Slashdot Mirror
Attention Sensitive User Interface
griffjon writes "The NYT (lame free reg blah blah) is running an article on Microsoft research into an attention-oriented UI that will use cameras and mics as well as software to monitor where a user's attention is focused and query other software (like e-mail notification, IM, etc.) to keep it from interrupting their chain of thought." This strikes me as being a really cool idea if properly implemented. Even simple things like not letting your biff update until you change focus out of a word processor. (mind you the anti-MS block on Slashdot will of course equate Microsoft's involvement with the project to mean that this is really about mind control or the corporately financed return of the plague, but what are ya gonna do?)
You realize that this will compeltely distroy most of the (commercial) web? Suddenly, companies will have proof of just how little time people spend looking at web advetisements. Since nobody watches them, they'll stop paying people for them, sites will vanish for not having the funds to pay for a server, and eventually every good clean site out there will vanish. As will every porn site that survives simply on advertising revenues.
Or, there's the flipside: If you aren't looking at an ad, the UI will move the ad into your line of sight or make it expand until you _have_ to look at a page's banner ads for five seconds before reading anything else on the page.
I dunno if this has already been said but do we want the os to control access to mics and video cameras for ui purposes especially with microsofts entrenchment in the computer os market. we have companys like realplayer etc that HAVE been known to send back information without our notification do we really need some company hijacking feeds from my computer?
I know this sounds overly parnoid but hey food for thought.
-Brian Peace
"Hi! It looks like you're trying to get some work done! Want some help?"
or:
"Hi! It looks like you're using an Oracle database! Did you know that SQL Server is used in 90% of Fortune 500 companies?"
or, worse yet:
"Hi! It looks like you're surfing Slashdot again! Would you like some help trolling?"
COOL then! Is there any source or binary or any kind of info about it anywhere? I'd like to try it out...
So when I chuck MSOffice the Bird... will it undo?
This is not about a new mouse. This is about applying Bayesian learning models with sensors providing visual and audio input. This system will learn your preferences by observation. That is why it needs to watch you.
So microsoft is doing it, so let them!
.NET. Here is a related story btw.
.net future will use.
I can only imagine using this kind of stuff once it gets completely themable in our wearable gnome (or equivalent) huds. The research and implementation will be done already, so it will be easier to spot mistakes that ms might have made and not repeat them.
All in all the article is very good at showing a new direction taken by microsoft, maybe hinting at the post-PC future envisioned by
I get the idea that there's nothing there that couldn't be replicated by free software, and it would be simple to start a system that did it. Perhaps it's important to get started soon though: there is a dire lack of GPL'ed software for embedded systems and whatever else MS's
"Most Internet entrepreneurs treat the users' attention as a Third World country to be strip-mined"
Classic words on ui design, seen especially on websites with lots of javascript... I wish they could be symbiotic not parasitic!
I look forward to the day when computers have feelings; because I plan on hurting them really badly... "Your mother was a toaster!!!!"
Do whatever you want with it. Can you make fvwm2 do this? I would appreciate that :-)
-- Cheers!
Excellent point!!
IMHO, this isn't about MS being incompetent of implementing something like that properly. This is about a passive interface vs. an active interface.
Who is supposed to be in control here? the computer or the user? Surely the user. Now of course, it can be argued that this attention-sensitive UI is only receiving orders from the user, just that instead of detecting mouse-clicks, it's detecting eye-glances. But there is a vast difference between consciously clicking the mouse, and unconsciously glancing at something that caught your attention on the screen. When you click a mouse button or hit a key on the keyboard, it at least goes through your brain first and gives you a chance to consciously decide to do it. But your eyes are often distracted by unexpected events, and often this reaction is sub-conscious.
There is a vast difference between interpreting what a user means by a mouse click and what you think a user means by looking at something. Interfaces should be passive: waiting for explicit orders, and not active: *guessing* what the orders might be from vague signs.
---
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
>mind you the anti-MS block on
/. just isn't the same since all of those
>Slashdot will of course equate
>Microsoft's involvement with the project to
>mean that this is really about mind
>control or the corporately financed return
>of the plague, but what are ya gonna
>do?
Poo poo. Hey! If you don't like the anti-MS slant
around these parts then go post to some other
web log. Damn, MS shills.
So does anybody know who this CmdrTaco fella is?
We need to figure it out and break his virtual
knees.
Windows-wienies started showing up around here.
;)
I'd say your 'freeware' copy of Microsoft's new inovative software will take you about five minutes to finish.
Forgive me if I seem somewhat jaded, but I really do not believe that this will work. I keep thinking of all the 'user-friendly' idioticies in, for example, Word, where the program tries to out-guess me. No, I really don't want this as a numbered list. No, I do *not* want a capital letter here. Leave my headings alone, you moron! I shudder to think what that new idea will do when it tries to second-guess me as I sit on my PC. Seeing Micro$ofts track record at second-guessing their users, I can see some MajorChaos (tm) on the horizon...
---
"What, I need a *reason* for everything?" -- Calvin
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
maybe they should start by getting rid of some of those nasty noninformative modal pop-up windows in Word..
--
CmdrTaco didn't write that. If you read closely, you'll find that that was written by someone named Griffjon. To my knowledge, CmdrTaco really *does* hate Microsoft.
Brian Woodring
Apple: Cool... will they open source it?
:)
Sun: What kind of liccens will they use?
The responce is SOO predictable... and yet...
Apple: Closed source Apple only with no way to port to Linux... Microsoft finnaly cons Apple to port to Windows and Linux gets bashed for lacking feature....
Sun: It's Open Sorce and free... send $19.95 for CD with binarys... sign contract and send blood sample to get source...
We are so predictable becouse they are so predticable...
We allready know what will happen... yet we feel compelled to post telling everyone else what they allready know...
I guess it's the smart users "first post"
I don't actually exist.
Personally, I think it would be a great improvement over the current MS philosophy that any program can grab your attention when it feels like it (v. annoying if your typing something, and another program grabs focus in the middle of it).
Amen to that my brother. IE is the great offender.. I click on the "open in new window" link...then alt-tab to my contact manager software and start to do some work.. and WHAM.. good ol IE decides to just "pop back up" and take charge.. uh... that's just wrong in my book.. wrong and annoying.
I'm not sure I like the idea of my computer trying to "guess" what I want.. if I don't want to be distracted at all.. well I just turn off anything which might distract me. Prettyy simple eh. Besides.. MS usually fails badly when they try to desing software that is *smart* so why should this be any diferent. But I will give them credit for at least trying.
Of course, if this attention sensitive interface gets implemented, then it'll recognize that the top of the screen has become a spot you never look at, and move the bar somewhere else.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Ever tried PDF? The suits seem to like that one. I'm thinking of using it when I have to send out resumes again.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I think this is just one step towards agents that help us deal with the enormous amount of information available at our jobs and on the internet.
I personally could use an agent that would keep an eye on all the websites I frequent and pre-download them and keep them in a queue for me to look at, with a "new items" counter in the system tray. Especially if it could retrieve items and grade them according to keywords for me.
The technology spoken of in this article is too far away and too imprecise. Human behavior (eye roving) is just too unpredictable. It's more a pie-in-the-sky kind of thing that sounds cool but will never go anywhere, until image recognition is much more improved and the CPU cycles to process the data are free.
Their involvement with the project is really about mind control or the corporately financed return of...
Never mind.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Microsoft should spend more time eradicating bugs, stablizing the UI and securing their operating systems, and less time spent on all the eyecandy and other crap.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Call me cynical, but when I see Microsoft working on something that will sit between the OS and the user and filter out what gets the user's attention, I don't think of it being used for good.
I think of it being used to crush rival companies' instant messenger programs.
"Windows ME Isn't Done Till ICQ Doesn't Run"
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Heck, I'd be happy if X-based window managers would do simple things-- like make sure that dialogs can't be moved behind their parent windows if they're modal dialogs.
Or make it so that when you click on a window any modal dialogs it has are bought to the front and focused on. Those things are real killers when you've got a busy screen.
I actually think it does...Way to go MS....
"Hey look over there!", swipes your PGP key. "Oh, I guess it was nothing.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
(emphasis mine)
Sounds like they better be careful with the DoJ - it would be "interesting" to see many of their patents invalidated for antitrust reasons.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Who said anything about punching?!
---
Posting at -1 means never losing karma.
Can you metamoderate?
They will have to think very carefully about how to implement this :-)
because software that thinks for you can be really annoying. On the other hand,
if the software can remove my Lynx window to help me focus
on my work, that would be really nice
-- Cheers!
...or Microsoft could make it that applications don't steal focus from each other. I hate that!
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
To come up with something that works well, would take enormous amouts of time and resources, as well as adding huge over head to the system. Hmm, wonder if intel is gonna push this.
This kind of technology would us be seriously in danger of doing nothing but annoying the end user. Ever gotten into a fight with Microsoft Word over some formating issues? It can be dang near impossible to get it to do what you want because it is being so helpfull.
Still if ever got impletmed correctly, and wasn't annoying, it would be nice.
guvf vf zl fvt
I think this will be the first time that microsoft has payed any attentions to it users, maybe something that will actually help people instead of more buggy features...... Nahhh, gotta be mind control..... MG
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
From the innovator(tm) that brought you Bob(tm) and The Paperclip(tm), it's another insidious intelligent agent -- The Agitator(tm). I can hear it now:
"I couldn't help but notice that you're an idiot, and that you type like my gramma."
"Hey pal, you wouldn't know a DLL if it bit you in the ass."
"Excuse me! I'm TRYING to innovate(tm) over here!"
"Why don't you ever talk to me anymore...I mean *really* talk to me?"
Bleh. This is just another crappy half-assed cock-eyed notion from that leemer Horvitz.
See http://research.microsoft.com/~horvitz/ if you want to email the guy who "invented" The Paperclip and Bob. If you email him, be sure to start with..."It looks like you're about to write a letter! Allow me to assist!"
Great... now my computer is gonna start complaining that I don't pay enough attention to it.
Thanks M$
Why, we'll make Rock Ridge think it was a chicken that got caught in a tractor's nuts!
LaTeX is, in my opinion, a far superior product
Aye, and it can produce absolutely second-to-none-quality documents with almost no effort. All the formatting can be encoded into templates. Also, you have pdfTeX, so DVI isn't the only target format available.
iSKUNK!
Nobody here likes doing the NYT registration. Are they the ONLY source for this information? I understand they run the occasional exclusive news-for-nerds story, but a story like this, it seems to me, could be found other places. Why do we keep getting stories with links to them when even the Slashdot editors agree their registration policy is "lame"?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Yeah, you can do a similar thing. A windows program will "blink" in the taskbar to say it wants focus. It's very similar to the mac thing (didn't the applicaiton menu flash, it's been a while since I used a mac). I like it. It's relatively unobtrusive. I was looking up the API call for it the other day to make a program do it. Pretty easy.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Will this be a case of natural selection, with the winking-impaired left by the wayside? ;-)
Your computer will learn what you teach it. If you want to be distracted all the time then your computer will do that... Think of it as setting preferences conversationaly
If Sun or RedHat, or even some post on freshmeat had announced this research, the tone of these posts would be drastically different. I personally think that the technology is cool, and even though Microsoft doesn't have a great track record at trying to make things "user friendly" or even more helpful, there are some successes.
I could list the successes, and you would pick holes in them, but name a piece of gui software that couldn't possibly improve in its interface, or just needs a tool that does _____.
Microsoft, while using unfair and monopolistic tactics, and possibly pushing back personal computing about 5 years, has enough resources to figure out exactly what needs to be done, or at least build the prototype for the Open Source world to implement correctly.
Even just removing items like that can be REALLY annoying. Recently I was trying to figure out how to compare documents in Word for a friend - now she had never used that feature before so that item might have been removed from view. In looking for that feature I do not hang around menus long enough for anything to figure out I want more choices, I just flip through them - how aggrivating it would have been to search and search and then find later Word had hidden it from me!
I think UI's that are really easily altered by the user are the way to go - application developers should look at games to see how simple and configurable UI's can be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The real quesiton is when are we going to put this on Linux/UNIX? We can't have software starting out on Windoze. That's just not heard of...well ok sort of...
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Personally, I'm inclined to think that the most useful tools are the highly customizable ones - while I don't go near the Microsoft paperclip, tools like Outlook or procmail give me fine-tuned control over how I receive and organize my mail and that's good. So a big thing that I look for in new software is how easily I can customize it to work with me. Microsoft Word nearly always seems to work against me.
I can't imagine trying to set up rules for something that was responding to my hand and/or eye movements. They're often way too subconscious and I don't understand them well enough to formulate rules that are as useful as "Beep when I get mail from my boss." Also, what if I want to wear mirrored sunglasses while I code? (I just got a new desk at which I face big windows with no blinds - around 3 or 4 pm, I'm very tempted to put on dark glasses). Is that going to break the UI? There are also a lot of variables in a person's behavior - sitting in a different chair, not getting enough sleep, and drinking too much coffee can all change one's movements. Although I've got to say that a UI which could detect when I hadn't had enough coffee and brew me a fresh cup would be a huge improvement.
So, I think this idea is barking up the wrong tree. The things I'd rather see in a new UI paradigm are some integration of voice commands, easier methods for customization (so that it's not just for geeks anymore. Outlook's Rules Wizard is actually moderately good at this.), and an interface with some sort of ability to learn from interactions with a user (while maintaining enough consistency so the guy doesn't feel like his computer is schizophrenic).
my only concern is will it start shutting down my machines more often cause it thinks am not paying attention ?
