Of course the "easiest" (and therefore the "best") user interface will be the one that is as close to 100% identical to the only one they've used before.
That's false. The best interface is one that reflects the user expectations. The Windows interface doesn't reflect user expectations in many ways, so it's possible to create a better interface than one which is just identical.
That should be the aim for the Linux Desktop design, not just to attract former Windows users but to best serve previous Linux users as well.
Yes, it's easier for us to work with, but again, I don't see that as evidence why natural laws should be simple or elegant.
That's because there's nothing in science *requiring* natural laws to be simple or elegant. Indeed, there *are* natural laws which aren't simple nor elegant at all (have you studied probability?).
But if there are two laws describing a phenomena equally well, and one is simple and elegant while the other is complex and bizarre, we stick to the simple one because *it works better for doing science*. It's just a heuristic for getting best results quickly, not a scientific fact. And, since heuristics do fail sometimes, you always have the option of reverting to the complex theory if the simple happens to be incorrect.
The rule for "simple and elegant" is actually broken by many people in computer science quite often - it's sort of a exploratory game for discovering new concepts by pushing the known limits.
You didn't understand a single comma of what I wrote. That's why you simply don't get the open source economy model - you keep comparing it to communism when it is simply not the same thing. Open source is pure "Smithsonian" self-interest in action: the benefits of developing and using it are not merely "the pleasure of serving your community ", but the very tangible profit of getting an improved code & content at low or no cost, in a way that is scalable - something impossible in a money-based market.
Human attention is valuable because of the products it can achieve. It's the most versatile resource in the universe, and as such is a very good interchange good.
FYI the scientific peer-reviewed freely-published-research model is more than 200 years old and growing, thank you very much. Free open source relies on the very same principles. (And you already should know that charging for the scientific papers themselves does hurt researchers performance - i.e. it's not the most efficient way of funding this research).
I don't believe the attention market is that different. Philosophically speaking, money is valuable because of the yearning it produces in people's minds, not because of its material content. Value in a market is a matter of beliefs. The problem is that whilst each page does have a value in terms of human attention, its value is not obvious to potential buyers. Price is not the same as value; the only obvious one is the first one (if the object is tagged). A very highly priced item could be of little value; so value can also be difficult to determine. On the other hand, there are obvious signs for when either an item or a Wikipedia article might be valuable - expensive materials and fine design on the first, lots of content and a good structure on the second.
if something is underpriced a single agent can buy huge quantities and the price will adjust.
This happens mainly because commercial markets are fairly well known; otherwise none would risk to buy huge quantities of items for which she doesn't have any utility.
In the future similar processes could apply to attention economies. For example I think memetic propagation can achieve a similar result to that leveling: if some valuable content is under-reported, someone who finds it can link to it and publicize it; then network effects can make it enormously popular in a few hours.
For this to happen it's better that the person finding is famous on its own; but that's equivalent to having lots of money for buying lots of underpriced items for scalping.
Well, if you free yourself of the narrow confines of american-libertarian thinking;-) you would notice that Wikipedia *is* a free market in the best of its definitions. Just because you're under the misconception that what is not paid in dollars has no value, doesn't means that there isn't a market interchange with signaling and interchange processes going on. In information economies the most scarce value is human attention, and that's just the interchange format of this market. More valuable than dollars, and more evenly distributed as well.
Thanks to the Free-as-in-speech license, users for whom information is mission-critical *can* put old-world green-money investing it for buying people's attention to test the truth of that information. Thanks to Wikipedia being Free, there's no compelling for it to be "bucks-free". Also, thanks to the GPL-like nature of that license, the results of that investment are required to be given back to the wiki-market if they want them to be published.
Of course "flamers" who supply misleading information also has their fair share of attention to spend, so it just happens that this free market adjusts to their needs and wants as well as those of the people using it for mission critical tasks. The market is being efficient in doing this, but it doesn't need to match *your* definition of efficiency. That information has been put there from people who invested their valued attention, and that's the value that you'll extract from it. But maybe you value money more than people's wants?
you instead assert that etymology is a rather dull, uninteresting part of lingusitics and really not a central problem of the field as some people seem to think. [my emphasis]
Good. Now replace "some people" with "most of the people writing the 'linguistics' articles for Wikipedia," and we'll be getting somewhere...
