search of your vehicle if they feel like it.
No, this isn't because the US-Mexico border magically moved north a few miles. You didn't cross an international border without realizing it. It's because DHS claims authority over areas 100 miles from all US borders, including sea borders. In this case, you must show papers to travel within the US... and it's not a small case, it's actually a very broadly applicable area.
Seriously man, are you trolling, or are you really THAT ignorant? The noose isn't getting any looser. Start worrying!
Well said. I don't envy your position. Progress can be slow in academia.
My own thesis advisor couldn't grok why I was using such an obscure tool, but when he requested I change citation formats with a week left and I delivered the change in half an hour I'd like to think he was impressed. Then I showed him how easy it was to create grant proposals that didn't look horrid. I probably didn't convert him from Word, but maybe he'll come around in a decade or so.
If it's any consolation, one of the senior faculty review members for my thesis was a LaTeX fan. He has enough clout that he can coerce his students into using it, and they all appreciate it once they get over that initial hump.
Actually I've found LaTeX better for collaborative documents than Word. I can use a version control system to do merges very easily if two people are working separately on changes to a tex document. Subversion and Git don't play nicely with (binary) .doc files, and the document merge "feature" of Word always leaves me with hanging invisible style issues. It's inconsistent, it's opaque, and it looks ugly. WYSIWYG, but what you see isn't what's all there.
Tell your colleagues to give you a flat text file for their chapter or portion of the document. Use a substitution tool to change the quotation marks to TeX's admittedly awkward backtick and apostrophe notation, then \input the file into your main document. If they need to edit your text, the tex syntax is human-readable enough that they can ignore what they don't understand. Then demo for them how easy it is to switch between ACM and IEEE formats (or any format of your choice) by changing a single line at the top. LaTeX's learning curve is long, but it's not particularly steep; you can learn to do things like bold and italics and chapter headings as you need to. Citations are a little bit more advanced but most people quickly warm to the idea of never having to look up bibliography styles Ever Again.
Coder/geeks tend to appreciate the simplicity of getting output based ONLY on what's in the input file, but you can convince anyone who can appreciate the professional classiness of a consistent document style. I can't count the number of times I've tried to copy and paste from one Word doc to another (while retaining bold and italics) and royally screwed up the formatting somehow without being able to see and fix the problem. Of course if your coworkers regularly use Comic Sans then it's probably a lost cause.
Burma Shave?
Indeed, this story is a bit long in the tooth.
Actually this isn't as important as you think. You can make ale with a lager yeast and lager with an ale yeast, it will just take longer and probably won't taste right. The temperature, however, is very important, because different yeasts prefer different temperatures. As it was explained to me, if the wrong temperature for the yeast is chosen either they won't multiply quickly enough and bacteria will overwhelm them, or they will start to consume the wrong sugars and produce bad things like fusel alcohols. (Random trivia: the name "fusel" comes from the German word for a bad brew.)
Grandparent's post is accurate because certain simple sugars settle to either the top or bottom of a fermentation vessel. The yeasts will tend to congregate where the food is, and the food depends on the temperature. Ales multiply quickly and ferment in the top of the vessel, while lagers go nuts at the bottom. Interestingly enough, most major beers nowadays labeled "lager" are actually ales. My guess is that since the sugars are completely homogeneous in space, assuming you can keep the bacteria out you might wind up with a very smooth beer as everything ferments evenly... but it will take longer to brew. Or you might end up with a completely awful beer.
To answer the GP's question, I guess this means that if it ferments further toward the enemy's gate, it's a lager?
Clearly you're quite mad.
I can understand that copy editing is a lot of work, and GOOD copy editing is somewhat expensive. But "preparation costs?" Complete horseshit. Typesetting is essentially free unless you need to make physical copies, and it's a job that should be done by the copy editor, not a separate engraver. This isn't the 20th century anymore.
(Of course that particular free typesetter only creates a PDF or Postscript file. I'm sure the excessive DRM schemes and platform-specific obfuscation cost several million dollars to create and apply.)
Promotion is a burden that's essentially already borne by Amazon et al. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for a book anywhere. Where the hell does that advertising budget go? My guess is the publishers are mainly competing with each other for "prime estate" on the front page, but many people-- specifically college students-- are more interested in finding a specific book than whatever is being promoted most heavily. Even private purchasers are loath to pay $5 for a book they may not enjoy at all; most purchases are via word of mouth or because the reader enjoyed reading previous works by that author. The search infrastructure allowing specific purchases is already there, if immature. A Pandora-style associative advertising system probably isn't far off. I don't see where the publishers fit into either of these cases.
