I'd be facinated to hear exactly how you think this kind of incredibly flexible and quick-to-use functionality could be exposed in an easier-to-use manner.
Especially since a few modifications can make this vastly more powerful (say, use ls|grep foo|xargs grep shaman to search for all files containing "shaman" with "foo" or "bar" in their name. This sort of thing would take much more manual effort under, say, Windows.
Graphic designers generally suck at user interface design.
User interface design is wildly different from graphic design. As a matter of fact, there are probably more industrial designers that would do a better job of doing software user interface design than graphic designers.
I'd say that a lot of awful websites out there were due to people with traditional publishing and graphic design experience trying to apply old knowledge to the Web and failing.
1) Background noise. I have to ask people to repeat things in noisy environments, and I'm an organism that's very well adapted to speech recognition with stereo inputs and spatial processing. It's tough to expect a computer to do better. Existing computer interfaces are good for anything except an evironment where everything is violently shaking, perhaps.
2) Strain of continued use. I can type all day. Talking continuously all day long is a burden.
3) Ability to localize signal. If I'm using my computer with an interfact that broadcasts all over a shared medium (like aurally over a room where everyone must use the same environment to broadcast sound and listen), I run the risk of distracting other people, interfering with their own computer's speech recognition, and I run the risk of privacy issues (as people can *listen* to what I'm doing). I can pack people in a conference room and let them type on laptops -- having them all speaking would be very annoying.
A way that software might support this behavior would be the ability to create "usability reports" and file them in Sourceforge or Bugzilla, and have bugs that simply refer to elements in them.
Switch from windows to mac os, and you will find yourself in the same predicament of "having to read documentation".
Apple once held up the idea of the user never having to read a manual as a goal for their software.
Apple's now-unfortunately-defunct help system (Apple Guide) was what I consider to be one of the best UI creations in the desktop world. Microsoft took a "wizards" approach, where they slap a basic interface up to allow the user to accomplish a simple task. Often, if this was what the user wanted to do, they could accomplish the task quickly. Unfortunately, they had no idea what was done in the "regular" interface to accomplish this task. Their knowledge did not transition to the regular interface, they did not learn how to do something very similar but different from what the wizard allowed, and sometimes they couldn't figure out how to accomplish the a particular element that they could manage through the wizard in the regular interface. In short, Microsoft gave the user a fish.
Apple Guide was a much, much better design for the user in the long term, though it might be less immediately satisfying. Instead of popping up a wzard that hid the regular interface, Apple Guide walked the user through accomplishing a task *with the regular interface* so that they learned how to use the regular interface. This is much slower the first time or perhaps two times, but after that the user knows how to accomplish his task using the regular interface. It is much easier for him to become an "expert" with the software, and he requires less technical support in using the software.
Actually, I'd say that Apple's UI standards have gone downhill since the old days -- it was the reason that a lot of people weren't happy with OS X when it came out. It had more emphasis on eye candy, and not the old "usability above all else" that once characterized Apple.
I spoke with one of Apple's UI engineers about this (or OS experience engineers, or something similar -- Apple has wonky title schemes). He was part of the "new school" that I'm not a huge fan of, and criticized the old Apple UI engineers as "dinosaurs that always have to try to get things absolutely perfect and take forever to do so". He advocated the new approach, which was "throw something in and see how users react". While that approach does have merits, it's *not* how Apple impressed me for over a decade.
Ugh. Please don't let PHBs run the show... that's how we get Microsoft Bob (that's not why MS are successful, anyway. It's because they're primarily a marketing company rather than a technical company... it doesn't matter how bad it is they convince millions of people they want it).
It is useful to have input from less technically-ept people, though, even if they aren't running the show.
Is it just me or are video games way ahead of other apps on user interface.
I think it's just you, but let's take a look.
Let's take an old RTS, say Command and Conquer. The designers figured out how to make a USEABLE virual desktop that DOESN'T SUCK! You can navigate around this huge screenspace and the radar keeps track of where you are.
The goals of C&C are not that of a desktop. You can do C&C-style virtual desktop stuff by just having an enormous virtual desktop under xorg -- move your mouse to the side of the screen and it scrolls. It's not that popular -- people usually use multiple viewports. Among other things:
C&C has a very simple imaging model -- just the locations of some static sprites. It doesn't have any sub-processes running. To try to scroll a pixel at a time in xorg or Windows (assuming you aren't using the abovementioned large virtual desktop), and you'll have a ton of different processes having to redraw windows. You could use the Mac OS X approach of buffering everything, but that consumes huge amounts of memory.
C&C users are always using their mouse. They never need to type for a while, and thus have no reason to "throw their mouse to the side of the screen", as many windowing environment users like to do.
The tasks windowing environment users are doing are frequently more complex than C&C users (such as working on data in both a web brower and a word processor). Certain configurability is provided to help deal with this, like the ability to layer windows and place them spatially close to each other, so that no edge flipping is required. In C&C, if one is working with two things on different parts of the map, there is no dragging -- one must scroll.
You can navigate around this huge screenspace and the radar keeps track of where you are.
Almost every virtual desktop environment that I've seen has a pager.
Also, how do they handle things similar to launching apps? Well there's a sidebar full of big easy to distinguish one click icons, and a set of tabs at the top that switches what set of icons is displayed by type (units, buildings, etc). Seems pretty easy to figure out to me.
People have added docks to windowing environments. Basically, the main problem is that unlike C&C, one doesn't require very-low-latency access to start apps (one doesn't start apps as frequently as one queues up more units in C&C). One does use the additional screen space effectively, though. Also, even in C&C, scrolling the dock could become a problem, and I have vastly more applications than C&C does buttons.
