My friend and I looked into controlling those apps for a program we made to control media players with your voice called Shoevox - http://shoevox.org
The hard part was that we used sending keyboard shortcuts as our method of sending commands (which works for programs we support like WMP or VLC), but we couldn't do that reliably to Flash. We thought about switching to UI Automation but haven't done so yet.
As several comments suggested, we also considered shrinking the size of the image and displaying it at random positions and slight rotations on the screen to minimize any risk from smudges. We knew from usability feedback that decreasing the size of the image both increased the difficulty of properly entering the gesture and made the login experience feel less immersive; however, if there were a significant improvement to security, we wanted to consider the costs and benefits. What we discovered was that while shifting the image could reduce the buildup of smudges in specific spots, there were even more prominent “clouds” of taps, lines and circles that were identical relative to each other. With this information, an attacker could easily figure out the gestures relative to each other. With that information, it was a simple exercise to move them around the picture until they appeared to coincide with significant elements of the picture. There wasn’t a noticeable improvement in security and we were able to measure significant degradations to the fast and fluid user experience. In reality, using smudges is very difficult.
It's not really a status symbol. PMs tend to be more mobile, presenting in meetings and such, and need laptops. Devs and testers get much better desktops.
A status symbol is, by definition, something only or mostly upper echelons of a hierarchy can get, with fig leaf justifications about why the folks on the lower rungs are "not worthy" of them. The surest way to make anything (a private office, a parking space, a laptop) a status symbol is to mandate that only people above a certain level in the hierarchy can get one.(Note that I am responding to a comment that states that laptops are only for managers and devs have to get "loaners". Other people at MS seem to disagree that this is the case)
"Devs and testers get much better desktops."
Good desktops aren't an excuse for not having good laptops.
The association of laptops with presentations and meetings conveys a lot about MS's approach to development. No wonder the place is infested with multiple layers of redundant management. I wonder how MS Research fares? Do Peyton Jones and co go laptopless too?
Everything done at MSFT is based upon dev-test-pm triads where all members of the team have equal say in the product and decisions. This is true from the individual contributor level up to the VP level (where it starts to break down). Dev's report to dev leads, test to test leads, and PMs to PM leads. All PMs, including individual contributors, get laptops. They are the same level as developers, and more importantly, in a completely different hierarchy.
I'm not going to lie and say devs don't want laptops - of course they do. Everyone wants a free laptop. But guess what? I'm a PM at MSFT, and you know what I want? A second desktop and better monitors. Are these a status symbols for devs? No. Resources are fairly assigned based on need, and everyone at the company realizes that.
I should also point out that most senior devs do have laptops in my experience. It's the really new, junior guys that don't get them right away. There are communal resources if a dev really needs portability for a few days.
"I'm a PM at MSFT, and you know what I want? A second desktop and better monitors."
If you want them to do your job and you are not getting them, that just illustrates the point better. Economizing on hardware (and paper towels, heh!) is really dumb for a software/tech company.
"I should also point out that most senior devs do have laptops in my experience. It's the really new, junior guys that don't get them right away."
So, in other words a laptop is a status symbol. Junior devs rank lower in the hierarchy though they use the same tools and work on the same codebases as senior devs.
So what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?
In my book what Microsoft does is waaaaay beyond "trying to save on toilet paper". The last place I worked having a monitor bigger than 19" was a status simbol.
Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right? Because I have noticed that juniors tend to have this petty fascination with hardware that goes away with time (myself included).
"what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?"
I work on a 3000 node super computing cluster doing heavy duty Machine Learning and signal processing and a lot of funky (and classified) hardware, and yes, no one would blink if I wanted two more machines (or a 100 more) - as a matter of fact we recently did a million$ + upgrade of the hardware on my say so, so yeah everyone on this project gets all the hardware they want ;-)
Looking around I see (my personal system, doing mostly rendering and reports) 7 quad core machines, three 27 in monitors, 2 laptops, both Thinkpads. I (literally) only have to ask to get more machines.
"Excuse my patronizing - you are around/under 25 right?"
Patronizing is always inexcusable and rude, and snark appropriate on reddit isnot so valued on HN, but I don't mind at all. When you say things like that you just make a fool of yourself in public, go right ahead. :-)
And as for my age, I am closer to 40 than 25, so perhaps you just need to try again? ;-)
EDIT: (btw "paper towels" != "toilet paper". You missed the reference This which wrt the benefits cuts in 2004which included stopping towel supply(later rescinded) - I confess I am only guessing the towels were paper. ;-)
from mini msft (I heard from a friend in MS, but mini is an online reference)
"Should have just done the towels and called it a day!" - Lisa Brummel, May 18th 2006.
You know, one moment of reflection: the circle is now complete. My second post to this blog was on July 6th, 2004. It was right after an impromptu employee meeting with Ballmer and Gates and as part of that, Mr. Ballmer justified the unfortunate recent benefit cuts, the main two points of ire being the towels and the ESPP revamp. Now, two years later, we're getting our towels back.
Has it always just been about the towels?
(Possible book title flashes through my mind.)
It's not like we're sweaty work-out animals always in need of a shower and fresh towel. No. What riled us was the bone-headed way the towel cut-back was handled, explained, and justified. It truly made us wonder just who are these people in charge and just who do they think they are leading? The towels became the symbol of poor leadership. That and the office-supply hide-and-seek.
Someone should send Ms. Brummel a golden towel award. I'd like my old ESPP back, too."
