There is a wealth, nay, a crapload, nay, a truck full of craploads of applications that are extremely poorly designed because of the ability to click on things. I don't know how many times I've used a program, let's use the music examples of Finale and ProTools, where there is an enormous amount of mousing that must be done in a very repetitive manner that could very easily have sensible keyboard navigation.
The problem is even worse in games. PC ports of console games are especially guilty of this. Here you have a game with an intuitive, elegant gamepad-based interface, e.g. Knights of the Old Republic. A handful of buttons and a directional wheel or two. The hands never move position. It is then ported to the PC. Lo and behold, look at all these things that can be clicked on! Instead of maintaining quick-access buttons and supporting gamepads, it is forced into mouse-navigated, carpal-tunnel-inducing tedium.
A reduced control set is also perfectly reasonable for even the most unlikely of games. My first exposure to both Sim City and Civilization was on the Super Nintendo. Not only were the games incredibly fun on that system, they also were very elegantly designed and intuitive, perhaps even more so than their native PC counterparts, because they had to make do with a more restrictive interface, and so cut down on the unnecessary fluff.
My point, I suppose, is that in too many applications, the mouse interface is designed first, with keyboard input as a "bonus to make things go quicker." This mentality can lead to worlds of tunnel-clicking tedium under the guise of "easy-to-see functionality," defeating the art of interface design and its effect on a fluid, non-aggravating user experience.
knowing that if Gershwin were here to play it himself, it would sound just the same.
But that's not how it would sound if Gershwin himself were here to play it. Rather, you've heard a replication of his dynamics, attacks, and tempi. If he were to play it today, it would sound different. No two performances are the same. As a performer, I'll take things in wildly different styles depending on what kind of day I'm having, the acoustics of the hall, the vibe of the audience. Not to mention that anything done slightly different in a performance can have potentially wide-reaching, though sometimes subtle, repercussions throughout the rest of the performance.
Taking a single recording of a single performance of Gershwin and replicating it is fine, but when it is passed off as the authoritative Gershwin, it does disservice to both the piece and the performer.
I think Sousa said it best in his comments that recording would kill off live music.
This technology brings up two points:
1: Are we now trying to eliminate the performer from the loop altogether?
2: Have listeners become so detached from good performances, as predicted by Sousa, that we can't tell the difference between a live performance and a replication in the style of one particular live performance from long ago?
This is a cute idea. However, without constant communication and feedback between the audience and performer, as well as introspection on the part of the performer, I'd hesitate before calling it a performance, but rather a presentation.
While I agree that the RTS is completely at odds with the console, I must disagree with you on the sim, and add Turn-Based Strategy to the mix.
The first time I played both Sim City and Civilization was on the Super Nintendo. The interface was extremely intuitive, and the games felt like they were originally designed for that console. Granted, this could just be a result of excellent interface design, but it is quite possible. On the console, they can't get away with making things a clickfest, so everything was far more efficient in those particular cases.
I'd say that's a side-effect of the desire for an impossible combination:
Military Simulator
Realism
Good AI
Not getting killed
Fun
In the real world, if you run solo into the streets of sniper-infested WW2 Berlin, there's a good chance you won't make it out alive. Oh, and one shot means you're dead, not that your armor has gone down a bit.
You can't have everything, and I think it's time people realize that you can't have a realistic soldier-oriented military simulator without a good chance of being dead.
It's all very well to try to educate your kids as to what is good, but they're going to ingore you.
And that's part of life. Yes, parents will be concerned, as they should be. However, if they are always hovering over their kids, inspecting their every move, how can the children be expected to ever make responsible decisions on their own?
Every piece of information a parent can get as to what their child is doing, is information the parent can use to better determine exactly where they need to be concentrating their efforts
If parenting is done by "concentrating efforts," it's no wonder kids are so messed up. These are people, not coding projects or marketing statistics.
Well, obviously you're fabricating wild fantasies about your so-called "school." It is a law of nature that school lunches are not allowed to be tasty.
Then tell your kid you expect to see the reciept or the money back.
This totally misses the point. It's the obsessive monitoring of diet, whether verbal, by receipts, or technologically, that instills distrust. If a person is expected to make responsible decisions, they should be trusted to actually MAKE those decisions for themselves. Who are the ones that always sneak the cookies in ninja-style? The kids with parents who militantly monitor diet.
