An example of where it's done poorly is Burnout 3. EA got their hands all over that one, and besides shoving a mostly crap soundtrack in it, they also plastered billboards for their games everywhere. Fair enough, when you drive around in real life, you see billboards too. But in Burnout, a lot of the EA billboards look like ass, they've very repetitive, and they don't have normal billboard qualities. Billboards generally have something amusing, or funny, or in some way eyecatching. They usually aren't just a crappy logo and a big title for some product.
In the grand theft auto games, the cities are full of signs with puns or clever mixups of what you might see in a real city. It doesn't effect the flow of the gameplay much, because it's done in a subtle way, but if you're just wandering around, it brings a little more entertainment to you, which is the whole point of games anyways.
Not to mention letting the developers/artists have fun. Would you rather draw a nice texture for choco-vitamins sugar pills or whatever goofy product you made up, or would you rather cut and paste logos that some marketing guy threw on your desk? The enthusiasm of the development team shows through. Maybe that's why the EA billboards in Burnout look so crappy.
An image isn't embedded directly in the webpage, the html just includes a specific text reference to it. Then your browser goes and finds the image, and displays it instead of the text. Sure, the image might be on a server, instead of saved locally in a directory somewhere, but it's basically the same.
Don't most online video games do this? When I move my guy around in battlefield, my cable modem isn't sending video clips of my character animations to the other players. It's sending boring ol' data, which the server and then the other clients eventually turn into images by using local resources. Find a simpler, tile-based game, and then they're using pre-set images. I remember doing this over email a decade ago.
And yeah, IM clients have been doing this specifically with smilies for a while.
Exactly. Anyone comfortable enough with the internet to be able to research the steps necessary to accomplish this modification will have already seen way "worse" stuff online. Porn is one of the motors that makes the internet go. Any kid who's curious enough to see sex in GTA will have already seen it on the web.
Well, the article summary mentions "middleware", and I'm guessing that that means that Japanese developers often had trouble integrating things like Havok into their games, due to a lack of documentation that they could read. I'm sure that the Japanese developers got plenty of useful documentation from Sony. But some guy hacking on OpenGL in his basement in upstate New York probably won't be localizing the comments he adds to the code.
Basically, If I wrote a library that would be functionally useful to s japanese developer as a part of their game, they're going to have a harder time learning about it and asking me questions, because I don't speak japanese one bit, and they might not have the best understanding of english. If Sony wanted to step in and do good translations of the documentation for me, then that's great, everyone benefits.
One solution your wife might consider, that I used on my mom to make those sorts of coversations easier, I took a blue sharpie and colored in the right mouse button on her computer.
Telling her click the blue button, or the grey button, it worked a whole lot better than left or right. Everyone knows their left from their right, but it's still takes more thought than identifying by colors for some reason.
Like you said, they both click, they both feel pretty much the same, and while they have different effects on the computer screen, that's sort of detached. Coloring in one of them is the easiest way I could think of to differentiate between the buttons before they've even been pressed.
Ringtones aren't about listening to music though, they're about personalizing your phone. It's different. Although it's still ridiculous how much it costs.
What they need to do is be smarter about all the damn loading screens. It really kills the energy of the game sitting through as many of them as you have to. Especially in crash mode. I did some of those crash levels a dozen times in a row trying to get gold. There's no reason I should've had to sit though a couple loading screens each time I reset the crash to try again. Everything should be there in memory, what are you loading for?
That was, by far, the most aggravating part of Burnout 3. All that being said, what an awesome game. Even my girlfriend loves it. She bought herself a smaller xbox controller for it. Games that I can get her to play with me are automatically winners in my book.
I agree. The difference between standard DVD and the next gen isn't nearly as compelling as the jump from VHS to DVD was. Maybe if you've got a hugemongous HD television, but I don't, and most people that I know don't either. Maybe another five years down the line, but it'll almost be time for another generation of consoles by then.
