First off - a movie is a very different storytelling medium than a (rather long) novel. You have to make some allowances for that. The essentials of the story were unchanged and those changes that were made in general made for a better movie.
Arwen: Warrior Princess. 'Nuff said.
I have to say that this didn't bother me at all. It would be silly in a movie to introduce a character like Glorfindel and then drop him - so you have to replace him with someone who is a continuing character in the story. That person has to be from Rivendell, Elrond doesn't work, Why not Arwen. So in the book she is not a "Warrior Princess" but she is the daughter and sister to some of the most renowned living elvish warriors, a Noldorin elf of importance and particularly high lineage including a great-great-grandmother that with her human husband crept into Angband and stole a silmaril from the crown of Saurons much more powerful boss.
- Aragorn draws his FULL LENGTH sword?!?!?
Bugged me too. No reason for it. I think Aragorn fighting with a (longish) shard of the broken Narsil would have been a symbolic and powerful image. But not a flaw worth walking out of a movie for.
- Big argument at the Council of Elrond. Never happened.
Well there is some argument. A fairly high level of suspicion and animosity is evident in the books between the various races and it has importance to the plot. The movie doesn't have many places to portray this while the book can talk about peoples thoughts and emotions and go on about the sad history of conflict in the various lands the fellowship travels through.
- Merry and Pippin setting off Gandalf's fireworks. In Harry Potter (a fine movie adaptation of a book), maybe, but here it is gratuitous comic relief.
Yes Pippin and Merry take on the role of comic relief that is usually Sam's in the book. The humor is more slapstick. But it's consistent with their characterization in the books as impetuous, lighthearted and young. Again how is Jackson to establish these personality traits quickly. He can't just say it the way you can in a book.
- The cave troll troll never was never part of the fight in Moria (Frodo stabbed him with Sting and he ran away), yet they devoted a whole fight scene to it.
Please,
- Saruman bringing down an avalanche from Caradhras? Umm, no.
In the book a malevolent intelligence is strongly implied. The movie makes it Suraman to simplify the plot - unnecessary in my view but not a fatal flaw
- Shadowfax seems to have gone to the glue factory.
Jackson is here more acurate to the book than your memory. Shadowfax is introduced in the "Two Towers" Why should Jackson have inserted him into FOTR? Especially since Gandalf is never even on horseback until they get to Rohan.
- In the book, Gollum doesn't get mentioned until the Fellowship is on the river. He never says "gollum", either.
On both points the movie here is again more accurate than your memory. Gollum indeed begins following them in Moria though he loses them when they go through Lorien - though the othrewise almost exact to the book dialogue about pity takes place in the shire. As for saying "Gollum" Bilbo gave him that name because he made that sound - his given name was Smeagol.
- Neither Boromir nor any of the other characters (with one major exception MUCH later) touches the Ring.
Again, a way of using visuals to convey a sentiment that is expressed in the book through reading the characters mind. I suppose to be true to the book you could have "voices" expressing the characters inner thoughts and feelings but that never seems to work very well in film.
Saruman is represented as being completely under Sauron's thumb, which wasn't the case at all.
Again the movie is more true to the book than your memory - In FOTR Saruman is assumed to be and IS in league with Sauron. It is not made clear until "The Two Towers" that he doubly a traitor and is playing both halves against the middle.
- Elendil and Isildur look like refugees from a Seattle grunge band. Actually, that whole intro was completely unnecessary and lame. Jackson wasted all the suspense potential of the first half of the book in favor of a big crowd-pleasing CGI fight scene. Bah.
Yes I would rather they had shaved too but who knows how good razors were in the antedeluvian world of middle earth - though Narsil was sharp enough to give a good shave. The history portrayed in Jackson's Prologue is important to the plot and is doled out throughout the book in conversations which would be rather dry on film - It would have been more like "My dinner with Gandalf" than FOTR. I do think it would have been better to tell the tale in a series of backflashes as when Elrond recalls Isildur not destroying the ring when he had the chance.
Saruman shows Gandalf the Palantir before he imprisons him??????? Whaaaaat????
Though it isn't made explicit in LOTR it is suggested in Tolkiens own unfinished writings that Gandalf knew Saruman most likely had a Palantir. It would not have been a huge secret among the wise. Orthanc was well known to be the resting place of one of the Palantir and it had never been taken by any enemy. Jackson introduces the Palantir as a significant element earlier than the book because introducing it half way through the second of three movie wouldn't work as well as introducing it half way through the second of three books.
After all the prerelease hype about how true to the book the movie was going to be, I was pissed at how much violence
they did to the story. Crouching Saruman, Hidden Gandalf indeed! And WTF is up with Orcs running up stone pillars like so
many cockroaches?
Not only that but In Itchy and Scratchy episode 206 Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylphone, he strikes the same rib yet produces two clearly distinct tones. What are we supposed to believe this is some sort of magic xylphone or something? Geez I really hope someone was fired for that.
...spending whole minutes in slow-mo reaction shots was a bit silly.
I saw one review that said "I wish there were fewer scenes of Frodo staring into the camera like Jodie Foster in Nell (or Contact, or a half-dozen other movies where Foster seems to think that intense, wide-eyed staring is what the academy is looking for)"
The thing that bothered me (and might be related to your complaint about long slow-mo reactions) was what I thought was an over-use of awe inspiring special effects - Not where it was appropriate like the battle scenes in Moria but in segues. Especially all that zooming about up and down the tower of orthanc and into the fantastical (and a little fake & hokey looking) caves and crevices beneath it. By over doing it by so much in such inconsequential scenes Jackson had no way other than just making it longer to make an impact during the really pivotal scenes. I wish he had used a lighter hand which would have not only improved the scenes affected by making them appropriately more subtle but also would have improved the scenes with all the FX that would be improved and given more impact by the contrast.
But that is really my only complaint and it is mere nitpicking. Many of the things that bothered other people didn't bother me at all. It is a movie after all which is a very different storytelling media and many of the changes were necessary and good for the story in movie form. I don't mind dropping Tom Bombadil or Arwen replacing Glorfindel and moving the love story between Arwen and Aragorn out of the Appendix at the back of ROTK and into the main storyline.
Manpower certainly is and it is the closes parallel since the word "manpower" would be a generic term in that industry.
Of course, Windows is a product name, not a company name.
Not really relevent except that you could probably find alot more product names that are generic terms - even generic terms in the industry where the name is trademarked.
Besides, trademarks don't last forever.
Actually they do.
They're only enforcable to the point that they don't become common terms for the general concept that the origional product represents. Kleenex and Xerox are the classic examples of this.
Actually Asprin is a classic example of this. Kleenex and Xerox are still trademarked and if tommorow the Lindows people also came out with Leenex brand tissues and Zerox brand copiers they would be sued - and they would lose. Besides windows is not in that situation - if someone comes up to you and says:"I have Windows installed on my computer" You know they are not talking about MacOS or X Windows but Windows(TM) - On the other hand if someone says "give me a Kleenex" you know what they are talking about even if you actually have some other brand.
Windows not being a common term in the industry at the time is certainly debatable.
Thats all I was saying.
As I recall, there were several companies which opposed the granting of the trademark on those grounds.
And right or wrong those companies lost. A few years later and it would probably have been a slam-dunk that Microsoft would lose, a few years earlier and it would have been a slam-dunk that Microsoft would win. I think they should have lost back then. But they didn't and as long as Microsoft doesn't harass people for using the word generically it really isn't a problem for their competitors.
But Lindows isn't doing that - Lindows IS playing off of the well trademark of their competitor to make a claim about interoperability. If they were NOT direct competitors selling something in the EXACT same product catagory (An OS for X86 processors that runs "Windows" software) perhaps Microsoft would let it slide - but this is pretty blatant. People will be confused by this, they will mistake it for a Microsoft product that runs linux software or a Microsoft licensed product for running windows software on Linux. People that buy it for that reason (call them what you will;) will have been deceived. There are plenty of other names out there and Lindows is a really stupid sounding name whose ONLY advantage for it's owners is it's association with their competitors trademark. It is exactly that kind of cheap maneuver that trademark protection is all about.
How many of those were associated with the particular use in question before the product was created or the trademark registered?
Off that list only Manpower
Off the top of my head
News Corp
Computer Sciences Corporation
Wheels Inc.
Admittedly using a descriptive term like "windows" is an iffy proposition but the Trademark was upheld because at the time it wasn't yet a common term in the industry. The court may have got that wrong (indeed I think they did) - but then again if Microsoft had trademarked it just a few years earlier though there would have been no debate - it would have been valid.
More to the point: It is pretty obvious that Lindows isn't using that word just because they have a GUI that uses "windows" (like X, or the MacOS) but because they have a system that emulates Windows(tm) for that reason alone I think they will (and should) lose in court.
I know that Microsoft and all it's works are evil incarnate but come on. A couple of points:
1) this isn't just any "windowed operating system" it is a Windows clone that will run Windows software. To suggest they are innocently using such a sound alike name for their product only because it also happens to use "windows" is more than a little disingenuous.
2) If Microsoft was doing this to a competitor (changing one word in their competitor's trademarked name to sell a directly competing product) we'd all be screaming bloody murder no matter how generic the name Microsoft was hijacking.
