"Being good human beings, we've adjusted admirably to contraptions such as keyboard and mouse pointing devices," said Charles Golvin, a mobile phone industry analyst with Forrester Research. "But these are very, very poor ways to go about interacting with such machines."
Well, it's not like we evolved with a pen in our hand either! It's just a very, very poor way of interacting with paper. (and as others are pointing out, a poorer way than interacting with paper than say, a typewriter is)
Kurzweil is betting that voice recognition is the future. I don't know, a full day of talking, and an office full of talkers, could get pretty rough after a while, though I suppose they could pretty quickly get into subvocalizations.
...or the content has gotten stupid. Ads and spam don't bother me at all. The problem is the content- there isn't any. For awhile, the best and timliest content was on the web. Now it's been displaced by meaningless advertorial drivel.
blah, blah, blah. There is a ton of interesting content, and more being produced all the time. Enough to support an entire web genre of link-centric blogs like this one and that one.
Blogs. People can spend less time randomly browsing, and go to their favorite, trusted, reliably interesting link-centric Blogs (as opposed to content-manufacturing, often more journal-y blogs) and see a plethora of interesting stuff: a much higher cool stuff / filler ratio than if you start with, say, a typical search engine.
I think one effect of this is even the Blog compilers do less random surfing, and in fact depend a bit on other blogs. So there's a bit of a circle jerk effect, though enough incidental stuff gets added in from the occassional surfer or tangent to a websearch (for instance, my own gets an infusion from outside sources like Usenet) that over all things don't get too stale.
(-1, Offtopic...and I don't really want to get intoa big debate, but...)
"They say that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'...well I think the gun helps...If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people." --Eddie Izzard
Or, as someone else put it...every society has some loose screws running around. The trouble is in the USA, there rather more likely to be able to get some guns.
Well, as a dozen people have already pointed out, it's not a mutation. I suppose over generations, if the ability to quickly dial their social network members phone #s or impress potential mates with their Nintendo ability, we might see some evolutionary selection for this terrific thumbness, but it's gonna take a while.
Another, some what related idea: classic video gamers have often speculated about whether young people are now more dexterous with their left hand than they would be otherwise, given the new standard of having the primary joypad or stick be used by the left hand. This started, more or less, with the NES; most other systems were right handed (atari 2600) or ambidexterous (Intellivision, Colecovision, many video games)
It doesn't provide all of what the original poster asks for (and maybe I'm missing the point entirely) but I get some of what the user asks for with good old telnet (well, ssh now) and running my own servers and using my old academic account. The old academic account I use for Usenet, so I have the same newsrc etc from home and work. And I rent webspace, so it's someone else's job to make sure my information is always available...my VisualIDE is emacs;-)
Joking aside, where your data lives is an issue you can't escape. Either you resort to sneaker net, burning to a rewritable cd or other portable media, or you store data on a remote server--which doesn't "divorce yourself from any particular computer".
Assuming you don't want to go to full unix remote shell mode, I'm not sure if Java or any other platform-independent software suite is going to meet your need. My realpolitik approach is that I'm almost given a Microsoft desktop, so I've assembled my own collection of favorite tools (editors, compilers, etc) and burnt 'em to cd. So I can be up running in a new environment quickly.
Yeah, I put this on my blog a few weeks ago. They have all sorts of high falutin' ideas, but in the end their production is just a lame crossbreed of non-interactive dance dance revolution and tamagotchi. It's kind of pretentious of them, the way they go on about ideas of AI, public/private spaces, and sharing data.
Could politicans use that same loophole to do graveyard advertising? Could I legally replace my great-grandmother's tombstone with one that said, "If I were alive, I'd vote for Nader!"
In Chicago, the tombstone could leave off the first part of that...
Err no. Most Playstation games rated from crap to mediochre. It was Nintendo that was constantly trying to innovate, while the PS was a breeding ground of cookiecutter games, ports, and uninspired drivel.