Isn't it just natural that a documentation work reflects the views of the majority of people working on it?
I have some ideas of how to fix the sort of problem that I pointed out here with the linguistics entries, which is to classify a lot of articles currently labeled as "linguistics" with another term: "traditional grammar." However, actually doing that would be a lot of work; and potentially most of it would be thankless maintenance work
There's a third explanation and you would never think of it. People are naturally selfish, and some of us are afraid of what could happen to us if we ever were in a position with no money at all, and no means to take care for ourselves.
So we stablish a system in which a part of the money earned by capable people don't belong to them but get into a common fund from which it's given to people who can't earn it. That way, if we are in that position with no money for ourselves, we can take something from the common fund. And thus, while we can earn money, we see paying some of this as just fair. (And since that money doesn't belong to anybody to begin with, it isn't theft at all).
I have found that one could seriously argue that ALL IP law is harmful to society, NOT helpful.
Something that I've never understood is how do (internet-era) libertarians differentiate from Intellectual Property and all other kinds of property? I find that both have the same theoretical fundations. So should we made a different treatment just because of the undesired output of defending IP? If that is the case, shouldn't we also differentiate when other kinds of property have undesired results?
As for their surprise, I'm going with a new version of the popular Eye Toy being part of the basic PS3 bundle and perhaps being touted as an intrinsic part of the PS3 experience.
Actually that's not far fetched at all - the eye toy is the kind of controller which could compete with the one of the Revolution. It provides for new gameplay mechanics (something that a classic controles won't do), its only hardware requirement is just a cheap webcam, and it has been already quite tested on the market. It even was rumored on early designs to be bundled with the PS3, so it is quite possible that they take again the idea.
Any changes in UI or operation will require much more retraining than you think.
Not *any* changes. There are kinds of changes that will be instantly grasped by any user because they eliminate burdens for human perceptual and cognitive capacities, eliminating a previous barrier to a task. Like, for example, taking a obscure 3-level-deep menu command and automatically putting it in front of the user when she need it. Or showing a graphic preview of the result of a applying command before you actually select it.
Both of which, btw, is what MS Office 12 does; no one will complain to that improvements. This is also the approach that Google took and why users changed in mass from previous search engines - there really wasn't anything to learn despite they had to change the interface they used.
You can be sure that MS has thoroughly tested this interface and make sure that it doesn't need user retraining, eliminating confusing elements through several design iterations; this is how good UI design is done nowadays.
...except for the part of making it extremely precise, which would take more that throwing in stock pieces. I don't know what's the overall precision of 3D motion sensors, but it surely would take a lot of testing to make them work properly.
Changes to the Office 12 UI are not that radical, they're just making the context menu always on-screen - and adding big icons and a "preview results" feature to the menu commands.
Such minor changes are a BIG improvement in usability, but that's only because the previous usability sucked. End users will require little to no retraining - the interface is designed for that.
Changes on the file format, that might require a big retraining for developers (but not for the Office final users).
When is the gaming industry going to start introducing original games and not producing sequels just for the sake of production and/or profit?
Why stopping one of those trends, when industry can do both?
What kind of game do you enjoy?
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Good games (and specially videogames) entail a great deal of simulation of reality: they are bits of everyday life simplified for casual enjoyment.
What do you feel is more important for a game to be great and/or successful: that the bits of reality captured in the simulation will create an environment with interesting and complex possibilities, or that the game mechanics are fun and easy to grasp?
Is balance required between these two design forces? And which of the two do you enjoy most in your own experiences as game user? (provided that you actually enjoy playing games and not just design them!)
They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.
They do that because users understand spreadsheets and they don't understand databases. No, really.
A spreadsheet is a good prototyping tool, it doesn't force structure on your data - you can play with it and throw it lots of data dumps, reformat them, reposition them, and the overall structure of the data emerges from all that dirty work. Contrast this with a database in which the first thing you have to do is define the schema - before even you can type in the first data instance.