Calling a windowed operating system "Windows" is like naming an automobile "Wheels."
Maybe not "Wheels" since they were in common use by the earlier technology that cars replaced but if Ford Motor Company had decided to simply call themselves "Motor Inc." and their products commonly called "Motors" as distinct from the generic "Automobiles" it probably would have been fine and it's not like they all haven't been stuck for names other than "Lotor".
This is a little fuzzy but at the time it was trademarked it is debatable that "windows" was a common generic computer term in the minds of consumers. It was one feature of a GUI that Microsoft happened to use as emblematic of their system and adopted as their trademark. They could have called it "Folders" or "Desktop" and now we would be arguing over a competitor named "Folderz" of "Lesktop" who after all is just selling a "Desktopped" operating system.
There are plenty of other words out there in the English language for "Lindows" to use - and if they don't like any of them they can make one up. They are NOT innocently using one that sounds like their competitor because it is a generic word that is a feature of their system. They are doing it intentionally perhaps not to decieve consumers but to make a claim about it's simularity to to the competitor they are imitating. Microsoft could have named it's product EvilIncarnate and this competitor would have named their product LevilIncarnate.
Now, this last bit has nothing to do with current law, to the best of my knowledge, but I remember hearing a principle of trademarks that I really wish was law: all linguistic trademarks should consist of a proper noun followed by a descriptive term. Nobody should ever own marketing catchphrases, fictional character names, or descriptive terms as trademarks by themselves. (I don't recall the source)
A very logical but sterile world you envision. Disallowing trademark protection for short, catchy names might seem to be an orderly solution but would be a failure. People would still use shortened or catchy nicknames. They would still call "Microsoft Windows" simply "Windows" and the existence of "IBM Windows" (or perhaps "MicroZoft Windows") would only create confusion and deception of consumers by unscrupulous businesses. Salesman to consumer:"Oh, yes this computer is running 'Windows'" either knowing full well, or maybe innocently ignorant, that the consumer means Microsoft Windows but the computer is running Sun Windows (or vice versa).
Making "lindows" change it's name is not a "failure" of the system as you sarcastically suggest - it is the system working as it was intended and as it should.
The right decision would be to invalidate Microsoft's Windows trademark because it's a common word.
Um...
Apple
Sun
Oracle
Dell
Gateway
Bull
Next
Ford
Chevron
Target
Sprint
Caterpillar
Gap
Staples
Manpower
Whirlpool
Nike
Progressive
Mead
Universal
Amazon
Virgin
I have to say that on the whole I actually agree with the some of your concerns. Of course honor, duty and courage are important for a soldier. I would go futher and say they are important for any person - though the precise expression of it will be differ along with different peoples roles. I share your concern about the decline of these virtues (among others) in our culture as a whole, not just in our military.
BUT your tendency to hyperbole and flaimbait insults is a problem not only because it detracts from the presentation of your thesis but because it weakens your thesis itself. Let me make a couple of points.
First: throughout history the defense of a nation has depended on a variety of soldiers with differnt roles and varying degrees and expressions of 'warrior spirit' Certain soldiers because of their roles have always had to have it to an extreme not necessary (and often not even desirable) in soldiers with a differnt role. It is certain that the French nobility at Agincourt and Crecy had more raw physical courage, sense of honor and duty than the masses of English pikeman or yeoman. Without their 'high tech' longbows the yeoman were not to be relied upon to pick up a spear and fight on. If an airforce engineer at Wright Patterson by some tragedy finds himself on the front lines then of course we as a culture would expect him to do his duty as a soldier but for obvious reasons we don't expect nor train him to have or exhibit the same battlefront expression of 'warrior spirit' that is necessary in a Marine. We don't even expect the same level of 'warrior spirit' in the regular army infantryman that we expect in a marine. That is as it should be, marines are an elite with a different role.
Secondly, as I pointed out before some loss of warrior spirit is inevitable when there is no war to be spirited about. We have an armed force and culture experiencing a long period of peace and security. We should seek to mitigate the loss of 'warrior spirit' through training but there is no real substitute for the real thing. That being the case I prefer the alternative (peace) I also have confidence that our military would rise the occasion should it come (the word 'rise' in that phrase is exactly what I'm getting at). It could be far worse. I would argue the demoralised force we had after Vietnam was less ready to rise to a challenge than the force we have now, we are certainly better prepared for a challange now than the sad pittance of a military we had the day of Pearl Harbor - and yet just a few months after that we were bombing our enemies capitol.
Third, your complaint about being over dependant on our technology - true perhaps, but so what? Every military since we moved from rocks to bronze has become increasingly dependant on it's technology. And the force with the technological advantage has always won, even when their opponent was superior in the military virtues we have been calling 'warrior spirit.' I'd rather have a technocrat dependant on his technology be it greek fire, a long bow or F-18 than the supreme warrior carrying a rock. Yes I'm sure that because of their martial virtues a unit of marines with nothing but rocks and stones will still be a force to be reckoned wheras a bunch of airmen would be a hopeless mob. Of course we hire those nerdy technocratic airmen precisely so it won't come to that.
Finally, you are overstating your case - and by a long shot. I don't believe that our military is as lacking in 'warrior spirit' as you make it out to be. Sure there are stupid little distractions like giving *everybody* a black beret so they can all pretend to be army rangers and feminist senators trying to turn the military into a social laboratory to test their latest gender theories. But for the most part this is tomfoolery on the part of politicians not soldiers. Where it is soldiers it is those of a high enough rank to be more properly considered politicans rather than soldiers. Despite your concern that the Air Force doesn't have the brave men it needs I think they do and they are found in those positions where their bravery is most required - forward ground controllers, fighter and attack pilots etc. etc. etc. Which brings us back to my original post.
The problem with your assertion is that you reduce the functionality of a car to just "go."
When a tool has but a single purpose, of course the controls can be made simple.
Fortunately, computers do NOT have one single purpose.
Reread my post again and tell me where exactly we disagree. For the life of me it sounds like you are "refuting" my first paragraph with my third paragraph. What exactly is your point? I don't mean for those questions to come across as sarcastic but with all the nitpicking about a metaphor (which are never intended to stand such close scrutiny) I am no longer sure that I understand the thesis of your argument.
I'll lay out my thesis as a couple of simple sylogism for the sake of clarity and just leave cars out of it. Supporting Argument:
Major Premise: Systems that have a wide variety of functions will require a complex use interface.
Minor Premise: Computers have a wide variety of functions.
Conclusion: Therefore computers have by necessity a complex user interface.
Primary Argument
Major Premise: Complex and/or illogical and/or inconsistant interfaces are a barrier to getting the task accomplished. To the extreme of becoming useless to accomplish the desired task.
Minor Premise: Computers already have, by necessity, a very complex interface which is a barrier to accomplishing the tasks.
Conclusion: Therefore additional barriers of illogic, inconsistancy and UNECESSARY complexity in computer user interfaces should be strenuoiusly avoided.
I would go on to argue that most computer programmers are more concerned about functionality than about interface and that therefore computer interfaces in general have had a tendency to multiply unessecary complexity, inconsistanancy and often illogic (from the point of view of a user attempting to accomplish a task ) I think that a thoughtfully designed user interfaces by avoiding the unessary barriers to usablity can significantly mitigate the unavoidable barriers to usablity without any loss of functionality. My pet peeve: programmers that are hostile to users that complain or are understandably confused by these barriers, that say in effect:"computers are complex - get over it." If you have done everything you could to get rid of unnecessary barriers to usablity you can go ahead and say "it is the users problem - not the UI" but any objective observer of computers today would have to admit that computers are a long way from being able to make that claim.
By the sound of it, you are someone who ascribes to the 'fighting fair' philosphy.
No, not at all. If a war is just you have an obligation to win it as quickly as possible.
What is "morally indefensible and cowardly" about gunpowder? Especially when compared to bows,...
Nothing. I was being a bit sarcastic. Read my post again - that was the opinion of those in their day that exemplified the "warrior spirit" as you purport to honor today - it was also their opinion on the subject of the long bow. My point was that they would have had the same low opinion of you that you have towards the Air Force. You may have received excellent and long training and have lived as a soldier for your entire adult life. They were bred for it - from childhood they trained for combat and for the excersise of authority. And on the fields of Crecy and Agincourt they were wiped out by mere peasents who lived as farmers knowing nothing of the code or the rigors of mind, body and spirit that was the "warrior spirit." Your complaint about the decline of "warrior spirit" is as old as war.
I will grant you there is some truth to it - but it is true of every nation that has experienced long peace and security. During peace time an army is just a bureacracy who's function is just to sustain itself as insurance against the day it is needed. The skills a soldier needs to succeed in such an environment are not the same as those needed to succeed in war. At the start of every real war there has usually been a shift as those with the skills for peacetime maintenance give way to those with the skills to wage war.
