Why is that a problem? Especially if the QB returns the favor?:-)
See, the point is, you're being judgemental about something you aparently know very little about. Aparently Johnny has a 'problem' if he doesn't look, act, behave, or believe like you? If he's gay, then having a crush is perfectly normal for him, just like some girl going to the game just because she has a crush on the QB is perfectly normal for her.
Again, your OPINION here is unfounded and erronious.
I guess that makes you special. Your 'gaydar' aparently works better than that of most gay men. How proud you must be! I'll bet the Army wants to sign you up to screen recruits! You have a future!
Homosexuality cannot be equated with vegetarianism. I can't even fathom a way to equate them. Apples and oranges.
I totally respect your sexuality, your sexual orientation, etc. No problem there. That was never an issue. At issue is your 'belief' that you know the root cause for my sexual orientation being different than yours, when it's plain that you know no such thing. If you wouldn't try to (mis)characterize my sexual orientation, we'd have no issue what-so-ever between us:-)
I am the way I am. You are the way you are. And it's all good.
Hrm. Maybe you can spot the extremes, but you can't spot the every-day gays... and you most certainly can't spot the closeted ones.
I can guarentee I could put you in a room of 50% gay/straight people, and the results of you picking on the gay woulds would be no better than random chance.
I know you're just trolling, but too many people actually DO hold the ignorant bigoted viewpoint expressed here.
(for the record, I don't care much for Streisand or musicals or show-tunes, I can't stand fashion, I can't decorate, I don't lisp, I love professional football, and am a computer geek (naturally). I doubt you'd pick me out of a crowd as being 'gay'...)
I base my believe that you are wrong upon my entire life history, and the entire life history of all my gay/lesbian/bi/straight friends.
Your characterization is baseless and incorrect. Usually intelligent people prefer being corrected so that they don't appear to be a fool in front of others... they enjoy learning new things and getting new perspectives.
Finally, nobody ever said the X-Men was *about* gay people, just that gay people can rather strongly identify with it (as can geeks, and many other 'outcast' groups).
Sorry, but the essense of X-MEN really really DOES appeal to gay people, who have felt much of the same persecution and 'otherness', and who have struggled with the 'assimilation v.s. confrontation' issues, etc. I think the metaphore is very solid there, and that tons of gay people respond to it on a very deep level. It speaks to them. It's not a crime for the author to note this.
Of course, the true brilliance of the X-MEN is that they're vague enough, sometimes getting closer to one issue, sometimes another, that all self-identified groups of 'otherness' can readily identify. The X-MEN is not prejudiced into depicting only ONE form of discrimination and intollerance and fear... but of encapsulating the *concept* of these things. It's not ABOUT gays or blacks or jews or geeks... it's about mutants. But it's about them in a way that gays, blacks, jews, geeks, etc., can all readily identify with.
heck, I've gone 40mph on my bicycle several times. I don't want to think of what would have happened if I had fallen off, my chain had jammed, there was an unseen stick in the roadway, etc...
But I really am concerned about how one STOPS in these boots, or how one controls the speed. And if a 'normal' person can get up to 25mph, can an olympic runner go faster than that in these boots?
It sounds like all you suggest is far better handled with a simple 'smart' indexing file system that allows natural language queries ("show me all MP3s by X", "Show me all my jazz music", etc.)
I don't think a '3-d' interface adds ANYTHING to a file handling interface or a 'desktop'.
Some mention has been made about how a major step in GUIs won't really be made until there's some sort of giant leap in display technology. Others were saying that it wouldn't happen until something other than a mouse or keyboard was the primary input device. This got me thinking...
There have been many articles about up and coming display technologies, for very flat, flexible displays of very high resolution that should start appearing in about five years time. I also thought about alternative input devices, such as pen tablets, touch screens, and speech.
If we had a very thin, flexible, large, and very high res display (say 18" tall by 24" wide, thin as a credit card, flexible as a mouse-pad), and had it be touch-sensitive using a pen-stylus, our desktop might actually *become* our desk top. No bulky CRT/display, keyboard, or mouse. Just a pen and speech input, allowing us to naturally draw/write right on forms or in windows, or take dictation and edit using the pen.
I'm sure such new hardware would *definitely* result in a revolution in standard UIs.
Beyond that, is the issue of the 'files' metaphore.
I don't know about you, but I think saying "Find that letter from my mom from about two weeks ago" to locate a file is much more intuitive than trying to locate an email (search your inbox) or a document (search the file system), etc. What we really need is much better indexing, and much better integration of our information stores.
