For those wanting higher res screens, my bet is that they'll be released at the same time as Leopard. Why? Because Leopard is likely to support resolution scaling to avoid the problem of text/icons becoming small at high-dpi's. From memory, there aren't settings in OS X for upping font size of things like the menus (for example), making it a problem at the moment, although there is supposed to be developer support for it already. Vista also supports some form of high-dpi display: when you up the DPI, new style apps should scale themselves appropriately, and old-style apps (e.g. currenfirefox) get scaled too to increase their size, making them larger but a little fuzzy or softened.
That said, I completely disagree that 1920x1200 is too much. I'm on a 15.4" Dell latitude d820, and the screen is beautiful! I'm dual-booting ubuntu and Vista, and neither have any problems with this dpi. The text is rendered super-crisply and at a readable size. That said, my dell has had chronic keyboard issues (broken on arrival, keyboard replaced twice, motherboard replaced twice) and I'm getting a refund for it. With the money, I'll buy the better of the 15" Macbook Pros. But I will still miss this screen =)
Thats's an excellent idea. What's more academics and experts would clamour to help write the books, since their motivation is usually reputation, or improved teaching materials, rather than money. This desire can be milked for the public good, and star teams of authors could be assembled to put together definitive texts.
Wait a moment. If they're wikibooks, maybe the authors won't get credit at all... perhaps this would be better for citizendium. Then the "star team" could be the official editors of a given book, supplying most of the original content themselves. Give citizendium the money! (lol)
Nobody knew that these cellphones, together with similar technology would contribute to the increase in our stress levels.
It does seem that the tech making everybody more productive just increased expectations on productivity, and thus increased stress. I'm not sure there's any way around it though, without getting less done. Of course, some people just choose to get less done, earn less and have a less stressful life.
Do you know that the chances of a kid getting a brain disorder are just 1 in 166? It iused to be 1 in 11000 in the late sixties.
Common reasons for such increased statistics include better reporting, better diagnosis, and sometimes changing definitions of illness. Wading through these factors, then we can work out if the stat is still valid. Out of curiousity, got a ref for the study?
...increased cancer for us Australians this year. Not to worry though, in 60 years, whatever skin we have left on our face and arms after the melanomas have been removed will be safe(r).
I don't think most of the extensions that people pay money for can be knocked up so quickly or easily, although I'm sure that workflow stuff is made a lot easier by having simple scripting available. I guess the real problem is, how many pro graphics people can also do this sort of scripting? Some, but not most. I also don't think they'd react well to the "knock it up yourself" suggestion if there's something missing. They would be willing to pay well for it though. Maybe if there was some sort of responsive bounty system where they were able to put money towards a feature, and know that someone who did have the expertise could put it together in a given time frame.
Even aside from reputation, people who've used PS to make their living for years know it inside and out and would be much less effective with anything else, unless it was vastly better than PS, which the GIMP won't be. The price of PS doesn't matter if you've already bought it and it's just another business expense anyway.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there also a lot of highly used commercial extensions for Photoshop? Given the amount of money and developer time involved, it's unlikely that Gimp will ever match the feature set of photoshop + extensions. Luckily it doesn't have to. It can still undercut photoshop, and eventually become the product which up and coming design students use (instead of a pirated copy of Photoshop). That would get around this problem of people cutting their teeth on a different tool, and would be very good for the community, even if these students later migrated to Photoshop.
I think you're right, in many cases it's a matter of perception. In my experience (pure maths/software eng. combined degree grad), there was no part of what I did in maths which is directly relevant now to software. Most of it I don't even remember. Perhaps that would have been different if I'd done discrete maths instead.
What I did find was that pure maths was a series of incredible mental exercises. You were reasoning about complicated systems, and the best proofs came from lateral thinking and reaching a deep understanding of the system you were studying. I think pushing your abstract reasoning abilities to that level helps to manage complexity and abstraction in software. As it is pointed out, the best programmers are able to turn a complex problem into a simple one [through reaching the right abstraction]. For me, that is why maths was helpful.
Perhaps the experience is also different for different areas of maths. Discrete maths may be better for algorithms, pure maths for abstraction, applied maths/physics for ??? (scientific programming/game dev/very specific areas of software)...