Rather than having a talk about moderation and providing attractive alternatives (there are fruits and vegetables that can taste good!), too many parents simply enact a new set of rules and monitoring without explaining the rationale. "You're going to get fat. Stop eating so much. I'll make sure of it!" is not exactly motivation... the kid then will try to beat the system.
It's like this with most all living creatures... if you give them space, trust them, they will repay you with respect. The cat will always run away if you chase it and keep it locked up, but if you sit calmly and talk to it invitingly, it will have some incentive to return.
There are certain school lunch entities that are unmistakable. These include:
Spaghetti, mixed in with sauce in a large vat, cut into small pieces that are easy to ice-cream-scoop onto a tray.
French bread pizza, also known as a mozzarella-parmesan-cheddar blend and runny sauce, baked onto a piece of bread and topped with soggy pepperoni
Mexican Day: Cheese Quesadilla. Different from the non-redundant "Quesadilla" in that you are expected to be fully nourished by one small tortilla, folded in half and filled with a non-generous helping of grated cheddar.
Hot dog. Not kosher, not turkey, not the kind that plumps when you cook it, but the random-pig-guts kind. With one mustard packet, two if you're nice to the lunch lady. They ran out of ketchup. The relish is contaminated with mayonnaise.
People in the real world do not desire such foods, reputable restaurants do not serve them. School lunches lead to confusion as there is little correlation between them and good food in the real world (this may explain the popularity of establishments such as The Olive Garden and Pat & Oscar's...). Perhaps if the food in school lunches was healthy, not untasty, eater-friendly, and had corresponding "real food" equivalents, people would have better eating habits.
Indeed! People (myself included) cry foul over the use of technology to check up on people but so often ignore the blatant lack of respect for the individual that the system already espouses, using old-fashioned resources of people, pens, and paper.
Our society seems obsessed with ranking, labeling, and insisting that everyone should receive the same manner of education. After all, those methods are very effective in manufacturing automobiles!
Perhaps the only thing worse than that was the horrendous personal attacks that hounded yours truly and many others in years of private religious school.
From TFA: It's a concern because federal health data shows that up to 30 percent of U.S. children are either overweight or obese.
There's a simple solution to this that is quite cost-effective as well: Kick the kids out. When they arrive home from school, make them go outside. That's what my parents did. An hour on the computer had to be matched by an equivalent hour outside. The length of the outside hour was, of course, not enforced, and often ballooned to a few hours of hide and seek (do people play that any more?), rollerblading, and bike riding. We were then met back at the house with juice, fruit, popsicles, cheese, crackers, etc.
Then again, I suppose the parents most interested in the food-tracking system are the ones who enforce bizarre standards such as curfews and grounding, take their children to the gym instead of enrolling them in gymnastics, and medicate like there's no tomorrow for any minor behavioral inconvenience.
Not too much wrong with this? Screw the "what next" aspect. This concept to begin with is sick. Parents need to take the responsibility to talk to their kids and be involved, supportive influences. It's a matter of trust, a concept which this only helps to erode. If opportunities for trust, responsibility, and decision-making are removed, the child is likely to have trouble living their own life in years to come.
When people learn new ways of doing things, they often forget or disregard other possible ways of doing things. Most people assume the new ways they learn are better, and they often are. However, it is a quite easy way to get a group of people in a rut, especially if they only work with each other and, shall we say, "don't get out much."
This happens in the musical world as well. As a composer, learning new rules and methods leads to writing that better follows and can more skillfully and effectively bend these rules. However, I've noticed that once I learn any given rule, I forever think in terms of that rule. If I ever want to ignore that rule, I am "actively" ignoring it. Once a new method is learned, methods that are oblivious to it vanish from one's repertoire, for better or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Halting Progress for the Sake of Progress?
Cell phones in an airplane is progress? This must be some definition of "progress" I'm not familiar with.
it would be interesting to see how an airline would do if they maintained a no-cellphone policy.
I'd pay extra to fly with them.
I'm sure that cell phones will be capable of it soon, if they aren't already...
What if people, on their cell phones, on the airplane, were to be running SETI@Home?