Want to quickly get back to the thing you were last working on? You can designate hotkeys with ctrl+number an then pressing the number jumps back to it.
Not a bad idea. A few window managers can do this.
One of the things that keeps me happier with windows than linux is the at least moderate effort at standardized interfaces. Most apps of simlar types have similar interfaces and I don't have to relearn all the terms that someone decided to use THEIR names for.
Ironically enough, Microsoft makes up quite a bit of unnecessary terminology for their own software.
Every time I see a custom media player or something with this horrible neo-future interface on windows I cringe, because it's such a bad idea.
That's ironic -- I would have said that Linux is ahead here. Of the media players that I know of for Linux, there is xmms (pretty much identically bad to Winamp 2, and Winamp 3 is much worse from a consistency standpoint, much like Sonique). Other than that, most people use a *single* other application under linux (mplayer or VLC or xine) that plays all their media with the same interface. Under Windows, users need to learn QuickTime (bad interface), Windows Media Player 9 (bad interface), RealPlayer (really bad interface), and whatever their DVD players is (thus far, all the DVD p
Many open source projects have unfinished features, differing UI conventions and throw the user curve balls. This can be expected for testing and non stable releases. However any release labled stable build or 1.0 and so on should have a clear consistent UI and NO I repeat NO unfinished features.
Frankly, I've found commercial software to generally be worse off with v1.0 releases. There are lots of pieces of OSS that slowly climb the ladder towards version 1 for a *long* time.
I have seen this interface used occasionally before (a Linux audio package, forget the name, and in Spreadsheet 2000).
It's largely useful when the main point of your application is configuring data flow, when the programs being written are fairly short, and when many people will look at your program (and thus an easily-read visual representation is valuable).
I don't agree that discoverability is necessarily a good thing to hold up as a high goal. I think that it tends to compromise other, more important things.
The most discoverable interfaces that I've seen (and obviously, this is an extreme case) is in graphics software produced by HSC/Metacreations. For example, in KPT Convolver, doing various things in the software periodically "unlocked" new features if it found you using related features. The problem? It was a pain for people that just wanted to use those features.
Microsoft puts a large emphasis on "discoverability" (much as Apple (used to) put emphasis on "intuitiveness"). I've largely been unhappy with the interfaces Microsoft has come up with. The problem is that they tend to de-emphasize the quick finding of an interface element for those people that *know* what they're looking for. For example, I know one person who wanted to run their "disk clean up" suite. The only way he knew how to invoke it was the obviously discoverability-oriented method of filling up the disk until a warning came up.
(1) Context menus. Don't make entries disappear, dammit! Ghost them out. That way the user knows the thing is possible, even if it's not possible "right now". And you can learn their position.
Moving context menu items is a bad idea. Sounds interesting, yes, but as can be seen from Microsoft's failed "smart menu" metaphor, learning something that can be re-used and everywhere is more important than the time that it would take if there was no learning and we were just trying to minimize seek time each time we use a feature. Do not hide menu items, do not re-order them.
(4) Affordances. Make it clear that things are clickable. A simple bevel frame around a button might be ugly to you for some reason. But then make a prettier button, don't try and disguise the _fact_ it's a button and supposed to be clickable! This is the #1 sin of many a "skinnable" UI skin. Perhaps unlike many, I don't necessarily disagree with skinnable UIs. But then the skin needs to be designed for discoverability as well or better than an ordinary GUI!
This is an interesting problem. Apple heavily considered this in their UI design, and thanks to the fact that they did so, people that copied Apple interface design largely had good interfaces for a while.
When the web came along, there were suddenly a huge mass of people, many of whom were graphic artists (not *interface designers*) who thought that "flashy" was appealing and equated to good interface design. And they made many, many clickable things that were not obviously clickable (the imagemap was one of the more commonly-used tools here). This is a pretty high sin in GUI design, where the goal is to quickly present all the available options to those people that are not yet familiar with what they are.
The solution came in the form of a technical fix -- rollovers. The designers could just make everything that could be clicked animate or change when the mouse rolled over it to designate it as clickable. This was a *terrible* UI convention, since it meant that in order to get a full listing of choices, one had to pan the mouse back and forth across the screen. Furthermore, the constant flashing and animation was extremely distracting -- normally, changing state on the screen is *rarely* used in UI, so that it may be reserved for cases where attention is immediately required, or where there is only a single point that requires attention that must be quickly located. The flashing cursor, for example.
Microsoft, in their "the operating system is like the web" days, when they were inextricably tying MSIE to Windows and worried about Netscape, unfortunately put some web designer type in charge of their UI design, and designed that rollovers would be *great* for toolbar buttons. They hid the dark outlines around the buttons that *used* to be the visual cue for something being clickable, and only made it visible w
This is a pretty major benefit, especially on a large scale and in the long term.
It also allows an organization to fix bugs even if a vendor goes out of business.
It's also just plain more economically efficient.
These are major pragmatic reasons to use open-source software. Even if a package is slightly less featureful, the fact that it can be steadily improved and there is no lock-in to it is a significant draw.
It has even gotten to the point where idiots like "Brotha Lynch Hung" say things like "Take ya glock off safety", but, as anyone who has ever held a Glock pistol will tell you, there is no external safety on a Glock this gangsta thug has just exposed himself as a poseur.
Just out of curiosity...
a) What would make being "the real thing" so fantastic?
b) What generation hasn't had some sort of silly set of idols? What generation hasn't looked for "style over substance"?