Idealy, I should never have to give a name to a file, or know a file's name in order to use it, edit it, print it, send it, etc. The details of how the information is organized on the disk should disappear behind other abstractions that let me look at the information in any old way (let me see all my email... let me see all the documents I worked on last tuesday... let me see all the MP3s I have by They Might Be Giants... show me all MP3s that have "Electric" in the title... Play that 'StarCraft' game... Create a new email to my mom...)
A computer's main benefit is its ability store, retrieve, and manipulate data efficiently and quickly.
This is a road we've been long heading down... first with long file names, then with things like Word's document organizations and searching abilities (ability to see thumbnails without 'opening' the document, everything located in a 'my documents' folder) to yahoo and alta-vista search engines and the way browsers work. We still have a very long way to go, and I think it's all going to be about natural language.
One important aspect is having the computer have some heuristics about what it is people are doing, and giving it a history of past actions that it 'knows' about, so request like "show me that last file again" can be answered, or actions "send a copy of that last email I sent to Fred" can be performed unambiguously.
Speech based UIs don't HAVE to be verbal, but can be written as well. In an office setting with cubes, I'd imagine a lot of typing would be going on. For an executive in his own large office, he can speak into a hands-free head-set (which would double as his phone, etc).
I too believe the next real leap in UIs will only come after vast improvements in human language recognition engines (both spoken and written).
We're talking about a computer's UI. Not a UI for a specific app, like CAD or other modeling software. We're talking about launching apps, entering/editing data, manipulating devices and resources...
So what does a 3D UI bring to the table, besides needless complexity? Besides taking tons more overhead, it adds difficulty in finding things (they may be obscured by other objects, or behind you), and depending on implementation, makes it even easier to get 'lost' in the UI, because there's a whole extra dimension to get lost in!
For all those drawbacks (and a dozen more I could probably whip off the top of my head), what does it buy you? What are the advantages? How does it make me get my work done faster, or make me more productive? How does it make it *easier* to learn, or stimulate my thought processes and creativity?
I can't see that it does any of those. Care to enlighten me?
I have yet to hear any real compelling advantage a "3D UI" brings to the table. We're talking about launching applications and manipulating system resources (files, connections, devices).
A 3D UI adds huge layers of overhead and conceptual complexity (and lots of additional possibilities of things being inadvertently 'hidden' unless you move objects out of the way or change the camera position, etc). So, given all the potential minuses, what are the pluses? I can't think of even one...
The 'explorer' file dialogs, where files are listed in a variable number of fixed length columns, scrolling off to the right. So you see files A-C in the first column, D-F in the second, and you have to scroll way over to the right to see files X-Z.
I agree, that organization just sucks when there are lots of files. When there are small numbers, it's really indistinguishable from a more sane organization.
Luckily, you can click the 'details' button, and it becomes a one-line-per-file display, that scrolls down. But you see far fewer files at once (but more info about them). At least you're given a choice. Now, if only all apps respected that choice, and defaulted to your last selected display mode. Unfortunately, this sort of behavoir has to be coded for in each and every dialog, so some apps do and most apps don't.
Sorry to respond to flaimbait like this, but I can't stop myself...
Windows' UI doesn't totally suck, any more than the Mac UI is totally the best possible in the universe. Both have strengths and weaknesses, some of which are purely religious in nature.
And let's face it, lots of real UI "refinements" (I hesitate to call them innovations) have occured on the Windows platform (not all started or endorsed by MS) compared to the Mac. I mean, in the last ten years, how many UI changes have been driven by the Mac? Sure, some... is the Mac really a driving force for change? I think it is quite the opposite, in fact...
MS has updated the basic Windows UI several times... first with Win95, then again with ActiveDesktop, and Win2K includes further refinements. Some are steps forward, some are steps back, but at least they're steps!:-)
So I think that claiming that MS sees no reason to change the UI is not very well founded. If you don't believe it is good, that's one thing, but it's not arbitrarily static -- that distinction belongs far more to Apple, historically (of course, starting off with a better UI means they didn't have to 'hunt in the dark' as much, but still, you get my point).
I like the tool-tips and context menus that evolved on Windows (due to weaknesses in the huge 'button panels' that sprung up, though I admit I do sometimes prefer those tool palettes to selecting from menus for some applications, and I really appreciate having the *choice*). I like the use of tree-view organizations for many applications (though I admit they're hardly intuitive for most newbies, they're very much so for me). I like having the 'back button' in my computer environment as well as on my browser.
The web represents a definite change in UI. I think more are coming as displays get larger, flatter, cheaper, and higher-resolution... and as bandwith ceases to become a huge bottle-neck. And while Apple (especially Aqua) will be on the vanguard of some of those UI changes, Windows will be as well. Frankly, I think there's a lot to DISlike in Aqua (three little dots below a dock icon means it's running? Huh?), but there's also an awful lot to like (including its "pretty face"). However, there are some things that just seem like steps backwards in usability for more complicated tasks, or for more advanced users.
