Foamy

Analysis of results is tomorrow; I have a reasonable number of results but not as many as hoped. Any additional surveys would be really useful. No need for extra comments in them either. Thanks for all the help so far. I think this study is going to be very valuable for the future.

You can get it here: Link I've been working on this for ages, and the larger game for over a year now. Mostly completely silently while we prepared. Hunter's Moon is not as far along as I feel it should be before reveal, but the testbed needs exposure and so HM has to be there too. The main push of development is still to come where most of it will be completelt overhauled. That time is only a week or so from starting. Here's the description of the testbed: The plan for this game was to develop a greatly simplified version of the Hunter's Moon (see website for details) hunting mechanics that didn't depend on any of the main game features, and that put the focus on the AI. The first reason for the testbed is to act as a research project for my final year of university by analysing the merits of training a complex Multi-Agent System with a Genetic Algorithm rather than doing it manually, the second reason is to aid the development of Hunter's Moon. The data for analysis is provided by a user study at the end of each play-through of the game. The game will randomly pick an AI configuration at the start of each game (either manually tuned, or computer tuned), that adjusts the behaviour of the wolves. Both attempt to maximise the fun of the game. After this project is concluded more AI development will be done to make it do everything HM requires and to flesh it out, but the basic foundation is here. Details on the big game, Hunter's Moon, can be found here: Link It's based on this ancient Dwarf Fortress mod idea: Here Feedback and survey responses are very much appreciated.

I think that is an appropriate conclusion to this thread.

Your wish is my command.

OK so do you actually just hate old versions of windows then? I love 7/8 but I detest XP and older as most sane people do. You can't judge the quality of a product when you use a 10 year old version.

I have moved this to off-topic.

Watch this: Then this series: Helped me a lot.

Checking in here, DF has been a long love of mine.

If you dislike 8 you should still buy it, just spend an extra $10 on some third party utilities to make it usable. You can pretty much make 8 look like 7 for free even, and then you get to enjoy all the enhancements under the hood, like faster boots, better task manager, etc. You'll also get 8.1 free in a few months that will hopefully resolve a lot of the issues.

Buy Dell, and buy IPS, 16:10 if you can afford it, also get two if you can. That quickly sums things up, under no circumstances buy a "gaming" monitor.

I enjoy having a consistent performance across my entire OS no matter what I am doing, that is why I spent a lot on a 500GB SSD. I don't regret that at all, I've spent that much on other components in the past but none of those improved my experience as much as the SSD. Not having to constantly monitor space and shuffle things around between SSD and RAID is fantastic.

I agree with this, it would in fact be so stupid that I do not believe MS intends to do that. Win 8 is a stopgap with some misplaced priorities, 8.1 is a far better test of their intentions which we will see soon enough. Win 8 was cheap precisely because MS knows it is far from ideal, don't criticise them for pricing it low when that was the decent thing to do given the limited scope of the changes. Win 8 has hardly been a dismal failure, it is oriented for tablets, and in tablets it is already above 8% of new sales in less than 6 months. Win 8 was never meant as a true successor to 7, hence the price and the marketing. it is a tablet oriented version of 7 and is doing very well in that area. I would agree that a more balanced approach would have been better overall, but MS is not forcing you to upgrade to it and it's cheap enough that no one is being ripped off here. Metro will never be optional, it's the mobile oriented UX that will be optional. Evidence suggests that the desktop will transition to a Metro design while exceeding the UX of 7. Already, if you ignore the mobile side of Win 8, the desktop UX is superior to 7 in some major ways (new task manager is a great example). Office is following metro design principles very well, and it's not touch friendly; that 100% means metro does not force touch friendliness. Not liking Metro design is completely fine, but not liking it because you think it means inappropriate touch friendliness is very wrong. If you separate the stupid decision to force a mobile UX on desktop users then you get a much clearer picture of how Metro is viewed. Metro is a design language, Win 8 does not implement it very well and people hate that. But when it is implemented well it is very popular. Every version of windows has enforced some form of design language, you can and could tweak almost all of it if you wished though, with third party tools, that has not changed in Win 8. It is tragic that MS has alienated so many people unnecessarily. Not so much by making a bad product, but by not communicating their intentions very well. They have done this many times in the past though, and they regularly win people back in even higher numbers when they get around to cleaning things up, just look at Vista > Win 7.

I would be inclined to agree. Wouldn't be a problem if you were just using them for sports though, it's going to be the long term daily users that see issues if they do happen.

Yeah, shouldn't be a problem. I'd only do it if you are happy with your current OS state though, if you're getting crashes or other weirdness it may be best to start fresh.