I think the reason that idol emulation is so silly today is that the people being emulated are generally movie characters or music characters, which are over-the-top people that aren't exactly living out human lives (particularly in their movies) and emulation of them can come off as a bit more obvious than emulation of people in real life.
So, essentially what Steve Allison from Midway is saying is that Midway has sold out and are adopting the grow the company, mainstream marketing bit.
And what content publishers of any sort in any market haven't "sold out"? They're a *business*. They're out to make money. That may well involve marketing.
It's not as if marketing of some sort hasn't swept every generation of teens off their feet.
There would be an emotional scar because sexual abuse is more than just a "taboo." A young child would be horribly disturbed by the act of a grown man ejaculating in their face.
Why? They aren't scarred by the killing and eating of other sentient, feeling living beings.
They aren't scarred (well, in the mental manner at hand) by having living parts of them removed (appendix, circumcision, etc).
Of course, there *are* places and families in the world where this *would* be considered barbaric and horribly emotionally and mentally damaging [many non-Judeo-Christian locations for circumcision, certain sects that have issue with common medical practices for appendix removal, ethically vegetarian or vegan families or groups for the eating of animals) behavior -- simply because those are the social mores of that location, and they choose to consider such things taboo.
What makes this particular experience a mentally scarring one?
That's unhealthy,
I suppose I can understand a claim of it being a disease vector, but there's an awful lot of ways that diseases can be transfered -- anything that can live in the respiratory tract is nicely cultured on doorknobs, desks, and telephones. Anyone that skateboards, rollerblades, or bicycles has ripped open parts of their body, and exposed themselves to organism transfer into their blood.
I'm not saying that there isn't merit to the argument, but neither do I consider it overwhelming and worthy of a taboo of the strength involved.
immoral,
[shrug] That's a bit of a cop out -- it just says "I happened to have decided that this is bad, and will not justify why." What about it has made you decide to consider it imooral?
vulgar,
Vulgarity is simply a statement as to the value placed on an action relative to your social mores. In some places, it's vulgar to burp after eating food... in other places, it's vulgar not to do so.
disturbing
I would argue that this is determined by what taboos have been placed within your culture.
Pot has only a very minor impact on long-term memory (I was trying to argue against drug legalization in a debate once, and tried using the "long term damage" card). Turned out, once I actually read a couple of studies, that pot really isn't particularly damaging in the long term. I ended up being vaguely pro-legalization after also reading up on some of the less-than-savory politics involved with pot's delegalization.
I would suspect that the fact that you're smoking something that's unfiltered is a larger concern, but really, when it comes to long-term damage or addictive factor, pot simply doesn't compare with alcohol (can cause violent behavior and lack of inhibitions, damages the liver, slows reactions) or cigarettes (lung cancer is a major issue and very addictive).
I kind of wish that people wouldn't smoke pot, but it's on the same level that I wish people wouldn't watch football -- both "waste" time, but just aren't all that damaging.
I'm even a fan of the War on Drugs (how's that for not being a hippie) -- I'm just no longer convinced that pot is enough of a concern for it to be included in that war. The big problem that I have with drug abuse is the addictive nature. The efficiency of our economy and society depends on rational thought and addictions break that assumption. Pot just isn't addictive. Drink caffinated beverages, and you'll pick up more of an addiction.
And I've never smoked pot, nor consumed alcohol. I'm speaking with about as little of a bias as could be imagined.
Furthermore, DARE and a number of other anti-drug programs maintain marketing programs that I consider to be fairly dishonest -- I remember the images they had of "80s drug dealers" with claws and the like. It's just not good for a government to try to lie to its people -- it eliminates trust, and promotes cynicism.
Without the heavy taboos and social imfluence regarding oral sex, why would there be an emotional scar?
When I go to shower, I spray water on my body. Semen doesn't really have all that much practical difference. Humans regularly eat all the components of semen -- it's necessary for them to *produce* semen.
It's just that there's a huge degree of social fluff associated with sex.
Look at Victorian values -- in Victorian England, a woman's value was severely damaged once she had had sex. It was a reasonably arbitrary point. Our own social mores are no less abitrary.
And because it is much easier to say "You should never shoot anyone" than to explain the complexities of when, where and with who it is reasonable to have sex.
It seems like it would be a *good* thing to have parents explain their viewpoints on sex as much as possible, instead of letting their kids learn things the hard way (oh, if they want to take the hard route, then that's pretty much the way it's going to be, but it seems *inane* that we spend so much time trying to produce an ignorant society).
The amount of money and effort spent on trying to keep children ignorant of sex and sexually-related things in the United States is amazing. And it doesn't *keep* children from finding out about sex, because, well, sex is everywhere. Really, the main thing that it manages to isolate children from is their parents' values. A lot of children may have "The Conversation" with their parents and that's pretty much it when it comes to sex. They run out and are forced to form their own values. And the taboo makes it harder and harder for parents ever to talk about sexual subjects.
Remember that part of the maturity process is learning who to trust -- there are people that lie or are mistaken or simply have different values in everyone's life, and people (including children) learn how to evaluate which things they should ignore. If a parent simply says "You can't watch that." "Why?" "Because I said so.", then the child is not given any reason at all to trust that the person making the call is correct and not mistaken. As a matter of fact, they are inclined to think that they are *wrong*, since given the child's current values and mindset, what they were doing is clearly desireable -- they were doing it. This just teaches the child to ignore or bypass what people say on the subject, just as they learn to ignore the advertisers on TV that say that "this gum is the coolest thing ever".