But even during the height of war there are different roles and different expressions of "warrior spirit" The Army Air Corps never had the same expression of "warrior spirit" as the marine corps and they shouldn't. The roles are different - the function is different - the necessary skills and values are different. The capabilites needed to maintain and operate an air force is different from those needed to storm a hill. For a marine you want raw courage, and blind devotion to the task at hand, a high IQ may be present but it doesn't help any and if it is couled with inquisitiveness it may even hurt. An air force is a high tech organization that requires a few brave men with 'warrior spirit' to fly the planes and whole whole mass of technocratic support personell who don't particularly need courage or any of the traditional martial virtues but had better be smart and inquisitive if your high tech knight going into battle hopes to come back again. If it makes you feel better think of them as the serfs required to raise the crops for the knight's war horse and the smiths that made his armor rather than as fellow warriors.
I have to point out that cars, even automatics, have a lot more controls then that.
I only mentioned those necessary for the essential function of the car (to go). Yes you need a key in the ignition but I was sort of focussing on using the functionality of a computer or car not the "on button". Granted, headlights, signals and wipers are important to go *safely* under certain conditions - the rest is fluff.
I still stand by my contention that the essential functions of a car are 'intuitive' because of their relative simplicity and their standardization. You will notice that they are standardized and thus easy to use in relation to how essential they are. The essential controls I mentioned are iron clad standard. The important safety functions are a little less standardised but you still basically know where they are what they will do on every car. The fluff - cruise control, AC, stereo, internal lights etc. are a bit less standard but still they are essentially the same from car to car.
A computer is a more general purpose thing. It doesn't have just one essential function the way a car does. It also has a vastly larger number of functions that you may want it to perform and thus a vastly larger number of controls the user needs to understand. There will always be a certain level of complexity and difficulty in mastering a computer BUT, that not an excuse for sloppiness and laziness or just not thinking at all about UI, If anything it is a reason to be far MORE concerned about it.
Sorry but programmers that arrogantly assume that it is the users responsiblity to make sense of the unnecessary mess that the programmers have wrought are one of my pet peeves. Have a little more pride in your work for God's sake.
I think that well-labeled tooltips have their place just like a well-drawn icon. Some of your customers will have different preferred modalities (they'll like reading text versus looking at a picture, or vice versa), so providing both will satisfy more customers
No they are a hack. The decision was made to go with icons and NOT text and no choice was given - nobody could understand the icons so text was added in an inconvenient way as an afterthought. What you are talking about is something like what most web browsers use where you have a choice between text, icons or both - that would be a good UI but that is NOT what tooltips are.
On the other hand I do see the value of a tooltip type pop-up help for newbie users. Apple had this with "balloon help" but I never felt so lost using an unfamiliar Mac applicatin as to actually find the balloons any more helpful than the simpler interface already was - I maybe used it twice.
You can increase the intuitiveness of the interface by reducing complexity, but that just means you have cut off some subset of functionality.
WRONG you are confusing the word "intuitive" with the meaning "simple." "Intuitive" is a broader concept: it means knowledge that percieved by intuition rather than by deduction. Being consistant is part of making a system intuitive, logical organization (even though "logic" assumes deduction) leads to intuitive knowledge. The greater the level of internal logic and consistency the greater the intuitive nature of the system.
Simplicity can be part of what makes a system 'intuitive' but some of that simplicity can be attained by reducing *needless* complexity. It can also be attained without any loss of functionality by organizing that functionality - a vast array of functionality can be present and yet not always "in front". Every time you launch a program you are "hiding" some functions to make available some other functions. Imagine the complexity of a system that never changed modes - if every function of every program was always available. It would be horrendiously complex and yet would not have added one bit of functionality.
Of course the user will not be able to come by all of their knowledge about something as complex as a computer purely by intuitive means. Teaching and deduction will of course be part of it. But if the UI designer does as much as he can to make the interface "intuitive" that teaching and that process of deduction will be easier and may even be accomplished by the interface itself rather than by books or teachers.
That is why you understand the icons;) Perhaps it is unfair to single out MS word since it is not the worst offender - and people use it so often that eventually even the worst icons "become" intuitive with long familialarity. Some of the icons are not hard to figure out, most are merely ambigious, and some are just pointless. What the hell does that little broom mean? Is it the sweep command? What would "sweep" do to a word document? And come on "draw" should have been an easy icon to come up with - WTF is that little "A" (i think it's an A) with a cylinder and a cube? What does that have to do with drawing?
There's even the nifty "tooltip" systme that pops up if you can't figure it out by the shape.
Tooltips are an acknowledgment that the icons are failures. If you need a text label to understand the icon why not just use the text in the first place and get rid of the unnecessary and frustrating step of 'scrubbing' the toolbar to find the hidden clues.
Where the complexity and confusion come it isn't the icons or the interface, though--it's in the design. Concepts like a "Clipboard", "Styles", and all the rest aren't intuitive at all
I'm not saying that all software will be 'intuitive' and 'easy.' Yes some of the concepts are complex but they are made even more so when concept is hidden behind another layer of abstraction that is essentially arbitrary. You get your user to understand the concept behind the word "clipboard" or "style" and then add to the confusion with understanding the feeble attempt to visually represent concepts that simply can't be visually represented.
I'm not against all use of icons, I am against the missuse of icons. Icons are often overused, to create what UI designers call "angry fruit salad" or are often vague and misleading in a vain attempt to visually communicate a concept that is resistant to visual representation. A UI can work better and be easier to learn and use, and even be more aesthetically pleasing when icons are used only when they are helpful and words are used when an icon would be unclear.
One caveat: Even a complex abstract concept can be reduced to a visual symbol IF concept is a common one and the symbol is standardized.
Perhaps one solution to this would be to use a couple permanent menus - they can be dragged like windows
Why make them draggable? There is a very good reason to make commonly used UI elements stuck in a permenant place - they are always in the same spot and easy to find. After a while "muscle memory" takes over and you don't even think about the location - this is much faster and once learned truly 'intuitive'. (there are certain menu and key combinations I don't consciously remember. People ask me "how do I do so-and-so and I can't answer, I have to sit at the computer for my hands to remember for me) This is why I like the Mac way of always putting the menu in the same spot (which they did just for that purpose) even though the windows way seems more logical (menu physically tied to the window it is applicable to).
But then, on the Mac at least (I'm less familiar with windows), there already are permenent menus for such commands. And there are customisable menus where I can add any missing function I want.
Some devices are easy to figure out because they have very limited purpose. Computers are harder because they do a nearly infinite number of tasks
Very good point and it explains why a computer UI will always be more complex than a car or VCR. BUT, the fact the computers perform a "nearly infinite" number of tasks makes it all the more important that the UI *attempts* as much as possible to be intuitive. A car can use a "counterintuitive" interface precisely because it's function and thus it's interface elements are so limited. There are only three pedals, a wheel and a stick - or even two pedals and a wheel. The UI of a car is NOT complex! On the other hand it IS consistant. No matter which make or model I buy a car from the pedals and the steering wheel all do the same thing and are in the same spot. It's not like Ford puts the clutch on one side and Chrysler puts it on the other - or a Taurus uses a steering wheel, Saturn uses a joystick and Yugo's use a rudder to steer the thing.
By contrast a computer, as you pointed out, can perform a nearly infinite number of tasks and so requires a just as nearly infinite number of UI elements. If those elements are arbitrary, inconsistant and counterintiutive it will take a nearly infinite amount of knowledge to master them to use the computer. If those UI elements are thoughtfully designed to be as intuitive and consistent as possible the user can get the computer to perform those nearly infinite tasks without himself having to expend nearly infinite time and mental energy learning the interface.
There are some things in life that people should just be expected to learn how to do, like operate cars and computers (regardless of the computer's OS).
True, one thing that programmers should be expected to learn (or should hire those that have learned) is good UI design. The people expected to learn the use of computers should themselves expect thought to be put into the UI of those things by the people who design them. Unlike cars too many computer programs and operating system UI's are poorly thought out, needlessly complex, inconsistent, and needlessly constantly changing.
Uhh... They're called "tooltips". Hold the mouse over a button long enough, and it will TELL YOU what it means.
Tooltips are a hack and evidence of a failed UI. They prove that the icon failed to perform it's function. If the icon is useless why not just put the text found in the "tooltip" itself in the button so I don't have to "scrub" the toolbar? The tools are in plain sight (rather than hidden in a meny) specifically so they will be readily available - if nobody can understand what the buttons are for and have to scrub the meny to see the tooltips they AREN'T readily available.
I am a GUI advocate - I like icons (properly used) - I design GUI's and icons for a living. I HATE crappy implementations of GUI's that squander and waste the advantages of the interface.
Stop feeling pity for these lazy people, and force them to learn something!
Amen!! We should not tolerate the ignorant and lazy thinking that brings us poorly designed hacks like "tooltips" and force micro$oft to learn something about decent UI design. - Oh, that's not what you meant?
But you are right - the people who make these icons must be fruit-loops.
See my rant responding to the same parent on this topic. I have to speak up for the poor sap that got stuck designing the icons because I've been stuck in that position myself. Most likely he was not the one that made the decision to use icons - he was just stuck with the impossible job of visually representing a complex abstract concept. Believe me he was the very first one to realize that the concept could not be meaningfully represented visually. Designer to self: "How the HELL am I supposed to draw a picture of THAT! Damned PHB!!