The smaller jump from the current standard, not to mention the potential difficulties with the two competing formats is going to slow the adoption of BluRay and HD-DVD. It's not going to be anything like DVD's were. It's just not that big of a deal.
While they could certainly have an adaptor/update for connectivity similar to the GBA/Gamecube deal, I don't see the DS being practical for the actual everyday controller.
First off, it's a bit too expensive. I'm not going to buy an extra DS just so I can play two player games. And I'm certainly not buying four of them. Unless the price drops to twenty-thirty bucks, and I don't see Nintendo making much money that way.
Second, the lack of an analog control would be very annoying to me. The touch screen is only a so-so substitute, and once you're using it to emulate an analog control, you can't use it for all of the neat stuff that a touch screen is really good for. Having to choose either an analog control or a normal touch screen at any one time seems to rather limiting for game designers. If the revolution does involve a touch screen on a controller, it'll have to be in addition to an analog stick.
Yes, once again, the gameboy is being challenged by a more powerful system. It obviously stands no chance, because how could a weaker piece of hardware compare. We'll just ignore the game gear and lynx and all that.
Oh, and rumors of a next gen gameboy have been CRUSHED! No next gen handheld announcement at E3 2005! Nintendo's last chance ever to announce something new! It'll be impossible now!
Yes, the introduction of the Micro clearly indicates that even Nintendo is submitting to the GBA being close to the end. The huge collection of GBA games at Target show just how dire the situation is.
Make no mistake, the GBA is about to die, and Nintendo is going to die with it. So is Japan, the global economy, and several species of lizards. It's tragic.
I dunno, the article, to me at least, seems to be pointing out all the ways that the GBA is still alive and well. I don't think the/. editor, the article submitter, or whoever gave the article its title bothered to read it all that well.
I'm on a dual 2.5 G5, and my boot times are pretty darn fast. I've never timed it with a stopwatch, and it pauses so I can enter my username/password, but 10 seconds doesn't sound out of the question for Apple logo to desktop.
Although there's usually a few seconds between the machine powering up and the apple logo appearing. What's going on during that time? How mysterioius.
No, but the computer is going to take over the home entertainment center. Tivo and the like are the start of this. We're getting some good options besides just deciding what channel to watch. Time Shifting is the big thing happening right now, widespread content on demand will hopefully be coming along soon, and maybe we'll see the internet as a more stable avenue for freelance distributing of video content (beyond little 90 second.mpgs of people getting hit in the head with a shovel).
All this is going to end up getting stored on hard drives, and you're going to need an interface/OS to organize and access all of that. Add in video games, music, and you've got a whole lot of stuff that computers are currently good at. Might as well throw one on into your entertainment center.
Plus a computer allows for new features without replacing hardware(as much). Who knows what might happen if everyone has easy, cheap, reliable access to videos on demand. Maybe videoconferencing (or some sort of the videophone) will take off. Who knows.
FWIW, cable TV isn't as tightly regulated in terms of content as broadcast television is. Comedy Central, in particular, often has shows with the swearing and whatnot still left in. Although, even though they might legally be able to get away with it, most stations avoid that because it can alienate advertisers.
The rest of your argument is right on, however. When I was a kid, I only got new video games on my birthday or christmas, and someone else was paying for them, because back then I thought $10 was a whole lot of money to have saved up. I would, however, like to think that if I did get a chance to play a more violent game at age 10 or whatever, I'd have been able to distinguish it from reality.
Kids aren't dumb. If you can figure out how to play a game like GTA3, then you should be smart enough to understand how it differs from the real world. If not, then your parents have failed you.
Please. There's just a whole lot of loud morons, and unfortunately, the media likes to talk about whoever's the loudest, and the politicians like to talk about whatever the media talks about. And the public eats it all up, because it's generally fun to watch people get all huffy and loud.
All that being said, I don't personally know too many people who would care enough to make that big of a deal out of this. But in this case, like almost every case, the negative voices are the loudest, the people with common sense(the majority) have better things to worry about, and life goes on.