I pretty much agree with this...I've had an N64 since Star Fox came out, then I decided to get a ps-one late last year, mostly for the game "Unholy War" (sequel to Archon, really.) I've looked around for more good PS games but have only found a few that really appealed to me. (Especially the prop games, Point Blank 3 and Dance Dance Revolution)
"Mario and a couple Zeldas" is such a laughable summary of the N64's gaming library, it's almost not worth responding to. A lot of the great (and often groundbreaking) games were Mario: Kart, Party, Tennis, etc, but don't forget Smash Brothers, Golden Eye, Perfect Dark, Rogue Squadron, and a huge slew of others.
If you think RPGs and fighting games are the end all and be all of gaming, then you probably think PSX was *it*. If you think multiplayer games offer the best bet for gaming goodness, then N64 was your clear champion. If you have a balanced view, you realize that both systems offered some terrific gaming experiences and you picked the one that most met your preferences. (Or maybe like me, you picked up the other system once it was cheap for the games you couldn't get on your main one.)
Well, even the smart techies would forget and let their grip slip a bit, thus, broken pictures, and unless you're watching the laptop screen and not where you're drawing, you're stuck.
Maybe they need to build in audio feedback...anyone remember "Ichabod Marker" on Bill Cosby's "Picture Pages"? That guy was ahread of his time!!
Not counting that Mimeomouse, the regular Mimeo product was pretty bad, at least a couple of years ago...you put the marker in a special holder, all well and good, but the mark only registers if you're pressing really firmly...it was way too easy to miss many lines, so we never could count on it as a reliable tool.
What I really want to see are big honkin' LCD flatpanel touchpanel white boards. (and the same technology for laptops while we're at it.) If it would make it cheaper, I don't the resolution would have to be all that great, just have great big pixels at 1280x960 or whatever.
by the lore of "alt.hackers" the Usenet group, it qualifies as a hack, that is using a tool in a way it wasn't intended. This is slightly different than an older definition, these big stunts and pranks MIT students would pull, and a later definition, breaking into systems. There are a few more variations on the theme hanging out there as well.
Yeah, and it seems that often UI "science" is misguided. Only rarely do they say "well, this whole system works better than this whole system according to our double blind study". Instead they come up with gems like "people are.2 seconds faster at scrolling to a given word with this kind of scrollbar than with that kind", making the assumption that that finding would scale when part of a complex system, or that other factors aren't more important to having a happy, ultimately more productive user.
I don't particularly like skins per se, as they seem to be mere eye-candy and I kind of like the Win95's level of functional utility. But whenever I start with a virgin Windows machine with a newer OS, I have to do a bunch of fiddling, remove the fade in and/or smooth opening windows, change the explorer defaults to list rather than big honking icons, etc. Does that count?
Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.)
Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny
introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well.
(Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliantStar Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
The funny this is, except for VERY rare great gameplay games, the novelty wears off pretty fast and I just delete it again for a few years. I really appreciate having them available though...
This is an excellent point. One of the things people who argue "well what if you could mailorder these games for $20, or even $2?" miss is the convenience of picking and choosing from a large selection and quickly finding out if a game still has engrossing gameplay. You need to get into micropayments w/ electronic fufillment before this becomes worthwhile.
For many, it's the breadth and not the depth of the microcosms that these games give us that's the real draw.
Very good article. It focuses only on PC games though. MAME and its console-based ilk are another kettle of worms altogether.
I see these emulators as a valuable service, preserving what I call our "pop culture heritage"...sure, "Time Pilot" may have been popular enough to make it in some emulator packs, but what about "Time Pilot '84"? A much cooler scifi game in my book, but one whose limited release (during the crash) means that it's not likely to see a repackage rerelease.
I admit it is a bit complicated, because MAME does directly compete with the emulation game packs for modern consoles. But overall I'd rather err on the side of caution and not let these things fall into obscurity.
