No-one is romanticising a particular culture. John Gray's argument (which I quite like, even if it's not 100% my own opinion) is this: western thought has been driven by a human-centered world view since the time of Plato. This world view has, indeed, been the basis for modern western life, but also the basis for seriously aggressive religions and many social problems.
The argument continues: the idea that humans are "special" leads to the myth of human perfectability, which flies in the face of scientific knowledge (all life is equal), and has been the cause of many of the disasters of the 20th century, including the "-isms". The Nazi ideas of perfectability, he argues, could only have arisen from a world view in which ideas could be disconnected from the natural world, and this requires a totally abstract alphabet.
Of course it's a more elegant explanation than I can give here, and one that is anything but romantic. Find the book, read it, you will not regret it.
John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.
Paper, the way we describe our world, the way we describe ourselves... the impact on the way we think can be enormous.
As for "technology", everything we make has been radical new technology at some point. People are so impressed that chip prices fall every 18 months. But this applies to all technological products when you're climbing the S curve.
"K" refers to kilobits, not kilobytes. Speed measured in optimal circumstances, not all users may achieve similar results. Figures may include sum of up/download speeds. Weather may impact throughput. Excess ozone or solar flare activity may impact throughput. Figures are provided for information purposes only and do not constitite a contractual obligation or guarantee of any kind. User equipment may impact network throughput. Compatible with all compatible equipment, non-compatible equipment may cause performance degredation. Not for use outdoors. Not for use by minors. Not end-user serviceable: any attempt to reverse-engineer software or hardware internals is contrary to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) of 1999, sections 2b and 3a. May cause fatal electrocution. Not for indoor use. May not be exported to the following countries: Afghanistan through Zimbabwe. Not for use in Canada.
Some serious analysis required
on
ISS Fender Bender
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The scene... a silently rusting space station, somewhere in near Earth orbit.
"Honey,..."
"Yeah?"
"... I think I crashed the space station"
"WHAT?!!"
"Look, it wasn't my fault. Some space junk came out without stopping and I ran right into it!"
"Honey, baby, how often have I told you, DON'T DRIVE MY SPACE STATION. Sorry, I got a little emotional there."
"We're insured, aren't we?"
"Not over international territory. Right now we're about over Afghanistan. No coverage."
The idea that businesses are "run" is somewhat of a illusion. In fact, businesses run themselves once they get beyond a basic size, and they follow rules (like Zipf's law) which (appear to)govern their size and market position.
Of course a business has a culture, and this affects the way it works, but a culture is like a strategy: theft, honesty, quality, exploitation... all choices made in order to improve the odds of winning at what is always a gamble.
No surprise that as Google gets larger, its culture would change: it is entering new domains, needs to adapt, has many new people, each with their ideas and influence.
The "give the customer what they want" culture is very strong at Google, and is the reason for their success up to now. But it is only a successful strategy when it makes a difference. When Google find themselves needing to defend a captive market (of advertisers), fight off hostile intruders (like Microsoft), and change its definition of "customer" (from people doing the searches to people placing adverts), it will also change as a company. This is what is happening now.
Zipf's Law is fun, BTW. It explains the relationship between size and power, in summary it states that in a self-adjusting system, power is balanced out at all levels. I.e. in a market, the largest business will be about twice as large as the two second-largest businesses, about three times as large as the next three businesses, and so on.
The same kind of organic maths applies to cities, earthquakes, and natural languages.
One of the first things I learned as a computer scientist was the impossibility of proving a piece of software "correct".
Still, I always found it an interesting concept.
Then, one day, watched a Eureka (EU) team build a formal verification suite based on Z. One of my friends was on the team. One of the best programmers I ever knew, he decided the whole venture was a fraud, said so, and was fired.
My opinion? Formal proofs are a holy grail, unreachable, and the reality of software is that small, testable, interworking pieces is the only way to assure "correctness". That, and code generation, the wizard's wand of software.
The scene: a smoky downtown office lit by one bare lightbulb. Mr D is sitting at his desk, studying his computer screen.