All this comes down to is just marketing to Joe User. Getting his focus and maintaining it is of interest to people buying the Ad space. M$ is just trying to figure out how to Steal (more) Cycles from the average person.
Ultimately this is a boost for free software. Microsoft and its brilliant scheme to better market will just annoy people trying to use computers. Thus forcing them over (to free software) from The Dark Side.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
What priority does it put on surfing for pr0n?
Will it ship with a "feature" that berates me when my attention strays from the video conference?
Watkins! this is for your benefit! Pay attention!
Everything's been downhill since the TRS-80
We all know, based on experience of MS's other attempts at being 'helpful' (wizards, paper clip bastards...), that at least the first version will be useless, probably the first few versions. I doubt I will be using software like this for several years, it will take that long for it to become anything other than an irritation for me..
Slashdot readers are hardly a representative cross-section of the population as a whole, or even of computer users or internet users. I do wonder whether some people actually *like* the paperclip bastard and find it useful, presumably they do otherwise MS wouldn't spend cash writing it (I am assuming they know what their customers think they want, which is distinct from what we know they want). It's these people that will be the target market, the people who find using a computer to do anything hard, so I wouldn't expect a positive reaction from Slashdot readers.
A certain ammount of praise is due to MS, at least it will be they who make the mistakes from which the rest of us can learn.
--
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
Then I read in the article that this was an "improvement" on the famous dancing paper clip. My initial impression was confirmed; Microsoft Bob, by another name.
I cant stand it when the ATM beeps at me to remove my card (which I have already done since I *can* anticipate its next move). I refuse to use such helpful programs as Office and Outlook (or are they the same thing now?) because of the multitude of features that do nothing but distract me from what I am trying to get done. When I made the move from the MS world to *NIX it was a bit confusing, but the discovery of simple tools that did what I need with no bells and whistles (literaly!) made it all worth while. I am just glad that I now work in an environment that has whole heartedly embraced Linux/Solaris for its development and desktop platform. There are still many Windows users here but slowly but surely all documents are being converted from MS formats to open ones. Now all I need to do is demote the Exchange server....
-- Hail Eris
(mind you the anti-MS block on Slashdot will of course equate Microsoft's involvement with the project to mean that this is really about mind control or the corporately financed return of the plague, but what are ya gonna do?)
We just equate Microsoft's involvement with the project to mean that it won't work.
Just think, if they can track where you are looking, then advertisers can start charging customers for how often an ad was looked at instead of just impressions. Then they could take it one step further and move the ad to where you are looking. Hmmm, maybe I should patent this and then if anyone tried to do this, then I could stop them.
Just me, or does this sound like a marketer's dream come true? Forget about click-through rate- we're talking about exact demographics about who looks at what for how long.
Anyone else worried about privacy issues here? MS doesn't have the best track record when it comes to consumer privacy.
According to Brittanica.com, people blink at a rate ranging from once every two to ten seconds. I'd be curious to figure out EXACTLY how such a piece of software would determine whether you were blinking for the sake of blinking, or blinking to activate something on the computer. Presumably, it would keep track of how often you normally blink, along with standard deviations from that pattern, and then say, "ooooo, that was quick - better send a message to the application...". This leads to one major problem: What if I have something in my eye, and I start blinking a whole lot? Is it going to open every application I have? Even if we forced a double blink, this could potentially be a problem. Blinking, unfortunately, is not a very well regulated activity - we do it often, and we can come up with averages for intervals, but for a computer to decide whether I really meant to initiate an action, or whether I am just having a crazy eye spasm has got to be difficult. Mouse clicks are easy. They are a definite action - which demands a definite response on the part of an application.
The roots of the paperclip as Bob still show: Ask office help about "Bob" and it takes you right to the "Office Assistant" entries...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
so let's try something more complicated.
Seriously, I think this is a great research project, but the reason that UIs stink is not because we have fully exploited the capabilities of GUI and have to look beyond it to a new class of capabilities. The word "agent" when applied to UI is always a red flag. Think about the paperclip tracking where your eyes are going. "I see you are looking for some nasty Pr0n..."
The reason interfaces stink is because developers have little understanding of or deference to user needs and wants. I don't doubt that a dash of attentional interfacing wouldn't be a good thing in limited amounts, but the idea that the same people who are slapping GUIS together today are going to be able to agressively intuit what users are about to do is at best a pipe dream and at worst a nightmare.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But just think of the boon this could represent to script kiddies everwhere....
M$ AI: It looks like you are trying to crack a system, can I offer you some help from my knowledge base? There an excellent source of exploits covering most M$ products located here.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Worse than that, if this were to be implemented in something like a web browser, doubleclick and kind could come up with interesting statistics on which of their banner ads draw the most attention.
(nil)
an attention-oriented UI that will use cameras and mics as well as software to monitor where a user's attention is focused and query other software
Has anyone else given any thought to this? I got Big Brother circulating in my computer! Granted, it doesn't hurt if it stays in my computer, but who says that this information couldn't be leaked out, like through IE? I could be playing some flight sim, and the next thing I know when I switch over to my web browser, there's a web pop-up add advertising Microsoft Flight Simulator!
The software would monitor what I am doing at my computer, both by camera and by mouse clicks. The moment this information leaves my computer (Microsoft innovation, anybody?), my privacy goes up in smoke.
Great. MORE CPU overhead.
Is anyone ever going to realize that the best step forward will be to take a step back? To hell with adding on all these whiz-bang new-fangled "features" to the OS. Do the opposite - go back, hack all the crap out, and optimize, optimize, optimize.
I've been thinking for quite a few years now that things would be just great if someone would take an OS (for example, Windows) and instead of adding varios eye-candy crap to it, just hack it down to the simplest, purest form. Make it work, make it stable, and make it SMALL. At some point (we may have already reached it) code optimization will give us more speed than upping the speed on our CPU's will.
Attention-sensitive UI's, voice recognition - keep it. Give me a lean, mean machine with some nice tight code and I'll be a happy camper.
Mr. Ska
"Such as if I start typing a letter in Word and the paperclip interupts my typing asking me if I want help. "
Doesn't actually bother me in an active way. You don't have to click on it, it kinda pops up in the background.
Of course, I always turn the damn thing off.
Never fails to amaze me, though, if I'm writing some poetry and I make a new line:
To crash microsoft:
It asks me that letter thing. Even 2 or 3 pages in . . . annoying, yes, avoidable, yes.
Now, if someone can tell me how to turn OFF autoformatting, I'll be happy.
later
Dan
Unfortunately, I realised that most of the time my eyes are actually at the keyboard or just wandering aimlessly around...
- the Crazy Fraggle
The article indicates he was the inventor of the Evil Clippy. We all know that Clippy Must Die(TM)!
-----
Eye trackers have been around for about two decades; the only new thing about this one is how simple it is. It depends on the fact that human eyes have quite different reflective properties in IR than the rest of the body or clothing. So they take a video frame with IR lights on, then one with it off, and subtract. Eyes show up as dots.
Now, here's the question:
Aside from the frequent crashes and the inefficiency, my other great frustration with Windows 9x/NT is that when I'm banging away at Eudora and waiting for Internet Exploiter to load a busy webpage, Internet Exploiter will steal the focus away from Eudora while I'm typing. With no time for me to respond, it just goes and takes the next character I was typing to Eudora as being my response to its question.
Of course, these aren't the only programs affected by this design shortcoming; when you have ten applications running at once, the frustration can be immense.
Now, has anyone figured out a way to make Windows behave differently when an app wants focus? How about flashing the window's taskbar presence and beeping a couple of times?
Is this a problem that I'll see when I'm running X on my Linux box? (I'm still very new to Linux, and I'm not yet at the point where I've ever had more than about three X applications open at once.)
Thanks.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
An OS/browser that traverses ad links in literally the blink of an eye would cause more defections to Linux than any feature that could be added to Linux. For all of their prowess, Microsoft can also be their own worst enemy. e P.S. I don't even like point-to-focus
First, there is no connection between wearing a straightjacket and being a droid. If I anthromorphize the droid sufficiently (a la Star Wars), it might be said to "like" or "dislike" something, but I seriously doubt that they will ever be programmed with predilictions (or not) for straightjackets. Second, as a human (non-droid) you and I have the liberty of wearing straightjackets or not wearing them; it might be part of our particular kink to wear them. I, myself, like to have all of the different kinks available for me to use or not to use. Replace the word "kink" or "choice" with "straightjacket" and you will see that MS are not confining us at all by introducing this new (or borrowed) technology. If we want to use it, use it, which is always better than wanting it and not having it available. Yes, I'm pointing out that your objection is simple-minded anti-MS bullshit.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
It just means that when you don't pay attention to it when it offers help, it'll whistle and get obnoxious until it recognizes that you do.
While I can see the value in this type of interface, there's something that scares me about putting these tools into the hands of the type of people that put popup windows into a web interface...
We have rich decision software called Bayesian Inference Software that we can build down into the system that can track your usage and adjust in an automatic fashion
As someone mentioned already, this can be used for many another thing than what this is intended.
A couple of these uses c(w)ould be:
- Permanent monitoring of the users with the camera. It can already be done right now actually, but a boss deciding to put a webcam on every machine for supervision purposes will make everyone feel 'spied'. This system would provide an 'excuse' for having webcams on every machine.
- Advertisement banners can now position themselves where you're looking.
- Since the thing would monitor the user's activities in order to determine what to give the focus to (or what to prevent being given focus to actually), it'll be easy to keep trace of the activities of the user: slashdot reading 2 hours, coding 4 hours, speaking jokes with colleages 30 minutes...
This thing really raises a couple of disturbing issues. I may be paranoid but I don't like monitoring systems. At least are they aware of that: And Horvitz and his researchers themselves acknowledge that the information collected by the notification manager software -- potentially, information on the personal activities and movements of millions of people that would be stored on the Internet -- raises privacy and security issues that have yet to be resolved. But I doubt those issues will be resolved.
Ignoring the system requirements to run the thing - that certainly aren't trivial - the system could be useful, if the user is given to set the "disturbance value" (or "worth") of possibly disturbing events. But that would be a hell to configure, imagine every morning having to say to the program "I'm waiting for urgent messages from person X and Y" and changing that everyday. I doubt very much that a program will be able to determine what I think important and what not.
A simple example of this would be that a message I receive from a colleage might very well be the information I've been waiting for 2 days but also an email to, for example, notify me of a colleague's birthday party.
Another thing I'm skeptical about in the article is: He expects that the system will be able to greet and converse with new visitors. The conversation, he says, will be on par with speaking to a person who is hard-of-hearing.
AFAIK (As Far As I Know [I realised that acronysm's meaning only very recently...]) no current software is able to converse with a human being. Answer a couple of pre defined questions maybe, but certainly not converse.
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
How is it MS can talk about mounting cameras on your computer and such When the IE browser still lists slashdot.ogr EVERY TIME i type it because once in my life i mistyped it??!! Can we get some AI over there?
In Outlook, it pops up something like "You have new mail. Would you like to read it now?". If you happen to type Y or Enter before you notice the message, you can unintentionally do all sorts of interesting things. Once I sent email with half a sentence in it to someone I had never met (he was on a mailing list I was subscribed to, and I replied to his mail).
Nevertheless, the way to cure this problem is to nuke stupid programs that do that. Not to have some idiot "clever" program that guesses when I might be trying to do some work.!!!
I don't have Office 2000 on my computer, just Office 97, but I do have Outlook 2000 and I agree that those menus are damn annoying and inefficient. Some of my cow-orkers with Office 2000 are always confused by the Intellisense (that's what it's called) menus. Since it hides the options that you don't always use, how are you supposed to be creative and try something new? Talk about hindering the innovation of the users.
When you think about it, you really don't need the menu system to only show you recent and frequently used options. That's what all the buttons (ie save, open, print) on the toolbars do!
When I access the menu system, I go into it to use options that I use *infrequently*. Thank you MS for forcing your ass-backwards logic on us.
/me takes deep breath...ok, here is how to turn off Intellisense...at least for Outlook 2000...I'm sure it's similar for Word & Excel.
1. Click on the "Tools" menu
2. Choose "Customize"
3. Go to the "Options" tab
4. De-select the check box for "Menus show recently used commands first"
5. Close out the menu and that should do it
I'd just like to add that I like using Office, especially Excel. Some people complain about the bloat, but that's only a state of mind. In my company, we end up using all of the nitty gritty features of Word and Excel that others may find unnecessary. In terms of getting things done in a timely manner, it works ok. The real problem IMO is Windows (9x and NT). All of our problems with crashes and other problems always seem to stem from the OS. When MS is broken up, I think the apps company will be the winner, while the OS company burns in hell for all eternity when the apps get ported to other OSes.
The cure for 1984 is 1917.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I want to know when email comes, even in the heavy midst of coding, ...
That depends on the mail... When you get mail from some people, you want to know it directly, but some things (some types of mailing lists, spam, what have you) you don't really need to read the second it arrives. I'd really like to set different mail sounds in NSCommunicator based on my mail filters, but unfortunately that's not possible (at least not in my version (4.08, WinNT)).