While the US culture is definitely more prude than Europe or whatever, most of us don't care all that much. We just don't bother writing our senators every time we see something that doesn't offend us.
I agree. They already function a lot like Apple. Probably why I'm such a big fan of both. It will serve them well, and hopefully, like Apple did with the iPod, Nintendo will once again figure out a product that really resonates with the market, and they'll gain some more prominence. The whole industry would benefit from that.
I've read that article, and it is fascinating. I'm not in any way worried about Nintendo going out of business or anything, I'm just amazed at how much they get crapped on by so many people.
Part of it is a general "winner take all" mentality, even though that's not how the economy works. MS and Sony are preparing to duke it out in the next generation, all over this "winner take all" idea, while Nintendo is perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing.
All that being said, Nintendo had, at one point, practically won it all, and they basically owned the video game market. A number of factors went into their slide from that dominate position. I was trying to counter the original commenter's thesis, which was that Nintendo is "losing" because they don't make good games. It's my opinion that they've been making excellent games all along, and that their marketshare has been affected by other sources.
It's probably the fanboy in me, but I just get annoyed when people look at the sales percentages and whatnot and decide that Nintendo must be worthless. I guess I wish they'd get more respect, because even with their smaller marketshare, they still do more to improve video games than Sony or MS.
I would be incredibly surprised if they didn't put an ethernet port on the revolution as well. The article linked hinted that they wouldn't, but that doesn't make it true.
Perhaps I'm just unusual, but out of the last four places I've lived, only one has had the cable modem sitting next to the TV. It usually goes where the computers go. I've got enough stuff plugged in in my living room already.
Not everyone wants to run Cat5 from their computer room, through the hallway, into the living room, around the couch, and into their gaming console. Dropping ports through the walls isn't the easiest thing for a lot of people either. God forbid Nintendo offer us any choices.
The problems with Nintendo are much simpler than that. They pissed off all their 3rd party support with the N64 (expensive cartridges instead of cheap optical disks, and other stupid moves). And a lot of those third parties were still a little upset because Nintendo made some fairly anti-competitive moves during their NES monopoly marketshare days.
Also, while gaming in general began to market heavily towards the teenage male demographic with games involving gore, violence, and less clothing, Nintendo generally just kept making the games they wanted to make, and with Mario and the like they took on the aura of "kiddie games."
With all of that, Nintendo's marketshare has dropped significantly, and Sony and MS have become major players. In my opinion, however, Nintendo's games are generally just as high quality as they ever were. And they're definitely the most innovative of the big three.
Halo made the Xbox, no argument there. The PS2 is not riding high on the coattails of Katamari Damacy, its real killer app was GTA3, although it already had plenty of market share by that point.
*shrug* It's my anecdotal evidence vs yours at this point, but I thought the gamecube Mario Kart was a real improvement over the N64 version. I have all three of the current consoles, with a similar number of games for each, and the gamecube easily sees the most play. Not to mention that, except for Burnout3 on the Xbox, I can't get my girlfriend to play anything other than the gamecube.
I hope Nintendo keeps doing what they've been doing(with a few minor exceptions maybe). And hopefully as the gaming community continues to mature, more people will rediscover how Nintendo does a good job of making fun games.
That's something that pre OSX, Apple did right. You had the close button in the upper left, and the minimize/maximize up along the right side. When they first showed off aqua, a lot of people were wondering why the hell they did that (along with a lot of other things). I haven't heard much rumbling about it since then, although I hit the wrong one and close a window occasionally still. It's not the worst thing in the world, but the solution used to be standard, and I don't know why they ever changed it, other than to make it more windows like. Boo.
The thing is, for 99% of the people using computers nowadays, available RAM and CPU cycles aren't the bottleneck. We've gotten to the point where, in general, there's more hardware than we need. Instead of having it sit around all day waiting for me to get around to doing some non-linear video editing, why not put it to work making my workspace a bit more pleasant to look at? I paid for those transistors, they should get busy stimulating my brain, even if it's in just a visual aesthetic capacity.
