DB Query Becomes Browseable In Virtual World 82
Jani Pirkola writes to tell us that Green Phosphor's new project "Glasshouse" allows users to take database queries or spreadsheets and create 3D representations in a virtual world. Man what I wouldn't give to mash my level 80 death knight up with some of the ugly joins I have run across in the past. "Users can see data, and drill into it; re-sort it; explore it interactively - all from within a virtual world. Glasshouse produces graphs which are avatars of the data itself. We've tailored the system for the use of biotech companies, specifically for drug discovery and development. Dr. David Resuehr, a molecular biologist, recently joined Green Phosphor as our Chief Scientist."
These tools.. (Score:3, Interesting)
.. always seem fun and then never seem to go anywhere. Anyone else remember psDooM [sourceforge.net]? Blast away unwanted processes with a shotgun? Sounds great, right?
Well.. turns out, when you actually want to terminate a process, Windows Task Manager, or ps & kill are vastly more efficient, effective, and obvious tools to do the job.
Re:You couldn't make this up... (Score:3, Interesting)
In a slightly more considered tone I will say this:
This tool (assuming it has some diagnostic benefits), can be just as easily deployed to mislead as to inform. Anybody that's looked at company reports knows they're full of graphs that for the most part tend from lower left to upper right. "That's good isn't it?"
Earlier generation was "Adventure Shell" (Score:5, Interesting)
Doug Gwyn's Adventure Shell added a layer of Adventure-like syntactic sugar to the regular Bourne Shell. It wasn't terribly useful, but it was fun for 15 minutes, and since it was written in shell, you could hack on it yourself, and everything worked relatively normally.
If I were using the 3D visual interface, I'd expect my data to be slightly out of focus and to get carried off by pterodactyls if I didn't pay enough attention to everything at once...