I don't think there's really even any effort in video gaming. Anyone can do it. Those guys just sit on their asses twelve hours a day, play a video game and drink Coca-Cola. Kind of like every other hardcore gamer on the planet, but the only difference is that for some reason they're just a little better than others... with the current game, anyway. There just isn't any real effort involved.
I was once told by a lecturer that if you want to be world class at something, you need to spend at least three solid hours a day on it alone, as athletes might train. Given that everyday people spend this much time on a popular game, I imagine that to be world class you need to spend 5 to 8 hours or a day playing. It's probably not good enough anymore just to play, you need to train in a group with other like minded people, determine your weaknesses, and play through scenarios which aren't exactly fun, but which make you a better player. That is a lot of work. Competition gaming is different to playing for fun.
Think about how much effort someone needs to put into a sport like boxing. All the training, conditioning, repetition, injuries... if we compare video gaming with something like chess, I don't think it still qualifies. Chess is an ancient and well-established game, and being the best isn't quite as simple as being the best Counter-Strike player. It requires more effort, more intelligence, more talent, more training.
Unlike Chess, video gaming has real injuries. If you're twitch gaming for 8 hours a day, don't believe that RSI isn't coming your way. Unlike programming, you can't stand up and take a break and stretch your arms/shoulders/neck in the middle of a competitive multiplayer game. Agreed, current video games emphasise different player characteristics than chess. We're not comparing to chess though, we're comparing to sports, and there games fit the bill.
That said, I'd love to see some new games with the simple rules, high branching factor and emergent play styles. Basically modern competitors to Chess and Go. The problem is that the uptake is never high enough to warrant serious competitions. Then again, a mixed competition, where competitors play a variety of turn-based games? That would be cool!
I'm sure a mod will be made in no time which would allow copying of files between Zunes without DRM. Who would prevent it? Not Microsoft, since they'd benefit most. Of course they can't ship a player without restriction on file sharing and still keep the music companies on board. They can however sit back and watch once the damage is done later.
I think you're making a big deal over a small thing here. I really liked HL2, and I really liked getting it over Steam. I've reinstalled, changed computers, etc, several times. I didn't have to worry about where the hell the CDs were, or about CD keys and crap like that. This kind of convenience for me far outweighs the loss of control you're complaining about.
As for the change itself, it seems like variable weapons pricing will provide more balance and variety to the game. Instead of everyone getting that same weapon they've chosen (or 2 weapons based on price bracket), there'll be incentives to use others. Besides, it's not a MUD or MMORPG where rebalancing has just borked the Lv60 Cleric of Crapacity you spent 2 years and destroyed a marriage to create. A little perspective please.
Google are going to run into the same problems here that people already do when they try to go with ethical investment funds. At some level, you have to deal with the conflict between your goals of making a profit and investing ethically. At least in the case of these funds, it seems that unless you're willing to take a loss from time to time for the right cause(s), you can't claim to be investing ethically. The funds which behave less ethically will have more flexibility in where they put your money and will do better on the average.
They need to make a profit to be self-sustaining, right? There might be room for Google to do well here if there are other reasons why existing companies don't want to provide ethical products that would clearly be profitable. For a hypothetical example, if car companies and big oil together collaborated to avoid providing hybrid cars at a reasonable price for other business reasons. It seems strange that such market gaps wouldn't get filled by just any other big company though.
This is a very good point. They could make the paper thicker, but this wouldn't solve many issues. You couldn't fold it at the corners, staple it too often, etc...
Sci-fi novels which feature this sort of thing (e.g. for daily newspapers) often suggest some form of plastic which is much more durable than paper, and has the property that it can easily be de-creased and reflattened. Unless they find a print medium which is much more durable, or make printers much more forgiving, this will have limited use, which is a shame.
Nonetheless, a step in the right direction! (As are ebook readers with the "electronic ink" and terrible licensing restriction on book purchases. I'll buy one soon.)
It seems that they'll need to get it out a bit rushed, however it turns out. Here's the problem. If they take too long to get it out (i.e. Longhorn), then by then consumers will expect lots of new features, or it'll be obviously inferior. So they have to go back and spend their time on the new features, instead of polishing what they had and releasing it. This could happen over and over if they weren't careful, and they're not making money off it until it's out in the market.