There is a wealth, nay, a crapload, nay, a truck full of craploads of applications that are extremely poorly designed because of the ability to click on things. I don't know how many times I've used a program, let's use the music examples of Finale and ProTools, where there is an enormous amount of mousing that must be done in a very repetitive manner that could very easily have sensible keyboard navigation.
The problem is even worse in games. PC ports of console games are especially guilty of this. Here you have a game with an intuitive, elegant gamepad-based interface, e.g. Knights of the Old Republic. A handful of buttons and a directional wheel or two. The hands never move position. It is then ported to the PC. Lo and behold, look at all these things that can be clicked on! Instead of maintaining quick-access buttons and supporting gamepads, it is forced into mouse-navigated, carpal-tunnel-inducing tedium.
A reduced control set is also perfectly reasonable for even the most unlikely of games. My first exposure to both Sim City and Civilization was on the Super Nintendo. Not only were the games incredibly fun on that system, they also were very elegantly designed and intuitive, perhaps even more so than their native PC counterparts, because they had to make do with a more restrictive interface, and so cut down on the unnecessary fluff.
My point, I suppose, is that in too many applications, the mouse interface is designed first, with keyboard input as a "bonus to make things go quicker." This mentality can lead to worlds of tunnel-clicking tedium under the guise of "easy-to-see functionality," defeating the art of interface design and its effect on a fluid, non-aggravating user experience.
Kinda obsoletes the Futurama concept of heads in jars, doesn't it? :)
knowing that if Gershwin were here to play it himself, it would sound just the same.
But that's not how it would sound if Gershwin himself were here to play it. Rather, you've heard a replication of his dynamics, attacks, and tempi. If he were to play it today, it would sound different. No two performances are the same. As a performer, I'll take things in wildly different styles depending on what kind of day I'm having, the acoustics of the hall, the vibe of the audience. Not to mention that anything done slightly different in a performance can have potentially wide-reaching, though sometimes subtle, repercussions throughout the rest of the performance.
Taking a single recording of a single performance of Gershwin and replicating it is fine, but when it is passed off as the authoritative Gershwin, it does disservice to both the piece and the performer.
I think Sousa said it best in his comments that recording would kill off live music.
This technology brings up two points:
1: Are we now trying to eliminate the performer from the loop altogether?
2: Have listeners become so detached from good performances, as predicted by Sousa, that we can't tell the difference between a live performance and a replication in the style of one particular live performance from long ago?
This is a cute idea. However, without constant communication and feedback between the audience and performer, as well as introspection on the part of the performer, I'd hesitate before calling it a performance, but rather a presentation.
Au contraire!
While I agree that the RTS is completely at odds with the console, I must disagree with you on the sim, and add Turn-Based Strategy to the mix.
The first time I played both Sim City and Civilization was on the Super Nintendo. The interface was extremely intuitive, and the games felt like they were originally designed for that console. Granted, this could just be a result of excellent interface design, but it is quite possible. On the console, they can't get away with making things a clickfest, so everything was far more efficient in those particular cases.
In the real world, if you run solo into the streets of sniper-infested WW2 Berlin, there's a good chance you won't make it out alive. Oh, and one shot means you're dead, not that your armor has gone down a bit.
You can't have everything, and I think it's time people realize that you can't have a realistic soldier-oriented military simulator without a good chance of being dead.
It's all very well to try to educate your kids as to what is good, but they're going to ingore you.
And that's part of life. Yes, parents will be concerned, as they should be. However, if they are always hovering over their kids, inspecting their every move, how can the children be expected to ever make responsible decisions on their own?
Every piece of information a parent can get as to what their child is doing, is information the parent can use to better determine exactly where they need to be concentrating their efforts
If parenting is done by "concentrating efforts," it's no wonder kids are so messed up. These are people, not coding projects or marketing statistics.
Tasty
/moves to India.
Well, obviously you're fabricating wild fantasies about your so-called "school." It is a law of nature that school lunches are not allowed to be tasty.
A kid will not keep his reciept.
Then tell your kid you expect to see the reciept or the money back.
This totally misses the point. It's the obsessive monitoring of diet, whether verbal, by receipts, or technologically, that instills distrust. If a person is expected to make responsible decisions, they should be trusted to actually MAKE those decisions for themselves. Who are the ones that always sneak the cookies in ninja-style? The kids with parents who militantly monitor diet.