Why? Because we speak with our children all the time about how people should act and how they should treat other people.
I really wish that there were more people like you.
The answer is never to isolate people from content, to keep them from learning how to deal with it. It's to teach them to be able to handle it and explain and justify *why* you think some actions are bad. It means that kids can always come talk to their parents about something without worries that they're just going to get chewed out or banned from viewing material. If a parent thinks that, say, using drugs is undesireable, it's infinitely better for them to tell their kids why, be honest, and explain their viewpoint as much as possible instead of trying to simply impose it on their kids. That results in a child that can learn to trust his parents judgement (and someday, when to make his own decisions), and someone who learns to justify his own choices.
If every parent acted like this, with a degree of fundamental honesty and openness, I think that a huge degree of awfulness in American society would go away.
You're trying to apply social pressure to eliminate an act that people perform in private (download pirated music to their computers).
It's not going to work. Why bother? I mean, yeah, sure, if everyone took a particular action, IP would work. Same goes for communism -- if nobody became unmotivated in a communist nation, communism would work fine.
The problem probably cannot be stopped by politics, and likely not even significantly slowed.
It *might* be solved by technology -- massive deployment of DRM-enabled hardware that focuses on preventing people from *playing* infringing content rather that keeping people from making initial copies of the content. I don't see that as very likely.
The problem is this, going way back:
Once upon a time, someone realized that free markets were a really neat system for efficiently producing commodity goods. They caught on, and everyone started using them. A bunch of people got pissed off about particular nasty problems that had cropped up when people managed to take advantage of free markets (for example, free markets make certain assumptions, like complete information and rational actors, that are not always true). They tried to set up communism. It didn't work, because they failed to take into account another element of the system -- that people need positive feedback for doing the right thing. The production and sale of data became big. Fortunately, data replication was so expensive and hard to do that it was easy to tie the cost of the data production to the physical objects, and charge a fee at the time of the physical replication to cover the cost of both the replication and the initial creation of the data. We called the laws formalizing and supporting this "intellectual property" -- an attempt to introduce artificial scarcity, to retrofit scarcity into a system with no scarcity so that we could have a system to fund the production of more original content. This worked well for a while, but the cost of replicating data steadily fell. Machines helped, computers helped more, telecom helped more, and the Internet helped even more. However, for very massive distribution, there were still associated costs. Then P2P came along, and spread the cost of distribution among all the people obtaining data. At that point, the cost of distributing an arbitrary piece of data was effectively zero, so people could distribute anything, including data which used to be tied to physical objects, even if they didn't make a monetary profit in return. A number of the existing entities that depended upon such a system become upset, and tried to introduce "legal remedies", which would add a cost to distribution to the point that again content creation could be funded using the same old system. Unfortunately for them, it was very difficult to globally adjust the cost of every actor's actions -- this was the difficulty of enforcing laws like the one being introduced now.
I think that the free-market method of funding content production is probably dead in the long term, though perhaps not at present. The required scarcity is just not present. Tips might be introduced as a way of funding artists. Centralized production, where the government funds artists, might be possible. Perhaps some new economic system will be introduced -- something has to be done to fund new content production. But the era of free markets being applied to data is, well, over.
Why, then, can so few of you understand that stealing information is as harmful as stealing materials?
It's different. I don't think most folks here will defend copyright infringement as meaningless or intellectual property as inherently bad (though there are a few folks that feel that way).
However, copyright infringement *is* very different from theft, and should not be interchanged.
If I duplicate something of yours (while possibly infringing on a copyright), in the worst case I deprive you of a potential sale. As many people have pointed out, in many cases I do not even do that, if I would not have bought your original product. This clearly can damage the system that we use to fund content development, but the damages are obviously more limited.
If I steal something of yours, I deprive you of both the potential sale (without question) and the physical object.
The two crimes are *different*, and the cost of copyright infringement is never greater than that of stealing. In the worst cases, it can come close to, approximate the cost of stealing.
There are two variables involved -- whether people would actually have purchased the product, and what the materials cost of the good is. As you have pointed out, the materials cost of a photograph is very low relative to the purchase price. Furthermore, few people would steal a photograph except the people that were reasonably interested in it -- there are many photographs in the world, but only a few are of interest to any given person. Unless the photograph was simply priced too high for him to be willing to buy it, he would probably have made a sale.
The variables are very different in the music world. Trying out new music and collecting complete albums is of interest to a number of people. They would never collect all the photographs in the world, but many people do collect vast amounts of music. So the "deprived of a potential customer" factor is lower. In addition, while CDs are not that expensive, the distribution and production costs on a CD, the case, the shelf space, and so forth, and probably higher than those associated with a photograph. This makes the gap in damages between the different crimes of theft and copyright infringement greater than in the example of a photograph.
If the P2P companies wait around and the bill passes, then get one of the senators to publically state (maybe as part of a not-my-fault dealing with public reaction) that the letter played a role in their decision to make the bill.
At that point, the P2P companies have been dealt massive damage by this lobbyist, and the RIAA is subject to significant liability.
Of course, this is really just a useful last-ditch legal tactic for the P2P companies, if this stinker passes...
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a "roundedness" in education is no longer what people want. They want a degree that gets them a job making money.
Screw both roundedness and job training. I say study what you like.
That is a nice bit of interface work, but it's also a single very simple instance of what can be done with *IX command line.
ls -la |grep foo > foo.txt
I'd be facinated to hear exactly how you think this kind of incredibly flexible and quick-to-use functionality could be exposed in an easier-to-use manner.