Bad GUI's might make particular tasks slower, but I don't think they make people less productive in general. While there are, no doubt, so tasks that can go faster on the command line, I think you could design a GUI for any particular function that would allow someone to work just as quickly. A properly designed GUI program has a few layers of complexity, it didn't just stop at point and click. Key combinations and the like help the power user move through the software very quickly, just like a skilled CLI jockey.
Yeah, that's something that you have to keep in mind about people. We're only as productive as our state of mind lets us be. There's been a number of articles over the past few weeks on/. about how IT people and programmers are working these ridiculously long work weeks, and how after 60 hrs, your productivity goes down, regardless of how smart you are, or how important your deadline is.
Plainly put, the bottleneck is hardly ever going to be the computer. Unless you're totally in the zone, you've got more stuff distracting you than transparency effects. If you spend so much time "in the zone" that all that is causing you serious time, well, spend one of your bouts of super-efficiency to create the perfect OS for yourself.
Efficiency at all costs is not a particularly natural human goal. I'd rather get 80% of what I'm capable of done and enjoy my life than make myself uncomfortable or even miserable worrying about that last 20%.
I think that really comes down to what you're doing, and it's competition of anecdotal examples either way.
I prefer to look at it like this. There's a whole lot of things that can be done in GUI's that a command line won't really work for. And a GUI designed for it can act a whole lot like a command line. I can draw stuff with the mouse in photoshop if I need to, but I can also use key commands to jump around within photoshop and accomplish many tasks just as quickly as I could with any command line app.
I think you could make a better argument that GUI apps require a lot more interface design, and the more complicated something gets, the easier it becomes to screw it up. But I think that's really more an effect of the 90% of everything is crap rule, and less a problem inherent in GUI's themselves.
There are plenty of pixels, they're just too small. I can see and react to a character that's an inch wide much better than the same character only an eigth of an inch wide, even if they have the same number of pixels.
Slashdot Mirror
I sort of agree, as long as it's done well.
An example of where it's done poorly is Burnout 3. EA got their hands all over that one, and besides shoving a mostly crap soundtrack in it, they also plastered billboards for their games everywhere. Fair enough, when you drive around in real life, you see billboards too. But in Burnout, a lot of the EA billboards look like ass, they've very repetitive, and they don't have normal billboard qualities. Billboards generally have something amusing, or funny, or in some way eyecatching. They usually aren't just a crappy logo and a big title for some product.
In the grand theft auto games, the cities are full of signs with puns or clever mixups of what you might see in a real city. It doesn't effect the flow of the gameplay much, because it's done in a subtle way, but if you're just wandering around, it brings a little more entertainment to you, which is the whole point of games anyways.
Not to mention letting the developers/artists have fun. Would you rather draw a nice texture for choco-vitamins sugar pills or whatever goofy product you made up, or would you rather cut and paste logos that some marketing guy threw on your desk? The enthusiasm of the development team shows through. Maybe that's why the EA billboards in Burnout look so crappy.
Isn't this sort of how the whole web works?
An image isn't embedded directly in the webpage, the html just includes a specific text reference to it. Then your browser goes and finds the image, and displays it instead of the text. Sure, the image might be on a server, instead of saved locally in a directory somewhere, but it's basically the same.
Don't most online video games do this? When I move my guy around in battlefield, my cable modem isn't sending video clips of my character animations to the other players. It's sending boring ol' data, which the server and then the other clients eventually turn into images by using local resources. Find a simpler, tile-based game, and then they're using pre-set images. I remember doing this over email a decade ago.
And yeah, IM clients have been doing this specifically with smilies for a while.
Exactly. Anyone comfortable enough with the internet to be able to research the steps necessary to accomplish this modification will have already seen way "worse" stuff online. Porn is one of the motors that makes the internet go. Any kid who's curious enough to see sex in GTA will have already seen it on the web.