I have found that usually it is not the visual design people (graphic/UI designers) that are pushing for icons everywhere but the project managers and even the technical people. Probably because the visual people know, because they are actually attempting it, that a particular concept is impossible to turn into an icon - the managment and technical people because it is not their problem tend to think of it as easy: "well, you're the creative guy - be creative, come up with something" they also want their product look polished and be as visually impressive as the underlying code they worked so hard on - naively they sometimes seem to think that using lots of icons will acheive this, in fact the overuse of icons has the opposite effect.
My SO can pick up a remote control, figure it our without the manual
To be fair a computer is quite a bit more complex.
The whole idea that GUIs are easy to use is a myth
Maybe not *easy* but easier. Also your complaint isn't so much about the GUI as a concept but about the implementation. I was going to say that a CLI would be even less intuitive to the new user but realized that my complaint was about the implementation as well. Of course for a CLI to be of ANY use to a completely new user it would have to be able to respond usefully to such commands as: "How the hell do I use this thing?" or "Show me the file I just made." Until a CLI comes into being that understands the language of the user rather than making the user learn the language of the CLI GUI's will be easier to use.
Your average Word user goes on a 3 day course to learn the basics of clicking on the correct toolbar icon, when they could select a perfectly meaningful English word from the menu system.
Warning: Anit-Microsoft maczealot pet peeve rant below!
This has always bugged me about Microsoft products. When I first started seeing these micro$oft inspired toolbars made up of double rows of tiny icons I realized I was seeing the result of somebody just imitating something they didn't understand. I think Gates said "Macs use icons in a few places and are easy to use. If I use even more icons everywhere it will be even easier to use." If you compare the original Mac and Mac software to windows (and sadly even to today's mac) you are struck by how sparing the use of icons actually was. The desktop had pretty obvious icons of the floppy disk, folders, documents and the trash can. The only icons that weren't immediately obvious were the icons of the applications but the fact that they were the only exception made them pretty easy to distinguish and understand. Inside the applications all commands were in text menu's and only selection or drawing tools were indicated using icon tool bars. Even today the Mac UI looks cleaner and is easier to use because they DON'T use icons as much. When Micro$oft made their own GUI it was obvious in many ways that they didn't quite understand what they were imitating - they used icons not just in a few places where a picture was worth a thousand words but in a lot of places where a word was worth a thousand pictures.
I am a graphic designer and have done a fair amount of UI design for software companies - ironically I am the one that is always arguing NOT to use icons for *everything*. Good Icon's are hard to design - they work for a few simple concrete concepts that are easily expressed and understood visually. The more abstract and/or complex the concept you are trying to represent the more likely the icon will hurt more than it helps. It is exactly those complex imossible to visually represent commands and tools that Micro$oft and it's legion of imitators INSIST on using icons for. And not just a few of them but a whole bunch of them that would be visually confusing as a whole even if the individual icons were themselves useful. I've used computers for a long time - I'm a very visual person comfortable with visual metaphors (I've got the BFA to prove it) - I've designed quite a few icons myself. I still can't make any sense of 75% of the icons used in windows software.
is "internal consistency" something that people really look for in an OS?
Yes!! Most people have been pointing out that consistency is important in the UI particularly for first time users. Of course UI consistency is usefull even for advanced users - after all even the most advanced user might on occasion use a piece of software that he is not familiar with - if there is no consistency he is not able to take all the knowledge and skills that make him an "advanced user" and apply it to the new unkown application. For that application he is essentially a "first time user" and must struggle through the learning curve all over again. If the UI is consistent he probably already knows how to use it even though he has never laid eyes on it before.
But internal consistency goes beyond just the UI. Consistency is important under the hood too. Why do you think the Linux crowd is always pushing open standards? A standard is simply a way of maintaining consistancy. Without some level of consistency you wouldn't be able to get anything done. A system that is designed as a whole rather than cobbled toegether from a variety of components has the potential advantages of enforced compliance and more comprehensive standards. The decentralized organic evolving "cobbled together" compenents of GNU/linux has other advantages but the more it can be standardised and so become "internally consistent" the better and more useful it will be.
but for the legions of DIY'ers out there, is this something to be worried about in an open-source OS?
That depends: Do you want it just for the sake of being a DIY'er or do you want it to be an effective tool? Do you want it to be an effective tool for other people to use it or is it just for yourself? If actual use is a secondary concern to the joy of doing it for yourself and you don't care if anyone else will use it then consistency is not so important. If on the other hand being a useful tool is important then internal consistency is very important.
Calling Gandalf an angel outright would have religious nuts going mad.
About calling Gandalf and angel would have had religious nuts going mad: true. But J.R.R. was himself something of a religious "nut" and decided not to use the word "angel" not only because he did not want LOTR to become a religious work but also because he himself have felt it to be sacreligious (perhaps even worthy of burning;). I think Tolkien did not even consider to dare calling his own creatures in his own "sub-creation" after the name of what he believed to be quite real, sacred servants of the living God even if they were the closest analogy.
(Especially at that time, but it's not like we don't have people living in the Southern US trying to burn Tolkien's works nowadays..)
That's an incendiary comment;) No really that is a bit of trolling. It's not like these alleged "southerners" couldn't get their hands on Tolkiens books of they really wanted to burn them. I am sure there are plenty of fundamentalists who think Tolkiens works with their pagan and mythological subject matter are veiled satanism. Yet most evangelicals and even a lot of fundamentalists quite like Tolkien and compare it favorably with the Harry Potter books precisely because Gandalf is (analagous to) an angel. His powers are according to his nature and granted to him by God... Er, Illuvitar; not occult magic acquired by striving for power and occult learning. In the christian mind and indeed in Tolkiens world such striving for power beyond that granted by God (or in Tolkiens sub-creation: Illuvitar) is precisely what makes Satan and satanists (and Melkor, Sauron, and Sauraman) evil.
Very nice troll. Though ironic when coming from an admitted "anonymous coward".
Of course you're complaint has been a common throughout history. Assuming you are yourself a soldier and that you are not inhumanly old (Your name isn't John Carter is it?) you yourself are an example of the sad decline of warrior spirit. I'll bet that you learned to shoot your enemy from hiding rather than issuing a challange and facing him squarely on the field of battle. I'll bet you even use that morally indefensible and cowardly weapon: gunpowder. I have it on the good authority of the chivalry of France that no true warrior could employ such a weapon. And even those noble knights were sadly fallen from the warrior spirit of their forefathers that disdained the use of armor (or even clothes) and rushed naked into battle against the Roman legions. The Romans in their cowardice defeated the Gauls, the English in thier cowardice defeated the French, the Americans in their cowardice employed ambush and hid behind trees to defeat the orderly ranks of the English. And today the Air foce continues the long sad decline.
I take it from your comments that you are bitter about having been a POW and losing your legs, you feel underappreciated and that it is unjust that other soldiers with less demanding and dangerous tasks share in the reflected glory of your heroism. It's a little odd that as a POW you would be so particularly bitter about the Air Force not making similar sacrifices - most of your fellow POW's in whatever war during which you were a prisoner would be either air force or navy pilots.
I know this was posted by an Anonymous Coward but how something so informative and relevant to the thread can have a score of 0 is beyond me.
Also to all the people saying:"No LOTR does not reflect christian thought but ancient European pagan mythology" - well of course it does. But it is interesting to look at how Tolkien treated the ancient pagan mythology he loved in light of the influence that Lewis and Tolkien had on each other and Lewis's belief in the mythopeoic nature of God. Basically Lewis believed that the actual nature and actions of a real God (which he, and Tolkien, belived was the christian God of the bible) was echoed in God's creation and resonated with the human imagination. Thus there are "corn king" gods that die and are resurected for the salvation of their people in the mythology of every people. This mythology comes from the natural cycle of "death" and "resurection" in nature and has a powerful hold on human imagination. But Lewis belived that God created nature in that way and that it resonated with man's imagination because God was communicating a truth about himself to man - and that truth was forshadowing what Lewis called the "true myth" of an actual historic incarnation of God who died and was resurected for the salvation of his people.
I don't know if Tolkien had similar beliefs but I suspect that even if he did not hold those beliefs precisely as Lewis expressed them he was certainly influenced by them. It is even possible that he was the one influencing Lewis By Lewis's own testimony this understanding of the mythopoeic nature of God was instrumental to his becoming a christian - and Lewis also said that his conversations with Tolkien were instrumental to his becoming a christian. It is not too much to imagine that the idea that was pivotal to Lewis's conversion came from the conversations with Tolkien that were pivotal to Lewis's conversion.
One interesting observation about the warrior spirit and the Air Force. I was intrigued at the footage of the special forces who were first on the ground and closely engaged with the enemy at the uprising in Mazar-i-sharif - those were not Marine Recon uniforms or Navy SEAL uniforms or Army Delta Force uniforms they were Air Force uniforms. Apparently the Forward Air Controllers at least have not gotten the word that they are part of a "chair" force.
...so it's not exactly the same s those orginal birds.
Actually it IS those same original birds. Yes they have had parts replaced and upgraded but no new B52's have been built since 1962. Some of today's pilots are probably the grandchildren of pilots that flew the exact same bird in the early 60's and in 2040 or 2050 thier grandchildren could be piloting it. It is an amazing testiment to superior engineering and design.