Especially since a few modifications can make this vastly more powerful (say, use ls|grep foo|xargs grep shaman to search for all files containing "shaman" with "foo" or "bar" in their name. This sort of thing would take much more manual effort under, say, Windows.
Graphic designers generally suck at user interface design.
User interface design is wildly different from graphic design. As a matter of fact, there are probably more industrial designers that would do a better job of doing software user interface design than graphic designers.
I'd say that a lot of awful websites out there were due to people with traditional publishing and graphic design experience trying to apply old knowledge to the Web and failing.
Three major issues with voice:
1) Background noise. I have to ask people to repeat things in noisy environments, and I'm an organism that's very well adapted to speech recognition with stereo inputs and spatial processing. It's tough to expect a computer to do better. Existing computer interfaces are good for anything except an evironment where everything is violently shaking, perhaps.
2) Strain of continued use. I can type all day. Talking continuously all day long is a burden.
3) Ability to localize signal. If I'm using my computer with an interfact that broadcasts all over a shared medium (like aurally over a room where everyone must use the same environment to broadcast sound and listen), I run the risk of distracting other people, interfering with their own computer's speech recognition, and I run the risk of privacy issues (as people can *listen* to what I'm doing). I can pack people in a conference room and let them type on laptops -- having them all speaking would be very annoying.
True.
A way that software might support this behavior would be the ability to create "usability reports" and file them in Sourceforge or Bugzilla, and have bugs that simply refer to elements in them.
Switch from windows to mac os, and you will find yourself in the same predicament of "having to read documentation".
Apple once held up the idea of the user never having to read a manual as a goal for their software.
Apple's now-unfortunately-defunct help system (Apple Guide) was what I consider to be one of the best UI creations in the desktop world. Microsoft took a "wizards" approach, where they slap a basic interface up to allow the user to accomplish a simple task. Often, if this was what the user wanted to do, they could accomplish the task quickly. Unfortunately, they had no idea what was done in the "regular" interface to accomplish this task. Their knowledge did not transition to the regular interface, they did not learn how to do something very similar but different from what the wizard allowed, and sometimes they couldn't figure out how to accomplish the a particular element that they could manage through the wizard in the regular interface. In short, Microsoft gave the user a fish.
Apple Guide was a much, much better design for the user in the long term, though it might be less immediately satisfying. Instead of popping up a wzard that hid the regular interface, Apple Guide walked the user through accomplishing a task *with the regular interface* so that they learned how to use the regular interface. This is much slower the first time or perhaps two times, but after that the user knows how to accomplish his task using the regular interface. It is much easier for him to become an "expert" with the software, and he requires less technical support in using the software.
Actually, I'd say that Apple's UI standards have gone downhill since the old days -- it was the reason that a lot of people weren't happy with OS X when it came out. It had more emphasis on eye candy, and not the old "usability above all else" that once characterized Apple.
I spoke with one of Apple's UI engineers about this (or OS experience engineers, or something similar -- Apple has wonky title schemes). He was part of the "new school" that I'm not a huge fan of, and criticized the old Apple UI engineers as "dinosaurs that always have to try to get things absolutely perfect and take forever to do so". He advocated the new approach, which was "throw something in and see how users react". While that approach does have merits, it's *not* how Apple impressed me for over a decade.
Ugh. Please don't let PHBs run the show... that's how we get Microsoft Bob (that's not why MS are successful, anyway. It's because they're primarily a marketing company rather than a technical company... it doesn't matter how bad it is they convince millions of people they want it).
It is useful to have input from less technically-ept people, though, even if they aren't running the show.
Is it just me or are video games way ahead of other apps on user interface.
I think it's just you, but let's take a look.
Let's take an old RTS, say Command and Conquer. The designers figured out how to make a USEABLE virual desktop that DOESN'T SUCK! You can navigate around this huge screenspace and the radar keeps track of where you are.
The goals of C&C are not that of a desktop. You can do C&C-style virtual desktop stuff by just having an enormous virtual desktop under xorg -- move your mouse to the side of the screen and it scrolls. It's not that popular -- people usually use multiple viewports. Among other things:
C&C has a very simple imaging model -- just the locations of some static sprites. It doesn't have any sub-processes running. To try to scroll a pixel at a time in xorg or Windows (assuming you aren't using the abovementioned large virtual desktop), and you'll have a ton of different processes having to redraw windows. You could use the Mac OS X approach of buffering everything, but that consumes huge amounts of memory.
C&C users are always using their mouse. They never need to type for a while, and thus have no reason to "throw their mouse to the side of the screen", as many windowing environment users like to do.
The tasks windowing environment users are doing are frequently more complex than C&C users (such as working on data in both a web brower and a word processor). Certain configurability is provided to help deal with this, like the ability to layer windows and place them spatially close to each other, so that no edge flipping is required. In C&C, if one is working with two things on different parts of the map, there is no dragging -- one must scroll.
You can navigate around this huge screenspace and the radar keeps track of where you are.
Almost every virtual desktop environment that I've seen has a pager.
Also, how do they handle things similar to launching apps? Well there's a sidebar full of big easy to distinguish one click icons, and a set of tabs at the top that switches what set of icons is displayed by type (units, buildings, etc). Seems pretty easy to figure out to me.
People have added docks to windowing environments. Basically, the main problem is that unlike C&C, one doesn't require very-low-latency access to start apps (one doesn't start apps as frequently as one queues up more units in C&C). One does use the additional screen space effectively, though. Also, even in C&C, scrolling the dock could become a problem, and I have vastly more applications than C&C does buttons.