Well, the article summary mentions "middleware", and I'm guessing that that means that Japanese developers often had trouble integrating things like Havok into their games, due to a lack of documentation that they could read. I'm sure that the Japanese developers got plenty of useful documentation from Sony. But some guy hacking on OpenGL in his basement in upstate New York probably won't be localizing the comments he adds to the code.
Basically, If I wrote a library that would be functionally useful to s japanese developer as a part of their game, they're going to have a harder time learning about it and asking me questions, because I don't speak japanese one bit, and they might not have the best understanding of english. If Sony wanted to step in and do good translations of the documentation for me, then that's great, everyone benefits.
One solution your wife might consider, that I used on my mom to make those sorts of coversations easier, I took a blue sharpie and colored in the right mouse button on her computer.
Telling her click the blue button, or the grey button, it worked a whole lot better than left or right. Everyone knows their left from their right, but it's still takes more thought than identifying by colors for some reason.
Like you said, they both click, they both feel pretty much the same, and while they have different effects on the computer screen, that's sort of detached. Coloring in one of them is the easiest way I could think of to differentiate between the buttons before they've even been pressed.
Ringtones aren't about listening to music though, they're about personalizing your phone. It's different. Although it's still ridiculous how much it costs.
What they need to do is be smarter about all the damn loading screens. It really kills the energy of the game sitting through as many of them as you have to. Especially in crash mode. I did some of those crash levels a dozen times in a row trying to get gold. There's no reason I should've had to sit though a couple loading screens each time I reset the crash to try again. Everything should be there in memory, what are you loading for?
That was, by far, the most aggravating part of Burnout 3. All that being said, what an awesome game. Even my girlfriend loves it. She bought herself a smaller xbox controller for it. Games that I can get her to play with me are automatically winners in my book.
I agree. The difference between standard DVD and the next gen isn't nearly as compelling as the jump from VHS to DVD was. Maybe if you've got a hugemongous HD television, but I don't, and most people that I know don't either. Maybe another five years down the line, but it'll almost be time for another generation of consoles by then.
The smaller jump from the current standard, not to mention the potential difficulties with the two competing formats is going to slow the adoption of BluRay and HD-DVD. It's not going to be anything like DVD's were. It's just not that big of a deal.
While they could certainly have an adaptor/update for connectivity similar to the GBA/Gamecube deal, I don't see the DS being practical for the actual everyday controller.
First off, it's a bit too expensive. I'm not going to buy an extra DS just so I can play two player games. And I'm certainly not buying four of them. Unless the price drops to twenty-thirty bucks, and I don't see Nintendo making much money that way.
Second, the lack of an analog control would be very annoying to me. The touch screen is only a so-so substitute, and once you're using it to emulate an analog control, you can't use it for all of the neat stuff that a touch screen is really good for. Having to choose either an analog control or a normal touch screen at any one time seems to rather limiting for game designers. If the revolution does involve a touch screen on a controller, it'll have to be in addition to an analog stick.
Yes, once again, the gameboy is being challenged by a more powerful system. It obviously stands no chance, because how could a weaker piece of hardware compare. We'll just ignore the game gear and lynx and all that.
/. editor, the article submitter, or whoever gave the article its title bothered to read it all that well.
Oh, and rumors of a next gen gameboy have been CRUSHED! No next gen handheld announcement at E3 2005! Nintendo's last chance ever to announce something new! It'll be impossible now!
Yes, the introduction of the Micro clearly indicates that even Nintendo is submitting to the GBA being close to the end. The huge collection of GBA games at Target show just how dire the situation is.
Make no mistake, the GBA is about to die, and Nintendo is going to die with it. So is Japan, the global economy, and several species of lizards. It's tragic.
I dunno, the article, to me at least, seems to be pointing out all the ways that the GBA is still alive and well. I don't think the
I'm on a dual 2.5 G5, and my boot times are pretty darn fast. I've never timed it with a stopwatch, and it pauses so I can enter my username/password, but 10 seconds doesn't sound out of the question for Apple logo to desktop.
Although there's usually a few seconds between the machine powering up and the apple logo appearing. What's going on during that time? How mysterioius.