Why should you put either first? On a scale of one to ten you could set them both at ten, "Let me know right away!".
And who would spend a day at this??? The idea of these systems is to evolve, so unless you specificly say "This is my wife/boss, let me know right away." the different prioity values should be evaluated on the fly in responce to your actions. In a perfect world you wouldn't even need to specify that your Wife/Boss get highest priority and the system would figure that out by itself, but this isn't a perfect world.
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
Many of you seem to be missing the point here...this is merely one more way for MS (or others) to gather data on users.
They'll know what sites you spend time at, which ads attract your attention, etc. In short, they will be able to develop a very comprehensive database of your likes and dislikes.
Imagine, you're browsing through gizmo.com when up pops a new banner ad "Buy the new M$ gizmo here!"
The worst thing about it is you won't have to enter anything into the computer for them to gather data.
Any doctrine that weakens personal responsibility for judgement or action helps create a climate that welcomes an
Does this mean that if doubleclick et al gets ahold of this, they could do some market research?
/.'s ads before I got junkbuster http://www.junkbusters.com) then they would know the ad is effective, and maybe worse could know you (specifically) looked at it and they'll get you with junk (e)mail!
[imagine ad here]
suppose this attention thing (I didn't read the article, free reg >:( ) could tell that you looked at the ad and were unconsciously intrigued (I used to do this on
by the way the technology has been around for about a decade now.
# debian/rules
A letter I have sent to Microsoft Research Labs today.
Dear Research People,
I am particularly concerned about your research into an attention orientated UI.
Have you considered that this research could lead to people being jettisoned into space?
Yours sincerely
I propose that all X window manager authors add the EyeballFocus setting, complementing MouseFocus, SloppyFocus, and ClickToFocus, immediately, thus avoiding any possible claims of "innovation" from Microsoft. Just create an X extension that accepts x,y screen coordinates from an arbitrary source, and worry about pesky issues like hardware later.
Alright, so this was meant to be funny, but there are actually eyeball tracker->mouse replacements out there, I saw one in use ten or more years ago. Has anyone made one work under X?
That seems to be a consequence of a MS Windows bug, not a feature. If you bring up a dialog box under Win32 with the default settings, it often comes up behind the current window. The default ought to be "in front of the windows for this application", but the default that's supposed to do that doesn't work reliably. Unfortunately, "in front of everything" is easy to specify, does work, and gets used far too often.
It was once a rule of the Macintosh user interface guidelines that you never grab the focus unsolicited. You were supposed to use the Mac's "Notification Manager", which did no more than put little blinking icons in the upper right of the screen, hinting that some background app wanted attention, when you got around to it. This was very polite. Unfortunately, as screens became cluttered with too much blinking stuff, notifications became ignored. This led to a more aggressive style of notification. Today, it's more like MS Windows. Things were slower-paced back in the Mac's heyday.
Tell me about it. When I'm on a PC at work, using the programmes which are provided for me, I spend way too much time and energy using the help index, trying to figure out how to stop MSW messing with what I want to do. On Macs, I use MS Word 5.1a, from the early 1990s I believe. It does everything I need. Without the dictionaries (I use British rather than American English anyway), the programme is about 880k. Which means I can carry it around on a floppy and install it wherever I need to use it in a couple of minutes. Plus, on a G4, it starts up and runs so quickly.
I can see the new office feature now...
It looks like you're eyeing up that secretary over there! Would you like some help with
chatting up clerical staff?
(*) Suggest subtle approach.
(*) Suggest crude approach.
(*) I'm married, don't bother me again.
-- Now that WOULD be an office assistant!!
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
The beauty of this software is that it knows that. If you read the article, you'll find that a main part of the project is AI that tries to figure out how valuable a particular interruption is to you. When the program sees that e-mail from your wife is important, it will do everything in its power to tell you about it, even away from your desktop (the software will be able to send notifications to your cell phone, your pager, etc, and will choose between these based on where you are at the time). If an e-mail is not so important, then it will wait for a good time to inform you.
The downside: big brother will always be watching. They'll have to work pretty darn hard on privacy part of this (which the interviewee acknowledges).
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Is it that hard?
- Justin
Forget Attention responsive applications, the thing is much more simpler than that and I was thinking about it already for a while. With a camera you can estimate where on screen you are looking, and if this would be really precize we could use this instead of the mouse, imagine blinking with one eye instead of pressing a button :-) but this will probalby not be precize enough, so we could add a plugin to the window manager that will move focus to the window that we are currently looking. I'll be buying a webcam soon to try to do something like this, if I have time...
ciao Damjan
And sure enough that's exactly what's happened. I find myself wondering how different the reponses to this article would have been if it had been reported that Sun or Bell Labs or Apple were doing this work instead of Microsoft. With luck, someone with clout at /. will post just such a faux story and we can see for ourselves ...
Please - let's try to evaluate things on their merits. Don't get me wrong, ``I hate the Romans as much as anyone'' but there's really no need to go bashing Microsoft for no reason.
Not when there are so many legitimate reasons :-)
--
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Or ICQ clients which reappear on the top at a new message coming in
I hope you're not referring to Mirabilis ICQ, it's got UI options galore to suit everyone's taste. I knows how to shut the hell up and mind its own business if you click a few widgets. Too bad it's *7 megs*.
Wah!
"Dave, you have an appointment with Microsoft to arrange selling your soul for my next upgrade."
"Cancel that appointment"
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that"
Don't get me started. I was installing the latest version of IE the other day whilst posting to Slashdot, and during the process it stole my focus (without even requiring anything of me) no less than seven times; then, at the end of the process, just as I was pressing the 'return' key, what should pop up but a dialog saying 'You must restart your computer before the settings will take effect. Do you want to do so now? NO YES'!!
(cue comments slagging me off for installing IE in the first place, my mother cooks socks in hell, etc.)
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Waggoner-Edstrom (Microsoft PR agency) has a talent for hyping old news that Microsoft suddenly discovers it has (re)invented.
If you read the article and web page of this technology you can see that Bayesian analysis was used during the 1970s in medicine extensively. The programmer in question was a physician. "Artificial intelligence" at the time was an attempt to use computers to solve complicated problems such as diagnosis in medicine. The program "MYCIN" was able to give advice on antibiotic use to physicians, based on expert rules.
This technique never quite succeeded. The answers were probably right, but physicians didn't have full confidence in them, since the argument process was a bit mysterious. This was disturbing to psychologists, who had concluded that humans were conservative Bayesian in decision making under uncertainty.
A new wave of psychologists had to come along and show that humans are not Bayesian in their thinking. It might be that computer aids could help humans to decide matters better, and help solve complex problems, but pure Bayesian analysis would not provide a full answer to our problems. This unfortunate conclusion should have been foreseen when one considers that the rationalist agenda to reduce arithmetic and logic to a complete and consistent decision theory was doomed by Goedel long ago.
Human-computer interface theory has moved away from Bayesian analysis in another respect. The complexity of modern technology has caused enormous problems, even disasters, for which we would like to have some procedure to prevent such errors in the future. It turns out that the great technology errors such as Chernobyl or Challenger were not human-operator errors or technology-operation errors, so much as human-organizational errors and technology-design errors. The errors were latent in the design and just waiting for the random events to be exposed. Bayesian analysis would only predict what could be foreseen and calculated--these errors were overlooked in the design stage, and Bayesian analysis could never reveal them.
Experts such as Don Norman and James Reason have written extensively on the failures of rationalist Bayesian analysis to manage complex technology. They propose concrete solutions for the design stage. I wish Microsoft would pay more attention to their ideas, instead of fooling around with this Bayesian stuff.
One example: I sat in the audience in the big tent at the launch of Windows 95 and watched Bill Gates and Jay Leno show off the spell-checking ability of WinWord 95. Bill typed in something like, "We are at the premierr of Windows 95" and the word beginning with "p" was underlined with a red wavy line. Jay and Bill clicked on the word and accepted Word's suggested correction "premier". Based on Bayesian analysis, quite likely that would be the most probable spelling. However, it is wrong in this context: instead, the more unusual spelling "premiere" is correct. Since Jay and Bill didn't know any better, they took the word of the computer expert.
If we follow strict Bayesian tools, this situation of exposure to unexpected errors will increase. That is why users turn off Microsoft Bob--the technology is wrong, annoying, and causes more problems than it is worth.
Finally, someone is talking some sense! The tutorial that I used is on this page. Click on the link that says 'the best LaTeX guide that I've found'. It's a dvi file so you need to have a dvi viewer. There's also a link to a good index of LaTeX commands on this page.
-vax computer, vi, lynx. 'nuf said
LyX is an advanced open source document processor running on many Unix platforms and OS/2, and experimentally under Windows/Cygwin. Unlike standard word processors, LyX encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents, not their appearance. LyX lets you concentrate on writing, leaving details of visual layout to the software.
LyX produces high quality, professional output -- using LaTeX, an industrial strength typesetting engine, in the background; LyX is far more than a front-end to LaTeX, however. No knowledge of LaTeX is necessary to use LyX, although it will give a user more power.
LyX is stable and fully featured. It has been used for documents as large as a thesis, or as small as a business letter. Despite its simple GUI interface (available in many languages), it supports tables, figures, and hyperlinked cross-references, and has a best-of-breed math editor.
I think technology you mention would be a good step forward for immersive VR. Now that computers are starting to get the the point where a dynamic level of detail can be calculated for objects from their underlying geometric data, that would provide a nice boost to realism.
Another neat thing that could be done with this is in a VR environment, one of the hardest things to deal with is the problem of how to model interation with a very limited sensory/motor bandwidth. If objects could have lists of actions the user could perform on/with them when a user looks at something, the system could pop up a translucent menu over it with a list of hotkeys to perform a list of logical actions =:-)
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Strange, I thought everything not italics or inside quotes was written by the poster. If you looked at that carefully, you'd understand. After all, according to english, everything Griffjon wrote should have been enclosed in the quotes.
For example,... Harry said, "Dear Fran" Will you marry me?
Don't seem right.
Great. If you're on a network, it will presumably be so easy to send all your 'attention metrics' to some central location, where your performance can be 'tracked' by mindless automatons, to determine just how much you are 'concentrating' on your job. The equation will run, less switching between tasks = better productivity. But what's wrong with hopping between windows? That's how I work best anyway. Doing just one task for a while can drive me nuts.
Hehe Microsoft has this reputation for such things as BSOD. A very desered one.
What will be done with this technology?
How will it be used.
Will it work effectively or will we have Ms.ADD..
I can see Windows going insain becouse my hair is in wild flopy mode (hair standing up like a well know scientist.. relitively speaking) or cat jumps on my lap and gets my attention computer is confused becouse I am no longer focused on it
I don't actually exist.
This attention-based computing business probably has more to do with MS's vision of "pervasive computing"--that is, computers everywhere, and interaction with all sorts of computers without realizing it.
For example, imagine the simple scenario where there are 10 or 12 different monitors in your house, and you're watching TV, for example.. If the computer REALLY NEEDED your attention (e.g. Little Bobby broke his nose), it could figure out where you were, what you were doing, and notify, for example, the stove that it should flash "YO! BOBBY'S BEEN SMACK-DOWN'D!" or something...
--
You know, I have never read a single manual on Word (I did use the help a few times, but rarely). Yet I consider myself somewhere near expert level in it. On a general note, I believe that a good interface should be intuitive enough to easily reveal all of its features to a reasonably knowledgeable user without the user having to go through manuals. Of course then it shouldn't be too intimidating to a novice either, like you're saying. So we got ourselves a little dilemma.(spelling right?)
I'm not just complaining about Microsoft, there are plenty of other apps guilty of these kinds of things. As far as customizability goes, Microsoft gives you the illusion of customizability without providing much actual benefit. Yes you can adjust locations of menu items or toolbar elements. How do I drag the contents pane into a seperate window entirely? How do I bind any key I want to any command? These again might be possible, but anything that does not fall inside the realm of the "options" box is so hard to do it might as well be impossible.
I don't use the contents pane so I can't help with that. You can bind any key you want to any command, I don't recall exactly how that's done, but it is possible in Office and in Windows shortcuts, too. Generally, I disagree with you. Office is reasonably customizable. Other M$ products may be less customizable but still... I wouldn't bash them on that.
If you're thinking that I'm saying CLI's and X-windows programs are superior, I'm not.
no I was just saying that Word is very intuitive compared to any CLI.
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
some rules of thumb as carved in stone. There was a nice article a
while back in the CACM The Anti-Mac
which was about what a user interface would be like if we threw out
the desktop metaphor, one of whose assumptions is this idea of the
passive interface. Think how useful non-passive intefaces are, like
xbiff...
I'm really interested in new work on user interfaces. I don't
like the idea of hiding what programs are doing that comes with the
desktop metaphor, and by extension to almost all GUIs, but on the
other hand, I wouldn't go back to text-only, mouse-free, console
experience. So I use my machine in an unprincipled mess of GUI and
CLI. Consistency isn't so important, but surely there has to be a
better way...
quite a few th... oh look! blinky-lights!
Yeah, I agree with you on all of your points here (I didn't think about the keybinding part of the interface when I was talking about FPSs... tell me about it - I have all of UT's keys remapped to the keypad, and use all of my keypad buttons extensively with the left hand on keyboard, right hand on mouse, intelligent weapons switching via the scroll wheel (another excellent UI invention :) )... I love it. The "game UI"... well whatever you're referring to - I love UT, the game environment is simply amazing and fun to play, that's all I can say.