Want to quickly get back to the thing you were last working on? You can designate hotkeys with ctrl+number an then pressing the number jumps back to it.
Not a bad idea. A few window managers can do this.
One of the things that keeps me happier with windows than linux is the at least moderate effort at standardized interfaces. Most apps of simlar types have similar interfaces and I don't have to relearn all the terms that someone decided to use THEIR names for.
Ironically enough, Microsoft makes up quite a bit of unnecessary terminology for their own software.
Every time I see a custom media player or something with this horrible neo-future interface on windows I cringe, because it's such a bad idea.
That's ironic -- I would have said that Linux is ahead here. Of the media players that I know of for Linux, there is xmms (pretty much identically bad to Winamp 2, and Winamp 3 is much worse from a consistency standpoint, much like Sonique). Other than that, most people use a *single* other application under linux (mplayer or VLC or xine) that plays all their media with the same interface. Under Windows, users need to learn QuickTime (bad interface), Windows Media Player 9 (bad interface), RealPlayer (really bad interface), and whatever their DVD players is (thus far, all the DVD p
Many open source projects have unfinished features, differing UI conventions and throw the user curve balls. This can be expected for testing and non stable releases. However any release labled stable build or 1.0 and so on should have a clear consistent UI and NO I repeat NO unfinished features.
Frankly, I've found commercial software to generally be worse off with v1.0 releases. There are lots of pieces of OSS that slowly climb the ladder towards version 1 for a *long* time.
What would be wrong with incorporating speech recognition. "Mozilla, go to google, search for boobies".
Some of us don't want to hear this from our friends in the next cubicle all day.
Besides, I can type and mouse all day, but talking all day will get your throat raw.
I have seen this interface used occasionally before (a Linux audio package, forget the name, and in Spreadsheet 2000).
It's largely useful when the main point of your application is configuring data flow, when the programs being written are fairly short, and when many people will look at your program (and thus an easily-read visual representation is valuable).
but discoverability isn't.
I don't agree that discoverability is necessarily a good thing to hold up as a high goal. I think that it tends to compromise other, more important things.
The most discoverable interfaces that I've seen (and obviously, this is an extreme case) is in graphics software produced by HSC/Metacreations. For example, in KPT Convolver, doing various things in the software periodically "unlocked" new features if it found you using related features. The problem? It was a pain for people that just wanted to use those features.
Microsoft puts a large emphasis on "discoverability" (much as Apple (used to) put emphasis on "intuitiveness"). I've largely been unhappy with the interfaces Microsoft has come up with. The problem is that they tend to de-emphasize the quick finding of an interface element for those people that *know* what they're looking for. For example, I know one person who wanted to run their "disk clean up" suite. The only way he knew how to invoke it was the obviously discoverability-oriented method of filling up the disk until a warning came up.
(1) Context menus. Don't make entries disappear, dammit! Ghost them out. That way the user knows the thing is possible, even if it's not possible "right now". And you can learn their position.
Moving context menu items is a bad idea. Sounds interesting, yes, but as can be seen from Microsoft's failed "smart menu" metaphor, learning something that can be re-used and everywhere is more important than the time that it would take if there was no learning and we were just trying to minimize seek time each time we use a feature. Do not hide menu items, do not re-order them.
(4) Affordances. Make it clear that things are clickable. A simple bevel frame around a button might be ugly to you for some reason. But then make a prettier button, don't try and disguise the _fact_ it's a button and supposed to be clickable! This is the #1 sin of many a "skinnable" UI skin. Perhaps unlike many, I don't necessarily disagree with skinnable UIs. But then the skin needs to be designed for discoverability as well or better than an ordinary GUI!
This is an interesting problem. Apple heavily considered this in their UI design, and thanks to the fact that they did so, people that copied Apple interface design largely had good interfaces for a while.
When the web came along, there were suddenly a huge mass of people, many of whom were graphic artists (not *interface designers*) who thought that "flashy" was appealing and equated to good interface design. And they made many, many clickable things that were not obviously clickable (the imagemap was one of the more commonly-used tools here). This is a pretty high sin in GUI design, where the goal is to quickly present all the available options to those people that are not yet familiar with what they are.
The solution came in the form of a technical fix -- rollovers. The designers could just make everything that could be clicked animate or change when the mouse rolled over it to designate it as clickable. This was a *terrible* UI convention, since it meant that in order to get a full listing of choices, one had to pan the mouse back and forth across the screen. Furthermore, the constant flashing and animation was extremely distracting -- normally, changing state on the screen is *rarely* used in UI, so that it may be reserved for cases where attention is immediately required, or where there is only a single point that requires attention that must be quickly located. The flashing cursor, for example.
Microsoft, in their "the operating system is like the web" days, when they were inextricably tying MSIE to Windows and worried about Netscape, unfortunately put some web designer type in charge of their UI design, and designed that rollovers would be *great* for toolbar buttons. They hid the dark outlines around the buttons that *used* to be the visual cue for something being clickable, and only made it visible w
Open source largely disallows vendor lock-in.
This is a pretty major benefit, especially on a large scale and in the long term.
It also allows an organization to fix bugs even if a vendor goes out of business.
It's also just plain more economically efficient.
These are major pragmatic reasons to use open-source software. Even if a package is slightly less featureful, the fact that it can be steadily improved and there is no lock-in to it is a significant draw.