Slashdot Mirror
First off - a movie is a very different storytelling medium than a (rather long) novel. You have to make some allowances for that. The essentials of the story were unchanged and those changes that were made in general made for a better movie.
Arwen: Warrior Princess. 'Nuff said.
I have to say that this didn't bother me at all. It would be silly in a movie to introduce a character like Glorfindel and then drop him - so you have to replace him with someone who is a continuing character in the story. That person has to be from Rivendell, Elrond doesn't work, Why not Arwen. So in the book she is not a "Warrior Princess" but she is the daughter and sister to some of the most renowned living elvish warriors, a Noldorin elf of importance and particularly high lineage including a great-great-grandmother that with her human husband crept into Angband and stole a silmaril from the crown of Saurons much more powerful boss.
- Aragorn draws his FULL LENGTH sword?!?!?
Bugged me too. No reason for it. I think Aragorn fighting with a (longish) shard of the broken Narsil would have been a symbolic and powerful image. But not a flaw worth walking out of a movie for.
- Big argument at the Council of Elrond. Never happened.
Well there is some argument. A fairly high level of suspicion and animosity is evident in the books between the various races and it has importance to the plot. The movie doesn't have many places to portray this while the book can talk about peoples thoughts and emotions and go on about the sad history of conflict in the various lands the fellowship travels through.
- Merry and Pippin setting off Gandalf's fireworks. In Harry Potter (a fine movie adaptation of a book), maybe, but here it is gratuitous comic relief.
Yes Pippin and Merry take on the role of comic relief that is usually Sam's in the book. The humor is more slapstick. But it's consistent with their characterization in the books as impetuous, lighthearted and young. Again how is Jackson to establish these personality traits quickly. He can't just say it the way you can in a book.
- The cave troll troll never was never part of the fight in Moria (Frodo stabbed him with Sting and he ran away), yet they devoted a whole fight scene to it.
Please,
- Saruman bringing down an avalanche from Caradhras? Umm, no.
In the book a malevolent intelligence is strongly implied. The movie makes it Suraman to simplify the plot - unnecessary in my view but not a fatal flaw
- Shadowfax seems to have gone to the glue factory.
Jackson is here more acurate to the book than your memory. Shadowfax is introduced in the "Two Towers" Why should Jackson have inserted him into FOTR? Especially since Gandalf is never even on horseback until they get to Rohan.
- In the book, Gollum doesn't get mentioned until the Fellowship is on the river. He never says "gollum", either.
On both points the movie here is again more accurate than your memory. Gollum indeed begins following them in Moria though he loses them when they go through Lorien - though the othrewise almost exact to the book dialogue about pity takes place in the shire. As for saying "Gollum" Bilbo gave him that name because he made that sound - his given name was Smeagol.
- Neither Boromir nor any of the other characters (with one major exception MUCH later) touches the Ring.
Again, a way of using visuals to convey a sentiment that is expressed in the book through reading the characters mind. I suppose to be true to the book you could have "voices" expressing the characters inner thoughts and feelings but that never seems to work very well in film.
Saruman is represented as being completely under Sauron's thumb, which wasn't the case at all.
Again the movie is more true to the book than your memory - In FOTR Saruman is assumed to be and IS in league with Sauron. It is not made clear until "The Two Towers" that he doubly a traitor and is playing both halves against the middle.
- Elendil and Isildur look like refugees from a Seattle grunge band. Actually, that whole intro was completely unnecessary and lame. Jackson wasted all the suspense potential of the first half of the book in favor of a big crowd-pleasing CGI fight scene. Bah.
Yes I would rather they had shaved too but who knows how good razors were in the antedeluvian world of middle earth - though Narsil was sharp enough to give a good shave. The history portrayed in Jackson's Prologue is important to the plot and is doled out throughout the book in conversations which would be rather dry on film - It would have been more like "My dinner with Gandalf" than FOTR. I do think it would have been better to tell the tale in a series of backflashes as when Elrond recalls Isildur not destroying the ring when he had the chance.
Saruman shows Gandalf the Palantir before he imprisons him??????? Whaaaaat????
Though it isn't made explicit in LOTR it is suggested in Tolkiens own unfinished writings that Gandalf knew Saruman most likely had a Palantir. It would not have been a huge secret among the wise. Orthanc was well known to be the resting place of one of the Palantir and it had never been taken by any enemy. Jackson introduces the Palantir as a significant element earlier than the book because introducing it half way through the second of three movie wouldn't work as well as introducing it half way through the second of three books.
After all the prerelease hype about how true to the book the movie was going to be, I was pissed at how much violence they did to the story. Crouching Saruman, Hidden Gandalf indeed! And WTF is up with Orcs running up stone pillars like so many cockroaches?
Not only that but In Itchy and Scratchy episode 206 Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylphone, he strikes the same rib yet produces two clearly distinct tones. What are we supposed to believe this is some sort of magic xylphone or something? Geez I really hope someone was fired for that.
...spending whole minutes in slow-mo reaction shots was a bit silly.
I saw one review that said "I wish there were fewer scenes of Frodo staring into the camera like Jodie Foster in Nell (or Contact, or a half-dozen other movies where Foster seems to think that intense, wide-eyed staring is what the academy is looking for)"
The thing that bothered me (and might be related to your complaint about long slow-mo reactions) was what I thought was an over-use of awe inspiring special effects - Not where it was appropriate like the battle scenes in Moria but in segues. Especially all that zooming about up and down the tower of orthanc and into the fantastical (and a little fake & hokey looking) caves and crevices beneath it. By over doing it by so much in such inconsequential scenes Jackson had no way other than just making it longer to make an impact during the really pivotal scenes. I wish he had used a lighter hand which would have not only improved the scenes affected by making them appropriately more subtle but also would have improved the scenes with all the FX that would be improved and given more impact by the contrast.
But that is really my only complaint and it is mere nitpicking. Many of the things that bothered other people didn't bother me at all. It is a movie after all which is a very different storytelling media and many of the changes were necessary and good for the story in movie form. I don't mind dropping Tom Bombadil or Arwen replacing Glorfindel and moving the love story between Arwen and Aragorn out of the Appendix at the back of ROTK and into the main storyline.
How many of those company names are trademarked?
;) will have been deceived. There are plenty of other names out there and Lindows is a really stupid sounding name whose ONLY advantage for it's owners is it's association with their competitors trademark. It is exactly that kind of cheap maneuver that trademark protection is all about.
Manpower certainly is and it is the closes parallel since the word "manpower" would be a generic term in that industry.
Of course, Windows is a product name, not a company name.
Not really relevent except that you could probably find alot more product names that are generic terms - even generic terms in the industry where the name is trademarked.
Besides, trademarks don't last forever.
Actually they do.
They're only enforcable to the point that they don't become common terms for the general concept that the origional product represents. Kleenex and Xerox are the classic examples of this.
Actually Asprin is a classic example of this. Kleenex and Xerox are still trademarked and if tommorow the Lindows people also came out with Leenex brand tissues and Zerox brand copiers they would be sued - and they would lose. Besides windows is not in that situation - if someone comes up to you and says:"I have Windows installed on my computer" You know they are not talking about MacOS or X Windows but Windows(TM) - On the other hand if someone says "give me a Kleenex" you know what they are talking about even if you actually have some other brand.
Windows not being a common term in the industry at the time is certainly debatable.
Thats all I was saying.
As I recall, there were several companies which opposed the granting of the trademark on those grounds.
And right or wrong those companies lost. A few years later and it would probably have been a slam-dunk that Microsoft would lose, a few years earlier and it would have been a slam-dunk that Microsoft would win. I think they should have lost back then. But they didn't and as long as Microsoft doesn't harass people for using the word generically it really isn't a problem for their competitors.
But Lindows isn't doing that - Lindows IS playing off of the well trademark of their competitor to make a claim about interoperability. If they were NOT direct competitors selling something in the EXACT same product catagory (An OS for X86 processors that runs "Windows" software) perhaps Microsoft would let it slide - but this is pretty blatant. People will be confused by this, they will mistake it for a Microsoft product that runs linux software or a Microsoft licensed product for running windows software on Linux. People that buy it for that reason (call them what you will
How many of those were associated with the particular use in question before the product was created or the trademark registered?
Off that list only Manpower
Off the top of my head
News Corp
Computer Sciences Corporation
Wheels Inc.
Admittedly using a descriptive term like "windows" is an iffy proposition but the Trademark was upheld because at the time it wasn't yet a common term in the industry. The court may have got that wrong (indeed I think they did) - but then again if Microsoft had trademarked it just a few years earlier though there would have been no debate - it would have been valid.
More to the point: It is pretty obvious that Lindows isn't using that word just because they have a GUI that uses "windows" (like X, or the MacOS) but because they have a system that emulates Windows(tm) for that reason alone I think they will (and should) lose in court.
I know that Microsoft and all it's works are evil incarnate but come on. A couple of points:
1) this isn't just any "windowed operating system" it is a Windows clone that will run Windows software. To suggest they are innocently using such a sound alike name for their product only because it also happens to use "windows" is more than a little disingenuous.
2) If Microsoft was doing this to a competitor (changing one word in their competitor's trademarked name to sell a directly competing product) we'd all be screaming bloody murder no matter how generic the name Microsoft was hijacking.