Solution: get it into the market, crud or not, and polish it as they go. I'm all for them releasing it sooner, even if it's not perfect. Until they do release it, they're not even on the playing field for next-gen UI.
Ah, sweet, sweet C++ and array out of bounds errors. Memory bugs are always magic. Like I once worked on some code with an errant delete in there, and the project I was working on had very strict version control processes. When I ran the extensive test suite, it caused a crash in someone else's code. My code got committed, since another "unrelated" part of the system was crashing. Luckily, we found the real problem quickly.
That's all normal though. The really funny business was when a friend asked me for some advice on his code. He'd made a minor change, but it crashed the system badly. The sytem had been working before, so he stripped back and back his change until he found it worked again. It turned out that with a "do nothing" statement like int notUsedVar = 1; taken away, a bad memory error surfaced. I had to convince him not to just leave it in and keep going with his work =)
You're spot on. Microsoft is THE WRONG BRAND for this type of product. The marketing is all off. What they should do is start some subsidiary company or the like, and create it from scratch with this type of panache, with heavy marketting if need be. That way you're not buying a Microsoft Zune, you're buying a Zune. If they do it well, then they can attack Apple's market share much better from this angle. If they were successful with a few products, who knows, they might actually get some mind share with people who care about design and style. Then they'd be talking!
I know you've said that a stylus is too much gripping, but how bad is her condition really? Can she hold a normal pen, and write with it? If so, you'll find that the stylus solution really is quite good. As an absolute positioning system for a mouse, you'll find that it can save a lot of arm movement in getting to what you want, and this translates directly to lessened pain. This is what my partner now uses exclusively rather than normal mouses.
Voice recognition is a good option, particularly if she cannot type or write at all. Current PC systems seem to work very well, make fewer mistakes, and allow you to correct the mistakes they made a lot faster than in the past. Maybe this is what she needs. It probably won't replace a mouse though, just a keyboard. Navigating a web page by voice is neither fun nor efficient.
All up, it really depends on the current condition of her arms. Although I've given this advice before, it's still relevant. Get software that kicks her off her computer regularly, say at 30 min intervals. If it really is a repeated-strain injury, giving her body a little extra time to rest and mend itself between damaging stints will be much better in both the short and long term!
My advice only really applies to someone who's still typing and working on a normal keyboard. If you're unable to do even that for short periods (as in the case of my fiance), then you need serious medical treatment, and I agree voice recognition is the way to go. She uses a tablet, which lets her do a little computer work, 1 year later from the initial flare-up.
In your case, spending 6 or 8 hours is clearly destructive, when the problem is already so bad. I still think the keyboard monitor to kick you off regularly (20-30 mins) would give you an interuption, a break to determine that actually, your arms have started hurting again, and that you should stop. Since it helps prevent the long destructive stints, you should find you get a little more computer time out of your arms in the long term. Perhaps just enough to not be disadvantaged in your chosen (preferably non-computer-based) employment.
Seriously, if you're suffering hand or arm pain, you should think about the way you're doing things now. Speech recognition is unlikely to replace your current coding practices, although it might help with writing reports.
Instead, try using the keyboard break feature in gnome. To start with, have it kick you off your computer every 30 mins for a 3 min break, and don't allow yourself to postpone breaks. Get some equivalent software for windows too. Use your 3 min breaks to walk around and stretch. Within a week, you won't be a lot less productive, but your arms will feel a lot better. Then you can maybe up it to 40 mins. In the short term, a course of anti-inflams might help (ask your doctor).
Also, don't come home in the evening and play games on your computer, or do more work. Your arms probably can't take it. Equivalently, inform your employer of your condition and subsequent inability to work reckless overtime hours.
These two things should get you started for long-term sustainable maintenance of your arms.
Clarity Vi runs some nice systems which do the background compression, face/activity detection, and other cool things which make it much nicer to go through the footage you get. I believe they run on linux machines. I'd check them out.
