.. how would we know, anyway? I presume by "came alive" he means "attains sentience". But looking at a robot from the outside, there would be no way to tell if it was sentient or not, since its actions would still be based on the physics of the machinery it is built with. We could ask it "are you sentient" and just go by its answer, but its answer would still just be the result of the computing machiner which forms its "brain", and that might give an incorrect "yes" answer based on some reasoning that it thinks and therefore exists, or something - this answer still wouldn't reveal if it was "alive" (in the sentient sense), or just a sophisticated machine. Since we don't know what sentience is, we cannot measure it. For all we know, a Pentium CPU has some sensation of "sentience" on some primitive level. Essentially we're asking, "what is the fundamental difference between a biological organism and a machine" that "makes the former be considered 'alive'". It surely isn't self-awareness; we consider plants to be 'alive' and its unlikely they are self-aware. Its a bit like asking the question if spiders or insects or rats or whatever are sentient or "have souls" etc. At some stage we would probably have to make decisions about robots based on unknowns, i.e. not being sure what the truth is, but taking the robots word for it, or pondering if the robot can "suffer". If we so readily kill animals we know are alive (e.g. for hunting/sport/food etc), why would we feel more about a robot anyway? We'd feel more sorry for the robots than "actual" living animals?
Re:Anybody look at the site?
on
Fishing for Ideas
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmm.. I also wondered about those "mental youths".. in some English-speaking parts of the world (not sure about the US), "mental" is used as an adjective to refer to a mentally ill person. Perhaps that was what was meant? However, it is more typically used as an insult to non-mentally-ill people, and never (to my knowledge) used to refer to actual mentally ill people.
(Hmm.. "Hope for Africa".. nice sentiment, but terribly naive..:/.. still, I hope she reaches her goals and learns something about Africa in the process..)
beauty pageants for preteens give me a much ickier feeling
Urgh, yes. Was watching a TV show about one the other day, and some adults were talking about "how beautiful some of these girls are", "how important it is to be beautiful", and were saying things like that "that one has such beautiful legs" and "what a nice body that one has" etc. It was kind of creepy and kind of sad. These girls were no older than 10 or 11, and were trying so hard to behave grown-up. The adults 'dressing up the girls in pretty dresses' and cooing over them reminded me precisely of young girls dressing up dolls in 'pretty dresses'.
Even so, one needs to keep perspective. At risk of sounding religous: if that sort of thing makes one "lose one's faith" in "the system", then that faith can't have been very strong to begin with. Meaning, if you really understand the scientific method, then you'd realise that over time it WILL expose the fakes, and we can actually be quite relaxed and confident about that. The system itself is sound: the only thing we should worry about is society giving up this system in favour of another. To quote Carl Sagan: "At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense."... "At the same time, science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way to winnow the wheat from the chaff is by critical experiment and analysis.".
This essay by Jearl Walker is an interesting and insightful read that relates this notion of "faith" in physics (read right up to the end).
Come on, surely you could have understood this from jspoon's post without having to have it explained to you?
OK, I see from your website that you don't seem to be a first-language English speaker.. in which case, my apologies; I assume that as a likely reason for the misunderstanding.