Calling a windowed operating system "Windows" is like naming an automobile "Wheels."
Maybe not "Wheels" since they were in common use by the earlier technology that cars replaced but if Ford Motor Company had decided to simply call themselves "Motor Inc." and their products commonly called "Motors" as distinct from the generic "Automobiles" it probably would have been fine and it's not like they all haven't been stuck for names other than "Lotor". This is a little fuzzy but at the time it was trademarked it is debatable that "windows" was a common generic computer term in the minds of consumers. It was one feature of a GUI that Microsoft happened to use as emblematic of their system and adopted as their trademark. They could have called it "Folders" or "Desktop" and now we would be arguing over a competitor named "Folderz" of "Lesktop" who after all is just selling a "Desktopped" operating system.
There are plenty of other words out there in the English language for "Lindows" to use - and if they don't like any of them they can make one up. They are NOT innocently using one that sounds like their competitor because it is a generic word that is a feature of their system. They are doing it intentionally perhaps not to decieve consumers but to make a claim about it's simularity to to the competitor they are imitating. Microsoft could have named it's product EvilIncarnate and this competitor would have named their product LevilIncarnate.
Now, this last bit has nothing to do with current law, to the best of my knowledge, but I remember hearing a principle of trademarks that I really wish was law: all linguistic trademarks should consist of a proper noun followed by a descriptive term. Nobody should ever own marketing catchphrases, fictional character names, or descriptive terms as trademarks by themselves. (I don't recall the source)
A very logical but sterile world you envision. Disallowing trademark protection for short, catchy names might seem to be an orderly solution but would be a failure. People would still use shortened or catchy nicknames. They would still call "Microsoft Windows" simply "Windows" and the existence of "IBM Windows" (or perhaps "MicroZoft Windows") would only create confusion and deception of consumers by unscrupulous businesses. Salesman to consumer:"Oh, yes this computer is running 'Windows'" either knowing full well, or maybe innocently ignorant, that the consumer means Microsoft Windows but the computer is running Sun Windows (or vice versa).
Making "lindows" change it's name is not a "failure" of the system as you sarcastically suggest - it is the system working as it was intended and as it should.
The right decision would be to invalidate Microsoft's Windows trademark because it's a common word.
Um...
Apple
Sun
Oracle
Dell
Gateway
Bull
Next
Ford
Chevron
Target
Sprint
Caterpillar
Gap
Staples
Manpower
Whirlpool
Nike
Progressive
Mead
Universal
Amazon
Virgin
I have to say that on the whole I actually agree with the some of your concerns. Of course honor, duty and courage are important for a soldier. I would go futher and say they are important for any person - though the precise expression of it will be differ along with different peoples roles. I share your concern about the decline of these virtues (among others) in our culture as a whole, not just in our military.
BUT your tendency to hyperbole and flaimbait insults is a problem not only because it detracts from the presentation of your thesis but because it weakens your thesis itself. Let me make a couple of points.
First: throughout history the defense of a nation has depended on a variety of soldiers with differnt roles and varying degrees and expressions of 'warrior spirit' Certain soldiers because of their roles have always had to have it to an extreme not necessary (and often not even desirable) in soldiers with a differnt role. It is certain that the French nobility at Agincourt and Crecy had more raw physical courage, sense of honor and duty than the masses of English pikeman or yeoman. Without their 'high tech' longbows the yeoman were not to be relied upon to pick up a spear and fight on. If an airforce engineer at Wright Patterson by some tragedy finds himself on the front lines then of course we as a culture would expect him to do his duty as a soldier but for obvious reasons we don't expect nor train him to have or exhibit the same battlefront expression of 'warrior spirit' that is necessary in a Marine. We don't even expect the same level of 'warrior spirit' in the regular army infantryman that we expect in a marine. That is as it should be, marines are an elite with a different role.
Secondly, as I pointed out before some loss of warrior spirit is inevitable when there is no war to be spirited about. We have an armed force and culture experiencing a long period of peace and security. We should seek to mitigate the loss of 'warrior spirit' through training but there is no real substitute for the real thing. That being the case I prefer the alternative (peace) I also have confidence that our military would rise the occasion should it come (the word 'rise' in that phrase is exactly what I'm getting at). It could be far worse. I would argue the demoralised force we had after Vietnam was less ready to rise to a challenge than the force we have now, we are certainly better prepared for a challange now than the sad pittance of a military we had the day of Pearl Harbor - and yet just a few months after that we were bombing our enemies capitol.
Third, your complaint about being over dependant on our technology - true perhaps, but so what? Every military since we moved from rocks to bronze has become increasingly dependant on it's technology. And the force with the technological advantage has always won, even when their opponent was superior in the military virtues we have been calling 'warrior spirit.' I'd rather have a technocrat dependant on his technology be it greek fire, a long bow or F-18 than the supreme warrior carrying a rock. Yes I'm sure that because of their martial virtues a unit of marines with nothing but rocks and stones will still be a force to be reckoned wheras a bunch of airmen would be a hopeless mob. Of course we hire those nerdy technocratic airmen precisely so it won't come to that.
Finally, you are overstating your case - and by a long shot. I don't believe that our military is as lacking in 'warrior spirit' as you make it out to be. Sure there are stupid little distractions like giving *everybody* a black beret so they can all pretend to be army rangers and feminist senators trying to turn the military into a social laboratory to test their latest gender theories. But for the most part this is tomfoolery on the part of politicians not soldiers. Where it is soldiers it is those of a high enough rank to be more properly considered politicans rather than soldiers. Despite your concern that the Air Force doesn't have the brave men it needs I think they do and they are found in those positions where their bravery is most required - forward ground controllers, fighter and attack pilots etc. etc. etc. Which brings us back to my original post.
The problem with your assertion is that you reduce the functionality of a car to just "go." When a tool has but a single purpose, of course the controls can be made simple. Fortunately, computers do NOT have one single purpose.
Reread my post again and tell me where exactly we disagree. For the life of me it sounds like you are "refuting" my first paragraph with my third paragraph. What exactly is your point? I don't mean for those questions to come across as sarcastic but with all the nitpicking about a metaphor (which are never intended to stand such close scrutiny) I am no longer sure that I understand the thesis of your argument.
I'll lay out my thesis as a couple of simple sylogism for the sake of clarity and just leave cars out of it.
Supporting Argument:
Major Premise: Systems that have a wide variety of functions will require a complex use interface.
Minor Premise: Computers have a wide variety of functions.
Conclusion: Therefore computers have by necessity a complex user interface.
Primary Argument
Major Premise: Complex and/or illogical and/or inconsistant interfaces are a barrier to getting the task accomplished. To the extreme of becoming useless to accomplish the desired task.
Minor Premise: Computers already have, by necessity, a very complex interface which is a barrier to accomplishing the tasks.
Conclusion: Therefore additional barriers of illogic, inconsistancy and UNECESSARY complexity in computer user interfaces should be strenuoiusly avoided.
I would go on to argue that most computer programmers are more concerned about functionality than about interface and that therefore computer interfaces in general have had a tendency to multiply unessecary complexity, inconsistanancy and often illogic (from the point of view of a user attempting to accomplish a task ) I think that a thoughtfully designed user interfaces by avoiding the unessary barriers to usablity can significantly mitigate the unavoidable barriers to usablity without any loss of functionality. My pet peeve: programmers that are hostile to users that complain or are understandably confused by these barriers, that say in effect:"computers are complex - get over it." If you have done everything you could to get rid of unnecessary barriers to usablity you can go ahead and say "it is the users problem - not the UI" but any objective observer of computers today would have to admit that computers are a long way from being able to make that claim.
By the sound of it, you are someone who ascribes to the 'fighting fair' philosphy.
No, not at all. If a war is just you have an obligation to win it as quickly as possible.
What is "morally indefensible and cowardly" about gunpowder? Especially when compared to bows,...
Nothing. I was being a bit sarcastic. Read my post again - that was the opinion of those in their day that exemplified the "warrior spirit" as you purport to honor today - it was also their opinion on the subject of the long bow. My point was that they would have had the same low opinion of you that you have towards the Air Force. You may have received excellent and long training and have lived as a soldier for your entire adult life. They were bred for it - from childhood they trained for combat and for the excersise of authority. And on the fields of Crecy and Agincourt they were wiped out by mere peasents who lived as farmers knowing nothing of the code or the rigors of mind, body and spirit that was the "warrior spirit." Your complaint about the decline of "warrior spirit" is as old as war.
I will grant you there is some truth to it - but it is true of every nation that has experienced long peace and security. During peace time an army is just a bureacracy who's function is just to sustain itself as insurance against the day it is needed. The skills a soldier needs to succeed in such an environment are not the same as those needed to succeed in war. At the start of every real war there has usually been a shift as those with the skills for peacetime maintenance give way to those with the skills to wage war.