A good UI has to accomodate both newbies AND experienced/advanced users, and be flexible to 'work like' each individual thinks, rather than trying to force every user to think the same.
Well, you can click start, run, wp as well. Or just double-click on the WordPerfect icon on the desktop.
CLIs aren't dying, they're just mutating. They'll always be around, even if it's just in the heavily disguised forms of scripting environments and/or speech recognition.
I think new innovations will come with blending GUIs with CLIs and/or speech.
After all, regardless of what zealots on either side will tell you, each has their own strengths. It's much easier to select files starting with A-H in a file listing in a GUI than with a CLI, but it's much easier to select files that end with.exe with a CLI than with a GUI. For a GUI, operations on small numbers of "contiguous" objects tend to be easier/faster, while a CLI shines in operations that require more objects, or more complicated selection criteria.
Blending the two brings out the power of both while helping to eliminate the weaknesses of each. It also allows users to adapt to the methods they find most comfortable.
Even the sideways ones are always (to my experience) sideways the same way. So color-blind people only need to learn TWO patterns (one for vertical, one for sideways).
I think when we get monitor resolution of laser quality (300dpi vert/horiz) in a nice non-strobing medium that's easy on the eyes (LCD, LEP,...), we'll THEN see more interesting UIs develope.
As long as we're in relatively the same X by Y CRT universe, we're not going to see much dramatically change, imho. As resolutions went up, our fonts got better, and a few other things, but not until looking at a monitor is equivalent to looking at a full 8x11 laser-printed page are we going to see really dramatic changes.
Too bad they don't apply that same reasoning with the conversion to the metric system. The USofA looks doomed to hang on to the old English system forever at this rate...
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that a problem? Especially if the QB returns the favor? :-)
See, the point is, you're being judgemental about something you aparently know very little about. Aparently Johnny has a 'problem' if he doesn't look, act, behave, or believe like you? If he's gay, then having a crush is perfectly normal for him, just like some girl going to the game just because she has a crush on the QB is perfectly normal for her.
Again, your OPINION here is unfounded and erronious.
- Spryguy
I guess that makes you special. Your 'gaydar' aparently works better than that of most gay men. How proud you must be! I'll bet the Army wants to sign you up to screen recruits! You have a future!
- Spryguy
I beg to differ.
:-)
Homosexuality cannot be equated with vegetarianism. I can't even fathom a way to equate them. Apples and oranges.
I totally respect your sexuality, your sexual orientation, etc. No problem there. That was never an issue. At issue is your 'belief' that you know the root cause for my sexual orientation being different than yours, when it's plain that you know no such thing. If you wouldn't try to (mis)characterize my sexual orientation, we'd have no issue what-so-ever between us
I am the way I am. You are the way you are. And it's all good.
- Spryguy
Hrm. Maybe you can spot the extremes, but you can't spot the every-day gays... and you most certainly can't spot the closeted ones.
I can guarentee I could put you in a room of 50% gay/straight people, and the results of you picking on the gay woulds would be no better than random chance.
I know you're just trolling, but too many people actually DO hold the ignorant bigoted viewpoint expressed here.
(for the record, I don't care much for Streisand or musicals or show-tunes, I can't stand fashion, I can't decorate, I don't lisp, I love professional football, and am a computer geek (naturally). I doubt you'd pick me out of a crowd as being 'gay'...)
- Spryguy
yes, but upon what do you base your 'belief'?
I base my believe that you are wrong upon my entire life history, and the entire life history of all my gay/lesbian/bi/straight friends.
Your characterization is baseless and incorrect. Usually intelligent people prefer being corrected so that they don't appear to be a fool in front of others... they enjoy learning new things and getting new perspectives.
Finally, nobody ever said the X-Men was *about* gay people, just that gay people can rather strongly identify with it (as can geeks, and many other 'outcast' groups).
- Spryguy
Sorry, but the essense of X-MEN really really DOES appeal to gay people, who have felt much of the same persecution and 'otherness', and who have struggled with the 'assimilation v.s. confrontation' issues, etc. I think the metaphore is very solid there, and that tons of gay people respond to it on a very deep level. It speaks to them. It's not a crime for the author to note this.
