Comment Re:12.64 percent in only 17 months (Score 2) 187
FTFY
Windows has jumped the shark. It's all downhill from here.
Many folks have finally tired of Microsoft just churning the interface just to make a new product. All that did was alienate the users that had grown accustomed to menu interfaces in Office and the Start menu. Paying to buy a whole new version of the OS and then dealing with the headaches of just trying to figure out how to just get back to the capability the user had before the change got really old.
The problems with Windows 8 are not necessarily with the features. Windows 8 may be the best OS under the sun, but most users won't ever know that because it is buried under one of the most craptastic PC user interfaces contrived. Folks probably would be happy to have the core features of Windows 8 if the menus and buttons looked familiar to the last version. They do not.
I finally went to Linux simply because they kept a lot of the UI features like menus and start buttons that Windows abandoned. Linux really is now at a point where it is an easier OS to transition to from Windows XP and 7 vs transitioning to Windows 8. That is not because Linux interfaces improved dramatically (though they are better than they were) but because Windows 8 broke a lot of UI features that the users really liked and wanted.
Happy trails Microsoft, best wishes from a formerly happy customer from the Windows 3.1 days. Friendly advice - stop pissing off your loyal customers and give them what they want to see.
You'll shoot your eye out!
Similar but less portable technologies are being used in just this way, to document existing structures, locations of electrical, plumbing, HVAC, networking cables, etc.. This location-based inventory is massively useful when planning and costing systems upgrades, particularly on campuses where there may be a complicated interaction of old and new structures.
This is also used in nuclear containments, for similar reason. It is even more useful as operators generally have limited periodic access to the containment, for obvious exposure reasons. Having an accurate 3D model of the containment and locations of equipment would greatly enhance the ability to simulate accident scenarios and to plan for upgrade outages.
The one hangup with these technologies is making the 3D models clean enough such they can be readily imported into engineering simulation software. In particular, CFD models of nuclear containments is complicated by poor geometry rendering (thin slivers of volume, non-planar surfaces, etc.).
Really though, we're trying to genetically resurrect an animal that died off likely due to human depredation and the end of the ice age. Now there are 7 billion MORE humans and the earth is getting warmer.
Way to jam a genetically square peg into a round hole.
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