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For those wanting higher res screens, my bet is that they'll be released at the same time as Leopard. Why? Because Leopard is likely to support resolution scaling to avoid the problem of text/icons becoming small at high-dpi's. From memory, there aren't settings in OS X for upping font size of things like the menus (for example), making it a problem at the moment, although there is supposed to be developer support for it already. Vista also supports some form of high-dpi display: when you up the DPI, new style apps should scale themselves appropriately, and old-style apps (e.g. currenfirefox) get scaled too to increase their size, making them larger but a little fuzzy or softened.
That said, I completely disagree that 1920x1200 is too much. I'm on a 15.4" Dell latitude d820, and the screen is beautiful! I'm dual-booting ubuntu and Vista, and neither have any problems with this dpi. The text is rendered super-crisply and at a readable size. That said, my dell has had chronic keyboard issues (broken on arrival, keyboard replaced twice, motherboard replaced twice) and I'm getting a refund for it. With the money, I'll buy the better of the 15" Macbook Pros. But I will still miss this screen =)
Thats's an excellent idea. What's more academics and experts would clamour to help write the books, since their motivation is usually reputation, or improved teaching materials, rather than money. This desire can be milked for the public good, and star teams of authors could be assembled to put together definitive texts.
Wait a moment. If they're wikibooks, maybe the authors won't get credit at all... perhaps this would be better for citizendium. Then the "star team" could be the official editors of a given book, supplying most of the original content themselves. Give citizendium the money! (lol)
Yeah, that and much better access to information via the web is turning us all into amateur "experts" on medical diagnosis, ..., you name it =)
every RTS is showing us we can win irak (and we can obviously, it will take time, lots of time, but we can)
Clearly the administration hasn't harvested enough Tiberium yet =)
Nobody knew that these cellphones, together with similar technology would contribute to the increase in our stress levels.
It does seem that the tech making everybody more productive just increased expectations on productivity, and thus increased stress. I'm not sure there's any way around it though, without getting less done. Of course, some people just choose to get less done, earn less and have a less stressful life.
Do you know that the chances of a kid getting a brain disorder are just 1 in 166? It iused to be 1 in 11000 in the late sixties.
Common reasons for such increased statistics include better reporting, better diagnosis, and sometimes changing definitions of illness. Wading through these factors, then we can work out if the stat is still valid. Out of curiousity, got a ref for the study?
...increased cancer for us Australians this year. Not to worry though, in 60 years, whatever skin we have left on our face and arms after the melanomas have been removed will be safe(r).
I don't think most of the extensions that people pay money for can be knocked up so quickly or easily, although I'm sure that workflow stuff is made a lot easier by having simple scripting available. I guess the real problem is, how many pro graphics people can also do this sort of scripting? Some, but not most. I also don't think they'd react well to the "knock it up yourself" suggestion if there's something missing. They would be willing to pay well for it though. Maybe if there was some sort of responsive bounty system where they were able to put money towards a feature, and know that someone who did have the expertise could put it together in a given time frame.
Even aside from reputation, people who've used PS to make their living for years know it inside and out and would be much less effective with anything else, unless it was vastly better than PS, which the GIMP won't be. The price of PS doesn't matter if you've already bought it and it's just another business expense anyway.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't there also a lot of highly used commercial extensions for Photoshop? Given the amount of money and developer time involved, it's unlikely that Gimp will ever match the feature set of photoshop + extensions. Luckily it doesn't have to. It can still undercut photoshop, and eventually become the product which up and coming design students use (instead of a pirated copy of Photoshop). That would get around this problem of people cutting their teeth on a different tool, and would be very good for the community, even if these students later migrated to Photoshop.
I think you're right, in many cases it's a matter of perception. In my experience (pure maths/software eng. combined degree grad), there was no part of what I did in maths which is directly relevant now to software. Most of it I don't even remember. Perhaps that would have been different if I'd done discrete maths instead. What I did find was that pure maths was a series of incredible mental exercises. You were reasoning about complicated systems, and the best proofs came from lateral thinking and reaching a deep understanding of the system you were studying. I think pushing your abstract reasoning abilities to that level helps to manage complexity and abstraction in software. As it is pointed out, the best programmers are able to turn a complex problem into a simple one [through reaching the right abstraction]. For me, that is why maths was helpful. Perhaps the experience is also different for different areas of maths. Discrete maths may be better for algorithms, pure maths for abstraction, applied maths/physics for ??? (scientific programming/game dev/very specific areas of software)...
