Netizen

Saturday, October 27, 2012

GUI To Touch To Gesture

Steve Jobs took the lead on touch and Microsoft is playing catch up. Steve Jobs stole the Graphical User Interface - a big jump from what existed before - from Xerox, and Bill Gates stole it from Jobs. But it was Gates that won the PC wars.

But there is something beyond touch. That is gesture. And there Microsoft seems to be ahead. Gesture promises to be even more intuitive than touch. It is exciting what they might do.

Point and click feels one dimensional. Touch feels two dimensional. Gesture feels three dimensional. It is a paradigm shift.

Microsoft's Plan to Bring About the Era of Gesture Control

The company wants to make it as common to wave your arms at or speak to a computer as it is to reach for a mouse or touch screen today. ..... "We're trying to encourage [software] developers to create a whole new class of app controlled by gesture and voice," says Peter Zatloukal, head of engineering for the Kinect for Windows program. ...... "We initially used keyboards, then the mouse and GUIs were a big innovation, now touch is a big part of people's lives," he says. "The progression will now be to voice and gesture." ... A conventional keyboard, mouse, or touch screen can be difficult to use in classrooms and hospital wards, or on factory floors. ..... Microsoft needs software developers to create killer applications. Along with the hardware, the company provides a software developer's kit, or SDK, that offers a range of ready-made tools, including voice recognition and body-part tracking .... by using infrared, your apps can see in the dark now ..... Nissan has introduced a gesture-controlled system for dealerships that lets prospective buyers look inside a virtual version of a new car. ...... It even trumps voice recognition, he says. "Voice recognition is 95 to 98 percent accurate, so one time in 50 it won't work," he says. "This works like a tool—it will work for you every time." ...... "When using a computer today, we think of our bodies as a fingertip or at most two fingertips," he says. But humans evolved to communicate with their whole bodies. .... detecting fidgeting or defensive body language such as folded arms. The hope is to address the social cues that are lost when video calls replace face-to-face communication

Windows 8

Many have predicted the demise of Windows, and you look bold when doing so, but here is Microsoft claiming to have married the tablet touch into the laptop Windows.

Microsoft has a small but legitimate presence in the mobile space by now. And so I am not about to call the end of Windows. As for the sexy, that right now rests with Apple and Google.

The new Windows tries to give you the tablet feel.

Windows 8: Does Microsoft’s Split-Personality OS Make Sense?

Microsoft is trying to leverage its Windows customer base to drive demand for the phones and tablets that are the company’s future. .... consumers today would prefer to buy a tablet rather than a desktop or laptop ...... Windows 8 has two separate ways of working. There’s a familiar Desktop mode, which resembles the multi-window, taskbar-at-the-bottom world most users have becomes used to. But it also has a completely new interface somewhat awkwardly called “Modern-style UI” (previously “Metro”). ..... a full-screen grid of large, colorful tiles whose contents change dynamically to show, for example, new Facebook photo posts. On a touch-screen tablet, it seems natural. ..... the company’s particular vision of mobile computing. ....... Don Norman .. a former Apple vice president .. “The requirements of small-screen mobile devices are incompatible with those of large-screen fixed devices,” Norman says. “Windows 8 has a problem. The real business workhorses of Microsoft Office are not well supported by the mobile apps. So Microsoft had to provide a backwards-compatibility mode, which provides the necessary power, but makes things even more confusing.” ..... wants Windows-powered tablets to seem more familiar than an iPad to potential buyers. ..... they’re using the “tablet” interface instead of Desktop even on desktop computers.

Google Should Pay For Linking? Weird

Image representing Rupert Murdoch as depicted ...

Image via CrunchBase

I think Rupert Murdoch had a similar beef a few years ago. He was sick and tired of Google linking to articles on his properties. I found that mindset amazing.

If Google scrapes your article and publishes them at its own property passing for its own, that is a huge problem. But if Google shows you up in search results, if it links to your articles from the Google News page, how is that a problem for you? What do you want? Less traffic to your site? I don't get it.

Learn from The Drudge Report about how to survive in this digital age.

French Minister Says Google Faces Critical Questions Over Copyright

French lawmakers want to pass a bill that would tax Google for content it currently indexes for free, after newspapers lobbied for the measure. .... Brazilian newspapers have taken the more extreme step of boycotting Google for the past year. .... The company noted in a letter it directs 4 billion people a month to French publishers’ pages, so a Google ban would be a significant blow to newspapers, too.