So remind me again where the money is going, aside from lobbying against copyright reform?
This.
Two things are necessary for privacy to really become important to the number crunchers. The first is a direct, measurable impact on individual privacy, which is arguably already happening. Whereas there was an implicit agreement of trust before, you now have essentially no privacy on social networking sites. The second is transparency, the wide exposure and dissemination that sleazy advertising companies have full access to YOUR stuff, and have no compunctions about sharing it.
You can tell who is on your side in this matter not by the first, but by the second metric. Everyone is swapping personal data like mad because there are no economic disincentives to do so-- in fact, there is a LOT of money in selling who your friends are and what things they like. The companies that want privacy to be taken seriously, like Google, are exposing the breaches themselves and letting loose the shitstorm, with the expectation that users will demand a reasonable privacy standard. The companies that don't give a flying monkey's butt, like Facebook, do their best to obscure what data is being shared and with whom. If you want to know which companies are really evil, look at who is trying to keep information from you.
You say it's better torque for comparable weight-- does that count the batteries? Didn't think so. That better torque curve is offset by significantly higher weight from the battery packs (translating to poor handling in corners). Electric cars also typically fit narrow economy tires (trading grip for higher efficiency) because they're supposed to be "green" and efficient and all that. You wind up with a car that wallows and lurches through a corner like a Buick.
I like the idea of electric motors, but the reality is not all rainbows and butterflies. Otherwise they'd be switching to pure electric engines for Le Mans.
Nah dude, \pr0n is a new escape character.
Fairly intuitive??? It took me about 20 minutes just to figure out where the fucking bookmarks were. The minimalist interface implied quite firmly that there was simply no bookmark functionality. Oh I have to hit Ctrl-B to show them? What the hell is this, emacs? How is that intuitive?
No real Adblock Plus. (The Chrome plugin doesn't actually block anything, just hides it. And no, I don't want to roll my own hosts file. It's a pain in the ass, and not nearly as versatile.) No CookieCuller. The tabs bar doesn't even scroll, it just makes existing tabs smaller and smaller as you add more. Unfortunately Google doesn't seem to care about fixing any of the things people have complained about.
Wait a sec... I think I recognize the background. Is that shot from inside Steward Mirror Lab?
Quite often the write-once nature of optical disks is a positive. Burn an OS install disc once, finalize the disc, and run a verification on a separate computer. You can be reasonably certain the install is "clean", and it can't really be tampered with. But if you instead put that installer on flash media, what's to keep compromised software from later rewriting the bootloader or modifying the installer in some way?
Systems do get rooted, and sometimes reinstalls from known clean media are necessary. If you reinstall from compromised media, you are actually worse off, because you get a false sense of security. Unfortunately most USB drives still don't have a read/write physical switch. Even if they did, I'd be reluctant to use them in some CYA environments; I can prove that my burned DVD of Ubuntu LTS could not have been modified after the disc was finalized. Can you say the same for your USB media? Same goes for backups. I love USB flash for its convenience, but it is actually a disadvantage in this situation.
>USB drive then?
If you're going to do that, then you might as well just make an intelligent crypto token that generates a sequence of numbers according to some known algorithm. The device should have a set of buttons (akin to a small PIN pad) where the user enters a known sequence of buttons on the device itself. Online bank software either queries the device directly as USB (which may introduce other security issues) or has the user enter a set of numbers from an onboard display, in addition to their username and password. A single PIN entry allows a single login session. For extra security have the user press a "confirm" button on the device and perform another verification every time money is transferred or other sensitive operations take place.
Prevents access via software keyloggers, because the buttons are on the device itself. Provides two-factor authentication, making phishing attacks a little bit tougher if done correctly. Should be reasonably cheap. And it's a lot more convenient than booting into another OS to do your banking.
> 1. You say each LED is not collimated or directional but then you mention a microlens system. What does this microlens do, if not collimate?
Think. Why are lasers of such importance? Why can't we just use LEDs with mirrors and lenses to accomplish the same thing as lasers in optical drives? The reasons here are very similar. There will be leakage, there will be diffraction, and the light won't focus cleanly on a single region of the retina.
> 2. Contact lenses move with the eye.
That's exactly the problem. When your eyes move the patterns from the outside world "move" across the retina, and the visual-optical response system can function properly. This set of lights is stuck to the front of your eyeball, so the light emitted by the LED array does not move. The way to solve this is to have some very intelligent circuitry that can pan the LED patterns on the display along with the eye movements.