It's not so much matches that I was thinking about, more the training to get there.
I don't think there's really even any effort in video gaming. Anyone can do it. Those guys just sit on their asses twelve hours a day, play a video game and drink Coca-Cola. Kind of like every other hardcore gamer on the planet, but the only difference is that for some reason they're just a little better than others... with the current game, anyway. There just isn't any real effort involved.
I was once told by a lecturer that if you want to be world class at something, you need to spend at least three solid hours a day on it alone, as athletes might train. Given that everyday people spend this much time on a popular game, I imagine that to be world class you need to spend 5 to 8 hours or a day playing. It's probably not good enough anymore just to play, you need to train in a group with other like minded people, determine your weaknesses, and play through scenarios which aren't exactly fun, but which make you a better player. That is a lot of work. Competition gaming is different to playing for fun.
Think about how much effort someone needs to put into a sport like boxing. All the training, conditioning, repetition, injuries... if we compare video gaming with something like chess, I don't think it still qualifies. Chess is an ancient and well-established game, and being the best isn't quite as simple as being the best Counter-Strike player. It requires more effort, more intelligence, more talent, more training.
Unlike Chess, video gaming has real injuries. If you're twitch gaming for 8 hours a day, don't believe that RSI isn't coming your way. Unlike programming, you can't stand up and take a break and stretch your arms/shoulders/neck in the middle of a competitive multiplayer game. Agreed, current video games emphasise different player characteristics than chess. We're not comparing to chess though, we're comparing to sports, and there games fit the bill.
That said, I'd love to see some new games with the simple rules, high branching factor and emergent play styles. Basically modern competitors to Chess and Go. The problem is that the uptake is never high enough to warrant serious competitions. Then again, a mixed competition, where competitors play a variety of turn-based games? That would be cool!
I'm sure a mod will be made in no time which would allow copying of files between Zunes without DRM. Who would prevent it? Not Microsoft, since they'd benefit most. Of course they can't ship a player without restriction on file sharing and still keep the music companies on board. They can however sit back and watch once the damage is done later.
I think you're making a big deal over a small thing here. I really liked HL2, and I really liked getting it over Steam. I've reinstalled, changed computers, etc, several times. I didn't have to worry about where the hell the CDs were, or about CD keys and crap like that. This kind of convenience for me far outweighs the loss of control you're complaining about.
As for the change itself, it seems like variable weapons pricing will provide more balance and variety to the game. Instead of everyone getting that same weapon they've chosen (or 2 weapons based on price bracket), there'll be incentives to use others. Besides, it's not a MUD or MMORPG where rebalancing has just borked the Lv60 Cleric of Crapacity you spent 2 years and destroyed a marriage to create. A little perspective please.
Google are going to run into the same problems here that people already do when they try to go with ethical investment funds. At some level, you have to deal with the conflict between your goals of making a profit and investing ethically. At least in the case of these funds, it seems that unless you're willing to take a loss from time to time for the right cause(s), you can't claim to be investing ethically. The funds which behave less ethically will have more flexibility in where they put your money and will do better on the average.
They need to make a profit to be self-sustaining, right? There might be room for Google to do well here if there are other reasons why existing companies don't want to provide ethical products that would clearly be profitable. For a hypothetical example, if car companies and big oil together collaborated to avoid providing hybrid cars at a reasonable price for other business reasons. It seems strange that such market gaps wouldn't get filled by just any other big company though.
This is a very good point. They could make the paper thicker, but this wouldn't solve many issues. You couldn't fold it at the corners, staple it too often, etc...
Sci-fi novels which feature this sort of thing (e.g. for daily newspapers) often suggest some form of plastic which is much more durable than paper, and has the property that it can easily be de-creased and reflattened. Unless they find a print medium which is much more durable, or make printers much more forgiving, this will have limited use, which is a shame.
Nonetheless, a step in the right direction! (As are ebook readers with the "electronic ink" and terrible licensing restriction on book purchases. I'll buy one soon.)