That cheerleader piece is really annoying. I agree with only the tiniest fraction of what the Christian Cheerleader Leaders say and stand for, but the guy who's doing the interview is the biggest dork I've read in a while. He sounds like a newish convert to his lack of religion, and like most new converts, he's all guns blazin' and basically a smug asshole. (I don't have religion either, but at least I try to have some dignity about it, even if I think concepts of faith help lead to stuff like WTC.)
Man, this stuff makes me really angry! I hate ignorant politicians like these guys who want to take away our electronic rights! Someone should smash into them with a Hadoken Fireball! Or take the chaingun into the Georgia legislative building corridors! Or jump on top of their stupid turtle-like heads! Or grab an energizer and give them a taste of their own medicine! Or something!
Yeah, that's true. I was making some assumptions about what "kind" of classical...personally I only like the big loud or fast stuff, Dvorak's New World Symphony, Mozarts Rondo Alla Turca (sorry mis-spelled).
Not sure if Sousa marches are considered classical though.
The NPR interview with one of the people there (perhaps the curator?) mentioned that the music the carp were listening to was generally classical. Now, despite the effect Barry White might have on humans (and Ally McBeal characters), I wouldn't be surprised if it lacks many of the qualities that made the classical interesting work with the carp. I'm no big fan of classical, but I do buy into the idea that it has a sense of complexity that modern music doesn't have. Most classical generally has less sharp percussion than Barry White's backing band, and probably a less jarring flow. They've said so far that the males seemed more excited, but maybe they're just getting agitated.
Anyway, it sound like pretty dubious science. Cute story for the day however.
Others have wondered if this is a troll...I think you may have a point. I think that you're wrong, but I think you have a point.
I make a lot of my own cgi scripts for personal use, and javascript helps *a lot*, from selecting multiple checkboxes at once, to a way to fake combo boxes where you can select from a set of values or enter a new one. And many, many sites depend on it...though I think many fewer legitimate sites would need the window.open() function if there had been a standard for sizing a window built into the A HREF tag.... (I hate those, 'cause I'm used to right clicking to open in new window, and they hardly ever code that right so that right clicking still works...)
If you read the patent itself (patent office link from the article), or at least the abstract, it specifically mentions "operation of a selected key of the keyboard". (Later on it says "The terminal apparatus may include data entry means, such as a manual keyboard"). Funny if they somehow win, maybe browsers will have to remove keyboard shortcuts, but mouse and trackpad clicking is still A-OK. (And then Amercians with Disabilities Act crew will jump on it...)
But yeah, this is really insane. Also, so many patents like this seem like they don't pass the "not obvious to a practitioner of the field" test.
...and don't mind a little blatant karma-whoring:
The Palm Graveyard is dedicated to tales and pictures of Palms that have piloted their way to the choir invisible.
Get adequate servers for dev work. PCs are relatively cheap. If you can set up a 'playbox' for each developer, as close to the final environment as possible, that can be a big boon. Too often I'm doing development on my NT desktop for something that's ultimately going to run on Solaris...it generally works ok because it's java, but any perl components and other things are likely to be screwed up. A linux box would be very useful, even if it's not in my cube...
...hand in hand with this is for big projects, do regular builds, preferably on a 'virgin' machine each week. This can be useful in goal setting/making as well as trying to avoid the "well it works on *my* PC" syndrome.
According to this story, for 2001, PalmOS still has 79% of the market, with Pocket PC OS machines only 12%. Palm hardware is 58% of the total new sales market. Not bad for a player whose older units are so usable many people stick with their old PalmIIIs and PalmVs!
Personally, I think Sony really has the right idea, combining the friendly PalmOS (and I will always argue that scaling up from simplicity is better than trying to scale down from a desktop for this form factor) with higher rez screens and multimedia features. It's too bad they're so proprietary with their hardware, but they definately point a nice third way between Palm's traditional spartan-ness and the gee-whiz-features at the cost of usability of the PocketPC offerings.
