Posting comment to undo wrong moderation.

The purpose of life is generating more life - it's the only way it has arrived here, by replicating itself. *Your* purpose may be not suffering, but that's uncorrelated with the adaptation of life to existence.

I'd very much like to see what would happen to Microsoft Research in case the mother base plummets. There is some incredibly good stuff in there, of which Kinnect is the most viable of their short term projects - but they have equally good things going on for mid and long term. I wonder where all that IP would go if/when the ship sinks.

It's the application, stupid

And there you've found the reason why chat apps are popular. The protocol doesn't matter at all, what counts is that they're dead simple to install and use for the intended purpose - chatting.

That whole package is something that email clients, Jabber and SMS don't have (SMS is the closest one, but it's too expensive, the basic version doesn't do multimedia and it doesn't keep track of the conversation).

that doesn't simply mean that eventually we'll run out of things to do. Now money that was once spent on a noodle cook can be spent on something else.

That assumes that there's something else on which to spend the money, and that those other things will have a value for which people will want to pay; none of those assumptions are givens. The observed effect is that this money will concentrate on a few hands, the only ones with access to most of the produced goods.

Socialist types will never understand or accept this, but the market will reach equilibrium.

Oh, we understand it, we simply don't believe it without the proper amount of support; exceptional claims require exceptional evidence, which that model doesn't have. Right now that argument is an unproven emotional belief, not a scientific certainty.

"War is the ultimate FPS. But that's the most expensive version of all."

Yeah, but the respawn time sucks...

And it only works for a limited set of players alignments.

That sounds a lot like Episode IV. I wonder how the Rebel Aliance theme will sound with Elton John lyrics?

Relative to the thumb, which can be recognized on its own. The other fingers will touch the screen later at some point after the thumb; all fingers have a fixed position and distance from it, so you can identify each finger after calibrating for hand size.

If you add the temporal dimension, you can recognize a variety of chords and multi-touch positions. Sure, it's not perfect tracking of all fingers the all time, but you don't need that to recognize a high number of hand positions, enough to provide a varied gesture-based control.

Why are people so fixated with the Minority Report UI? It was a terrible interface. I prefer the one from Harry Potter, way cooler.

You don't need 3D space recognition to identify which finger is being used - it can be done from their size and relative positions for a good deal of versatility.

"Forming a fist and then extending a single finger" is not a very good gesture, so that is not a major concern.

A good variety of user interfaces can be developed without exact identification of all fingers in all possible positions. Identifying a finger in a touchscreen can be done if that finger is the thumb, in a natural resting position; then, the other fingers can be from their relative distance.

This in particular allows for chording gestures, the ones used for touch-typing and that could be used for other precision tasks.

Wayne Westerman, who invented the software technology later bough by Apple to become the iPhone, explains in his master theses how it's done (see chapter 4), and how they're used for reliable input (chapter 5).

It's funny that you describe the situation that you do. I've worked hard with my teams to create a culture that emphasizes that everyone is responsible for every part of making great deliveries on time. The result is that we accrue technical debt like everyone else, but we've been in a pretty good position to choose where that technical debt comes from, and so we keep it as far away from unit tests and core design / infrastructure code as we can, knowing full well that it's seeped into the implementations of individual components. But because we got the design right, continuously improving those component implementations is straight forward.

You're asking the wrong question, as I've learned the hard way. The question you ask your users is not "what do you want", because obviously the answer is invariably "a pony and a cake and a million dollars and world peace." I've had much better success with "tell me about how things work today", which very quickly gets the conversation centered on pain points --- what is, from the user perspective, broken or otherwise less usable and friendly than it should be.

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