Redefining Privacy

Submitted by Matthew on

We are in the process of redefining privacy. More shadowy actors than we can count, in both corporate and government sectors, have dedicated themselves to hoovering up, archiving and cross-referencing every bit of information they can about our personal lives.

We might not be able to stop them. We may, however, be able to enact changes, as individuals forming a society, that would render them relatively powerless.

The power of metadata

Lost knowledge, and the sheer volume of crap on the Internet

Submitted by Matthew on

Have you ever looked at the Internet's seedy underbelly?

I'm not talking about the scammers, the porn peddlers, the file sharers, email spammers and political party operatives. They're just part of the landscape, we see them all the time, most of us know how to handle them.

No, this time I'm talking about the sheer volume of completely, utterly useless robot-generated crap that sits around, doing nothing at all except to make it harder to find what you're looking for.

User interface done right: McNeel Rhinoceros 3D

Submitted by Matthew on

I was ranting recently about some stupid UI design decisions in a certain piece of CAD software.

There is, of course, no requirement that sophisticated, powerful tools be hard to figure out and use. A case in point is McNeel's Rhinoceros 3D, a popular CAD / modelling program based on NURBS mathematics.

Part of the beauty of this program is that it does not force you to use any particular user interface paradigm. Almost every command you can think of has a menu item, a toolbar button, and a command-line syntax.

Pages

Subscribe to Thoughts on Tech RSS