Slashdot Mirror
"Being good human beings, we've adjusted admirably to contraptions such as keyboard and mouse pointing devices," said Charles Golvin, a mobile phone industry analyst with Forrester Research. "But these are very, very poor ways to go about interacting with such machines."
Well, it's not like we evolved with a pen in our hand either! It's just a very, very poor way of interacting with paper. (and as others are pointing out, a poorer way than interacting with paper than say, a typewriter is)
Kurzweil is betting that voice recognition is the future. I don't know, a full day of talking, and an office full of talkers, could get pretty rough after a while, though I suppose they could pretty quickly get into subvocalizations.
...or the content has gotten stupid. Ads and spam don't bother me at all. The problem is the content- there isn't any. For awhile, the best and timliest content was on the web. Now it's been displaced by meaningless advertorial drivel.
blah, blah, blah. There is a ton of interesting content, and more being produced all the time. Enough to support an entire web genre of link-centric blogs like this one and that one.
Blogs. People can spend less time randomly browsing, and go to their favorite, trusted, reliably interesting link-centric Blogs (as opposed to content-manufacturing, often more journal-y blogs) and see a plethora of interesting stuff: a much higher cool stuff / filler ratio than if you start with, say, a typical search engine.
I think one effect of this is even the Blog compilers do less random surfing, and in fact depend a bit on other blogs. So there's a bit of a circle jerk effect, though enough incidental stuff gets added in from the occassional surfer or tangent to a websearch (for instance, my own gets an infusion from outside sources like Usenet) that over all things don't get too stale.
(-1, Offtopic...and I don't really want to get intoa big debate, but...)
"They say that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'...well I think the gun helps...If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don't think you'd kill too many people."
--Eddie Izzard
Or, as someone else put it...every society has some loose screws running around. The trouble is in the USA, there rather more likely to be able to get some guns.
Well, as a dozen people have already pointed out, it's not a mutation. I suppose over generations, if the ability to quickly dial their social network members phone #s or impress potential mates with their Nintendo ability, we might see some evolutionary selection for this terrific thumbness, but it's gonna take a while.
Another, some what related idea: classic video gamers have often speculated about whether young people are now more dexterous with their left hand than they would be otherwise, given the new standard of having the primary joypad or stick be used by the left hand. This started, more or less, with the NES; most other systems were right handed (atari 2600) or ambidexterous (Intellivision, Colecovision, many video games)
It doesn't provide all of what the original poster asks for (and maybe I'm missing the point entirely) but I get some of what the user asks for with good old telnet (well, ssh now) and running my own servers and using my old academic account. The old academic account I use for Usenet, so I have the same newsrc etc from home and work. And I rent webspace, so it's someone else's job to make sure my information is always available...my VisualIDE is emacs ;-)
Joking aside, where your data lives is an issue you can't escape. Either you resort to sneaker net, burning to a rewritable cd or other portable media, or you store data on a remote server--which doesn't "divorce yourself from any particular computer".
Assuming you don't want to go to full unix remote shell mode, I'm not sure if Java or any other platform-independent software suite is going to meet your need. My realpolitik approach is that I'm almost given a Microsoft desktop, so I've assembled my own collection of favorite tools (editors, compilers, etc) and burnt 'em to cd. So I can be up running in a new environment quickly.
Yeah, I put this on my blog a few weeks ago. They have all sorts of high falutin' ideas, but in the end their production is just a lame crossbreed of non-interactive dance dance revolution and tamagotchi. It's kind of pretentious of them, the way they go on about ideas of AI, public/private spaces, and sharing data.
Could politicans use that same loophole to do graveyard advertising? Could I legally replace my great-grandmother's tombstone with one that said, "If I were alive, I'd vote for Nader!"
In Chicago, the tombstone could leave off the first part of that...
Err no. Most Playstation games rated from crap to mediochre. It was Nintendo that was constantly trying to innovate, while the PS was a breeding ground of cookiecutter games, ports, and uninspired drivel.