So users choose not to change because they're using what works best for them. Spreadsheets are a really good metaphor for user development of datasets - its just that for the final version you should use a proper storage technology (a database), but to do that you really need an expert programmer.
From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use....just now that MS Office has totally updated its interface and made it greatly simplified and easier (I've seen the videos, and it does). I'm not MS fan, but I recognize when they do a good job in usability. This time they got it right.
It's a shame that OOo will have to start the catch-up game again, and it's a shame because FOSS should be the one leading in discovering new ways of interaction (fortunately, there are areas where it does).
So is it possible to design a system that's suits both beginners and professionals? (No t33n-N30, the answer isn't Pr3f3r3nc3Zz!!!!!!!! 1337-H4XX0R5!!!.) That's funny....I was under the impression that preferences were exactly the answer to this issue.
No. You're thinking of programmability, which is not the same as preferences. A professional can program the system to accomplish any needed task. Preferences don't solve new tasks, they allow you to be comfortable when performing existing tasks (and they're way overused in current systems).
A well designed system should NOT use preferences for atomic tasks (these should be designed to be always comfortable), and complex tasks should be full-blown programmable, not just comfigurable through preferences.
You should also have a look at Archy (also by Jef Raskin), a modern multimedia environment based on the same principles as the Canon Cat. (It's a shame that it's in alpha and few FOSS developers seem to care about it).
Meanwhile you could go and try this interface, which is not *his* but does solve absolutly all of his concerns. (It's a shame that it's in alpha and few FOSS developers seem to care about it).
Did you note that you don't need to give an EXACT answer to qualify as human? Saying just "Because it's background noise? Well, no, because other background noises (e.g., a lawnmower or some co-workers' chatter) annoy me. What then? I have no clue" would have allowed you to pass the Turing Test. So the question was just fine, and the original answer was bot-likely stupid.
BTW, using images would put it out of the scope of the original form of the Test.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the "easiest" (and therefore the "best") user interface will be the one that is as close to 100% identical to the only one they've used before.
That's false. The best interface is one that reflects the user expectations. The Windows interface doesn't reflect user expectations in many ways, so it's possible to create a better interface than one which is just identical.
That should be the aim for the Linux Desktop design, not just to attract former Windows users but to best serve previous Linux users as well.
In some ways yes, in the areas where the Windows interface makes sense.
Yes, it's easier for us to work with, but again, I don't see that as evidence why natural laws should be simple or elegant.
That's because there's nothing in science *requiring* natural laws to be simple or elegant. Indeed, there *are* natural laws which aren't simple nor elegant at all (have you studied probability?).
But if there are two laws describing a phenomena equally well, and one is simple and elegant while the other is complex and bizarre, we stick to the simple one because *it works better for doing science*. It's just a heuristic for getting best results quickly, not a scientific fact. And, since heuristics do fail sometimes, you always have the option of reverting to the complex theory if the simple happens to be incorrect.
The rule for "simple and elegant" is actually broken by many people in computer science quite often - it's sort of a exploratory game for discovering new concepts by pushing the known limits.
You didn't understand a single comma of what I wrote. That's why you simply don't get the open source economy model - you keep comparing it to communism when it is simply not the same thing. Open source is pure "Smithsonian" self-interest in action: the benefits of developing and using it are not merely "the pleasure of serving your community ", but the very tangible profit of getting an improved code & content at low or no cost, in a way that is scalable - something impossible in a money-based market.
Human attention is valuable because of the products it can achieve. It's the most versatile resource in the universe, and as such is a very good interchange good.
FYI the scientific peer-reviewed freely-published-research model is more than 200 years old and growing, thank you very much. Free open source relies on the very same principles. (And you already should know that charging for the scientific papers themselves does hurt researchers performance - i.e. it's not the most efficient way of funding this research).
I don't believe the attention market is that different. Philosophically speaking, money is valuable because of the yearning it produces in people's minds, not because of its material content. Value in a market is a matter of beliefs.
The problem is that whilst each page does have a value in terms of human attention, its value is not obvious to potential buyers.
Price is not the same as value; the only obvious one is the first one (if the object is tagged). A very highly priced item could be of little value; so value can also be difficult to determine. On the other hand, there are obvious signs for when either an item or a Wikipedia article might be valuable - expensive materials and fine design on the first, lots of content and a good structure on the second.
if something is underpriced a single agent can buy huge quantities and the price will adjust.