Just a slight correction: the towels mentioned here aren't paper towels, but real actual towels. Many MSFT buildings have showers stocked with towels. At one point, the towel service was discontinued as a cost-saving measure. Lots of employees took issue with this and wanted their towels back.
That sounds very cost ineffective. I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot... but the productivity benefit is probably not worth the cost.
All organizations need to be cost efficient... unless you're a govt agency or contractor. In which case being cost INefficient is actually rational.
3000 node clusters? That is a tiny cluster as clusters go. 7 quad core machines? Two ThinkPads? A million dollars on
one-of-a-kind hardware?
You my friend, have zero clue in this. Since you have no idea what the specific cost benefit analysis on this project is that statement is built on nothing but your prejudices. I grant that it may "sound" ineffective to someone with no experience working on such projects. If I were to blather about whether a drug development proposal (something about which I know next to nothing) is "cost effective" without even looking at the financial documentation, I'd come close to what you are doing with that statement.
"I'd be more productive with a personal helicopter with landing pads in various locations with an oncall pilot"
In the right situation, expensing a personal helicopter would be trivial. What is "cost effective" depends on the derived benefit. Applies to startups too. The cost depends on the benefit derived not on what the raw materials cost.
So (fwiw, I could care less about convincing you) It is not really "cost ineffective". Machine/networking etc costs on this project are trivial compared to the total budget (spent on other resources) and (much) more importantly the derived benefit.
(just making up an example since I can't talk about what this project really does) If you were able to decrypt, and classify (in the Machine Learning sense) all enemy communication in real time, how much is that capability worth to a nation? Worth spending a few millions on? Not every project in the world has the financial structure of two guys in a garage coding up the next silly web app.
Iow you are talking about "unknown unknowns" with nothing to back up your conclusions. Amusing but not really relevant.
I see you are making up scenarios where people randomly order new hardware and that too every two weeks just for the hell of it. My assumption is that we are all professionals who won't do crazy things like that on our employer's dime and are talking of what hardware we require to do our jobs well. nostrademons's reply above provides a good justification for a laptop, for example.
No I can't justify helicopters (which was something you injected into the conversation). But I can justify some bandwidth on a satellite, say, and a few other things. Whatever it takes to do my job well. And I can also imagine some jobs ( a general in charge of an invasion say), where the cost of a helicopter on call would be so small in the overall context as to be non noticeable. The point is "cost effective" is always in reference to the overall context.
"you clearly don't work in the same space as virtually anyone here, much less a company like Microsoft."
I never said I did. And in my gp post I was responding to a sneering question as to whether (specifically) I could justify an extra machine or two where (specifically) I work.
I quote "So what you're saying is that where you work everybody has 2 desktops, 2 laptops and nobody would raise a brow if you wanted another?"
Guess what? That's right. Nobody would twitch an eyebrow let alone raise it.
Now wrt Microsoft specifically, even if MS were to give every single developer an extra laptop it cost much less than one of their VPs takes home as an annual bonus for doing nothing in particular. If Google can give their devs a MacBook Pro MS certainly can. (well, not a MacBook maybe but a top of the range Windown laptop). Without blinking.
"how much is that capability worth to a nation?
A fair bit of money. Although you clearly don't do that, otherwise you wouldn't even suggest it on HN. :-)"
Yeah that was a made up example. I explicitly identified it as such. I was just trying to demonstrate that what is "cost effective" depends on what you are trying to do. 1 $ maybe too much money. Or a million dollars may be a drop in the bucket. It all depends.
I do work on similar(ly ambitious) projects. Hardware is (so) not the bottleneck we have. " everyone on this project gets all the hardware they want" just happens to be the truth. Just append " that is needed to do their jobs well". I thought that wouldn't need to be explicitly stated here on HN, but whatever.
(And I am done with this thread. Too deep. should have triggered my cutoff alarm). Apologies to the rest of the folk on HN. Mea Culpa for getting irritated with a (perceived) sneer.
I am disgusted with myself for responding to obvious baiting and will leave the thread here (vs deleting it) as a monument to my folly.
My personal setup is 3 24" monitors, 2 quad-core desktops, and a ThinkPad laptop, backed up by a few tens of thousands of machines sitting off in a datacenter somewhere. With what they're paying me, they could afford my total hardware setup with less than a month of salary, and it's saved me far more time than that. I use basically all of it - all 3 monitors are usually covered with windows, and it's not unusual to have 4-6 webservers running on my desktops.
I'm older than 25, though probably not as old as plinkplonk.
Exactly. Unless a company's in such bad shape that they have to nickel-and-dime on expenses, the value of productive (and happy!) employees far outweighs hardware costs.
See nobody is disputing what all of us claim here.
But it's the usual perception of majority of companies that engineering, product development,... are cost centers and cost centers need to be minimized to gain profit.
It's what you get when you let the beancounters run the business. But people bitching here that developers at MS don't have it well off - are being ignorant about majority of industry where developers are still being under-utilized to everyones dismay.
And Microsoft's care of intellectual workers is top tier. Even the ones that are not well off (sitting in a room with 10 other people) are better off than 90% of our industry.
Indeed some people get to have anything they want or need - good for them. Even better if it makes the end result better. It's good that they don't get into situation as I have in multiple occasions - running a top priority, code red development effort which if fails it will take the company down, and then when I needed a new virtual appliance I got informed that I cannot get is since the ESX is out of harddrives and that there will be no purchases since the budged has already been spent.
And this is the industry standard - not the "I run bazillion node supercluster".
Hell where I used to work - two of the interns went and bought 2 24" monitors each out of their own money to use them at work.