It seems that they'll need to get it out a bit rushed, however it turns out. Here's the problem. If they take too long to get it out (i.e. Longhorn), then by then consumers will expect lots of new features, or it'll be obviously inferior. So they have to go back and spend their time on the new features, instead of polishing what they had and releasing it. This could happen over and over if they weren't careful, and they're not making money off it until it's out in the market.
Solution: get it into the market, crud or not, and polish it as they go. I'm all for them releasing it sooner, even if it's not perfect. Until they do release it, they're not even on the playing field for next-gen UI.
Ah, sweet, sweet C++ and array out of bounds errors. Memory bugs are always magic. Like I once worked on some code with an errant delete in there, and the project I was working on had very strict version control processes. When I ran the extensive test suite, it caused a crash in someone else's code. My code got committed, since another "unrelated" part of the system was crashing. Luckily, we found the real problem quickly.
That's all normal though. The really funny business was when a friend asked me for some advice on his code. He'd made a minor change, but it crashed the system badly. The sytem had been working before, so he stripped back and back his change until he found it worked again. It turned out that with a "do nothing" statement like int notUsedVar = 1; taken away, a bad memory error surfaced. I had to convince him not to just leave it in and keep going with his work =)
You're spot on. Microsoft is THE WRONG BRAND for this type of product. The marketing is all off. What they should do is start some subsidiary company or the like, and create it from scratch with this type of panache, with heavy marketting if need be. That way you're not buying a Microsoft Zune, you're buying a Zune. If they do it well, then they can attack Apple's market share much better from this angle. If they were successful with a few products, who knows, they might actually get some mind share with people who care about design and style. Then they'd be talking!
I know you've said that a stylus is too much gripping, but how bad is her condition really? Can she hold a normal pen, and write with it? If so, you'll find that the stylus solution really is quite good. As an absolute positioning system for a mouse, you'll find that it can save a lot of arm movement in getting to what you want, and this translates directly to lessened pain. This is what my partner now uses exclusively rather than normal mouses. Voice recognition is a good option, particularly if she cannot type or write at all. Current PC systems seem to work very well, make fewer mistakes, and allow you to correct the mistakes they made a lot faster than in the past. Maybe this is what she needs. It probably won't replace a mouse though, just a keyboard. Navigating a web page by voice is neither fun nor efficient. All up, it really depends on the current condition of her arms. Although I've given this advice before, it's still relevant. Get software that kicks her off her computer regularly, say at 30 min intervals. If it really is a repeated-strain injury, giving her body a little extra time to rest and mend itself between damaging stints will be much better in both the short and long term!
My advice only really applies to someone who's still typing and working on a normal keyboard. If you're unable to do even that for short periods (as in the case of my fiance), then you need serious medical treatment, and I agree voice recognition is the way to go. She uses a tablet, which lets her do a little computer work, 1 year later from the initial flare-up. In your case, spending 6 or 8 hours is clearly destructive, when the problem is already so bad. I still think the keyboard monitor to kick you off regularly (20-30 mins) would give you an interuption, a break to determine that actually, your arms have started hurting again, and that you should stop. Since it helps prevent the long destructive stints, you should find you get a little more computer time out of your arms in the long term. Perhaps just enough to not be disadvantaged in your chosen (preferably non-computer-based) employment.
Seriously, if you're suffering hand or arm pain, you should think about the way you're doing things now. Speech recognition is unlikely to replace your current coding practices, although it might help with writing reports.
Instead, try using the keyboard break feature in gnome. To start with, have it kick you off your computer every 30 mins for a 3 min break, and don't allow yourself to postpone breaks. Get some equivalent software for windows too. Use your 3 min breaks to walk around and stretch. Within a week, you won't be a lot less productive, but your arms will feel a lot better. Then you can maybe up it to 40 mins. In the short term, a course of anti-inflams might help (ask your doctor).
Also, don't come home in the evening and play games on your computer, or do more work. Your arms probably can't take it. Equivalently, inform your employer of your condition and subsequent inability to work reckless overtime hours.
These two things should get you started for long-term sustainable maintenance of your arms.
Clarity Vi runs some nice systems which do the background compression, face/activity detection, and other cool things which make it much nicer to go through the footage you get. I believe they run on linux machines. I'd check them out.