This happens mainly because commercial markets are fairly well known; otherwise none would risk to buy huge quantities of items for which she doesn't have any utility.
In the future similar processes could apply to attention economies. For example
I think memetic propagation can achieve a similar result to that leveling: if some valuable content is under-reported, someone who finds it can link to it and publicize it; then network effects can make it enormously popular in a few hours.
For this to happen it's better that the person finding is famous on its own; but that's equivalent to having lots of money for buying lots of underpriced items for scalping.
Well, if you free yourself of the narrow confines of american-libertarian thinking ;-) you would notice that Wikipedia *is* a free market in the best of its definitions. Just because you're under the misconception that what is not paid in dollars has no value, doesn't means that there isn't a market interchange with signaling and interchange processes going on. In information economies the most scarce value is human attention, and that's just the interchange format of this market. More valuable than dollars, and more evenly distributed as well.
Thanks to the Free-as-in-speech license, users for whom information is mission-critical *can* put old-world green-money investing it for buying people's attention to test the truth of that information. Thanks to Wikipedia being Free, there's no compelling for it to be "bucks-free". Also, thanks to the GPL-like nature of that license, the results of that investment are required to be given back to the wiki-market if they want them to be published.
Of course "flamers" who supply misleading information also has their fair share of attention to spend, so it just happens that this free market adjusts to their needs and wants as well as those of the people using it for mission critical tasks. The market is being efficient in doing this, but it doesn't need to match *your* definition of efficiency. That information has been put there from people who invested their valued attention, and that's the value that you'll extract from it. But maybe you value money more than people's wants?
you instead assert that etymology is a rather dull, uninteresting part of lingusitics and really not a central problem of the field as some people seem to think. [my emphasis]
Good. Now replace "some people" with "most of the people writing the 'linguistics' articles for Wikipedia," and we'll be getting somewhere...
Isn't it just natural that a documentation work reflects the views of the majority of people working on it?
I have some ideas of how to fix the sort of problem that I pointed out here with the linguistics entries, which is to classify a lot of articles currently labeled as "linguistics" with another term: "traditional grammar." However, actually doing that would be a lot of work; and potentially most of it would be thankless maintenance work
It surely would be a lot of work, but it shouldn't be done by just one person. Maintenance work should be organized to be done in a distributed manner; that's Wikipedia's strength. Wikipedia has a procedure to tackle those high level organizational problems. See the WikiProject Comics as an example, and some tips on how to start a WikiProject.
There's a third explanation and you would never think of it. People are naturally selfish, and some of us are afraid of what could happen to us if we ever were in a position with no money at all, and no means to take care for ourselves.
So we stablish a system in which a part of the money earned by capable people don't belong to them but get into a common fund from which it's given to people who can't earn it. That way, if we are in that position with no money for ourselves, we can take something from the common fund. And thus, while we can earn money, we see paying some of this as just fair. (And since that money doesn't belong to anybody to begin with, it isn't theft at all).
...the main problem then being "on time to compete with Nintendo Revolution"?
I have found that one could seriously argue that ALL IP law is harmful to society, NOT helpful.
Something that I've never understood is how do (internet-era) libertarians differentiate from Intellectual Property and all other kinds of property? I find that both have the same theoretical fundations. So should we made a different treatment just because of the undesired output of defending IP? If that is the case, shouldn't we also differentiate when other kinds of property have undesired results?
As for their surprise, I'm going with a new version of the popular Eye Toy being part of the basic PS3 bundle and perhaps being touted as an intrinsic part of the PS3 experience.
Actually that's not far fetched at all - the eye toy is the kind of controller which could compete with the one of the Revolution. It provides for new gameplay mechanics (something that a classic controles won't do), its only hardware requirement is just a cheap webcam, and it has been already quite tested on the market. It even was rumored on early designs to be bundled with the PS3, so it is quite possible that they take again the idea.
Any changes in UI or operation will require much more retraining than you think.