Of course, the true brilliance of the X-MEN is that they're vague enough, sometimes getting closer to one issue, sometimes another, that all self-identified groups of 'otherness' can readily identify. The X-MEN is not prejudiced into depicting only ONE form of discrimination and intollerance and fear... but of encapsulating the *concept* of these things. It's not ABOUT gays or blacks or jews or geeks... it's about mutants. But it's about them in a way that gays, blacks, jews, geeks, etc., can all readily identify with.
- Spryguy
Amen.
- Spryguy
...wouldn't that be GNU-MEN?
- Spryguy
Hell, XXX-Men sounds great to me! :-)
- Spryguy
Have you read "VALIS"? Now... was that book a work of fiction, or an autobiographical essay? :-)
- Spryguy
This should be moderated up, 2 (funny!)
- Spryguy
heck, I've gone 40mph on my bicycle several times. I don't want to think of what would have happened if I had fallen off, my chain had jammed, there was an unseen stick in the roadway, etc...
But I really am concerned about how one STOPS in these boots, or how one controls the speed. And if a 'normal' person can get up to 25mph, can an olympic runner go faster than that in these boots?
- Spryguy
It sounds like all you suggest is far better handled with a simple 'smart' indexing file system that allows natural language queries ("show me all MP3s by X", "Show me all my jazz music", etc.)
I don't think a '3-d' interface adds ANYTHING to a file handling interface or a 'desktop'.
- Spryguy
Some mention has been made about how a major step in GUIs won't really be made until there's some sort of giant leap in display technology. Others were saying that it wouldn't happen until something other than a mouse or keyboard was the primary input device. This got me thinking...
There have been many articles about up and coming display technologies, for very flat, flexible displays of very high resolution that should start appearing in about five years time. I also thought about alternative input devices, such as pen tablets, touch screens, and speech.
If we had a very thin, flexible, large, and very high res display (say 18" tall by 24" wide, thin as a credit card, flexible as a mouse-pad), and had it be touch-sensitive using a pen-stylus, our desktop might actually *become* our desk top. No bulky CRT/display, keyboard, or mouse. Just a pen and speech input, allowing us to naturally draw/write right on forms or in windows, or take dictation and edit using the pen.
I'm sure such new hardware would *definitely* result in a revolution in standard UIs.
- Spryguy
Beyond that, is the issue of the 'files' metaphore.
I don't know about you, but I think saying "Find that letter from my mom from about two weeks ago" to locate a file is much more intuitive than trying to locate an email (search your inbox) or a document (search the file system), etc. What we really need is much better indexing, and much better integration of our information stores.
Idealy, I should never have to give a name to a file, or know a file's name in order to use it, edit it, print it, send it, etc. The details of how the information is organized on the disk should disappear behind other abstractions that let me look at the information in any old way (let me see all my email... let me see all the documents I worked on last tuesday... let me see all the MP3s I have by They Might Be Giants... show me all MP3s that have "Electric" in the title... Play that 'StarCraft' game... Create a new email to my mom...)
A computer's main benefit is its ability store, retrieve, and manipulate data efficiently and quickly.
This is a road we've been long heading down... first with long file names, then with things like Word's document organizations and searching abilities (ability to see thumbnails without 'opening' the document, everything located in a 'my documents' folder) to yahoo and alta-vista search engines and the way browsers work. We still have a very long way to go, and I think it's all going to be about natural language.
One important aspect is having the computer have some heuristics about what it is people are doing, and giving it a history of past actions that it 'knows' about, so request like "show me that last file again" can be answered, or actions "send a copy of that last email I sent to Fred" can be performed unambiguously.
- Spryguy
Speech based UIs don't HAVE to be verbal, but can be written as well. In an office setting with cubes, I'd imagine a lot of typing would be going on. For an executive in his own large office, he can speak into a hands-free head-set (which would double as his phone, etc).
I too believe the next real leap in UIs will only come after vast improvements in human language recognition engines (both spoken and written).
- Spryguy
The proper question is "Why 3D?"
We're talking about a computer's UI. Not a UI for a specific app, like CAD or other modeling software. We're talking about launching apps, entering/editing data, manipulating devices and resources...
So what does a 3D UI bring to the table, besides needless complexity? Besides taking tons more overhead, it adds difficulty in finding things (they may be obscured by other objects, or behind you), and depending on implementation, makes it even easier to get 'lost' in the UI, because there's a whole extra dimension to get lost in!
For all those drawbacks (and a dozen more I could probably whip off the top of my head), what does it buy you? What are the advantages? How does it make me get my work done faster, or make me more productive? How does it make it *easier* to learn, or stimulate my thought processes and creativity?
I can't see that it does any of those. Care to enlighten me?
- Spryguy
I'm curious why you say that.
I have yet to hear any real compelling advantage a "3D UI" brings to the table. We're talking about launching applications and manipulating system resources (files, connections, devices).