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
I agree, the menu focus feature in Office 2000 really, really sucks, to use on a daily basis.
It makes an infrequently used, but annoying task about 10 times more annoying when you can't quickly scan through the menus to figure out which one it's in.
If they're going to do this, then they should have some kind of menu refresh button or something - or at least an easy way to turn it off.
I hate to say that a multitude of features, commonly used or not, is empirically bad, but in a lot of cases, they're just organized poorly for the new user, or the power user who just wants quick and dirty basic functionality. So having way too many features kills the usability of the product for what I'd say are the majority of the users - attempting to hide features based on frequency of use, is similarly a bad idea, for the reasons I've cited above. Giving the power user the ability to configure the UI is a good thing for that power user, but terrible for a normal or inexperienced user - and especially for Tech Support (there should be an easily accessible "restore defaults" button for these situations, and the change must be reversible).
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Another interesting idea that I wouldn't want... hmm....
I think the best solution for not being interrupted by other programs when you're working is still going to be not to run those programs when you don't want to be interrupted.
If I feel like chatting, I'll load an IM client. If I don't, well... I won't. Its just that simple.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Amen to that my brother. IE is the great offender.
It's not just IE, since I use Netscape exclusively on Windows and still have that same problem. There is a general Windowing issue of whether applications that do not have focus should be able to grab it all the time, never, or under special circumstances and exactly what circumstances. Windows apparently makes it easy for focus to be grabbed all the time.
Here's a (possibly original, but I make no claims on it) thought: the ability to grab focus (i.e., become the active application) should be the subject of an ACL. That is, the user or sysadmin has to give a program permission to take the window focus.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Oh yeah, this would be dynamite for Microsoft with their history of surrupticious scans during product registration. "Hey, He was looking at iPlanet.com while installing Microsoft Word...lets barrage him with mail about IE5.x and make sure we screw up his next support call."
So now the system will actually *know* when I'm staring that stupid paperclip to death; I hope they will implement a new feature: when you stare madly at the paperclip, it will catch fire, and will be reduced to a pile of ashes! Kewl!
How to make a sig
without having an idea
On the other hand this ought to help UI designers streamline their UIs, by knowing precisely what areas the user pays the most attention to, and putting important information in those places.
But most importantly how about Quake? Mouse too slow for you? Just look at your attacker and shoot...people will become overnight railgods ;)
Just because the HR people have their heads up their rear-ends, doesn't mean that the rest of the company isn't pretty cool. Many a good company makes the mistake of letting non-technical people determine who to hire in a technical field. (Of course, that beats the alternative mistake, which is to force techies to pull themselves from their work to make hiring decisions.) Trust me, I can speak from experience that sometimes the people who you interview with aren't always really representative of the whole company and who you'll be working with.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If Microsoft develops this program to the state it wants it to be that mean it can sell its .NET project. I have to admit it is a cool project but I don't know if I would want use something like that. I guess I would have to try to see.
Seriously, I agree with winzig, why should I defend Microsoft against FUD?
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
So kids with Attention Deficit Disorder AND Automatic Power Management are going to have their computers shutdown on them every 10 seconds...
Seriously, this sounds neat--if it works. But I can imagine new programs trying to compete for my attention by flashing, show nudie photos, or whatever in an attempt to boost a Nielsen-style rating.
--
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
anyone else find themselves getting a headchange off the way this guy writes? ..hypnotroll=fear.
iOh, really?[ESC]ZZ
For the last seven years or so, companies have competed with each other for our attention on the desktop by flashing and alarming etc. However, these competing companied rarely gave us a choice of what they planned to take over, and if they did it was an annoyance (would you like IE to be your default browser? ~ sheesh I answered that question a gizillion times!)
One of the potential problems I see with this interface is I will be dependent on my computer prioritizing for me. That, could be a great problem, because that skill isn't just used for dealing with my computer at work, but in problem solving and time management. If we don't learn how to deal with divvying(?) up attention, there is a lot we might lose (we only use a small percentage of our brains now... what's gonna happen when the computer tells us how and where we get vital info??)
My point is that I believe a new and efficient interface would be one that would make it more natural in performing actions for you, not lock you into a certain sequence so you can get something done. For example telling the computer to shutdown as opposed to looking directly at the shutdown icon (for those systems that track eye movement), or going through left clicking this button, answer some questions... (what we use now) or leave the room for 5 mins, etc.
It would be foolish to say that one kind of approach can solve the problem, but I do think that the emphasis, if they wish to make us more productive, should be on making how we interact with our computers, more natural.(Be it speech and tactic response etc)
Nuff Respec'
DeICQLady
7D3 CPE
After they've mastered figuring out exactly what you're paying attention to, they'll come up with the next big, amazing thing...
A bio-feedback monitor! Yeah, that's right, with a little head-strappie thing and a monitor that apparently picks up your brainwaves, you can control games, graphics, and much, much more. Coming soon for your *COCO 3*!!!
So much of this user-over-friendly technology is a half-step backwards... A lot of people, while they want computers to be friendlier, don't want the me to get much more helpful.
"I'm not even supposed to BE here today!"
Damn right! Only free (speech) plagues are ethical. That's why I think the human genome data should be free -- so the Free Plague Movement can progress.
You know, I had always thought that ADD was one of these conditions created by schoolteachers and stuff as an excuse for not being very good at classroom control.
Then, my best friend of 11 years was diagnosed with it, and lives on prescription dexamphetamines. He's got a brilliant mind, but all the way through high school, and, in fact, until the diagnosis, he couldn't stick with anything.
The change in his personality occurred within a few days of starting his prescriptions. He's a mechanic, and on a professional front, he moved from changing oil and mufflers at a Toyota dealership to working at the best automotive restoration shop east of California. Now, he repairs and restores big-buck collectible cars like 1930s Rolls Royces, Bugattis, and 1960s-1970s musclecars.
One of his lastest projects has been working on a 1950 Ford sedan that has been converted into a $500,000+ show car. He's at the top of his profession.
He's come a long way from hammering rusted exhaust systems off ten-year-old Tercels.
More power to you if you can beat this thing. It's truly the plague of genius. I don't know how I dodged that bullet. <grin>
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
"The system would also observe whether the computer user was typing, talking on the phone or speaking with someone face to face in the office. Helping keep tabs of the user would be a small camera that could determine whether the person was present and looking at the computer screen."
Sounds like that could easily link into SMS (or similar) to keep track of what all employees are doing - that's probably not their plan, but i'm sure some companies would want it, and where there's a market...
PigPog.
That's sorta their point. If email comes from your wife, it interrupts you. If the latest office joke comes in while you're heavy coding, it waits till later. I don't know how it learns your priorities, though.
This sounds like good innovative work. Why slam it just because it is from M$. UNIX/Linux/etal is still trying to mimic the user interface conventions of Windows. In the meantime, M$ is trying to move to the next stage.
The intellisense feature (or whatever it's properly called) is easily altered by the user. You can turn it off, you can reset your statistics. If you really want to have your menus under complete control, they are totally customizable! You can create your own toolbars, delete the whole default menu, put any of the Office COM-callable commands in a menu command, configure and reconfigure your toolbars all you want, draw your own icons easily. The Office menu/toolbar system is the most customizable one I've ever seen. Of course you need to learn a little how to use the program first... I didn't need any manuals to do it though, it's very intuitive, as opposed to Linux's many CLI tools that I have to read tons of mans on.
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Quite a few computer addicts have some form of mild ADD. Any interface that shuts us out will not be beneficial. (I know, I know ... So then don't use it) However, it's something to consider.
My surfing style is having several /. and RemarQ windows open in Infernal Exploiter while keeping my newsreader (not Outhouse) and a paint program (GIMP, silly!) open for when I need them. This way, my ADD doesn't automatically turn into swapping on this stupid Windows 98 installation that allocates 160 MB of RAM (out of the 64 MB in my machine) on boot-up.
--I don't use Windows; I tolerate it.
<O
( \
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why is MS always thinking about "how cool this ..." or "how cool that ...". Don't they realize that many of this is just straitjacketing people into one set of actions or options? Perhaps a droid might like it, but I am not a droid. I am a human being with priorities that cannot be turned into a well-ordered list.
- from friends (very high priority)
- from certain colleagues (high priority)
- from other colleagues (low priority)
I also wouldn't mind having an alert pop up when I'm doing something not so important (commenting on Slashdot) but not when I'm doing something important (writing a white paper).
Maybe this is supported 15 menus down in Outlook already, but it would be nice to make this easier to manage.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
How about electric shocks for innatentive office workers?
heh!
-- Cisk for the Cisk God
I can't believe you are complaining about a vague description of what a far-off technology MIGHT be able to do. Do you actually think that when this technology comes to fruition, that you won't be able to configure it the way you want? What do you care anyway, it doesn't sound like you'll be using Microsoft products when it's released.
How did this get +5??
"And like that
I'd be happy enough in Win98 if apps did not have the ability to switch on their own.
Scenario: I open up a web browser, and while I wait for the page to load, I go start > Run > (some other url). While THAT page loads, I go back to the first one, but the other one pops up TWICE to get my attention, even though the page hasn't finished loading yet.
If only the taskbar item would flash telling me something eventful is happening instead of alt-tabbing to it, I'd be more than happy.
This would be great, cause there's nothing worse than something like an IM from my mom popping up when I'm *ahem*..."enjoying" some pr0n ;)
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Personally, I've learned to cope with this. The last time I felt overwhelmed was when I got cornered by the little ghosties in PacMan...
So they'll just need to put this on their "Most Gay Feature" list, in competition with the paperclip, menu fade-ins (takes longer for menus to appear!), and the bi-weekly reinstall (that is supposed to be a feature, right?).
Hey microsoft, here's an idea: Make it WORK, then (and only then) make it BETTER.
It is pretty expensive trying to render every pixel on screen with the same amount of quality 60 times a second... why not use this technology to only render in the nicest possible way and in maximum detail the small area the player is looking at, and render the rest with all possible shortcuts?
Not the whole 3d engine can be made faster this way, but significant gains in fillrate and geometry (using x/y specific LOD) can be obtained. Plus it becomes more attractive to use very expensive rendering techniques (high quality antialiasing, per pixel dynamic lighting) for the focal point.
One of the reasons I can get faster and faster CPU's every year, yet still see no difference in how fast my computer runs is because too many application writers are getting off on programming in "tasks" for their applications to do even though I, the user, never asked it to do so. I run application x to do word processing, but little do I know, x is also listening for mail, watching the file system, watching my every action to see if it can help, etc. Now, they'll be watching where I'm looking, etc. I would appreciate it if a standard developed that application writers would allow enable/disable options for this stuff. There are times when I want my machine to run fast. Period.
On a related note, software takes advantage of faster and faster computers by doing more and more, rather than just going faster. Sometimes this is great, but I'd like to have some choice in the matter, as a user.
Computers doing things I never asked them to do - thinking on their own and then acting on their own decisions is not a good trail to go down for everyday usage. It's like the argument between the console and the GUI - developers like to know what is happening. I believe it actually is possible to have both - a nice GUI so that it isn't necessary to memorize obscure commands and and understandable program that doesn't do more than you asked it to. This is the kind of "GUI innovation" I'd like to see.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
I haven't seen any good game UIs lately, but then I haven't been playing many of the new games lately. I think the nicest one I've seen yet is in NFS 3. Everyone's talking about how Simcity's and The Sims' UIs are so good, but I don't find them that nice. I mean, they are neatly designed and all (though too loudly), but nothing is in them that really captures my attention. On the opposite side, Q3's UI is completely horrible. Unreal Tournament is better, but it just copies the Windows GUI. Could you hint at what games you were talking about?
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
There's also a salon.com article about this here.
A lot of my time at work is actually spent supporting new to intermediate Windows users, and, believe it or not, the paperclip and all the stuff that you and I, as more advanced users, consider to be the bane of our existances, is actually useful to a lot of them.
I just wish, in the control panel, there was a little setting called "User Skill". Drag the little control halfway for an intermediate user, all the way to 0 if you know that the user is a complete Windows newbie. If all the applications followed this lead, it would be the best of both worlds.
I use Internet Exploiter as my browser. Yes, it's evil, but since it's already there on my hard disk, like it or not, it saves me time and resources. And it seems to crash less often than any version of Netscape I've ever installed in Windows. And it didn't add that stupid AOL Instant Messenger the way Netscape did.
I just wish that, when an URL fails because the server is busy, Internet Exploiter didn't open up that stupid "Navigation Cancelled" screen. It wouldn't be so bad if the long URL I'd just (mis)typed into the address bar didn't get replaced with "About: Navigation Cancelled".
One would hope a User Skill control would, when cranked to the max, let me see the 404 error from the server.
Grrrrr...
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You CAN'T turn it off.
/. nowdays.
Shouldn't be suprised, ignorance is flourishing on
Tools -> Customize -> Options
is the same one that invented the paperclip guy who pops up in MS Word and other Microsoft office applications. So they have a lot of credibility already. Interesting that they blamed its failure on the fact that Bill & Co. "failed to implement" all of their ideas. How often does one see a Microsoft-owned company directly disparaging its parent (and lifeblood) for a past project?
maybe i should kill myself... but not until i?ve taken a few classmates with me. don?t bother trying to catch me, jonkatz -- you?ll never find me, fucker.