No. The term "user experience" generally has two different senses, depending on the context. The first is, simply, the perception of the experience of using some system, which is the meaning you refer to. The second, DIFFERENT meaning of "user experience", which was (rather obviously) the meaning intended by jspoon, was the "marketroid" term "user experience". This term, pronounced with emphasis and slight lengthing on "experience" (and was more common at the height internet economic boom years) is used to refer to a hypothetical system (that software providers wish they could provide) that captivates and/or entertains the user more completely. This more closely aligns with the term "experience" as would be used in a statement such as "an IMAX show is a real experience". A simpler example, websites with super "cool" flashy animated splash screens on the front page try to provide an *experience* for the user, to entertain and captivate the user, hoping the user enjoys it and wants to return for more. (Computer users tend to be more pragmatic: in most cases, people don't want to be 'entertained' by an animation on a web page, they just want to get to the information they are looking for, as fast as possible. Very much the same principle as Google). A marketing exec going overboard in an attempt to "beat" Google may miss this fundamental point, and this MS statement about "user experience" hints that this might happen. A possible example: in WinXP/IE6, if you click on a.AVI in a web page and allow it to open the page in Media Player in a sidebar, instead of just showing the damn AVI, they also go download links to latest hits, new DVD releases blah blah blah. In marketing terms, they are trying to provide a "user experience". That horrible software that comes with a SB Audigy that takes over your desktop tries to provide a "user experience". That RealPlayer software that tries to be your complete personal digital media management center is trying to provide a "user experience". Yes, its stupid.
(Come on, surely you could have understood this from jspoon's post without having to have it explained to you? Its not exactly difficult. Were you just arguing for the sake of being nitpicky?)
Don't underestimate MS. 8 years ago, you could have made this exact same argument with "Netscape" in place of "Google". Netscape had something like 80% browser share, and was so popular that many people used the term "Netscape" to mean "Internet" or web. And was totally platform independent. And MS joined that 'game' late.
Ah, I see the mistake in your reasoning now. With only a few exceptions, PC software is NEVER released when its "stable", thats a somewhat naive view. "Stable" has very little to do with a decision to release software, if that were the case, most software would probably take about 30% longer to release. "Relatively stable", yes. "Fairly stable", sure. But NEVER actually "stable"; any reasonably sized software project (e.g. IE or Mozilla) is always going to have in the order of thousands of KNOWN bugs at release time. The difference is that Microsoft's standards are lower than the Mozilla team's, so their definition of "stable" is different, that is, they will release as a new version with far more many known bugs in it. Mozilla 1.0 was definitely more stable then IE 5 (and I'm still more likely to get IE crashes than Mozilla crashes even with IE 6 in spite of using Mozilla much more (although other peoples MMV of course)).
For software development organizations, its never a question of "whether or not the software is complete and stable", but rather a question of "how many bugs are we willing to tolerate in a product with our name on it".
The IE buglist is not available to the public, while the Mozilla buglist is. So some people see this huge Mozilla buglist and say "wow what crap". But just because you can't see the huge IE buglist, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. "But IE is stable when I use it", you might argue, "how can there be that many bugs?". Well, Mozilla is stable too when I use it. I can't name one single bug off the top of my head. And yet they have a large buglist. If I wasn't aware of its existence, I might also be fooled into thinking that Mozilla was "complete and stable".
Companies like Microsoft don't wait for their software to be "complete and stable" when they release a new version, they also look at a number of other marketing-related and strategy-related factors.
So what? It was usable already. If they were Microsoft, they would have just slapped a "version 5" label on it, and then a "version 5.5" label on it, at equivalent stages of development. In fact, thats exactly what Microsoft did. If you really think that a "Version 5.5" from MS means more than a "version 0.9.3 pre-release" from the Mozilla team, then you place way too much stock in version numbers... version numbers are just for marketing in this industry, don't place so much importance on them.
Re:A little whack from the perspective stick...
on
Mozilla Project Turns 5
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It took nearly 5 years to get to version 1. At that rate, a few monkeys accessorized with keyboards could have accomplished that.
Version numbers don't mean much. Look at it in this light: even though Mozilla is "version 1", it is functionally / feature-wise pretty much on par with Internet Explorer "version 6". And the stability of the one or two years worth of betas leading up to version 1 was also not all that different to the stability of IE version 5 and 5.5.
Personally I think they should have just called Mozilla 1 "Mozilla 6". At least it would provide a more accurate representation of the level of quality of the product as compared to other similar products, to all those people out there who seem to think a version number means anything ("What? They're only at version 1 now? Ha, IE is at version 6").
And it has only really come to the spotlight since Apple adopted the KHTML renderer.