I pretty much agree with this...I've had an N64 since Star Fox came out, then I decided to get a ps-one late last year, mostly for the game "Unholy War" (sequel to Archon, really.) I've looked around for more good PS games but have only found a few that really appealed to me. (Especially the prop games, Point Blank 3 and Dance Dance Revolution)
"Mario and a couple Zeldas" is such a laughable summary of the N64's gaming library, it's almost not worth responding to. A lot of the great (and often groundbreaking) games were Mario: Kart, Party, Tennis, etc, but don't forget Smash Brothers, Golden Eye, Perfect Dark, Rogue Squadron, and a huge slew of others.
If you think RPGs and fighting games are the end all and be all of gaming, then you probably think PSX was *it*. If you think multiplayer games offer the best bet for gaming goodness, then N64 was your clear champion. If you have a balanced view, you realize that both systems offered some terrific gaming experiences and you picked the one that most met your preferences. (Or maybe like me, you picked up the other system once it was cheap for the games you couldn't get on your main one.)
Well, even the smart techies would forget and let their grip slip a bit, thus, broken pictures, and unless you're watching the laptop screen and not where you're drawing, you're stuck.
Maybe they need to build in audio feedback...anyone remember "Ichabod Marker" on Bill Cosby's "Picture Pages"? That guy was ahread of his time!!
Not counting that Mimeomouse, the regular Mimeo product was pretty bad, at least a couple of years ago...you put the marker in a special holder, all well and good, but the mark only registers if you're pressing really firmly...it was way too easy to miss many lines, so we never could count on it as a reliable tool.
What I really want to see are big honkin' LCD flatpanel touchpanel white boards. (and the same technology for laptops while we're at it.) If it would make it cheaper, I don't the resolution would have to be all that great, just have great big pixels at 1280x960 or whatever.
by the lore of "alt.hackers" the Usenet group, it qualifies as a hack, that is using a tool in a way it wasn't intended. This is slightly different than an older definition, these big stunts and pranks MIT students would pull, and a later definition, breaking into systems. There are a few more variations on the theme hanging out there as well.
Yeah, and it seems that often UI "science" is misguided. Only rarely do they say "well, this whole system works better than this whole system according to our double blind study". Instead they come up with gems like "people are .2 seconds faster at scrolling to a given word with this kind of scrollbar than with that kind", making the assumption that that finding would scale when part of a complex system, or that other factors aren't more important to having a happy, ultimately more productive user.
I don't particularly like skins per se, as they seem to be mere eye-candy and I kind of like the Win95's level of functional utility. But whenever I start with a virgin Windows machine with a newer OS, I have to do a bunch of fiddling, remove the fade in and/or smooth opening windows, change the explorer defaults to list rather than big honking icons, etc. Does that count?
Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
from my blog at kisrael.com
The funny this is, except for VERY rare great gameplay games, the novelty wears off pretty fast and I just delete it again for a few years. I really appreciate having them available though...
This is an excellent point. One of the things people who argue "well what if you could mailorder these games for $20, or even $2?" miss is the convenience of picking and choosing from a large selection and quickly finding out if a game still has engrossing gameplay. You need to get into micropayments w/ electronic fufillment before this becomes worthwhile.
For many, it's the breadth and not the depth of the microcosms that these games give us that's the real draw.
Very good article. It focuses only on PC games though. MAME and its console-based ilk are another kettle of worms altogether.
I see these emulators as a valuable service, preserving what I call our "pop culture heritage"...sure, "Time Pilot" may have been popular enough to make it in some emulator packs, but what about "Time Pilot '84"? A much cooler scifi game in my book, but one whose limited release (during the crash) means that it's not likely to see a repackage rerelease.
I admit it is a bit complicated, because MAME does directly compete with the emulation game packs for modern consoles. But overall I'd rather err on the side of caution and not let these things fall into obscurity.