Rather than having a talk about moderation and providing attractive alternatives (there are fruits and vegetables that can taste good!), too many parents simply enact a new set of rules and monitoring without explaining the rationale. "You're going to get fat. Stop eating so much. I'll make sure of it!" is not exactly motivation... the kid then will try to beat the system.
It's like this with most all living creatures... if you give them space, trust them, they will repay you with respect. The cat will always run away if you chase it and keep it locked up, but if you sit calmly and talk to it invitingly, it will have some incentive to return.
What about buildig confidence on love and trust?
We can't have that. Someone might get hurt.
Then someone will most surely get sued.
And that's expensive.
"So every time you go to the lavatory there, it's vitally important to get a receipt."
-Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
Excellent, so
Eddleman talked to her daughter, who has since switched to buying a bottle of water instead.
wouldn't even be necessary at your school! Another victory in the campaign to erode personal involvement!
Heck, it's Atlanta! If you only drink four ounces at lunch you'll dehydrate for sure!
- Spaghetti, mixed in with sauce in a large vat, cut into small pieces that are easy to ice-cream-scoop onto a tray.
- French bread pizza, also known as a mozzarella-parmesan-cheddar blend and runny sauce, baked onto a piece of bread and topped with soggy pepperoni
- Mexican Day: Cheese Quesadilla. Different from the non-redundant "Quesadilla" in that you are expected to be fully nourished by one small tortilla, folded in half and filled with a non-generous helping of grated cheddar.
- Hot dog. Not kosher, not turkey, not the kind that plumps when you cook it, but the random-pig-guts kind. With one mustard packet, two if you're nice to the lunch lady. They ran out of ketchup. The relish is contaminated with mayonnaise.
People in the real world do not desire such foods, reputable restaurants do not serve them. School lunches lead to confusion as there is little correlation between them and good food in the real world (this may explain the popularity of establishments such as The Olive Garden and Pat & Oscar's...). Perhaps if the food in school lunches was healthy, not untasty, eater-friendly, and had corresponding "real food" equivalents, people would have better eating habits.Indeed! People (myself included) cry foul over the use of technology to check up on people but so often ignore the blatant lack of respect for the individual that the system already espouses, using old-fashioned resources of people, pens, and paper.
Our society seems obsessed with ranking, labeling, and insisting that everyone should receive the same manner of education. After all, those methods are very effective in manufacturing automobiles!
Perhaps the only thing worse than that was the horrendous personal attacks that hounded yours truly and many others in years of private religious school.
From TFA: It's a concern because federal health data shows that up to 30 percent of U.S. children are either overweight or obese.
There's a simple solution to this that is quite cost-effective as well: Kick the kids out. When they arrive home from school, make them go outside. That's what my parents did. An hour on the computer had to be matched by an equivalent hour outside. The length of the outside hour was, of course, not enforced, and often ballooned to a few hours of hide and seek (do people play that any more?), rollerblading, and bike riding. We were then met back at the house with juice, fruit, popsicles, cheese, crackers, etc.
Then again, I suppose the parents most interested in the food-tracking system are the ones who enforce bizarre standards such as curfews and grounding, take their children to the gym instead of enrolling them in gymnastics, and medicate like there's no tomorrow for any minor behavioral inconvenience.
Not too much wrong with this? Screw the "what next" aspect. This concept to begin with is sick. Parents need to take the responsibility to talk to their kids and be involved, supportive influences. It's a matter of trust, a concept which this only helps to erode. If opportunities for trust, responsibility, and decision-making are removed, the child is likely to have trouble living their own life in years to come.
... might actually be your big brother?
Like in "The Net" with Sandra Bullock
When people learn new ways of doing things, they often forget or disregard other possible ways of doing things. Most people assume the new ways they learn are better, and they often are. However, it is a quite easy way to get a group of people in a rut, especially if they only work with each other and, shall we say, "don't get out much."
This happens in the musical world as well. As a composer, learning new rules and methods leads to writing that better follows and can more skillfully and effectively bend these rules. However, I've noticed that once I learn any given rule, I forever think in terms of that rule. If I ever want to ignore that rule, I am "actively" ignoring it. Once a new method is learned, methods that are oblivious to it vanish from one's repertoire, for better or worse.
I somehow thought this was relevant to the topic.
People who drive SUVs signal when they're changing lanes? Where is this?