Bollocks. Hits from Konqueror browsers have been (relatively) significant in my web site stats (typically 3rd or 4th most used, behind IE, Netscape/Moz and Opera) from MUCH longer ago than when Apple "adopted" the KHTML renderer. It may be more in the PUBLIC eye more recently, since Apple got involved, but Konqueror has been (quietly) in fairly wide use for quite a long time now. In other words, just because YOU hadn't heard about, doesn't mean it wasn't significant.
What else annoys me, is if you speak to these web developers and their answer is that "people should just use IE". "IE is the standard" they say. They actually seem to get annoyed at their visitors for not using IE, because it makes more work for them.
As of right now Mozilla isn't infringing on Internet Explorer's territory in any way that is either worrying Microsoft or causing a sweeping change in the way websites are designed.
The first point here doesn't bother me so much as it would have some years ago, but the second point is bothering me. Looking at the browser stats of visitors to my two websites, I'm seeing a wider variety of web browsers than ever before. This is a good thing, and is something we wanted five years ago, but better late than never. But with all the new browser choices appearing, you'd think we'd start seeing web developers realise that they can no longer go around assuming everyone is using IE. But its almost as if they just don't want to know about it, because they're too lazy to learn how to make their site non-IE specific.
Now, IE has, on one of my sites, 80.3% "share". I'm guessing the general average of IE users is about 90%. So 1 in 10 browsers is NOT IE. And yet we still have huge numbers of idiot web developers who somehow think its OK to turn away 1 in 10 people who visit their sites, almost always for no good reason other than to have some stupid little animated effect somewhere, or something else similarly pointless. Can you imagine a store in a mall turning away every tenth customer that tried to enter? Thats ridiculous. These web developers with their "optimized for IE" sites make me sick. Perhaps its time to start reviving interest in all those "made for any browser" campaigns that used to be so popular.
Well, I think the original poster was just exaggerating his/her point a bit. Regardless: you still posted your point as being an "absolute fact" that icons are better, which is no better than the original poster.
I don't think the original poster's post was "flamebait", just his/her opinion (also incorrectly stated as fact, but anyone with half a brain cell could deduce that that was the only problem with it - apart from that, he/she has a point).
Personally I like (well-designed, attractive) icons in certain situations, and I know that many other people actually prefer them - probably the majority of people. I'm simply in favour of choice. Today's computers are powerful enough to offer a choice to users in this matter. Heck, the computers of the 1980's were powerful enough to offer a choice in this matter. So I don't see what the point of bickering about it is.
Here's a revelation for you: people are different.
I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons.
Well, I can much more quickly find a text label in a sea of other text labels, than an icon I know in a sea of other icons. Does that make you "wrong"? No. People are different. This isn't "right" or "wrong". Deal with it.
Simple: "cut". You could fit that into 11x5 pixels and it would still be clearly readable.
Tooltips are not that useful because you can only see one at a time, and first have to float the mouse over a button. This is very different to seeing all available options spelt out on the screen at once.
Labels AND icons just take up lots of screenspace. This is fine for desktop icons, but not for toolbars. I agree with parent poster, but mostly about toolbars, and not icons in general. Toolbar icons are mostly meaningless; give me text anyway. The brain can process a written word MUCH faster than pretty much any 16x16 image, regardless of how well the image corresponds with the functionality. On toolbars, though, text would take up too much space horizontally.
Oh yeah, as opposed to the USA. OK, so maybe you don't consider PCs or handhelds 'electronic devices'.. but hang on.. what electronic devices does the US make anyway? Hmm.. Sony, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, LG, uh... ??
