Although while it's true, this interface isn't great for constant use, like the first person shooter games, it has some nice uses. 1. It could be handy for presentations 2. It could be useful to augment standard control methods. For instance, say you open a photo document and you want to zoom and rotate, that's not very easy with a mouse, so you can quickly switch to gesture controls for that. 3. Most importantly, for things like 3D modelling, it's a godsend. JackBond1234 in reply to iokat64 (Show the comment) 6 minutes ago Continue reading →
May 21, 2012, 3:30 pmReally, Do You Want Phones Used on Airplanes?Oh, great. Now it begins: cellphone calls on airplanes.It’s beginning timidly, for sure: only Virgin Atlantic, only on the Washington-to-London route, only for customers of T-Mobile and a couple of European carriers. And only six calls can be in progress simultaneously, a limitation of the satellite system that makes all of this possible. (Nine more Virgin routes will be added later this year.)I have only one question: Is anybody at Virgin thinking this through?What do people usually do on transatlantic overnight flights? Bingo: sleep.What will happen when the person next to you is yammering away about some business deal when you’re trying to get rested for a big presentation in London?Answer: an argument, a ... Continue reading →
You whippersnappers might not remember, but libraries used to have something called card catalogs. Each book’s index card told you which shelf housed the corresponding volume. You had to go fetch it on foot. Nowadays, you look up a book on a library computer screen, but you usually have to go fetch it on foot. Until recently, we’ve had the same situation with searching the Web. You could look up a Web page using Google and Bing, but you still had to go fetch it. But that’s about to change. In the last couple of weeks, both Google and Microsoft have added new features that try to spare you that last step. Now when you search at Google.com or Bing.com, you don’t just get a ... Continue reading →
As more and more cellphone owners are herded from unlimited data plans into the capped data plans, keeping tabs on how much you’ve used your phone this month is an increasingly urgent task. If you go over any of your monthly limits — calling minutes, text messages or data — you’ll pay overage charges.Now, I’ve always believed that part of the carriers’ scheme is opacity. They don’t want you to know how many minutes you’ve used of your monthly allotment, how many texts you’ve sent or how much data you’ve used. After all: If you knew where you stood, you’d be less likely to go over your limits and pay extra. The Times’s technology columnist, David Pogue, keeps you on top of the industry in ... Continue reading →
How Common Is Your Birthday? A friend posted an interesting data table on my Facebook wall yesterday, which was my birthday. The data listed each day of the year with a ranking for how many babies were born on each date from 1973 to 1999. Some interesting trends are evident in the data. Apparently, people like to make babies around the winter holiday season because a large proportion of babies are born in September (ours is due Sept. 24, btw). Sept. 16 was most common. Feb. 29* was least common. This heatmap is an effort to visualize the trends, with darker shades representing more births: Data source: NYTimes.com, Amitabh Chandra, Harvard University * A previous version of this post incorrectly listed Jan. 1 as the ... Continue reading →
The Google Search of the future is here. Now. Today. The long-talked-about sematic web — Google prefers “Knowledge Graph” — is rolling out across all Google Search tools, and our most fundamental online task may never be the same again. Starting today, a vast portion of Google Search results will work with you to intuit what you really meant by that search entry. Type in an ambiguous query like “Kings” (which could mean royalty, a sports team or a now-cancelled TV show), and a new window will appear on the right side of your result literally asking you which entity you meant. Click on one of those options and your results will be filtered for that search entity. To understand the gravity of this change, ... Continue reading →