You say your main problem with Metro is that it's oriented for touch, Office 2013 is absolutely not oriented for touch. If you don't like Office 2013 then you simple don't like Metro, that's a personal thing and it's not Microsoft's issue. MS has limited resources, it's not guaranteed that they will fix the desktop/mobile transition UX, but then it's also understandable that they haven't yet due to the time constraints and other things they've done. If you just hate Metro as a design language then that's fine, but don't try to pretend that it is fundamentally broken as an idea. Everyone likes different things, Metro as an idea has a lot of fans (it's heavily influencing a lot of new websites, apps, and elements in other OS's), so you are mistaken if you think that your personal dislike of Metro is a major misstep by MS.

Yep, that's exactly the one you want.

I think the idea has potential, but google's current implementation is far away from what I would be willing to pay for. A smartphone is better for almost every situation you can use glass for. The only exceptions would be: While driving, which may be too dangerous anyway. Recording first person video. This would be really cool, but not $1500 worth of cool. Hmm, that's about it. The CPU in it is not close to good enough to do anything interesting, the eyepiece is also too small, low res, and brightness. Needing to interact via voice is a big problem too, makes you look and feel like a twat. Maybe I'm missing something fundamental here but I honestly cannot see any reason for people to be considering spending money on it. Even if they were charging $150 for it I'd still say no.

+1 on the SSD recommendations, Crucial have a new line out recently that look really good. Personally I'm using a Samsung 830, only because the 840 didn't exist when I built mine. The time cost for changing gear is a big fear for me, CPU is pretty easy but GPU would be the big time cost. My biggest WC dream would be easy snap on/off auto closing valves for plugging into waterblocks. I don't tend to swap cards/CPUs very often though so it's not a massive issue to me.

This is poor implementation not the core of the idea. This is an issue with only having a touch oriented Metro interface, making a Metro desktop is a bigger job and hasn't been attempted yet. This is just poor design choices optimised for touch. This is just poor design choices and not reflective of the idea. This is just poor design choices optimised for touch. This is just poor design choices optimised for touch. Metro design rules could make a superior desktop experience. It would also allow the interface to actually change dynamically to suit a touch screen, or a tablet, or a phone, without the actual design rules changing much and offering a unified and consistent experience. Metro does not mean touch, it means flat digital design. It means a clean consistent interface that is built from elements and rules that can easily adapt to changes in touch ability, screen size, etc. A borderline good example of this is the office 2013 interface. It still gets a lot wrong but it shows that Metro can work for non touch (it is actually terrible for touch). This is completely true, the phone/mobile oriented interface has no place on the device while you are using it as a desktop PC. Just as Win 7 sucks on tablets and would be worse for phones. The greatness of the idea is that it has the potential to transition between modes as your usage changes. WP8 and Win RT are essentially the same operating systems just with different interfaces as they are for different devices. MS intends to bring them closer together so that they actually ARE the same OS just under different circumstances. THe issue here is that MS has to get each interface right before they can work on merging them. I think WP8 is very close to being good enough, so is Win 8 although it is farther behind. Once they are both good enough, then just setting up rules for when different interface elements switch will be easy. Win 8 already shifts based on your screen resolution. Transitioning from tablet style to desktop style is more difficult but it's not too bad. MS is already slowly moving the desktop towards the Metro style but the main reason for lack of progress here is that they are focusing on mobile interface because they already have Win 7 out there. Here are some examples: This concept shows some of the idea but it's not exactly what I'd imagine. More Here is Office 2013: Bigger I also love the Lync 2013 UI:

Actually WCing doesn't take any time to maintain other than changing the water once every year or so, air cooling is much harder to clean dust wise, WCing doesn't even need to be dusted so long as the radiator is clear.

My impression is that the devs know what to do but don't have the time to do a huge amount of little detail stuff, then the management decide that they need to move really quickly and be more ambitious, so we're left with an implementation that is broken at a lower level. If you want hope in this though you just have to look at Windows Phone, that was awful at the start, there was so much missing in the background it was almost unusably, now two years later there's only as couple of areas that need attention. Of the weak areas they were planned to be fixed for WP8 but they had such a big job rebuilding it on the Win8 kernel they ran out of time. Microsoft's current implementation of Metro is terrible compared to the potential there, they can and will get it there eventually. People who say they hate Metro really only hate the current crappy realisation of it, I'm reasonably confident MS will pull it together over time.