Hey dude, I'd be more worried about one of your classmates reporting you to Pinkerton's Thought Police.
Listen, life sucks. It's tough, it's frustrating, it's annoying. But no one ever said that life would be easy.
Go talk to your guidance counsellor at school or whatever. If you play your cards right, you'll get some nice and legal happy pills, paid for by your HMO. Then things start to look better.
Best of luck.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Well, Microsoft's customers aren't arrogant bastards who know computer science, and think everyone else should know just as much as them (otherwise they're stupid).
You do realise people have OTHER things to do, and people have other areas of expertise that aren't computer related don't you?
I personally want computers like this. I want computers that act the way the enterprise computer does, or the computers the as'gard have on sg1. They're powerful, and predict what you want etc.
That way I can get on with my life and have more time to do important things, not mundane tasks that you repeat over and over again (i'm sure they get you excited and feeling l33t tho).
"There are times when you want to study something passively..."
I'm sure the researchers working on this have NEVER thought of that! Good job!!
-thomas
"And like that
I dont see how this would be useful. Currently, I tell it what I want to do by using my mouse. Now it is going to stare at my face or something and guess what I want? Unless it can read my mind, I'd rather not have it do anything, as it is just going to get in the way. Windows is so helpful to interrupt anything you are doing by an event...so in other words, if I type in a site in IE then go check my email, IE is so nice to throw itself up front when the site is loaded and interupt the email message I was writing. This is how microsoft thinks. Such as if I start typing a letter in Word and the paperclip interupts my typing asking me if I want help.
//m
There is a post somewhere asking "what about users with ADDHD?"
Specific conditions aside, there are plenty of us whose brains do not work on the "oh please do not distract me" model. My most productive days are filled with interruptions, email, phone calls, and distractions of every sort. I thrive on the chaos. Call it the MTV attention span, but the more crazy things pour into my office, the more I find myself coming up with good ideas, innovations, etc.
So...that leaves me to wonder if I would spend my first few days figuring out how to use this idea to my advantage...I could check my email every thirty seconds just by staring at the right thing...this could be very, very useful...
In my office 2000, the only thing that happens is some entries are not shown if I don't use them enough. Same thing in Win2K. I can easily show all entries with the click of a button, and it is "smart" enough to do it automatically if I'm sitting there for a few seconds looking around.
Honestly, why the hell do I need to defend Microsoft against FUD?
"And like that
Loop without recursion? You can use a lambda calculus trick:
\def\loop#1{#1#1}
\message{begin loop}
\loop\loop
\message{end loop}
Aaargh, guess we can't use that epithet for Outlook anymore...
Finnaly I'll be able to watch AOL freeze in peace!
Mac OS has a "notify" widget. When your program needs attention from the user and the frontmost window belongs to another program, create a "notify" widget. It makes the Application menu (the one you pull down and get a taskbar) flash with an icon the programmer chooses and plays a loud sound (often system beep but can be overridden).
<O
( \
Will I retire or break 10K?
The general feeling from posts I've read (at threshold +2, but none of us has infinite amounts of time; exactly what this is all about) is that this is a bad thing. This seems mostly to be along the lines of "that bloody paperclip" / "Microsoft choosing what I should be doing" / "ultra-targetted advertising".
I think this is all wrong.
Sure, I'll state now: I don't believe that Microsoft, the consumer company, can produce a product that will get this right. However I believe that it's not only a useful development, but ultimately an essential one. People seem to be reacting without thinking things through: using a computer to manage incoming information _in_a_flexible_manner_ is surely a good thing.
No single, default, configuration of this sort of thing is going to work for everyone - but consider. I'm at home, I'm hacking on something interesting - say I'm porting linux to a wristwatch. What do I want to be interrupted by, in deep hack mode? Probably not much - except for emails about low-footprint linux issues, maybe. Without a system managing information flow, I'll do this by leaving My Email Client open on the appropriate mailing list inbox, and refreshing it every so often.
Now I take a break, and read some email. I want to deal with important personal emails first - things from my friends. Currently I do that by opening my Personal inbox in My Email Client, and telling it to sort them in some useful way.
Consider those two tasks when an information management system is running. I'll be notified - not in a big, irritating, manner - when an embedded linux message arrives (perhaps a status icon changes in my editor; perhaps a light goes green in my GNOME panel). When I take a break, I can do so by telling the information manager to let through some personal messages. There's not a huge difference - but it's _integrated_. It can manage information from newsgroups, from emails, from IM, from talk(1), from data mining agents working for me. I don't need to context switch myself to check for useful information about the project I'm working on, and I don't have to configure filtering rules on five different packages to avoid being swamped.
Take it further, as they talked about in the article. I'm driving in my car, and there's an in-car computer. I'm off to visit my mother - so I want a message from her to get through to me, in case she's delayed, or has to go out. I probably don't want my boss to be able to call me. If all calls are directed through my information manager, this can be achieved without great difficulty.
Sure, some companies will take this too far. I can see systems (and yes, Microsoft will probably be one) that will make it difficult for you to tell the information manager what you want - they'll try to automate everything so you don't need to configure it. However there are other companies working on this sort of thing - in fact, this is a part of the MIT Oxygen project, as I understand it. It'll take time, but if this sort of technology becomes available outside the normal computer domain (in cars, in phones, in things that people aren't scared of in the way they're scared of computers), people won't think of it so much as a computer device - and they won't tolerate systems that don't work effectively for them. Either they'll switch to another system, or they'll stop using them altogether - and I don't believe that there'll be any shortage of decent systems for people to turn to.
Yes, there are lots of issues. Yes, it's not simple. That's why it's Research; and Microsoft Research (look at the second word through the pink haze produced by the first) is actually pretty good at this. Sure, Bayesian inference may not be the best way of doing this; but you can't really tell until you try it.
Or what if banner ads somehow mess with the attention threshold so that if your eyes focus anywhere within six feet of the screen that it will suddenly act like you clicked on it.
I dunno, sounds pretty hokey to me...
yes, to turn of a feature like this one must play the happy game of find the dialog box. The way to play:
Click on a menu item. Since they are changing all the time anyway you can just randomly go around clicking. Now whenever a dialog box appears look at it. If it matches the one you are looking for, then we have a winner. If it doesn't you loose. Now how do we know weather or not the dialog box is the right one. You don't. Really you just click a couple times in the dialog box and see if it helps the situation you are in. If this doesn't help, then it probably did some damage. You have to start again, this time in search of the original dialog and the one you just manipulated. Eventually through skill at playing this game you will become proficient. This is one of the reasons that winNT is such a joke as a server. To reconfigure anything you need to play this find the dialog box game and the best remote admninstration tool for winNT is a car.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Actually, I've heard rumors of really cool stuff being created in MS R&D...anyone know if this is true? If so, what cool toys do they have? :-)
--------------------------
Yes, I know the paperclip was a failure, but why bash every M$'s attempt at a pseudo-AI? The Spellcheck feature has really come of age in Word 2K, do you know just how sophisticated it is? It corrects a wide range of your typing errors, it knows when one of your hands is typing faster than the other and swaps the mistyped letters... I could go on and on about how good it is. Don't assume, okay? Maybe this will be something cool...
btw, the parent's parent's sig: Two weeks of running Windows 2000. Two Blue Screens of Death. Thank goodness for Linux!
Interesting. How did you get them? It froze only 3 times on me I think for the past half year, once when I pulled out its hard drive when it was up... :)
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
.... we're the anti-MS bloc on Slashdot.
:/
deus does not exist but if he does
This is great! Now, with the proper implementation by the major browsers, pop-up ads will be guaranteed to appear right where you are looking!
Mojotoad
yeah, i can completely relate. i mean, what were those people thinking who created the first computer? i mean, i'm a human, i want to work in the sun, plant fields, do manual labor, build crap with my hands. don't they know this?
Strawman.
get serious. b/c this firm (which just happens to be MS so it's flame bait to all the little linux/bsd/unix/wack-wack-wack crowd)
"wack-wack-wack crowd"? A lame attampt at an ad hominem.
is trying something new, you slag it.
Wrong. The poster was criticizing it becuase he didn't like the idea of another company deciding what he wants to do with his computer.
god, reading most of the posts on this board is like hearing people in the middle ages speak on Da Vinci's works.
I hear his type of fallacy so often that it almost deserves a class of its own. We should call it, "If you don't agree with Microsoft, you're a Luddite."
it's called experimentation and it is what gives us new, cool and sometimes useful sh*t that gets used in ways originally never thought of.
Experimentation also yields some utter wastes of time, money, and enery. You seem to imply that we aren't intelligent enough to know that shit follows a fart. And this newest batch of Microsoft research sure smells like a fart to me.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
This sounds like a great idea to me. People work on the ergonomics and functionality of an operating system to allow maximum productivity with the least amount of input. Something like this is definitely a step in the right direction. I personally can't wait to see this implimented.
Linux is so bad it's free and most people don't use it. But you have the source code, so it's your fault.
What scares me about this that this could also be used for the oppisite affect. Imagine those annoying popup ads on websites knowing exactly the point of the screen you are focused on. I can see the Marketing Departments drooling now.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Reminds me of the old trick where you tell someone, "Don't think about elephants." Then watch with amusement as they vainly attempt to avoid thinking about elephants.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
In case you don't know, the MSR does not make applications but the do Research. I'd much rather read the research papers about this thing than just very limited opinions of some zealots who don't know anything about the matter but that the research is done by Micro$oft.
The fact is that MSR makes supprisingly high quality research for a commercial company. Especially their work on Bayesian Networks is of very high standard. If you're interrested in computer science you should find MSRs publications noteworthy.
--
--
Binaries may die but source code lives forever
M$ doesn't have that kind of UI. That's one thing they definitely should implement - user-customizable UI - before adding any features - be it voice-recognition, eye tracking, or whatever
So, again, this technology is kind of cool, but it's nothing more (or less) than new input method, and it should be up to software developer to decide wether his/her particular application needs it.
P.S. Almost forgot - M$ sucks no matter what !!!!!
Obama 2012: our incompetent asshole is slightly less of an incompetent asshole than the other incompetent asshole !
Anyone want to bet that all things labeled "Microsoft" or MS-Freindly companies will eventually take priority? Think about it: MS sends a spam e-mail which happens to be labeled "urgent" because if it's from MS, it must be important (probably a security patch to a poorly written program). I could be paranoid, but this could get really evil.
If MS really wanted to stop the information overload, they should find a way to stop the 200 daily spam messages to my hotmail account and not just complain that my account is too large.
Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another
Yep this is good.
Anyone from Linux world care to look at it?
Maybe launch a sourceforge project.
Aren't Quake III, UT already 3D and interactive and handle many users online?
Now imagine taking this, adding vision interaction, voice interaction.
Now change the whole setting so that the scene is not walls and monsters but apps, files and folders.....
Any thoughts?
The kernel needs a Gtk/Gnome-based post-install device configuration tools "a la" make xconfig. (Better sig coming soon
Okay, so this same group of whackos was in charge of 'innovating' the Answer Wizard. They're the ones who ensure that you don't find what you're searching for. Great. Now they're designing software that will decide how important my incoming email is and either deliver it or hold onto it until it thinks I'm not busy.
Yippee! So what happens when it decides I'm always busy and I never get that email I'm waiting for, etc etc. Exchange keeps doing this NOW - 'forgetting' to deliver email.
--- http://foo.ca
Yeah, read the whole message before replying, ok? My point was that although the paperclip was a failure, many other pseudo-AI features in Office and Windows are quite good.
I'm an optimist... there are many truly useful potential uses for this feature. Would you like the OS to intelligently track the focus following your eyes? Would you like (it's been said in this thread) a 3D renderer to be more effective byrendering what comes into your central field of vision better than what doesn't (that's how our eye works)? Would you like your computer to switch your user apps to higher priority when you're looking at the monitor and switch to your server or time-consuming apps when you aren't? I would, and I haven't even started on what else this could bring. This is promising research.
Know nothing about that. Don't have a Dell touchpad :) My desktop doesn't give a damn if I move the mouse when it's waking up. What bugs me though is that it only responds to the power button and not to mouse/keyboard, whereas Win98 (shudder) did. I liked it better that way.
Also, I'd like the OS to be able to wake the system up via scheduling... but that's more of a hardware problem...
Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Worse yet, you have to make a live update to the database for the sake of the conference and the conferencing software won't let you change focus to make the change.
It's one thing to be able to set a window to "always on top," it's an entirely different thing to set one to "always has focus" or "requires focus 80% of time."
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
This is old hat. Go look at what is been done in the MIT multimedia lab.
I can't believe people are taking this blather seriously.
Someday soon, Microsoft will make it possible to brush your teeth telepathically. And the toothpaste will be made of nanobots. Any day now, just you wait. We are SOOOOO innovative, and the government is so mean to us for no reason.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe Better a smartass than a dumbass.
I've worked a fair bit in VB, and I can tell you that its damn tough to make software that doesn't take the focus. By default, when a new window is made, it has the focus. The systems for moving around the zindex are really screwed up, so most develpers just let the windows appear on top. Then theres message boxes. Can anyone think of a more annoying way to inform the user of an event then to have a new window pop up in the middle of the screen with a loud sound that wont go away until you click "okay"?