That cheerleader piece is really annoying. I agree with only the tiniest fraction of what the Christian Cheerleader Leaders say and stand for, but the guy who's doing the interview is the biggest dork I've read in a while. He sounds like a newish convert to his lack of religion, and like most new converts, he's all guns blazin' and basically a smug asshole. (I don't have religion either, but at least I try to have some dignity about it, even if I think concepts of faith help lead to stuff like WTC.)
Man, this stuff makes me really angry! I hate ignorant politicians like these guys who want to take away our electronic rights! Someone should smash into them with a Hadoken Fireball! Or take the chaingun into the Georgia legislative building corridors! Or jump on top of their stupid turtle-like heads! Or grab an energizer and give them a taste of their own medicine! Or something!
Yeah, that's true. I was making some assumptions about what "kind" of classical...personally I only like the big loud or fast stuff, Dvorak's New World Symphony, Mozarts Rondo Alla Turca (sorry mis-spelled).
Not sure if Sousa marches are considered classical though.
The NPR interview with one of the people there (perhaps the curator?) mentioned that the music the carp were listening to was generally classical. Now, despite the effect Barry White might have on humans (and Ally McBeal characters), I wouldn't be surprised if it lacks many of the qualities that made the classical interesting work with the carp. I'm no big fan of classical, but I do buy into the idea that it has a sense of complexity that modern music doesn't have. Most classical generally has less sharp percussion than Barry White's backing band, and probably a less jarring flow. They've said so far that the males seemed more excited, but maybe they're just getting agitated.
Anyway, it sound like pretty dubious science. Cute story for the day however.
Others have wondered if this is a troll...I think you may have a point. I think that you're wrong, but I think you have a point.
I make a lot of my own cgi scripts for personal use, and javascript helps *a lot*, from selecting multiple checkboxes at once, to a way to fake combo boxes where you can select from a set of values or enter a new one. And many, many sites depend on it...though I think many fewer legitimate sites would need the window.open() function if there had been a standard for sizing a window built into the A HREF tag.... (I hate those, 'cause I'm used to right clicking to open in new window, and they hardly ever code that right so that right clicking still works...)
If you read the patent itself (patent office link from the article), or at least the abstract, it specifically mentions "operation of a selected key of the keyboard". (Later on it says "The terminal apparatus may include data entry means, such as a manual keyboard"). Funny if they somehow win, maybe browsers will have to remove keyboard shortcuts, but mouse and trackpad clicking is still A-OK. (And then Amercians with Disabilities Act crew will jump on it...)
But yeah, this is really insane. Also, so many patents like this seem like they don't pass the "not obvious to a practitioner of the field" test.
...and don't mind a little blatant karma-whoring:
The Palm Graveyard is dedicated to tales and pictures of Palms that have piloted their way to the choir invisible.
Get adequate servers for dev work. PCs are relatively cheap. If you can set up a 'playbox' for each developer, as close to the final environment as possible, that can be a big boon. Too often I'm doing development on my NT desktop for something that's ultimately going to run on Solaris...it generally works ok because it's java, but any perl components and other things are likely to be screwed up. A linux box would be very useful, even if it's not in my cube...
...hand in hand with this is for big projects, do regular builds, preferably on a 'virgin' machine each week. This can be useful in goal setting/making as well as trying to avoid the "well it works on *my* PC" syndrome.
According to this story, for 2001, PalmOS still has 79% of the market, with Pocket PC OS machines only 12%. Palm hardware is 58% of the total new sales market. Not bad for a player whose older units are so usable many people stick with their old PalmIIIs and PalmVs!
Personally, I think Sony really has the right idea, combining the friendly PalmOS (and I will always argue that scaling up from simplicity is better than trying to scale down from a desktop for this form factor) with higher rez screens and multimedia features. It's too bad they're so proprietary with their hardware, but they definately point a nice third way between Palm's traditional spartan-ness and the gee-whiz-features at the cost of usability of the PocketPC offerings.