No, but the computer is going to take over the home entertainment center. Tivo and the like are the start of this. We're getting some good options besides just deciding what channel to watch. Time Shifting is the big thing happening right now, widespread content on demand will hopefully be coming along soon, and maybe we'll see the internet as a more stable avenue for freelance distributing of video content (beyond little 90 second .mpgs of people getting hit in the head with a shovel).
All this is going to end up getting stored on hard drives, and you're going to need an interface/OS to organize and access all of that. Add in video games, music, and you've got a whole lot of stuff that computers are currently good at. Might as well throw one on into your entertainment center.
Plus a computer allows for new features without replacing hardware(as much). Who knows what might happen if everyone has easy, cheap, reliable access to videos on demand. Maybe videoconferencing (or some sort of the videophone) will take off. Who knows.
FWIW, cable TV isn't as tightly regulated in terms of content as broadcast television is. Comedy Central, in particular, often has shows with the swearing and whatnot still left in. Although, even though they might legally be able to get away with it, most stations avoid that because it can alienate advertisers.
The rest of your argument is right on, however. When I was a kid, I only got new video games on my birthday or christmas, and someone else was paying for them, because back then I thought $10 was a whole lot of money to have saved up. I would, however, like to think that if I did get a chance to play a more violent game at age 10 or whatever, I'd have been able to distinguish it from reality.
Kids aren't dumb. If you can figure out how to play a game like GTA3, then you should be smart enough to understand how it differs from the real world. If not, then your parents have failed you.
Please. There's just a whole lot of loud morons, and unfortunately, the media likes to talk about whoever's the loudest, and the politicians like to talk about whatever the media talks about. And the public eats it all up, because it's generally fun to watch people get all huffy and loud.
All that being said, I don't personally know too many people who would care enough to make that big of a deal out of this. But in this case, like almost every case, the negative voices are the loudest, the people with common sense(the majority) have better things to worry about, and life goes on.
While the US culture is definitely more prude than Europe or whatever, most of us don't care all that much. We just don't bother writing our senators every time we see something that doesn't offend us.
I agree. They already function a lot like Apple. Probably why I'm such a big fan of both. It will serve them well, and hopefully, like Apple did with the iPod, Nintendo will once again figure out a product that really resonates with the market, and they'll gain some more prominence. The whole industry would benefit from that.
I've read that article, and it is fascinating. I'm not in any way worried about Nintendo going out of business or anything, I'm just amazed at how much they get crapped on by so many people.
Part of it is a general "winner take all" mentality, even though that's not how the economy works. MS and Sony are preparing to duke it out in the next generation, all over this "winner take all" idea, while Nintendo is perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing.
All that being said, Nintendo had, at one point, practically won it all, and they basically owned the video game market. A number of factors went into their slide from that dominate position. I was trying to counter the original commenter's thesis, which was that Nintendo is "losing" because they don't make good games. It's my opinion that they've been making excellent games all along, and that their marketshare has been affected by other sources.
It's probably the fanboy in me, but I just get annoyed when people look at the sales percentages and whatnot and decide that Nintendo must be worthless. I guess I wish they'd get more respect, because even with their smaller marketshare, they still do more to improve video games than Sony or MS.
I would be incredibly surprised if they didn't put an ethernet port on the revolution as well. The article linked hinted that they wouldn't, but that doesn't make it true.
Perhaps I'm just unusual, but out of the last four places I've lived, only one has had the cable modem sitting next to the TV. It usually goes where the computers go. I've got enough stuff plugged in in my living room already.
Not everyone wants to run Cat5 from their computer room, through the hallway, into the living room, around the couch, and into their gaming console. Dropping ports through the walls isn't the easiest thing for a lot of people either. God forbid Nintendo offer us any choices.
The problems with Nintendo are much simpler than that. They pissed off all their 3rd party support with the N64 (expensive cartridges instead of cheap optical disks, and other stupid moves). And a lot of those third parties were still a little upset because Nintendo made some fairly anti-competitive moves during their NES monopoly marketshare days.