GUI's, or at least those of the Windows kind, were designed badly from the start, in that interaction for the most part was designed to be a series of pop-up dialog boxes to which the user had to respond.
Right now, using the Windows GUI is frustrating if what you want to do is different than what it wants to do. For instance, I can in the middle of typing this sentence, and if some other notice window pops up just before I hit the space bar, I will probably tell that window to perform its default action. Even if that doesn't happen, at the very least I will lose the focus, and I will have to click back to the window I want to give input to, or to be able to see completely.
If I am using the "Start" menu, and any window activity happens on the screen (which happens a lot for the first 30 seconds after boot up, when I usually want to start some programs) the Start menu pops back to its non-visible state. (This is probably just bad implementation on MS's part, there's no real reason it had to be implemented that way.)
I think actions of the computer in a GUI, to which the user is required to evalutate and make a response to, should only be based on direct actions of the user.
Its only a hop and a skip away from Agent Smith.
No login link Link here
Surely if you don't want your programs to be constantly intefering with what you're doing then you have them minimized? Outlook will stick a mail icon in the system tray when mail arrives, if you don't want to be bothered by it then don't look at it...
Still, this kind of thing can only be a good thing for people with a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it in. Probably over half of the mail you receive during the day is pointless, but currently you still have to check it just in case. And when you're in the middle of something important, the last thing you want is your train of thought inturrupted by someone mailing you about some sports result you already knew about.
So priority systems like this that rely on contextual information are likely to be a great help to anybody in a busy office, but only if they work! If the system fails to notify you of urgent tasks whilst letting through rubbish then this will make your job even more difficult.
So it's really all down to how well it works. If it works, MS will win big on this, if it doesn't then it'll be Bob Mk 2...
Take this a step further:
I can see advertisers, through DoubleClick, etc, notice that I never read ads (actually the Proxomitron filters out 95% of them for me, but I ignore them nonetheless) and they will charge me more when I attempt to buy something on-line.
Rick
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I have read and agree to the EULA...>Click
Paperclip: "You have read nothing. No software will be installed until you've read everything, including the procedures for sacrificing the chicken. Since you lied to me you must also read all the marketing brochures for Win 2K."
Me: "Hey is that an error message?"
Paperclip: "Here, read your e-mail. No wait here's some spreadsheets. Urgent database coming up!"
The BSOD will be replaced by an urgent e-mail from your boss "get in here or you're fired" Once you left it would reboot. Paperclip: "You did not write 1200 lines of code this morning. Really, this is where you were when you left to see your boss."
This sentence no verb.
Name: i_spade_ny
Passwd: slashdot
---
I am the dot in slashdot.org
You're focusing on your coding, reading through some source. You go deep into thought, your eyes close. The software figures that since your attention is finally away from the window you were coding in, now is a good time to bring up all those messages that have been waiting for the past couple hours. A couple dozen attention windows pop up, distracting you from your thoughts and making you forget about your project. :)
Is this better?
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
That means that you will open "click me!" links by merely looking at them...
:)
I'm sure that the banner code + Internet Explorer will develop that type of behaviour
WHen started using LaTeX (for writing stuff for school), I found enough documentation in the latex-doc package of my favourite (e.g. Mandrake) GNU/Linux distro.
(e)
You CAN'T turn it off. At least, I have never been able to find out how. Word's autoformatting is a major pain in the arse, and the single best reason why I prefer to use a five-year-old version of WordPerfect. When I have a chart or outline that I want done a certain way, it is usually impossible to get Word to accept it. Oh, and it's even worse in the new Office 2000 version of Word. And here's me thinking the software might actually get BETTER with each new build...
"Tools -> Customize -> Options" I'm not surprised at all, as rudeness has always flourished. Actually, it's my fault for not making it clear, but I was responding to the comment on Word's autoformatting, which cannot be turned off. My bad for not responding in the right place, I guess.
This software sounds very inefficient, while its
motives might be good (excepting the fact that
Microsoft would download the contents of your
brain and store them on their mainframe
somewhere in downtown hell)...
I, for one, find it a blessing to have a short
attention span and have to change through
things to get to what I want. I can't begin to
count how many problems I may have overlooked
if it wasn't for my happening across a piece
of information at a chance glance that would
otherwise not have been noticed if I was taken
directly where I wanted to go.
In short, high cost and lack of utility will
cause this concept to fade away (much like VR
goggles/gloves)
~- Llah -~
Avian Chaos's Slashdot Game will let you do all this from the comfort of your own workstation.
But of course, since it's Microsoft that's doing it, it gets headlines on Slashdot. Personally I'm sick of the site of Microsoft's name and I think Slashdot should put a one year ban on its use and burn the droid icon.
All those in favour?
Oh hell - I'll have to burn my sig too if they do that!
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Just imagine of the various cameras or whatever they are using to seee where your focus is. Kicks in during your "private time" with websites like "pbits.com" just imagine. I hate to be the one who has to code the functions to handle that kind of attention. hey wait. Maybe we can use this to make it automatically switch screens when the microphone hears your mom knocking at your bedroom door and you have to jump up and pretend you weren't doing what you were just doing
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
Would you really want a turing-complete language that can read and write files to be the primary language of the WWW? It's bad enough that we have Java and Javascript. Imagine if raw HTML had those capabilities! TeX is a document language, nothing more, nothing less.
Btw, I prefer LaTeX to raw TeX.
Also..
Is there a way to loop in TeX without using recursion?
Tools|AutoCorrect, AutoFormatting tab
Yes...it's a stupid place to put it, implying that their autoformatting is correcting your errors.
In my short computer science experience, I tried some software that can Think, like a company is advertising nowadays. But the real deal is that the software try to emulate, to guess what you Donna do after I've finished, let say type this comment in vi and paste it in the slashdot form. This imply that the designer of the software have some kind of clue. But hey, we all know here, at slashdot that the designer at Microsoft only have clues when the matter of design is a way of looking you in for the Greater Good (tm), The Greater Shareholders' Good :). But that another topic.
The Next Evolution to this guessing system will the Mind Reading System. No, not like Doctor X, that will be latter in the millennium, but with the Spock technics, you know The Three Finger technics (was it four? it's been to long): You Mind to my Mind, You Toughs to my Toughs, You Wallet to my Wallet, You Do Not Need Open Source, You Do Not Need To Know What You Are doing. We Do and that's Enough. I can Imagine the electrode snap in my head, and I close my eyes. Visualize the work be done, the letter to send to, the porn site to browse :-P. Hell that's look cool, no need of a keyboard or mouse. Just think of that guys.
And after that great experience, they will introduce the OS force feedback. Watch for the General Protection Fault.
news:
news: Linux Rulez!!!!!assert(expired(knowldege)); core dump
Thanks - you have no idea how long I have been looking for that. Second-guessing MS is an art form that I am not very good at... Now, if they would only add a Reveal Codes button I might be happy with Word!
Yeah, there's a market for that. And Microsoft knows just how to appeal to it.
http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe Better a smartass than a dumbass.
It also uses the XForms library, which is non-free.
Now the paper clip will know which bit of the screen I am paying attention to. As plant itself in the middle of my field of vision. Right over my Xceeed xterm. Or perhaps the paper clip could move with your field of attention so you see it everywhere you look! AGh! the maddness of it all....
James
Wait a second... I wonder how much they're being paid by the ad-mongers to develop this...
Dave was a typical end-user run around an AG torus kind of guy, but the geeks on the mission died. If they had been up there they could of kept HAL happy by upgrading his holographic memory lucite dildos with some suitable extensions. The only people that have to be afraid of a hal-like scenario are the end-users.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
you don't want it to, it will also come up WHERE you don't want it to. I can see some serious abuse of this kind of technology.
Lots of windows applications are already very presumtious about their importance in your life. Many an email package dines themselves to be of such import that, upon receiving new mail, they bring themselves to the foreground and open up a dialogue box informing you of your urgent life-or-death mail from XYZ-Spamco asking you to buy their product. Of course, the fact that you were mid-command, telneted into a unix box trying to stop circuit board etcher before it starts because you just realized there was a fault in your layout. But no, that spam mail is more important than your carefully preped sheet of copper laminated fiberglass.
Now, not only can applications bother you with this sort of thing, they can make sure the dialog box comes up right where you're looking, intentionally breaking your train of thought.
Did 2001: A Space Odyssey teach us nothing? Do you really want a computer that monitors you as you talk? Remember what happened in the movie? Personally, I'd rather not end up jettisoned into space.
And just picture it monitoring what you're paying attention. "I'm sorry, Dave, but I'm going to close ICQ now. You've been paying far too much attention to it, and neglecting your work."
http://www1 0.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biztech/articles/ 17lab.html
This is my biggest beef, too. I hate when a dialog pops up and steals focus while I'm tying. I end up sending half a dozen keystrokes to the dialog before my brain-to-finger buffer drains. :-) Heaven help me if one of those keys is a shortcut for a button on the dialog box!
Forget the intelligent agent nonsense. Just give me the ability to turn off the fscking pop-ups! I do like some notification of certain events. I like Outlook putting a little mail icon in my system tray, for example. I don't like it popping up a dialog box. And if I have something that's scrolling text that I want to keep an eye on while I do other things (running a compile, for example), I'll just arrange the windows so it's visible. Popup dialogs, especially those which steal focus, are evil.
Of course, then there's the other extreme. Some apps try to be nice by popping up dialogs at a lower depth. This will often put them behind another window, and with no button in the task bar. You have no indication at all that the app is waiting for you to click "OK" so it can get on with its job. At least well-behaved apps in Win98 can flash the taskbar button to let you know they want attention. That's a pretty good compromise.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
MFC gives you a lot more options, and you have lots of control over how you want the window to come up. However the Z-order, is yes, a bitch.
My personal preference is the use of poping up a dialog, and then causing the parent of the dialog to flash it's title bar. Annoying at first, but easy to ignore when 8 people ICQ you at the same time...
I think the sudden reappearance of a window (IE, Netscape, etc.) is based in that they are assuming you aren't using another applicaition. I often start 2-3 web page downloads at the same time (my pipe is a T1), and then wait for everthing inbetween me and the servers to figure out whats going on. Meanwhile, I do something else, and get interrupted as the windows pop up, thinking that a repait is worth calling CWnd::SetFocus()...
Okay. All comments about Microsoft aside, this is a very cool-sounding idea. But I'm concerned about it's workability in "real life" (yeah, I know - there's no such thing...)
The software that drives this would have to be incredibly intelligent to avoid making serious mistakes. It would probably have to learn about how a user uses it.
The danger is that, being part of the user-interface, errors would be very noticable, and very annoying. Imagine not being able to do something, because the computer thought you were looking away?? (in fact, I know someone with a lazy eye - any software which tried to watch where she was looking would really get confused!)
I don't want to put a damper on anyone's party, but I think I'll wait before I try this, until it's been well tried and tested.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
What's to stop M$ from using this to tell competing apps to stay in the holding pattern while M$ apps get priority in the message queue?
If I don't want to be interrupted by an email client, I'll shut it down manually.
Do I really need software to do this?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Apparently the software will even read your email and try to schedule appointments for you, etc. Of course this is somewhat beyond the state of the art - but who'd want it anyway? I haven't even let human secretaries make appointments for me; let's face it, our time is one of the few things we can't increase, and I take issue with anyone who'd (inadvertently) waste it.
Chris @ chrisworth.com
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Interface is a constant problem with computer software, and there are many approaches- the Linux "Do whatever, the user is a geek and can learn or reprogram anything", the Mac "Thou Shalt Code It THIS Way To Fit With The HIG", the Windows "If the user has a problem we'll put in a wizard to do it for them".
People seem to be analyzing this idea from Linux standards- the assumption being that you're going to spend hours reprogramming it to get it to work the way you want. That may not be an option...
The problem is this- defining interface systems in such a way that they can be learned by a user. Everything is learned- even the simplest things are learned (ever see someone use a mouse for the first time and not be able to immediately correlate sliding movement with pointer movement?).
The Mac approach (somewhat weakened with age but still alive and kicking) was to define everything beforehand and force UI to go a certain predictable way. All Edit menus will have cut copy paste IN THAT ORDER, followed by Clear if present. If Select All is present it is under Clear. File menu contains new, open, close, print, and quit. Print has an ellipsis (...) after it because ALL THINGS that pause for further input have ellipsis after them. They also ALWAYS allow the user to cancel out of the operation, meaning 'you can always select a thing with an ellipsis, even if you don't know what it is, because you get to cancel it if you didn't mean to do that'. And so on, for an inch-thick book... In this paradigm, all the energy is spent organising the UI passively. The user is the prime mover and everything sits there until you use it.
The Linux approach is similar- except that the user is expected to do their own organizing! All systems, passive or active, are for being customised by the user. The ones who get the most enthusiastic about Linux (or any Unix) tend to be the most adept at defining interfaces for themselves and improvising new functionality that doesn't necessarily exist in consumer OSes. The elaborate shell script is the highest peak of this art (barring the writing of entire programs) because it is encapsulating whole known behaviors into the computer's interface, behaviors that are personal to that particular user. Defining/configuring X is very similar.
When you get into Windows, some of the rules change. There's always been a profoundly influential desire to out-convenience all other OSes by secondguessing the user and doing stuff for them, like an automatic door that opens when you walk towards it (hey, it works for supermarkets). This desire is also expressed in the use of, and concept for, Wizards: the problem is not seen as making the UI comprehensible for specific tasks (which might assume user learning), the problem is seen as DOING the tasks for the user and requiring no learning at all.