But even during the height of war there are different roles and different expressions of "warrior spirit" The Army Air Corps never had the same expression of "warrior spirit" as the marine corps and they shouldn't. The roles are different - the function is different - the necessary skills and values are different. The capabilites needed to maintain and operate an air force is different from those needed to storm a hill. For a marine you want raw courage, and blind devotion to the task at hand, a high IQ may be present but it doesn't help any and if it is couled with inquisitiveness it may even hurt. An air force is a high tech organization that requires a few brave men with 'warrior spirit' to fly the planes and whole whole mass of technocratic support personell who don't particularly need courage or any of the traditional martial virtues but had better be smart and inquisitive if your high tech knight going into battle hopes to come back again. If it makes you feel better think of them as the serfs required to raise the crops for the knight's war horse and the smiths that made his armor rather than as fellow warriors.
I have to point out that cars, even automatics, have a lot more controls then that.
I only mentioned those necessary for the essential function of the car (to go). Yes you need a key in the ignition but I was sort of focussing on using the functionality of a computer or car not the "on button". Granted, headlights, signals and wipers are important to go *safely* under certain conditions - the rest is fluff.
I still stand by my contention that the essential functions of a car are 'intuitive' because of their relative simplicity and their standardization. You will notice that they are standardized and thus easy to use in relation to how essential they are. The essential controls I mentioned are iron clad standard. The important safety functions are a little less standardised but you still basically know where they are what they will do on every car. The fluff - cruise control, AC, stereo, internal lights etc. are a bit less standard but still they are essentially the same from car to car.
A computer is a more general purpose thing. It doesn't have just one essential function the way a car does. It also has a vastly larger number of functions that you may want it to perform and thus a vastly larger number of controls the user needs to understand. There will always be a certain level of complexity and difficulty in mastering a computer BUT, that not an excuse for sloppiness and laziness or just not thinking at all about UI, If anything it is a reason to be far MORE concerned about it.
Sorry but programmers that arrogantly assume that it is the users responsiblity to make sense of the unnecessary mess that the programmers have wrought are one of my pet peeves. Have a little more pride in your work for God's sake.
I think that well-labeled tooltips have their place just like a well-drawn icon. Some of your customers will have different preferred modalities (they'll like reading text versus looking at a picture, or vice versa), so providing both will satisfy more customers
No they are a hack. The decision was made to go with icons and NOT text and no choice was given - nobody could understand the icons so text was added in an inconvenient way as an afterthought. What you are talking about is something like what most web browsers use where you have a choice between text, icons or both - that would be a good UI but that is NOT what tooltips are.
On the other hand I do see the value of a tooltip type pop-up help for newbie users. Apple had this with "balloon help" but I never felt so lost using an unfamiliar Mac applicatin as to actually find the balloons any more helpful than the simpler interface already was - I maybe used it twice.
You can increase the intuitiveness of the interface by reducing complexity, but that just means you have cut off some subset of functionality.
WRONG you are confusing the word "intuitive" with the meaning "simple." "Intuitive" is a broader concept: it means knowledge that percieved by intuition rather than by deduction. Being consistant is part of making a system intuitive, logical organization (even though "logic" assumes deduction) leads to intuitive knowledge. The greater the level of internal logic and consistency the greater the intuitive nature of the system.
Simplicity can be part of what makes a system 'intuitive' but some of that simplicity can be attained by reducing *needless* complexity. It can also be attained without any loss of functionality by organizing that functionality - a vast array of functionality can be present and yet not always "in front". Every time you launch a program you are "hiding" some functions to make available some other functions. Imagine the complexity of a system that never changed modes - if every function of every program was always available. It would be horrendiously complex and yet would not have added one bit of functionality.
Of course the user will not be able to come by all of their knowledge about something as complex as a computer purely by intuitive means. Teaching and deduction will of course be part of it. But if the UI designer does as much as he can to make the interface "intuitive" that teaching and that process of deduction will be easier and may even be accomplished by the interface itself rather than by books or teachers.
I use MS Word a *lot*
;) Perhaps it is unfair to single out MS word since it is not the worst offender - and people use it so often that eventually even the worst icons "become" intuitive with long familialarity. Some of the icons are not hard to figure out, most are merely ambigious, and some are just pointless. What the hell does that little broom mean? Is it the sweep command? What would "sweep" do to a word document? And come on "draw" should have been an easy icon to come up with - WTF is that little "A" (i think it's an A) with a cylinder and a cube? What does that have to do with drawing?
That is why you understand the icons
There's even the nifty "tooltip" systme that pops up if you can't figure it out by the shape.
Tooltips are an acknowledgment that the icons are failures. If you need a text label to understand the icon why not just use the text in the first place and get rid of the unnecessary and frustrating step of 'scrubbing' the toolbar to find the hidden clues.
Where the complexity and confusion come it isn't the icons or the interface, though--it's in the design. Concepts like a "Clipboard", "Styles", and all the rest aren't intuitive at all
I'm not saying that all software will be 'intuitive' and 'easy.' Yes some of the concepts are complex but they are made even more so when concept is hidden behind another layer of abstraction that is essentially arbitrary. You get your user to understand the concept behind the word "clipboard" or "style" and then add to the confusion with understanding the feeble attempt to visually represent concepts that simply can't be visually represented.
I'm not against all use of icons, I am against the missuse of icons. Icons are often overused, to create what UI designers call "angry fruit salad" or are often vague and misleading in a vain attempt to visually communicate a concept that is resistant to visual representation. A UI can work better and be easier to learn and use, and even be more aesthetically pleasing when icons are used only when they are helpful and words are used when an icon would be unclear.
One caveat: Even a complex abstract concept can be reduced to a visual symbol IF concept is a common one and the symbol is standardized.
Perhaps one solution to this would be to use a couple permanent menus - they can be dragged like windows
Why make them draggable? There is a very good reason to make commonly used UI elements stuck in a permenant place - they are always in the same spot and easy to find. After a while "muscle memory" takes over and you don't even think about the location - this is much faster and once learned truly 'intuitive'. (there are certain menu and key combinations I don't consciously remember. People ask me "how do I do so-and-so and I can't answer, I have to sit at the computer for my hands to remember for me) This is why I like the Mac way of always putting the menu in the same spot (which they did just for that purpose) even though the windows way seems more logical (menu physically tied to the window it is applicable to).
But then, on the Mac at least (I'm less familiar with windows), there already are permenent menus for such commands. And there are customisable menus where I can add any missing function I want.
Some devices are easy to figure out because they have very limited purpose. Computers are harder because they do a nearly infinite number of tasks
Very good point and it explains why a computer UI will always be more complex than a car or VCR. BUT, the fact the computers perform a "nearly infinite" number of tasks makes it all the more important that the UI *attempts* as much as possible to be intuitive. A car can use a "counterintuitive" interface precisely because it's function and thus it's interface elements are so limited. There are only three pedals, a wheel and a stick - or even two pedals and a wheel. The UI of a car is NOT complex! On the other hand it IS consistant. No matter which make or model I buy a car from the pedals and the steering wheel all do the same thing and are in the same spot. It's not like Ford puts the clutch on one side and Chrysler puts it on the other - or a Taurus uses a steering wheel, Saturn uses a joystick and Yugo's use a rudder to steer the thing.
By contrast a computer, as you pointed out, can perform a nearly infinite number of tasks and so requires a just as nearly infinite number of UI elements. If those elements are arbitrary, inconsistant and counterintiutive it will take a nearly infinite amount of knowledge to master them to use the computer. If those UI elements are thoughtfully designed to be as intuitive and consistent as possible the user can get the computer to perform those nearly infinite tasks without himself having to expend nearly infinite time and mental energy learning the interface.
There are some things in life that people should just be expected to learn how to do, like operate cars and computers (regardless of the computer's OS).
True, one thing that programmers should be expected to learn (or should hire those that have learned) is good UI design. The people expected to learn the use of computers should themselves expect thought to be put into the UI of those things by the people who design them. Unlike cars too many computer programs and operating system UI's are poorly thought out, needlessly complex, inconsistent, and needlessly constantly changing.
Uhh... They're called "tooltips". Hold the mouse over a button long enough, and it will TELL YOU what it means.
Tooltips are a hack and evidence of a failed UI. They prove that the icon failed to perform it's function. If the icon is useless why not just put the text found in the "tooltip" itself in the button so I don't have to "scrub" the toolbar? The tools are in plain sight (rather than hidden in a meny) specifically so they will be readily available - if nobody can understand what the buttons are for and have to scrub the meny to see the tooltips they AREN'T readily available.
I am a GUI advocate - I like icons (properly used) - I design GUI's and icons for a living. I HATE crappy implementations of GUI's that squander and waste the advantages of the interface.
Stop feeling pity for these lazy people, and force them to learn something!
Amen!! We should not tolerate the ignorant and lazy thinking that brings us poorly designed hacks like "tooltips" and force micro$oft to learn something about decent UI design. - Oh, that's not what you meant?
But you are right - the people who make these icons must be fruit-loops.
See my rant responding to the same parent on this topic. I have to speak up for the poor sap that got stuck designing the icons because I've been stuck in that position myself. Most likely he was not the one that made the decision to use icons - he was just stuck with the impossible job of visually representing a complex abstract concept. Believe me he was the very first one to realize that the concept could not be meaningfully represented visually. Designer to self: "How the HELL am I supposed to draw a picture of THAT! Damned PHB!!