A 3D UI adds huge layers of overhead and conceptual complexity (and lots of additional possibilities of things being inadvertently 'hidden' unless you move objects out of the way or change the camera position, etc). So, given all the potential minuses, what are the pluses? I can't think of even one...
- Spryguy
The 'explorer' file dialogs, where files are listed in a variable number of fixed length columns, scrolling off to the right. So you see files A-C in the first column, D-F in the second, and you have to scroll way over to the right to see files X-Z.
I agree, that organization just sucks when there are lots of files. When there are small numbers, it's really indistinguishable from a more sane organization.
Luckily, you can click the 'details' button, and it becomes a one-line-per-file display, that scrolls down. But you see far fewer files at once (but more info about them). At least you're given a choice. Now, if only all apps respected that choice, and defaulted to your last selected display mode. Unfortunately, this sort of behavoir has to be coded for in each and every dialog, so some apps do and most apps don't.
- Spryguy
Sorry to respond to flaimbait like this, but I can't stop myself...
:-)
Windows' UI doesn't totally suck, any more than the Mac UI is totally the best possible in the universe. Both have strengths and weaknesses, some of which are purely religious in nature.
And let's face it, lots of real UI "refinements" (I hesitate to call them innovations) have occured on the Windows platform (not all started or endorsed by MS) compared to the Mac. I mean, in the last ten years, how many UI changes have been driven by the Mac? Sure, some... is the Mac really a driving force for change? I think it is quite the opposite, in fact...
MS has updated the basic Windows UI several times... first with Win95, then again with ActiveDesktop, and Win2K includes further refinements. Some are steps forward, some are steps back, but at least they're steps!
So I think that claiming that MS sees no reason to change the UI is not very well founded. If you don't believe it is good, that's one thing, but it's not arbitrarily static -- that distinction belongs far more to Apple, historically (of course, starting off with a better UI means they didn't have to 'hunt in the dark' as much, but still, you get my point).
I like the tool-tips and context menus that evolved on Windows (due to weaknesses in the huge 'button panels' that sprung up, though I admit I do sometimes prefer those tool palettes to selecting from menus for some applications, and I really appreciate having the *choice*). I like the use of tree-view organizations for many applications (though I admit they're hardly intuitive for most newbies, they're very much so for me). I like having the 'back button' in my computer environment as well as on my browser.
The web represents a definite change in UI. I think more are coming as displays get larger, flatter, cheaper, and higher-resolution... and as bandwith ceases to become a huge bottle-neck. And while Apple (especially Aqua) will be on the vanguard of some of those UI changes, Windows will be as well. Frankly, I think there's a lot to DISlike in Aqua (three little dots below a dock icon means it's running? Huh?), but there's also an awful lot to like (including its "pretty face"). However, there are some things that just seem like steps backwards in usability for more complicated tasks, or for more advanced users.
A good UI has to accomodate both newbies AND experienced/advanced users, and be flexible to 'work like' each individual thinks, rather than trying to force every user to think the same.
- Spryguy
Well, you can click start, run, wp as well. Or just double-click on the WordPerfect icon on the desktop.
CLIs aren't dying, they're just mutating. They'll always be around, even if it's just in the heavily disguised forms of scripting environments and/or speech recognition.
- Spryguy
I think new innovations will come with blending GUIs with CLIs and/or speech.
.exe with a CLI than with a GUI. For a GUI, operations on small numbers of "contiguous" objects tend to be easier/faster, while a CLI shines in operations that require more objects, or more complicated selection criteria.
After all, regardless of what zealots on either side will tell you, each has their own strengths. It's much easier to select files starting with A-H in a file listing in a GUI than with a CLI, but it's much easier to select files that end with
Blending the two brings out the power of both while helping to eliminate the weaknesses of each. It also allows users to adapt to the methods they find most comfortable.
- Spryguy
Even the sideways ones are always (to my experience) sideways the same way. So color-blind people only need to learn TWO patterns (one for vertical, one for sideways).
- Spryguy
I think when we get monitor resolution of laser quality (300dpi vert/horiz) in a nice non-strobing medium that's easy on the eyes (LCD, LEP, ...), we'll THEN see more interesting UIs develope.
As long as we're in relatively the same X by Y CRT universe, we're not going to see much dramatically change, imho. As resolutions went up, our fonts got better, and a few other things, but not until looking at a monitor is equivalent to looking at a full 8x11 laser-printed page are we going to see really dramatic changes.
- Spryguy
Too bad they don't apply that same reasoning with the conversion to the metric system. The USofA looks doomed to hang on to the old English system forever at this rate...
- Spryguy