Slashdot Mirror
.. how would we know, anyway? I presume by "came alive" he means "attains sentience". But looking at a robot from the outside, there would be no way to tell if it was sentient or not, since its actions would still be based on the physics of the machinery it is built with. We could ask it "are you sentient" and just go by its answer, but its answer would still just be the result of the computing machiner which forms its "brain", and that might give an incorrect "yes" answer based on some reasoning that it thinks and therefore exists, or something - this answer still wouldn't reveal if it was "alive" (in the sentient sense), or just a sophisticated machine. Since we don't know what sentience is, we cannot measure it. For all we know, a Pentium CPU has some sensation of "sentience" on some primitive level. Essentially we're asking, "what is the fundamental difference between a biological organism and a machine" that "makes the former be considered 'alive'". It surely isn't self-awareness; we consider plants to be 'alive' and its unlikely they are self-aware. Its a bit like asking the question if spiders or insects or rats or whatever are sentient or "have souls" etc. At some stage we would probably have to make decisions about robots based on unknowns, i.e. not being sure what the truth is, but taking the robots word for it, or pondering if the robot can "suffer". If we so readily kill animals we know are alive (e.g. for hunting/sport/food etc), why would we feel more about a robot anyway? We'd feel more sorry for the robots than "actual" living animals?
Hmm .. I also wondered about those "mental youths" .. in some English-speaking parts of the world (not sure about the US), "mental" is used as an adjective to refer to a mentally ill person. Perhaps that was what was meant? However, it is more typically used as an insult to non-mentally-ill people, and never (to my knowledge) used to refer to actual mentally ill people.
(Hmm .. "Hope for Africa" .. nice sentiment, but terribly naive.. :/ .. still, I hope she reaches her goals and learns something about Africa in the process..)
Now we can continue to pollute the planet and plunder the oceans and rainforests as much as we like. Phew!
Uh, how the hell is this "flamebait"? There is nothing inflammatory in there, its just a passing comment. Grow up, moderators.
Honestly, why do people feel the need to be snobbish about how they use their spare CPU cycles?
How the hell did this get modded down? Its COMPLETELY on-topic and relevant to the discussion. I guess some moderator has an agenda, or a stick up his
beauty pageants for preteens give me a much ickier feeling
Urgh, yes. Was watching a TV show about one the other day, and some adults were talking about "how beautiful some of these girls are", "how important it is to be beautiful", and were saying things like that "that one has such beautiful legs" and "what a nice body that one has" etc. It was kind of creepy and kind of sad. These girls were no older than 10 or 11, and were trying so hard to behave grown-up. The adults 'dressing up the girls in pretty dresses' and cooing over them reminded me precisely of young girls dressing up dolls in 'pretty dresses'.
He didn't say its funny, you've misunderstood his post. Go read it again, carefully this time. Read it a few times if necessary.
Even so, one needs to keep perspective. At risk of sounding religous: if that sort of thing makes one "lose one's faith" in "the system", then that faith can't have been very strong to begin with. Meaning, if you really understand the scientific method, then you'd realise that over time it WILL expose the fakes, and we can actually be quite relaxed and confident about that. The system itself is sound: the only thing we should worry about is society giving up this system in favour of another. To quote Carl Sagan: "At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense." ... "At the same time, science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way to winnow the wheat from the chaff is by critical experiment and analysis.".
This essay by Jearl Walker is an interesting and insightful read that relates this notion of "faith" in physics (read right up to the end).
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/hi nes/1799629.
Come on, surely you could have understood this from jspoon's post without having to have it explained to you?
OK, I see from your website that you don't seem to be a first-language English speaker .. in which case, my apologies; I assume that as a likely reason for the misunderstanding.