Normal contact lenses do not produce light. They act as a surface to modify the shape of the cornea in order to fix aberrations in the lens system. (The lens inside your eye is one source of refraction, but the boundary of your cornea with air is the other major one. This is why refractive eye surgery can correct your vision.)
Does this make more sense?
There are several difficulties with this type of system that have prevented it from becoming a reality. Here are a few:
1. This is too close to the eye to be able to resolve focus in most situations. The light isn't collimated or directional (it appears to be focused with some sort of "microlens" system), so one LED turned on can spread out to stimulate a wide patch of retinal cells. With any regular LED system you'd just see a big blur. For information requiring a single light this isn't a problem (flash an LED on/off under certain conditions, or change the color) but anything more will require something which can project cleanly onto the retina. This is not a trivial problem.
2. The detail-oriented part of your retina is near the center, in a part called the fovea. While you think your vision is equally clear across a wide range, this is actually a trick of your brain. Your eyes are quite sensitive to rapid movement (low latency) on the edges, and more sensitive to detail in the center. When observing fine detail such as text, your eye actually "scans" an area and forms a larger, detailed image from the composite. Even if you could project the light cleanly 1:1 onto the retina, for any textual/HUD information you'd have to track eye motion very precisely and provide the information that the brain "expects" to see at each point. And again, the light has to be projected onto a very small part of the retina.
3. Retinal cells can get easily overstimulated, much like the burn-in on old CRTs. Even when looking at one object of normal intensity for any period of time longer than a few seconds, your eye will "jitter" back and forth. This involuntary movement is called nystagmus, and your brain compensates for it. (The rhythm changes when alcohol or drugs are ingested, which is why nystagmus tests are part of a DUI test.) Lab tests have shown that when the eye is physically restrained from moving in this way, objects effectively become invisible to the subject. So any 1:1 projection would also have to track nystagmus and then "jitter" in the same way as the eye, or the conveyed information would also become invisible.
Excellent reminder. I wish I had mod points right now.
Wow. Do not post when preview is broken.
Why don't you just drive there?
... ohhhhhh nevermind, I see! :)
Two points:
1. You're not the average user.
2. Good UI design exposes functionality unobtrusively; it's not about airbrushed icons, and it's not just aesthetic.
Icon choice is only one minor facet of UI design. When you do File->Open in a native Windows application, it will probably look like this. The appearance may vary slightly, but for a given operating system revision the buttons are always the same size and in the same place. That is to say, the open file dialog is consistent across all applications, and a user familiar with the OS immediately recognizes it. Familiarity encourages your users by giving them a successful outcome essentially for free. "OK, I can do this." GTK+ on Windows ignores these conventions, giving the user something like this, or something like this. Though you might think they are stupid, 9 out of 10 users will be utterly baffled by the disparity here. They expect to see a Windows file open dialog, and they see... something completely new. They don't hate it because it doesn't look pretty, though I'm sure at some level that comes into play. More importantly they're thinking, "Oh crap, new interface! Man, if even opening a file takes this much thought and effort I hate to think what the rest of it is like." If they don't give up on the program outright, they'll have to spend an extra minute or two learning something they should already know how to do. Those are minutes they could have spent learning your program! Sit those same people in front of the same dialog in an Ubuntu context and they will chug right through it, mostly because they expect there to be a bit of a learning curve. But something as simple and ubiquitous as an open file dialog shouldn't present any learning curve. Do you see why?
If you're the only person using it, then you can design it using whatever interface you want. By definition you become familiar with it as you code it, and your interface will be designed around your logical conception of how the program works. I write most of my internal tools for CLI, just because it's easier. But if you ever expect non-programmers to use it, don't be surprised when they hate your program (and you) for making them jump through unnecessary hoops. "Why didn't the developers spend the time to do it right?" Things like whether or not the menus function as expected can make or break a project, and even an introductory UI and usability textbook should make this clear. Learning a proper cross platform kit takes a few hours at most, and makes everything feel loads more polished. And it will make your programs look a lot more professional if you ever decide to port them.
I'm struggling to think of a car analogy, but GTK+ applications under Windows remind me of a beat up car with primer gray doors, except that the seat belts pull up from the waist and buckle at the shoulder, and the ignition key turns the opposite direction. This is a trend we desperately need to change. The question isn't, "Does it function?" The question is, "Can the user operate it with minimal effort?"