I have found that usually it is not the visual design people (graphic/UI designers) that are pushing for icons everywhere but the project managers and even the technical people. Probably because the visual people know, because they are actually attempting it, that a particular concept is impossible to turn into an icon - the managment and technical people because it is not their problem tend to think of it as easy: "well, you're the creative guy - be creative, come up with something" they also want their product look polished and be as visually impressive as the underlying code they worked so hard on - naively they sometimes seem to think that using lots of icons will acheive this, in fact the overuse of icons has the opposite effect.
My SO can pick up a remote control, figure it our without the manual
To be fair a computer is quite a bit more complex.
The whole idea that GUIs are easy to use is a myth
Maybe not *easy* but easier. Also your complaint isn't so much about the GUI as a concept but about the implementation. I was going to say that a CLI would be even less intuitive to the new user but realized that my complaint was about the implementation as well. Of course for a CLI to be of ANY use to a completely new user it would have to be able to respond usefully to such commands as: "How the hell do I use this thing?" or "Show me the file I just made." Until a CLI comes into being that understands the language of the user rather than making the user learn the language of the CLI GUI's will be easier to use.
Your average Word user goes on a 3 day course to learn the basics of clicking on the correct toolbar icon, when they could select a perfectly meaningful English word from the menu system.
Warning: Anit-Microsoft maczealot pet peeve rant below!
This has always bugged me about Microsoft products. When I first started seeing these micro$oft inspired toolbars made up of double rows of tiny icons I realized I was seeing the result of somebody just imitating something they didn't understand. I think Gates said "Macs use icons in a few places and are easy to use. If I use even more icons everywhere it will be even easier to use." If you compare the original Mac and Mac software to windows (and sadly even to today's mac) you are struck by how sparing the use of icons actually was. The desktop had pretty obvious icons of the floppy disk, folders, documents and the trash can. The only icons that weren't immediately obvious were the icons of the applications but the fact that they were the only exception made them pretty easy to distinguish and understand. Inside the applications all commands were in text menu's and only selection or drawing tools were indicated using icon tool bars. Even today the Mac UI looks cleaner and is easier to use because they DON'T use icons as much. When Micro$oft made their own GUI it was obvious in many ways that they didn't quite understand what they were imitating - they used icons not just in a few places where a picture was worth a thousand words but in a lot of places where a word was worth a thousand pictures.
I am a graphic designer and have done a fair amount of UI design for software companies - ironically I am the one that is always arguing NOT to use icons for *everything*. Good Icon's are hard to design - they work for a few simple concrete concepts that are easily expressed and understood visually. The more abstract and/or complex the concept you are trying to represent the more likely the icon will hurt more than it helps. It is exactly those complex imossible to visually represent commands and tools that Micro$oft and it's legion of imitators INSIST on using icons for. And not just a few of them but a whole bunch of them that would be visually confusing as a whole even if the individual icons were themselves useful. I've used computers for a long time - I'm a very visual person comfortable with visual metaphors (I've got the BFA to prove it) - I've designed quite a few icons myself. I still can't make any sense of 75% of the icons used in windows software.
is "internal consistency" something that people really look for in an OS?
Yes!! Most people have been pointing out that consistency is important in the UI particularly for first time users. Of course UI consistency is usefull even for advanced users - after all even the most advanced user might on occasion use a piece of software that he is not familiar with - if there is no consistency he is not able to take all the knowledge and skills that make him an "advanced user" and apply it to the new unkown application. For that application he is essentially a "first time user" and must struggle through the learning curve all over again. If the UI is consistent he probably already knows how to use it even though he has never laid eyes on it before.
But internal consistency goes beyond just the UI. Consistency is important under the hood too. Why do you think the Linux crowd is always pushing open standards? A standard is simply a way of maintaining consistancy. Without some level of consistency you wouldn't be able to get anything done. A system that is designed as a whole rather than cobbled toegether from a variety of components has the potential advantages of enforced compliance and more comprehensive standards. The decentralized organic evolving "cobbled together" compenents of GNU/linux has other advantages but the more it can be standardised and so become "internally consistent" the better and more useful it will be.
but for the legions of DIY'ers out there, is this something to be worried about in an open-source OS?
That depends: Do you want it just for the sake of being a DIY'er or do you want it to be an effective tool? Do you want it to be an effective tool for other people to use it or is it just for yourself? If actual use is a secondary concern to the joy of doing it for yourself and you don't care if anyone else will use it then consistency is not so important. If on the other hand being a useful tool is important then internal consistency is very important.
Calling Gandalf an angel outright would have religious nuts going mad.
;). I think Tolkien did not even consider to dare calling his own creatures in his own "sub-creation" after the name of what he believed to be quite real, sacred servants of the living God even if they were the closest analogy.
;) No really that is a bit of trolling. It's not like these alleged "southerners" couldn't get their hands on Tolkiens books of they really wanted to burn them. I am sure there are plenty of fundamentalists who think Tolkiens works with their pagan and mythological subject matter are veiled satanism. Yet most evangelicals and even a lot of fundamentalists quite like Tolkien and compare it favorably with the Harry Potter books precisely because Gandalf is (analagous to) an angel. His powers are according to his nature and granted to him by God... Er, Illuvitar; not occult magic acquired by striving for power and occult learning. In the christian mind and indeed in Tolkiens world such striving for power beyond that granted by God (or in Tolkiens sub-creation: Illuvitar) is precisely what makes Satan and satanists (and Melkor, Sauron, and Sauraman) evil.
About calling Gandalf and angel would have had religious nuts going mad: true. But J.R.R. was himself something of a religious "nut" and decided not to use the word "angel" not only because he did not want LOTR to become a religious work but also because he himself have felt it to be sacreligious (perhaps even worthy of burning
(Especially at that time, but it's not like we don't have people living in the Southern US trying to burn Tolkien's works nowadays..)
That's an incendiary comment
Very nice troll. Though ironic when coming from an admitted "anonymous coward".
Of course you're complaint has been a common throughout history. Assuming you are yourself a soldier and that you are not inhumanly old (Your name isn't John Carter is it?) you yourself are an example of the sad decline of warrior spirit. I'll bet that you learned to shoot your enemy from hiding rather than issuing a challange and facing him squarely on the field of battle. I'll bet you even use that morally indefensible and cowardly weapon: gunpowder. I have it on the good authority of the chivalry of France that no true warrior could employ such a weapon. And even those noble knights were sadly fallen from the warrior spirit of their forefathers that disdained the use of armor (or even clothes) and rushed naked into battle against the Roman legions. The Romans in their cowardice defeated the Gauls, the English in thier cowardice defeated the French, the Americans in their cowardice employed ambush and hid behind trees to defeat the orderly ranks of the English. And today the Air foce continues the long sad decline.
I take it from your comments that you are bitter about having been a POW and losing your legs, you feel underappreciated and that it is unjust that other soldiers with less demanding and dangerous tasks share in the reflected glory of your heroism. It's a little odd that as a POW you would be so particularly bitter about the Air Force not making similar sacrifices - most of your fellow POW's in whatever war during which you were a prisoner would be either air force or navy pilots.
Or are you just talking out of your ass.
I know this was posted by an Anonymous Coward but how something so informative and relevant to the thread can have a score of 0 is beyond me.
Also to all the people saying:"No LOTR does not reflect christian thought but ancient European pagan mythology" - well of course it does. But it is interesting to look at how Tolkien treated the ancient pagan mythology he loved in light of the influence that Lewis and Tolkien had on each other and Lewis's belief in the mythopeoic nature of God. Basically Lewis believed that the actual nature and actions of a real God (which he, and Tolkien, belived was the christian God of the bible) was echoed in God's creation and resonated with the human imagination. Thus there are "corn king" gods that die and are resurected for the salvation of their people in the mythology of every people. This mythology comes from the natural cycle of "death" and "resurection" in nature and has a powerful hold on human imagination. But Lewis belived that God created nature in that way and that it resonated with man's imagination because God was communicating a truth about himself to man - and that truth was forshadowing what Lewis called the "true myth" of an actual historic incarnation of God who died and was resurected for the salvation of his people.
I don't know if Tolkien had similar beliefs but I suspect that even if he did not hold those beliefs precisely as Lewis expressed them he was certainly influenced by them. It is even possible that he was the one influencing Lewis By Lewis's own testimony this understanding of the mythopoeic nature of God was instrumental to his becoming a christian - and Lewis also said that his conversations with Tolkien were instrumental to his becoming a christian. It is not too much to imagine that the idea that was pivotal to Lewis's conversion came from the conversations with Tolkien that were pivotal to Lewis's conversion.
One interesting observation about the warrior spirit and the Air Force. I was intrigued at the footage of the special forces who were first on the ground and closely engaged with the enemy at the uprising in Mazar-i-sharif - those were not Marine Recon uniforms or Navy SEAL uniforms or Army Delta Force uniforms they were Air Force uniforms. Apparently the Forward Air Controllers at least have not gotten the word that they are part of a "chair" force.
...so it's not exactly the same s those orginal birds.
Actually it IS those same original birds. Yes they have had parts replaced and upgraded but no new B52's have been built since 1962. Some of today's pilots are probably the grandchildren of pilots that flew the exact same bird in the early 60's and in 2040 or 2050 thier grandchildren could be piloting it. It is an amazing testiment to superior engineering and design.