Not *any* changes. There are kinds of changes that will be instantly grasped by any user because they eliminate burdens for human perceptual and cognitive capacities, eliminating a previous barrier to a task. Like, for example, taking a obscure 3-level-deep menu command and automatically putting it in front of the user when she need it. Or showing a graphic preview of the result of a applying command before you actually select it.
Both of which, btw, is what MS Office 12 does; no one will complain to that improvements. This is also the approach that Google took and why users changed in mass from previous search engines - there really wasn't anything to learn despite they had to change the interface they used.
You can be sure that MS has thoroughly tested this interface and make sure that it doesn't need user retraining, eliminating confusing elements through several design iterations; this is how good UI design is done nowadays.
...except for the part of making it extremely precise, which would take more that throwing in stock pieces. I don't know what's the overall precision of 3D motion sensors, but it surely would take a lot of testing to make them work properly.
Changes to the Office 12 UI are not that radical, they're just making the context menu always on-screen - and adding big icons and a "preview results" feature to the menu commands.
Such minor changes are a BIG improvement in usability, but that's only because the previous usability sucked. End users will require little to no retraining - the interface is designed for that.
Changes on the file format, that might require a big retraining for developers (but not for the Office final users).
When is the gaming industry going to start introducing original games and not producing sequels just for the sake of production and/or profit?
Why stopping one of those trends, when industry can do both?
Good games (and specially videogames) entail a great deal of simulation of reality: they are bits of everyday life simplified for casual enjoyment.
What do you feel is more important for a game to be great and/or successful: that the bits of reality captured in the simulation will create an environment with interesting and complex possibilities, or that the game mechanics are fun and easy to grasp?
Is balance required between these two design forces? And which of the two do you enjoy most in your own experiences as game user? (provided that you actually enjoy playing games and not just design them!)
They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.
They do that because users understand spreadsheets and they don't understand databases. No, really.
A spreadsheet is a good prototyping tool, it doesn't force structure on your data - you can play with it and throw it lots of data dumps, reformat them, reposition them, and the overall structure of the data emerges from all that dirty work. Contrast this with a database in which the first thing you have to do is define the schema - before even you can type in the first data instance.
So users choose not to change because they're using what works best for them. Spreadsheets are a really good metaphor for user development of datasets - its just that for the final version you should use a proper storage technology (a database), but to do that you really need an expert programmer.
From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use. ...just now that MS Office has totally updated its interface and made it greatly simplified and easier (I've seen the videos, and it does). I'm not MS fan, but I recognize when they do a good job in usability. This time they got it right.
It's a shame that OOo will have to start the catch-up game again, and it's a shame because FOSS should be the one leading in discovering new ways of interaction (fortunately, there are areas where it does).
Communism dosen't work because it is against nature.
Yeah, tell that to ants.
So is it possible to design a system that's suits both beginners and professionals? (No t33n-N30, the answer isn't Pr3f3r3nc3Zz!!!!!!!! 1337-H4XX0R5!!!.)
That's funny....I was under the impression that preferences were exactly the answer to this issue.
No. You're thinking of programmability, which is not the same as preferences. A professional can program the system to accomplish any needed task. Preferences don't solve new tasks, they allow you to be comfortable when performing existing tasks (and they're way overused in current systems).
A well designed system should NOT use preferences for atomic tasks (these should be designed to be always comfortable), and complex tasks should be full-blown programmable, not just comfigurable through preferences.
You should also have a look at Archy (also by Jef Raskin), a modern multimedia environment based on the same principles as the Canon Cat. (It's a shame that it's in alpha and few FOSS developers seem to care about it).
Meanwhile you could go and try this interface, which is not *his* but does solve absolutly all of his concerns. (It's a shame that it's in alpha and few FOSS developers seem to care about it).
Would you like to play a game of chess?
Who's to say I'm not effective?!!!??
Did you note that you don't need to give an EXACT answer to qualify as human? Saying just "Because it's background noise? Well, no, because other background noises (e.g., a lawnmower or some co-workers' chatter) annoy me. What then? I have no clue" would have allowed you to pass the Turing Test. So the question was just fine, and the original answer was bot-likely stupid.
BTW, using images would put it out of the scope of the original form of the Test.