It has even gotten to the point where idiots like "Brotha Lynch Hung" say things like "Take ya glock off safety", but, as anyone who has ever held a Glock pistol will tell you, there is no external safety on a Glock this gangsta thug has just exposed himself as a poseur.
...
Just out of curiosity
a) What would make being "the real thing" so fantastic?
b) What generation hasn't had some sort of silly set of idols? What generation hasn't looked for "style over substance"?
I think the reason that idol emulation is so silly today is that the people being emulated are generally movie characters or music characters, which are over-the-top people that aren't exactly living out human lives (particularly in their movies) and emulation of them can come off as a bit more obvious than emulation of people in real life.
So, essentially what Steve Allison from Midway is saying is that Midway has sold out and are adopting the grow the company, mainstream marketing bit.
And what content publishers of any sort in any market haven't "sold out"? They're a *business*. They're out to make money. That may well involve marketing.
It's not as if marketing of some sort hasn't swept every generation of teens off their feet.
There would be an emotional scar because sexual abuse is more than just a "taboo." A young child would be horribly disturbed by the act of a grown man ejaculating in their face.
... in other places, it's vulgar not to do so.
Why? They aren't scarred by the killing and eating of other sentient, feeling living beings.
They aren't scarred (well, in the mental manner at hand) by having living parts of them removed (appendix, circumcision, etc).
Of course, there *are* places and families in the world where this *would* be considered barbaric and horribly emotionally and mentally damaging [many non-Judeo-Christian locations for circumcision, certain sects that have issue with common medical practices for appendix removal, ethically vegetarian or vegan families or groups for the eating of animals) behavior -- simply because those are the social mores of that location, and they choose to consider such things taboo.
What makes this particular experience a mentally scarring one?
That's unhealthy,
I suppose I can understand a claim of it being a disease vector, but there's an awful lot of ways that diseases can be transfered -- anything that can live in the respiratory tract is nicely cultured on doorknobs, desks, and telephones. Anyone that skateboards, rollerblades, or bicycles has ripped open parts of their body, and exposed themselves to organism transfer into their blood.
I'm not saying that there isn't merit to the argument, but neither do I consider it overwhelming and worthy of a taboo of the strength involved.
immoral,
[shrug] That's a bit of a cop out -- it just says "I happened to have decided that this is bad, and will not justify why." What about it has made you decide to consider it imooral?
vulgar,
Vulgarity is simply a statement as to the value placed on an action relative to your social mores. In some places, it's vulgar to burp after eating food
disturbing
I would argue that this is determined by what taboos have been placed within your culture.
Pot has only a very minor impact on long-term memory (I was trying to argue against drug legalization in a debate once, and tried using the "long term damage" card). Turned out, once I actually read a couple of studies, that pot really isn't particularly damaging in the long term. I ended up being vaguely pro-legalization after also reading up on some of the less-than-savory politics involved with pot's delegalization.
I would suspect that the fact that you're smoking something that's unfiltered is a larger concern, but really, when it comes to long-term damage or addictive factor, pot simply doesn't compare with alcohol (can cause violent behavior and lack of inhibitions, damages the liver, slows reactions) or cigarettes (lung cancer is a major issue and very addictive).
I kind of wish that people wouldn't smoke pot, but it's on the same level that I wish people wouldn't watch football -- both "waste" time, but just aren't all that damaging.
I'm even a fan of the War on Drugs (how's that for not being a hippie) -- I'm just no longer convinced that pot is enough of a concern for it to be included in that war. The big problem that I have with drug abuse is the addictive nature. The efficiency of our economy and society depends on rational thought and addictions break that assumption. Pot just isn't addictive. Drink caffinated beverages, and you'll pick up more of an addiction.
And I've never smoked pot, nor consumed alcohol. I'm speaking with about as little of a bias as could be imagined.
Furthermore, DARE and a number of other anti-drug programs maintain marketing programs that I consider to be fairly dishonest -- I remember the images they had of "80s drug dealers" with claws and the like. It's just not good for a government to try to lie to its people -- it eliminates trust, and promotes cynicism.
An emotional scar is worse than a physical one.
Without the heavy taboos and social imfluence regarding oral sex, why would there be an emotional scar?
When I go to shower, I spray water on my body. Semen doesn't really have all that much practical difference. Humans regularly eat all the components of semen -- it's necessary for them to *produce* semen.
It's just that there's a huge degree of social fluff associated with sex.
Look at Victorian values -- in Victorian England, a woman's value was severely damaged once she had had sex. It was a reasonably arbitrary point. Our own social mores are no less abitrary.
And because it is much easier to say "You should never shoot anyone" than to explain the complexities of when, where and with who it is reasonable to have sex.
It seems like it would be a *good* thing to have parents explain their viewpoints on sex as much as possible, instead of letting their kids learn things the hard way (oh, if they want to take the hard route, then that's pretty much the way it's going to be, but it seems *inane* that we spend so much time trying to produce an ignorant society).
The amount of money and effort spent on trying to keep children ignorant of sex and sexually-related things in the United States is amazing. And it doesn't *keep* children from finding out about sex, because, well, sex is everywhere. Really, the main thing that it manages to isolate children from is their parents' values. A lot of children may have "The Conversation" with their parents and that's pretty much it when it comes to sex. They run out and are forced to form their own values. And the taboo makes it harder and harder for parents ever to talk about sexual subjects.