No. The term "user experience" generally has two different senses, depending on the context. The first is, simply, the perception of the experience of using some system, which is the meaning you refer to. The second, DIFFERENT meaning of "user experience", which was (rather obviously) the meaning intended by jspoon, was the "marketroid" term "user experience". This term, pronounced with emphasis and slight lengthing on "experience" (and was more common at the height internet economic boom years) is used to refer to a hypothetical system (that software providers wish they could provide) that captivates and/or entertains the user more completely. This more closely aligns with the term "experience" as would be used in a statement such as "an IMAX show is a real experience". A simpler example, websites with super "cool" flashy animated splash screens on the front page try to provide an *experience* for the user, to entertain and captivate the user, hoping the user enjoys it and wants to return for more. (Computer users tend to be more pragmatic: in most cases, people don't want to be 'entertained' by an animation on a web page, they just want to get to the information they are looking for, as fast as possible. Very much the same principle as Google). A marketing exec going overboard in an attempt to "beat" Google may miss this fundamental point, and this MS statement about "user experience" hints that this might happen. A possible example: in WinXP/IE6, if you click on a .AVI in a web page and allow it to open the page in Media Player in a sidebar, instead of just showing the damn AVI, they also go download links to latest hits, new DVD releases blah blah blah. In marketing terms, they are trying to provide a "user experience". That horrible software that comes with a SB Audigy that takes over your desktop tries to provide a "user experience". That RealPlayer software that tries to be your complete personal digital media management center is trying to provide a "user experience". Yes, its stupid.
(Come on, surely you could have understood this from jspoon's post without having to have it explained to you? Its not exactly difficult. Were you just arguing for the sake of being nitpicky?)
Don't underestimate MS. 8 years ago, you could have made this exact same argument with "Netscape" in place of "Google". Netscape had something like 80% browser share, and was so popular that many people used the term "Netscape" to mean "Internet" or web. And was totally platform independent. And MS joined that 'game' late.
When they are complete and stable
Ah, I see the mistake in your reasoning now. With only a few exceptions, PC software is NEVER released when its "stable", thats a somewhat naive view. "Stable" has very little to do with a decision to release software, if that were the case, most software would probably take about 30% longer to release. "Relatively stable", yes. "Fairly stable", sure. But NEVER actually "stable"; any reasonably sized software project (e.g. IE or Mozilla) is always going to have in the order of thousands of KNOWN bugs at release time. The difference is that Microsoft's standards are lower than the Mozilla team's, so their definition of "stable" is different, that is, they will release as a new version with far more many known bugs in it. Mozilla 1.0 was definitely more stable then IE 5 (and I'm still more likely to get IE crashes than Mozilla crashes even with IE 6 in spite of using Mozilla much more (although other peoples MMV of course)).
For software development organizations, its never a question of "whether or not the software is complete and stable", but rather a question of "how many bugs are we willing to tolerate in a product with our name on it".
The IE buglist is not available to the public, while the Mozilla buglist is. So some people see this huge Mozilla buglist and say "wow what crap". But just because you can't see the huge IE buglist, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. "But IE is stable when I use it", you might argue, "how can there be that many bugs?". Well, Mozilla is stable too when I use it. I can't name one single bug off the top of my head. And yet they have a large buglist. If I wasn't aware of its existence, I might also be fooled into thinking that Mozilla was "complete and stable".
Companies like Microsoft don't wait for their software to be "complete and stable" when they release a new version, they also look at a number of other marketing-related and strategy-related factors.
So what? It was usable already. If they were Microsoft, they would have just slapped a "version 5" label on it, and then a "version 5.5" label on it, at equivalent stages of development. In fact, thats exactly what Microsoft did. If you really think that a "Version 5.5" from MS means more than a "version 0.9.3 pre-release" from the Mozilla team, then you place way too much stock in version numbers... version numbers are just for marketing in this industry, don't place so much importance on them.
It took nearly 5 years to get to version 1. At that rate, a few monkeys accessorized with keyboards could have accomplished that.
Version numbers don't mean much. Look at it in this light: even though Mozilla is "version 1", it is functionally / feature-wise pretty much on par with Internet Explorer "version 6". And the stability of the one or two years worth of betas leading up to version 1 was also not all that different to the stability of IE version 5 and 5.5.
Personally I think they should have just called Mozilla 1 "Mozilla 6". At least it would provide a more accurate representation of the level of quality of the product as compared to other similar products, to all those people out there who seem to think a version number means anything ("What? They're only at version 1 now? Ha, IE is at version 6").