Also, while gaming in general began to market heavily towards the teenage male demographic with games involving gore, violence, and less clothing, Nintendo generally just kept making the games they wanted to make, and with Mario and the like they took on the aura of "kiddie games."
With all of that, Nintendo's marketshare has dropped significantly, and Sony and MS have become major players. In my opinion, however, Nintendo's games are generally just as high quality as they ever were. And they're definitely the most innovative of the big three.
Halo made the Xbox, no argument there. The PS2 is not riding high on the coattails of Katamari Damacy, its real killer app was GTA3, although it already had plenty of market share by that point.
*shrug* It's my anecdotal evidence vs yours at this point, but I thought the gamecube Mario Kart was a real improvement over the N64 version. I have all three of the current consoles, with a similar number of games for each, and the gamecube easily sees the most play. Not to mention that, except for Burnout3 on the Xbox, I can't get my girlfriend to play anything other than the gamecube.
I hope Nintendo keeps doing what they've been doing(with a few minor exceptions maybe). And hopefully as the gaming community continues to mature, more people will rediscover how Nintendo does a good job of making fun games.
That's something that pre OSX, Apple did right. You had the close button in the upper left, and the minimize/maximize up along the right side. When they first showed off aqua, a lot of people were wondering why the hell they did that (along with a lot of other things). I haven't heard much rumbling about it since then, although I hit the wrong one and close a window occasionally still. It's not the worst thing in the world, but the solution used to be standard, and I don't know why they ever changed it, other than to make it more windows like. Boo.
Oh, come on...a glass trashcan? Like I want to see old gum stuck to the sides, mixed in with banana peels and crumpled up post it notes.
The thing is, for 99% of the people using computers nowadays, available RAM and CPU cycles aren't the bottleneck. We've gotten to the point where, in general, there's more hardware than we need. Instead of having it sit around all day waiting for me to get around to doing some non-linear video editing, why not put it to work making my workspace a bit more pleasant to look at? I paid for those transistors, they should get busy stimulating my brain, even if it's in just a visual aesthetic capacity.
Bad GUI's might make particular tasks slower, but I don't think they make people less productive in general. While there are, no doubt, so tasks that can go faster on the command line, I think you could design a GUI for any particular function that would allow someone to work just as quickly. A properly designed GUI program has a few layers of complexity, it didn't just stop at point and click. Key combinations and the like help the power user move through the software very quickly, just like a skilled CLI jockey.
Yeah, that's something that you have to keep in mind about people. We're only as productive as our state of mind lets us be. There's been a number of articles over the past few weeks on /. about how IT people and programmers are working these ridiculously long work weeks, and how after 60 hrs, your productivity goes down, regardless of how smart you are, or how important your deadline is.
Plainly put, the bottleneck is hardly ever going to be the computer. Unless you're totally in the zone, you've got more stuff distracting you than transparency effects. If you spend so much time "in the zone" that all that is causing you serious time, well, spend one of your bouts of super-efficiency to create the perfect OS for yourself.
Efficiency at all costs is not a particularly natural human goal. I'd rather get 80% of what I'm capable of done and enjoy my life than make myself uncomfortable or even miserable worrying about that last 20%.
I think that really comes down to what you're doing, and it's competition of anecdotal examples either way.
I prefer to look at it like this. There's a whole lot of things that can be done in GUI's that a command line won't really work for. And a GUI designed for it can act a whole lot like a command line. I can draw stuff with the mouse in photoshop if I need to, but I can also use key commands to jump around within photoshop and accomplish many tasks just as quickly as I could with any command line app.
I think you could make a better argument that GUI apps require a lot more interface design, and the more complicated something gets, the easier it becomes to screw it up. But I think that's really more an effect of the 90% of everything is crap rule, and less a problem inherent in GUI's themselves.
There are plenty of pixels, they're just too small. I can see and react to a character that's an inch wide much better than the same character only an eigth of an inch wide, even if they have the same number of pixels.