Remember that part of the maturity process is learning who to trust -- there are people that lie or are mistaken or simply have different values in everyone's life, and people (including children) learn how to evaluate which things they should ignore. If a parent simply says "You can't watch that." "Why?" "Because I said so.", then the child is not given any reason at all to trust that the person making the call is correct and not mistaken. As a matter of fact, they are inclined to think that they are *wrong*, since given the child's current values and mindset, what they were doing is clearly desireable -- they were doing it. This just teaches the child to ignore or bypass what people say on the subject, just as they learn to ignore the advertisers on TV that say that "this gum is the coolest thing ever".
Why? Because we speak with our children all the time about how people should act and how they should treat other people.
I really wish that there were more people like you.
The answer is never to isolate people from content, to keep them from learning how to deal with it. It's to teach them to be able to handle it and explain and justify *why* you think some actions are bad. It means that kids can always come talk to their parents about something without worries that they're just going to get chewed out or banned from viewing material. If a parent thinks that, say, using drugs is undesireable, it's infinitely better for them to tell their kids why, be honest, and explain their viewpoint as much as possible instead of trying to simply impose it on their kids. That results in a child that can learn to trust his parents judgement (and someday, when to make his own decisions), and someone who learns to justify his own choices.
If every parent acted like this, with a degree of fundamental honesty and openness, I think that a huge degree of awfulness in American society would go away.
I salute you, sir.
You're trying to apply social pressure to eliminate an act that people perform in private (download pirated music to their computers).
It's not going to work. Why bother? I mean, yeah, sure, if everyone took a particular action, IP would work. Same goes for communism -- if nobody became unmotivated in a communist nation, communism would work fine.
The problem probably cannot be stopped by politics, and likely not even significantly slowed.
It *might* be solved by technology -- massive deployment of DRM-enabled hardware that focuses on preventing people from *playing* infringing content rather that keeping people from making initial copies of the content. I don't see that as very likely.
The problem is this, going way back:
Once upon a time, someone realized that free markets were a really neat system for efficiently producing commodity goods. They caught on, and everyone started using them. A bunch of people got pissed off about particular nasty problems that had cropped up when people managed to take advantage of free markets (for example, free markets make certain assumptions, like complete information and rational actors, that are not always true). They tried to set up communism. It didn't work, because they failed to take into account another element of the system -- that people need positive feedback for doing the right thing. The production and sale of data became big. Fortunately, data replication was so expensive and hard to do that it was easy to tie the cost of the data production to the physical objects, and charge a fee at the time of the physical replication to cover the cost of both the replication and the initial creation of the data. We called the laws formalizing and supporting this "intellectual property" -- an attempt to introduce artificial scarcity, to retrofit scarcity into a system with no scarcity so that we could have a system to fund the production of more original content. This worked well for a while, but the cost of replicating data steadily fell. Machines helped, computers helped more, telecom helped more, and the Internet helped even more. However, for very massive distribution, there were still associated costs. Then P2P came along, and spread the cost of distribution among all the people obtaining data. At that point, the cost of distributing an arbitrary piece of data was effectively zero, so people could distribute anything, including data which used to be tied to physical objects, even if they didn't make a monetary profit in return. A number of the existing entities that depended upon such a system become upset, and tried to introduce "legal remedies", which would add a cost to distribution to the point that again content creation could be funded using the same old system. Unfortunately for them, it was very difficult to globally adjust the cost of every actor's actions -- this was the difficulty of enforcing laws like the one being introduced now.
I think that the free-market method of funding content production is probably dead in the long term, though perhaps not at present. The required scarcity is just not present. Tips might be introduced as a way of funding artists. Centralized production, where the government funds artists, might be possible. Perhaps some new economic system will be introduced -- something has to be done to fund new content production. But the era of free markets being applied to data is, well, over.
Why, then, can so few of you understand that stealing information is as harmful as stealing materials?
It's different. I don't think most folks here will defend copyright infringement as meaningless or intellectual property as inherently bad (though there are a few folks that feel that way).
However, copyright infringement *is* very different from theft, and should not be interchanged.
If I duplicate something of yours (while possibly infringing on a copyright), in the worst case I deprive you of a potential sale. As many people have pointed out, in many cases I do not even do that, if I would not have bought your original product. This clearly can damage the system that we use to fund content development, but the damages are obviously more limited.
If I steal something of yours, I deprive you of both the potential sale (without question) and the physical object.
The two crimes are *different*, and the cost of copyright infringement is never greater than that of stealing. In the worst cases, it can come close to, approximate the cost of stealing.
There are two variables involved -- whether people would actually have purchased the product, and what the materials cost of the good is. As you have pointed out, the materials cost of a photograph is very low relative to the purchase price. Furthermore, few people would steal a photograph except the people that were reasonably interested in it -- there are many photographs in the world, but only a few are of interest to any given person. Unless the photograph was simply priced too high for him to be willing to buy it, he would probably have made a sale.
The variables are very different in the music world. Trying out new music and collecting complete albums is of interest to a number of people. They would never collect all the photographs in the world, but many people do collect vast amounts of music. So the "deprived of a potential customer" factor is lower. In addition, while CDs are not that expensive, the distribution and production costs on a CD, the case, the shelf space, and so forth, and probably higher than those associated with a photograph. This makes the gap in damages between the different crimes of theft and copyright infringement greater than in the example of a photograph.
I'd suggest a modification.
If the P2P companies wait around and the bill passes, then get one of the senators to publically state (maybe as part of a not-my-fault dealing with public reaction) that the letter played a role in their decision to make the bill.
At that point, the P2P companies have been dealt massive damage by this lobbyist, and the RIAA is subject to significant liability.
Of course, this is really just a useful last-ditch legal tactic for the P2P companies, if this stinker passes...