And it has only really come to the spotlight since Apple adopted the KHTML renderer.
Bollocks. Hits from Konqueror browsers have been (relatively) significant in my web site stats (typically 3rd or 4th most used, behind IE, Netscape/Moz and Opera) from MUCH longer ago than when Apple "adopted" the KHTML renderer. It may be more in the PUBLIC eye more recently, since Apple got involved, but Konqueror has been (quietly) in fairly wide use for quite a long time now. In other words, just because YOU hadn't heard about, doesn't mean it wasn't significant.
What else annoys me, is if you speak to these web developers and their answer is that "people should just use IE". "IE is the standard" they say. They actually seem to get annoyed at their visitors for not using IE, because it makes more work for them.
As of right now Mozilla isn't infringing on Internet Explorer's territory in any way that is either worrying Microsoft or causing a sweeping change in the way websites are designed.
The first point here doesn't bother me so much as it would have some years ago, but the second point is bothering me. Looking at the browser stats of visitors to my two websites, I'm seeing a wider variety of web browsers than ever before. This is a good thing, and is something we wanted five years ago, but better late than never. But with all the new browser choices appearing, you'd think we'd start seeing web developers realise that they can no longer go around assuming everyone is using IE. But its almost as if they just don't want to know about it, because they're too lazy to learn how to make their site non-IE specific.
Now, IE has, on one of my sites, 80.3% "share". I'm guessing the general average of IE users is about 90%. So 1 in 10 browsers is NOT IE. And yet we still have huge numbers of idiot web developers who somehow think its OK to turn away 1 in 10 people who visit their sites, almost always for no good reason other than to have some stupid little animated effect somewhere, or something else similarly pointless. Can you imagine a store in a mall turning away every tenth customer that tried to enter? Thats ridiculous. These web developers with their "optimized for IE" sites make me sick. Perhaps its time to start reviving interest in all those "made for any browser" campaigns that used to be so popular.
Well, I think the original poster was just exaggerating his/her point a bit. Regardless: you still posted your point as being an "absolute fact" that icons are better, which is no better than the original poster.
I don't think the original poster's post was "flamebait", just his/her opinion (also incorrectly stated as fact, but anyone with half a brain cell could deduce that that was the only problem with it - apart from that, he/she has a point).
Personally I like (well-designed, attractive) icons in certain situations, and I know that many other people actually prefer them - probably the majority of people. I'm simply in favour of choice. Today's computers are powerful enough to offer a choice to users in this matter. Heck, the computers of the 1980's were powerful enough to offer a choice in this matter. So I don't see what the point of bickering about it is.
Sorry, but you're wrong.
Here's a revelation for you: people are different.
I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons.
Well, I can much more quickly find a text label in a sea of other text labels, than an icon I know in a sea of other icons. Does that make you "wrong"? No. People are different. This isn't "right" or "wrong". Deal with it.
Simple: "cut". You could fit that into 11x5 pixels and it would still be clearly readable.
Tooltips are not that useful because you can only see one at a time, and first have to float the mouse over a button. This is very different to seeing all available options spelt out on the screen at once.
Labels AND icons just take up lots of screenspace. This is fine for desktop icons, but not for toolbars. I agree with parent poster, but mostly about toolbars, and not icons in general. Toolbar icons are mostly meaningless; give me text anyway. The brain can process a written word MUCH faster than pretty much any 16x16 image, regardless of how well the image corresponds with the functionality. On toolbars, though, text would take up too much space horizontally.
Hmm .. you're right. I was a bit asleep when I made that post :/ Probably should have thought it through a bit more clearly.
Touche!
Oh yeah, as opposed to the USA. OK, so maybe you don't consider PCs or handhelds 'electronic devices' .. but hang on .. what electronic devices does the US make anyway? Hmm .. Sony, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, LG, uh ... ??