I don't have the time to go into every point you made there and offer alternative viewpoints, I wish I did but I don't. There are good counter points for just about every thing you brought up, not that you're wrong about any of it, just different viewpoints and perspectives. Microsoft's biggest weakness has been complete incompetence when dealing with consumers. They still have a huge amount of that in them and slightly disappoint at every turn. But gradually over the last 10 years things have been improving, they still have a long way to go but they have made a lot of progress. I believe in MS's current vision a lot more than I believe in them as a company but they're my only hope right now. Google has trended downwards consistently in their behaviour, Apple is just on a completely different path to what I want. There is a good chance MS can follow through with this though, and they need to be encouraged to do this. MS gets more FUD thrown at them these days than they dish out, that frustrates me because of the absolute hypocrisy that is celebrated by the linux/anti-MS community, it is childish and shameful. I'm not accusing you of this to any high degree though Amram, just pointing out that MS has a lot of bias against them. Any website which has 'death spiral' in the name of an article on MS has to be looked at with skepticism.

If you don't care about orbit then this is about as small as you can get: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEAT_1X_Tycho_Brahe

MS spends years making 7, everyone loves it, now that they're doing something else in addition you think they've suddenly forgotten how to do desktop at all? Like Win 7 was a fluke? Desktops don't need a desktop OS, they need an OS that can do desktop very well, that doesn't mean it can't do other stuff well too. MS knows how to do great desktop, Win 8 is in a state of flux and currently does not focus on that, there is absolutely no reason to think that Win 9 will not be magnificent as a desktop, it can be magnificent as a tablet OS at the same time though. If you're happy with Win 7's level of customisation then you should be happy with Win 8 aside from a couple of minor things that MS is fixing for 8.1. I can 100% understand people not wanting to use Win 8 on a desktop at the moment, but that doesn't mean the trend as a whole is bad for desktops. People want a great desktop & mobile experience, MS is certainly capable of making a great desktop & mobile experience, MS needs to make a great desktop & mobile experience, MS has the time to make a great desktop & mobile experience, they have shown and said that they intend to make a great desktop & mobile experience, and yet people scream and thrash around as if MS is driving full speed off a cliff in the opposite direction.

PCs as in the desktop/tower computer part are dying for personal use! That is the critical problem MS is working to address. People want portability, but people also need to be productive. That means we need a solution that can be both, the best answer for that is a tablet that can turn into a laptop and then turn into a desktop very easily. Sure, gamers and high demand people will need big PCs for years and years but that's a small portion of the population. As I've said before, stock Win 8 is awful for the desktop side right now, but it's fantastic for tablets and pretty good for laptops. We know MS can do desktop very well, we also now know (and importantly THEY know) that they can do tablets well, the only thing left is to bring those together. You can dispute whether MS's path for getting to the end is the best way or not (I'd say not quite) but the goal is exactly what is needed. As for the simplicity side, simplicity is not just about ease of use, it's also about reliability and consistency and that is what MS is focusing on for the mobile side. Over time I desperately hope MS brings more customisability to mobile but it's not as important as it is for desktop use. Win 8.1 is opening a huge amount up with a lot more customisation and desktop oriented features, it's also narrowing the gap between Metro and desktop. As for general desktop hackability, that's pretty much stayed the same or improved with 8. The share button doesn't hurt you, it's not in the way or forcing you. It's there because the basic UI needs to remain constant through the OS, it's also only really designed for the mobile side where it does make a lot of sense for people who use a lot of social stuff. MS hasn't abandoned the user base, what they've done is put out a masterpiece OS for their core users (7) and then taken a couple of years to work on other sides of the OS so it will be successful in the future. Also, it is looking increasingly likely that Stardock will lose a lot of purpose with 8.1 as MS is basically just checking off everything they are selling and adding it to the stock OS. This is just naturally filling out and polishing the OS as they get time to do it. Your mid section is mostly covered above. Evidence is suggesting MS is not stupid and they are starting to lean back towards the desktop, the eventual result of this will be that if you live 100% through a desktop PC it will be as good as Win 7. It's not there yet but just look at the XP>vista>7 UX improvements if you doubt MS can do it. If MS didn't take these risks now and invest in the unpleasant adjustment period this early they would be a much worse long term position. For one of the first times ever MS is taking preemptive action rather than reactive, that has to be celebrated. If it sounds like I'm too optimistic then all I can say is that I'm not certain about this, I know it's possible but MS has a long history of screwing things up, but so far? They have consistently done enough to maintain the momentum over the last few years, they still screw up a lot but they get a lot right too. My personal view is that I will stick with them until the WIn 9 time (2015), if they haven't achieved their goals by then I will look around for alternatives. Unfortunately on that front neither Apple or Google are showing any intention of moving to the future, Apple wants iOS to take over OSX (while MS is making Windows take over mobile instead), and Google seem to think that chromebooks are a valid desktop substitute! That is insane!