How are the Brazilians managing to stay away from Google? Beats me.

Boycott of Brazilian newspapers on Google becomes a model abroad

The Brazilian newspapers' pioneering boycott on Google News - most newspapers haven't allowed links with news to be displayed on the search engine for over a year - has raised interest abroad. ..... information requests from French, German and Chilean newspapers. ..... boycotting Google News helped to bring down one of the arguments the search engine used, that being featured on the search lists helps to improve audience - which could lead to more publicity revenues. ..... Since the newspapers associated with ANJ, which represent 90% of the market, decided to give up having their articles displayed by the search engine, their traffic declined on average less than 5%. ..... Unlike Brazil, in Germany and other European countries copyrights belong to journalists, not the newspaper.

I still don't get it. Even if you charge people to access your content, showing up in Google's search results would be in your interest, one would think. Scratch, scratch. Why is losing that 5% a good thing?

Mars Is Kind Of Far

What will humans do that robots can not? Mining the moon for energy is a better proposition, I think. But never say never.

The Deferred Dreams Of Mars

people communicating with a large and sophisticated piece of equipment 150 million miles away as it began to carry out experiments that should enhance our understanding of whether the planet has or has ever had life ..... six astronauts could be sent on six-month flights to Mars and what they would do there for a year and a half before their six-month flights home ...... NASA could perpetually remain 20 years away from a manned Mars mission. ..... a Mars crew would see Earth shrink into just one of billions of twinkles in space ..... the astronauts would have to survive in a freezing, windswept world with unbreathable air and 38 percent of Earth's gravity ...... systems for feeding them, sheltering them ..... the benefits are mostly intangible ..... right now Curiosity is exploring these very questions, firing lasers at rocks to determine their composition and hunting for signs of microbial life ..... Because of such robotic missions, our knowledge of Mars has improved so much in the past 15 years that it's become harder to make the case for sending humans. ...... "For the cost of sending one human to Mars, you could send an entire flotilla of robots." ....... the space shuttle would fly 135 times from 1981 through 2011 .... Going into space for more than two years would subject the astronauts to an unprecedented degree of isolation and extended weightlessness; the longest stay in space so far has been 14 months. Potentially deadly cosmic rays, which are blocked by Earth's magnetic field and atmosphere, would hit the spacecraft in flight and threaten the astronauts on Mars. ..... the sky crane used to land Curiosity wouldn't work for landing humans, whose craft could weigh 30 times more ...... something entirely new: protect and feed humans on another planet over a long stretch ...... "closed loop" life-support systems in which water and air are recycled ....... possible to extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide that makes up 95 percent of the Martian air. ..... dehydrated food that astronauts inject with water on the space station can retain adequate nutrients for five years ...... Pressure-treating the food ..... make the habitat inflatable, so it could be packed tightly en route to Mars. ...... the bone loss, blurry vision, and other problems astronauts suffer when removed from Earth's gravity ...... compared with the money and effort that get spent in the service of "greed and our ancestral urge to beat the crap out of each other." ...... colonizing the moon, stimulating space tourism, and harvesting solar energy from geosynchronous Earth orbit

Geoengineering

Dramatic changes in weather - like the impending Frankenstorm - is there for all to see. Climate change is real, people. I am in the school of all of the above. Let's do many things to combat climate change.

This can't be the only way, but it can be one of many ways.

Geoengineering Could Be Essential to Reducing the Risk of Climate Change

Geoengineering—using technology to purposefully change the climate—is the only option for reducing the risk of climate change from greenhouse-gas emissions in the next few decades .... effective methods of geoengineering are so cheap and easy that just about any country could do it .... it is already too late to avoid climate changes by reducing carbon emissions alone .... “If you want to, say, really stop the loss of Arctic sea ice or stop heat-stress crop losses over the next few decades, geoengineering is pretty much the only thing you can do” ..... shade the earth by injecting sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere ..... Though some critics have worried that geoengineering would alter monsoon patterns that are key to agriculture in India, Keith says moderate geoengineering could actually boost crop productivity there by 20 percent, in part by reducing temperatures. ..... would cost about a billion dollars a year and require about 100 aircraft. That’s cheap enough for most countries to pull off on their own. ..... He would introduce small clouds of sulfate and water vapor into the stratosphere using balloons ..... Even if geoengineering is employed, reducing emissions will still be important. Sulfate injection does nothing to address the ocean acidification associated with increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And if emissions continue to grow, ever-increasing amounts of sulfate will be needed.