Here is the fatal flaw: systems of this nature are complex! The tasks being done are likely to be complicated (prioritizing email and workflow is VERY complicated). While being 'wizard walked' through a task is timeconsuming but mindless (with every step explained as you get to it), having your life actively managed by such a software process BEFORE you get to it is another story. It cannot fall back on being mindless- it must try to be clever, but the more clever it is, the less predictable it is likely to be.
That is the fatal flaw in a nutshell: there will always be a mental model of the process being done. Failing to have a mental model is basically resigning yourself to cluelessness about what is going to happen- you'd need to at least think "It is sending personal email to my home and work email to work" or _something_. As these systems get more complicated and intrusive, the model becomes more complicated, and the more 'clever' it becomes, the less predictable it will be- the goal is 'do what I mean' but the result cannot be other than 'why the hell did it do that?' because it is an externalisation of a process that is also, inevitably, running inside the user's head. There will always be that parallel evaluation of significance and priorities- and the computer does not have the mind's ability to associate, does not have X many years of back data to associate with. The computer is bound to lose because it's not playing chess- it's trying to run parallel with a _particular_ very associative and dynamic human brain, that of its owner. It can't possibly win. Other HUMANS don't always win at this game (long-married couples still misinterpret each other fairly often and renegotiate things as a result). No computer can do it- unless its 'owner' is simply another computer- because it is not a purely logical process, and the computer can't match human bandwidth.
A quick example from a book by Grant Fjermedal: "What's the population of Kampala?" Most people will respond immediately, "I don't know". How do you know so quickly that you don't have that information in your head? It's much the same as remembering "Aunt Millie's cousin Fred lost both knees in the War, causing him to be unable to walk and needing to travel in a special van with lifts. Aunt Millie does all the shopping for her cousins. Aunt Millie has no clue about any sort of technology." Now, take that background, and when you read in Uncle Bob's email, "Millie is van-shopping and is all in a frazzle", the human reaction would be to quickly associate all these things and perhaps inquire if it was Fred's van that died, and if Millie can use some techie help with the special-van issues. But how are you going to load all the information of a lifetime into a computer and expect it to make priority calls like this- and who is going to KEEP loading the data in as life goes on? It's flat impossible, unreasonable.
This is why the only reasonable approach to future interface is finding ways to make it predictable and understandable by the intended user- which of course is how Apple survived the '90s when by all rights it should have been crushed. The Mac interface is only one of many possible interfaces but it was rigorously defined in a consistent and predictable way. Almost any interface will do if you define it consistently enough and STICK to it. In something like Linux, what ends up happening is you either end up defining your personal idea of an interface and sticking with it happily, or you give up.
In something like Windows, people learn (sometimes with the aid of community college courses!) the rules of an ill-defined interface much of which is not intended to be clearly understood by the user- when things are supposed to 'do themselves' there isn't the same motivation to make the process clear and visible. This attempt by Microsoft to go still further in that direction is DOOMED, because it will either end up so trivial as to seem a total joke, or it will proliferate the 'problem space' of possible computer actions so vastly that the resulting behavior is entirely unpredictable, yet still grossly inadequate for matching its user's priority 'rules'. That is worst of both worlds- and if this ever ships, expect a certain amount of excusemaking by its users along the lines of 'my computer screwed up' to explain the user's worse-than-average ability to interact with others, and their failures to deal with important things. And there's only so much of that you can get away with.
Nobody should attempt to copy this 'feature' for Linux. Instead, figure out ways of making the 'map' for computer systems' behavior more clear and predictable, get some consistent rules in there and then let the user use those rules and take their own actions.
BZZZZZZT! Wrong answer please try again.
Just what I'm sure everyone wants, a proffesional system that tracks their likes and dislikes, controls disemination of digital intercommunication, and knows where you are all the time... all this and no personal control of the device. The privacy concerns alone are staggering and I certainly wish to have no part of it. If it was siting on my home network behind an OpenBSD firewall I'd give it a second thought, but who can trust Microsoft?.. Either ethically in regards to privacy or technichaly in regards to security?
"But Horovitz said he was confidant that adequate security and privacy safegaurds would be created."
This guy sounds like a smart guy, so why would he come to this conclusion? Microsoft has never before provided adequate security (How many holes in NT last year?) or privacy (tracking numbers on Word docs).
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
I've always wondered why you can't get a monitor to follow your eye and bring focus to whatever you're looking at. This technology already exists in cameras and sight-to-speak computers (a la Stephen Hawking), so why can't it work on the desktop?
Now, if they sent over roadies to set up the AV units, now that would be something.
So what if I'm using Outlook? A mail comes in, I glance at Outlook--it opens the mail. It has an attachment, I look at the filename--it launches. Oh no! A virus! Don't infect Word (glance at Word). Crap! Don't send to the people in my address book (glance). Dammit!
There are times when you want to study something passively...
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Imagine, you're in the middle of an important videoconference and you can't participate because that your database interface insists on having all of your attention.
Hmmm, Alt-Tab should solve that problem, although I'd think that it wouldn't arise in the first place since the notification program will be aware of the fact that you're in a videoconference and will assign a higher priority to that. Your example is overly simplistic and doesn't add to the argument.
Worse yet, you have to make a live update to the database for the sake of the conference and the conferencing software won't let you change focus to make the change.
See above. This isn't some kind of "you must do this now" scheme, it's merely something to help you make the most of your time. If needs be you'll be able to override the program.
What's at pbits.com?
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Novice users are already distracted from the work they're desperately trying to figure out by every blink on their DSL modems, every whirr of their hard drives, and every change in the "helpful" indicators, telling them that they're on line 8.6", no, wait, 9.4" of their document.
Now try to imagine the same people believing, thanks to a new, ritalin-demanding UI, that they're supposed to be dealing with all the random odds and ends of software and background apps [already needlessly numerous] the UI decides they've been paying attention to!
"Am I supposed to deal with the 'Task . . . scheduler' now?"
"No, you're writing an essay."
"But it came up and. . .look! The calculator just started! Oh! 'Help'! That must be useful. . ."
"It's the 'Help' function for the calculator. . ."
"I wonder if it can help me write the essay?"
Larsal [It's Worse than an Animated Einstein]
Bill: Hey look, BOB's conked out in front of his workstation again.
Steve: Yea, wow, he must be having a great dream, check out what his REM patterns are doing to his computer.
Bill: I'll give it fifteen seconds before it segfaults.
Steve: I'll say twenty seconds and it'll be a page fault.
Boss: Eight seconds, and GPF.
(20 seconds later)
Bill: Damn, I've never seen a program GPF, Page Fault _and_ segfault at the same time!
Steve: Must be dreaming about Natalie Portman.
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Mrs. October sure does have large ... umm... ***MICROSOFT ATTENTION WATCHER HAS DETECTED INNAPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR. SHUTTING DOWN*** bloop.
With the current level of reliability and interoperabilty, you'll probably be able to conjure up a BSOD or dozens of dialog boxes just by staring at the wrong part of the screen. You know, something like "Cannot notify InstantMessenger of your inactivity. Click [OK] to continue.", or "You aren't paying enough attention to me. Look at me, dammit. (beep) [OK]".
As for the idea itself, sure, it's good research. But the ideas have been around for a number of years, and lots of people are using Bayesian modeling, decision theory, user modeling, and affective computing, so this is not some kind of breakthrough hatched at Microsoft Research.
I've been wanting to pick up LaTeX for just these reasons, but I can't seem to find a good tutorial. What did you use?
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This type of study will help increase the quility of software design, giving developers better guidelines in the creation prosess. HCI is so important and probley the main thing that turns people off from a piece of software, but there are still a lot of programmers that ignor this fact. They figure that if it works well, it is wonderful, not true. I don't know how many butt ugly pieces of software that I have come across that I have installed then uninstalled after a couple of minites 'cause they were not wearth the bother.
I really don't care who does the research, as long as they don't hog the results to themselves.
Thank you
This opens up a world of possibilities in interfaces controlled by gestures and facial expressions. Imagine a more general interface that would disable options that cause wrong behavior in response to a simple gesture immediately following any program behavior triggered by that option. Examples are left to the users' imaginations.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I don't think Microsoft needs any help insulting their customers' intelligence. They do it themselves, with every "For Dummies" or "For the Complete Idiot" or "For the Barely Verbal" book they purchase.
:)
I've never quite understood why people would buy these books, and still be insulted when I told them that they were a complete idiot on the tech support line
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If anybody has a copy of Rhapsody for Intel to give away, drop me an email.
True, this sounds like a great idea.. but it also sounds like Microsoft is grasping any concept that can lead them toward world domination (in the desktop sense).. .net, C#, now this.. too bad they can't seem to get a simple enterprise level server (windows2000) to function properly.. then they could perhaps attempt these tasks.. But heh, they will be two companies soon anyhow.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
It's bad enough when I go to a site that opens up ten windows I can't close, now they want me to use a system that opens and closes apps for me? Fsck that! I want CONTROL over what I'm doing. It goes back to the saying 'just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD.'
"Where do you want to - oh, never mind. You'll go where we take you."
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Jon Katz
http://slashdot.org
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The social interface BOB, the paperclip's accursed ancestor, tried to introduce a virtual valet that did this sort of thing- and flopped utterly. Like to know what happened to the MS executive dealing with the project?
Bill Gates married her.
Chris @ chrisworth.com
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
The company you impply did not invent even the paperclip. It was outsourced. Outside of the US for the matter. The question is that the guys who wrote it do not even need an NDA. They know that they will get lynched on the spot if their friends, collegues and customers understand that they have done it. And actually the library is obviously a non-MS software.
Guess why... It does not blow up as often as the standard Redmond B.S.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
.. about when you think about p0rno?
that's not good.
a good looking girl walks by, you think "i want to have sex with her, but i can't. i want to surf p0rno to be happy" and ie turns upp with www.hardcoresex.com (or something) and your boss walks by? that's not good at all.
anyway... Its about time that someone /anyone/ moved away from the WIMP type interface. Right now, the only /reasonable/ input devices are the keyboard and mouse-like pointing thingees. This hasnt changed since the mid 70's.
Allowing the user to have more ways of communicating with the computer will eventually make it easier for users to do work on the computer.
Right now, input must explicitly be provided for the computer. i.e. You type a command, you click on a widget. If you curse out the stupid paper clip, the computer doesnt know anything. If you get a frown on your face every time Word mucks up your formatiing, and then you need to go to help, you have to do this explicitly.
But if the computer could tell that you were puzzled in word, maybe it could pre-emptively prepare help. That is, get it ready for you to use, and not necessarily pop up the help window saying - "You look like you dont know what the fsck is going on"
thats the key - keeping things behind the scenes. Like checking email when you look towards your mail program, or preparing a document to print when you start looking at the print button - but not doing it until you say so.
The computer needs to anticipate what you are going to do, but not distract you from your task at hand while its doing it - to paraphrase Alan Cooper - the computer can not stop the workflow with stupidity.
It sounds like a great improvement, but I still think that the user interface will not make improvements until we find a better way of obscuring the inner workings of the file system.
... hi bingo
Thank you. I was gonna point out that distinction myself.
Maybe this will help tame one of the worst features in M$'s UI, the Start menu....how many times have I found myself n-levels deep looking for some obscurely filed shortcut when, BLAM, some app steals the focus and causes the whole menu to go away.
Of course, it would help if they stole some of Apples algorithms for menu response to the mouse pointer (on a mac you don't have to move in right angles), but I digress.
No one got beat up more often than the mimes of the old west!
and.... It sucks.
The menus in office 2000 apps already try to guess what you want to do. They are always moving menu entries arround based on what you are doing.
The end result is that you always have to read the pull-down menu -- you can never learn the position of a selection.
So by trying to anticipate what you want they make you less effecient. Wouldn't this just be more of the same?
I went by the IBM software research labs here in San Jose and got see some neat demo of exactly this (attention sensitive UI).
:)
The nice thing about this is that eye tracking is very cheap. The eye reflects IR very well so all you need is an IR strobe and a cheap IR CCD. An end product could cost less than $50.
One demo allowed you to speed up mouse click on things by automatically moving the mouse to an approximate location on the screen where you are looking.
They had one demo that would track your eye and blur the screen except for where the eye was focused. Everyone else sees a blurry screen, but you (the person being tracked) can't see a difference. Could be very cool in 3d games if the game could render the areas of the screen you were looking at in more detail and those you weren't in less detail. The military has been experimenting with this on high-end flight sims that do this with good success. But if your playing on a 13" monitor then pretty much everything is in focus.
Checkout their project page for a little for info.
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/blueeyes/
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TIMMAHHH!!!
Of course not. We already have two very effective attention managers: Junkbusters and Procmail, and I don't feel like I need some fucking paperclip on top of these.
Cmdrtaco, it's time to choose sides.
This is not intended to be flamebait, or a troll. I am simply calling it as I see it.
It used to be that Slashdot was a haven for people who, for the most part, hated Microsoft. But we've grown up, and we've realized that Microsoft is only one in a million of other companies doing the same thing.
So, please, Cmdrtaco, I beg that before you spout off about how "the anti-ms block on Slashdot will of course equate microsoft's involvement with the project to mean that this is really about mind control or the corporately financed return of the plague". Why don't YOU become the example, and change the logo for Microsoft stories.
After all, aren't you just fueling the fire?
P.S. I like the logo, but dislike hypocricy even more.
. Even simple things like not letting your biff update until you change focus out of a word processor. (mind you the anti-ms block on Slashdot will of course equate microsoft's involvement with the project to mean that this is really about mind control or the corporately financed return of the plague, but what are ya gonna do?)
Besides the fact that most MSFT technologies sound good on paper (the Paperclip is an artificially intelligent agent that molds itself to the users behavior and acts accordingly) they are usually horrible in implementation. Somehow I have a problem with software that will stop IMs from popping up because it's 2 AM and I'm reading Slashdot or that will not announce email notifications because I'm coding. The fact is there are more variables in whether I want certain activities to occur than where my eyes are positioned and what time of the day it is, after all if such things were so easily distilled into algorithms we would all love the paper clip.
From what I saw (talk of Bayesian Networks and agents) this is the same team that brought us the Paper Clip. I would hold of on applauding what will more than likely be another highly disparaged piece of MSFT bloatware until it is actually implemented and is no longer vapor. I remember taking a class where our professor described how some company had started research on using cameras to manage User Interfaces but the project was a failure because people do not act predictably when using a computer and a camera also distracts them. It turned out that the best thing it was useful for was for tracking how long users read banner ads.
From the article There have been other missteps indicating that Bayesian techniques must be added to software with great care. In December 1998, for example, Blue Mountain Arts, the Internet greeting card company, filed suit after it discovered that a preliminary version of Microsoft's electronic mail software mistakenly filtered Blue Mountain's e-mail greeting cards into users' trash cans. The filter, which had been based on software developed by Horvitz's researchers, was repaired in the final release of the program. It was an important lesson, he said, in the risk of artificial intelligence making poor judgments.
PS: I wish them luck, but this is one piece of bloat I'll definitely be avoiding.
yeah, i can completely relate. i mean, what were those people thinking who created the first computer? i mean, i'm a human, i want to work in the sun, plant fields, do manual labor, build crap with my hands. don't they know this?
get serious. b/c this firm (which just happens to be MS so it's flame bait to all the little linux/bsd/unix/wack-wack-wack crowd) is trying something new, you slag it. god, reading most of the posts on this board is like hearing people in the middle ages speak on Da Vinci's works. it's called experimentation and it is what gives us new, cool and sometimes useful sh*t that gets used in ways originally never thought of.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
"citizen kosAi your attention span has become too short... M$ pharmacy prescribes a dosage of 2 capsules of ritalin failure to comply is a federal offense."
(footnote:Bill G owns large parts of a pharmaceutical company amongst other things. Extend, Embrace and Extinguish baby)
How about that scene where they freeze duvall's brain for a few moments when they realize he's not stoned enough to do his job???
Soon we'll have banner ads that enlarge themselves when you don't look at them. Better yet, why don't come up with one that follows where your eyes go?
Otherwise, yes, quite an interesting an innovative project. Even without my paranoia over being monitored (serves me right posting from work), there's another interesting application: testing the effectiveness of banner advertisement and UIs in general.
The first is a fairly obvious one. Advertisers want to know exactly what sorts of ads grab and hold a reader's attention. This could be bad, considering how many seizure-inducing flashy whirly banners there are already.
The second, though, is a very good thing. In a good UI, you should be able to focus on your work without being distracted by anything else. Furthermore, you should be able to find what you're looking for instantly. If GUI designers have the opportunity to see how long your eyes wander around the screen before you click on a particular button, they can use this data to rethink the button's appearance and location.
Auto-expanding dialogue boxes! What if you set up a toolkit in the upper-left corner of the screen and it opened automatically when you stared at it. And if you're too lazy for point-and-click, wait 'till we do stare-and-blink. I kind of like that last one---my biggest peeve with GUIs is having to take my hands off the keyboard to get something done.
Okay, enough random commentary. This is definitely an interesting project, no matter who wrote it.
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But then how hard would it be to make this system fully customizable, so that each incoming event as a priority level associated with it. Then your boss logging on and your wife's email would show up anyway. As long as this system is fully customizable, it can't *hurt* anyone...
What about a virus that takes some snapshots and broadcast them to all the people in your address book. Might be embarrassing for some managers who sleep after lunch!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
And another thing, will it mail my boss if I keep looking at the clock.
The glass ins't half full or half empty it's just to damn big!
At first this seems great. I often shift my attention between windows without shifting focus and end up typing in the wrong window. (This is a big problem when I have a window to gcc open and am writing a /. post - gcc finds a syntax error, so I fix it, and look back to lynx without shifting the focus)
On second thought though, there are problems. When I sit down for a long coding session I've been known to have 2 big windows on my screen, each with references for functions/error codes that I'll be working with, with just one line of my editor showing. (I hate the way windows makes the window with focus be on top)
I like the idea, if it is powerful enough to tell when I want to shift window focus, vs when I want to keep the window focus, while reading a references
And a big AOL style me too, to what ohters have said about filtering email from someone important vs a less important company newsletter (But don't mistake a emergency mesage from the sysadmin) vs spam.
I need more sleep. I read it as :
;-)
"Attention! : Sensitive User Interface"
and as such assumed it was just an article advertising an emotionally-deficient Win2010. Or whatever..
Pastie
You can view NYTIMES articles by changing www to www10, changing it to partners no longer works.
t ech/articles/17lab.html
http://www10.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/biz
What happens if in five to ten years, a Windows box can actually understand half the things I tell it with voice recognition, can watch to know if I am enjoying what it's doing and can adapt, etc... And what if all we're doing in Linux is being luddites?
Sure, sure, it can take a lot of processor and memory, but what else is your computer supposed to do while waiting for you to type on your word processor? Computer speed and memory has outdone the needs of the average user, and we all know that. (Except for games and so on, and they could temporarily turn off all the smart system background stuff.)
I don't want to be following in MS's footsteps forever. For those people and companies that have direct influence on Linux development, try not to overlook smart systems. The CMU Sphinx voice recognition system on Source Forge might be a good start.
Maybe it's not urgent, but I think we should not completely ignore such developments.
- Tom
- Tom
"O, to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be."
The great thing about this is: once this kind of data tracked and collected in a computer, we can finally *prove* that most people have the attention span of a gnat. The question you have to ask is: Did I really want to know that?
I like my computer because it doesn't judge me. So why would I want another loved one constantly monitoring the attention it receives?
I can just imagine...
I grab a snack from the kitchen and return to my box to see the following error message:
Where the hell did you go? Is it too hard to leave a note telling me where you're going? Not even a phone call? I'm really not sure you're committed to this relationship
I prefer having no browser at all than having it and knowing that every time I'd get tempted to do something that could be non-work-related, not only the computer:
- will offer it to me before I reasonably decide to do it later (and thus open the related piece of software)
- but also he'll just report this to some executive (who'll just consider it as a misbehavior instead of judging the results he should actually expect from me)?
Now, let's dream a bit further about this and imagine yourself suspiciously staring at the ICQ icon like you'd look at a Damocles sword ?No doubt, MS-Big-Bro will just interpret this as a desire an it won't be long before it opens it.
This is for such (edulcorated, though) reasons that most of my colleagues use their own laptops for personal (mentally healthy) use, as here, any URL containing the words "forum" or "message" is forbidden.
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The problem with attempts at "smart" behavior in software is that its behavior becomes less predictable. I think this is an attempt to patch up previous attempts at smart behavior -- like the paper clip's interruptions based on smart analysis of what I'm doing. I see why they're trying to fix it, but now if I look away from the computer for a second, its state will be different when I look back. I can no longer easily control what input I give the computer; testers can't reproduce bugs because they don't remember exactly when they looked away from the screen; the msdn knowledge base fills up with bugs related to what noises and body movements you shouldn't make while FoxPro is saving a large file. Awareness of a user's drifting attention levels could be interesting in a game or something, but I don't want it in the OS until it's *really* mature.
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Can you metamoderate?
*cough*
Unfortunately, I think you're spot-on -- the net result of "attentional" interfaces will be programs that cannot be ignored. Just like banner ads run amok. The average corporate exec CANNOT ignore (heh) the advertising potential in this technology.
There's another down-side -- your boss will be able to tell, down to the second, how much time you spent paying attention to your work. I guarantee you'll have "EmployeeMaster 2000 Advanced Server Edition" in no time at all. They already try to do that sort of monitoring; an attentional UI would make their job about a million times easier.
Argh
I have no
Ouch! I'd rather be raked over the coals! Talk about getting f*cked over by the boss! (I can't claim to know BG's procilvities but it sounds like the expression "cutting someone a new *ss-hole" might be taken literally.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
This is nothing more than Bob with hardware. It's that idiot paperclip on steroids. It's just one more way that Microsoft insults the intelligence of their customers. I don't need an idiot paperclip popping up to tell me that it "looks like" I'm writing a letter. I know whether I'm writing a letter, thanks. If I were functionally illiterate then perhaps it might be useful to have dopey software "help" me write a letter. But Microsoft makes the blanket assumption that ALL its customers are functionally illiterate.
I certainly don't need my computer deciding for me whether I should be notified that I have mail. I think I'm capable of making that decision for myself.
No thanks, Mr. "Chief Software Architect" Gates.
Two weeks of running Windows 2000. Two Blue Screens of Death. Thank goodness for Linux!
The problem with a lot of the software I see around today is that in the desire to make software more open and friendly, it has got a lot more distracting to use. It's difficult to Zen-out when using a piece of software when every minor adjustment triggers an animated effect, be it a spinning hour glass, back illuminated button or piece of paper flying across the screen. In an attempt to give the user more feedback about what is active and what is not, software designers have taken away the "quiet" interface and have jazzed it up.
And this has not been restricted to just the application itself. The applications often demand attention like some spoilt brat - the "HELLO? YOU HAVE MAIL!!!" syndrome. While in some cases, such as Lotus Notes, the default is to rise to the top of the window stack and bang a modal window up to get your input everytime there is new mail, you can tone this down to an audible bell only. Or ICQ clients which reappear on the top at a new message coming in. And there are others - visual alarms on calendaring tools and probably more that I have forgotten.
When I have the option, these programs are pushed into the bit bucket as fast as possible. Using them is a dire waste of productivity. Where there is no choice about using that software, I try and tone down the alarms to be just audible effects which I can acknowledge without having to press a key, move the mouse or otherwise stir from whatever I'm doing.
So really, this research sounds like a patch for the problem, rather than a cure. The problem is with the UI design - programs are increasingly "rude" in their attempts to get attention. At least if I hold the source, annoying habits in essential software can be trimmed to a minimum. But rarely in the Unix side of the world do I have to worry about annoying software - 95% of the stuff which irks me is Windows-ware. Maybe the art of Zen is dead on the MS platform...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
This is really about a corporately financed return of the mind control plague, which swept the country last in the McCarthy era.
-- Chapman's Observation #1: Nothing is ever simple
There's an article on Salon.com about this focusing on the email screening element. It makes some pretty good points about the difficulty of the screening process (for example). One interesting example is an old friend you haven't heard from in years, who happens to be in town for a day. I just hope there is some way to disable this option (which I'll bet will be pretty difficult in a work environment).
Just imagine - subliminal advertising. Now those irritating little popups can skitter around the screen, trying to stay in your vision's periphery and worm their way into your subconscious.
I am sorry, but what use is this to anyone? hell most "smart" apps are a pain in the ass to use already and now we want to make the OS "smart"? If you cant ignore the ding of your email client, or ignore the "uhoh" of your IM client then you need social and physcological help not some $300.00 hardware/software solution. (Windows 2002! new sensitive version requires quad pentium 4 Xeon processors running at 3.6Ghz, 1.2terebytes of ram and 30 terebytes of hdd storage, 2- 1/2inch 3ccd cameras and capture cards. )
This isnt a MS bash, just a statement of disbelief that instead of making the OS better we just start to cram useless "neato's" into it.
Let's remove 60% of the "helper" crap and just make the OS's (no matter what it is) better/stable/faster! can we do that? please?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Before they start toying with technologies that will make it not interrupt your chain of through, they ought to clean Windows UI first.
Windows still pops-up alerts WHILE your drawing into applications (such as PhotoShop), screwing up your stroke.
"It looks like you're writing a letter."
Oh, never mind.
First, I don't like this idea for a selfish reason. I have congenital nistagmus, which means that my eyes move back and forth constantly. The mustles around my eyes are in constant seizure, so it is quite hard to tell where I am looking based on eye position :) And, knowing MS, they will make this feature mandatory for the whole computer to work right.
OK, now, for my other rant:
IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE INTERRUPTED, TURN STUPID NOTIFICATIONS OFF. THEY SUCK. The only thing that you need to be notified of is if your MB/processor/video card are overheating. The rest should be done without popups (a beep or a flashing alarm in taskbar/corner of desktop/wherever) would suffice. Software designers should be more conscious of users needs; if there is an error, don't bring the application into focus, or have an easily accessible button (on title bar?) that lets users regulate interruptions. No need for cameras.
Haven't you had that sig for like 4 months? I wouldn't say that you "just" bought 2 CDs. You probably forgot you had them by now.
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Posting at -1 means never losing karma.
Can you metamoderate?