"Damn", he says, and picks up the phone. "Get your ass in here!", he shouts, and puts the receiver down again.
A sweaty figure stumbles into the room, sneezes, and puts his coke tin and bottle of JDs on the table. "Whazzup, boss?"
"Our stock fell by two points. We need to sue someone. Who's left?"
"Uh, I think we sued them all, boss. Uh, wait, how about Microsoft?"
"MORON!! They're the nice gentlemen we met this morning!"
"Sorry, boss, it's the coke, it's making me forget shit."
"Look, we need a name, and we need it fast."
"Boss, why not try Google?"
"BRILLIANT!!! WE'LL SUE GOOGLE!!!"
"Uh, I meant just try the search... oh, shit."
"Get on the line to our hacks. This is going to be so big. We can ask for $699 per search result. Per web page. Per pagerank. Whatever, so long as we get into twelve figures."
"OK, Boss, you're the boss..." (picks up JD, stumbles out)
Yes, but to fill the hole in the market we plan a series of upgrades that will include automatic Bluetooth device matching, high speed (USB 2.0 "full speed") transfers, and hot swapping with realtime anti-virus protection.
Version 1.0 may crash now and then but we believe version 1.2 will be rock steady. It will also come with customisable casings, including a neon blue "shines in the dark" version. Batteries not included.
Surprised that laws are being enacted for the benefit of those in power?
Shocked that "right" and "wrong" do not seem to have any stable meaning?
Scandalized that money buys influence and influence buys money?
This is the modern social contract: keep us safe from the unwashed hordes, provide us with fuel for our SUVs, and we will vote for you, make you wealthy, and accept your regimes.
People get the governments they deserve and sadly the US deserves this one: it's the consequence of 25 years of "me 1st".
For once I agree with the fundamentalist Christians. Cranial credit card implants? What next... usb hard drives in finger tips, infrared laser eye lense replacements, 5.1 audio augmentations, keyboard tattoed onto left forearm, plug-and-play genitals,...
All this mucking about with technology has got to stop, and I for one have started a new web site (easy payments via cranial credit cards accepted) to distribute a new "down with technology" flash cartoon.
Uhm. WTF are those people smoking, and can I have some, please?
I'll report on progress in my journal. Our prototype is built using perl/gtk, and desktops are easily scripted as perl objects, so there will be ample opportunity to contribute to the project.
I think I understand the term, but does that mean it's a given that any application is built around a "framework"?
All well-constructed software is sliced into coherently-discrete layers that are solved as individual problems, but I believe the "framework" concept is largely a commercial concept designed by certain vendors to enable them to sell large, complex toolkits.
Are we not in danger of taking this commercial model and turning it into dogma, in which your application shall be built around a framework and the only choice is "which one?"
Other than web pages and e-mail, all of the other information I access on my computer is more abstract than a plain old document would be.
A "document" is just an entry point, it can be as low-level or as high-level as you like. For instance a web page is a "document" but it can be the main page for Slashdot, a high-level entry to a large amount of information.
I'm not defending the "document is everything" model, just pointing out that it's probably abstractable to any level.
What kinds of information are you talking about, and how do you access it?
I was aware of the Apple Piles concept, someone mentioned it after my original design post. However, my concept is not really based on piles, patented or not. This was one of the initial concepts but we have changed things somewhat since we began making a prototype. My second journal entry gives a more accurate picture.
(How on earth can one patent a "pile". Perhaps a specific implementation of a pile, yes. But "piles" in general? Anyhow...)
"Wasting time", also a nice concept given that we all live 24 hours per day and we all die and our works all become dust, patented or not. Time is only wasted when we suffer, and this not my case so far.
I'd like to thank Slashdot for the great feedback on this one. You've been cool!
It's task centric because the 'fetch email' mote lives according to the same rules as any other mote.
I could have many 'fetch email' motes, the ones I use most often will show up larger, the others will get smaller.
The goal with the interface is to present each project in terms of the most important tasks that need to be done, which are generally those that are most often done and those that have most recently been dropped onto the desktop.
Documents are just a special kind of task.
I believe that's task centric. Like an 'inbox', but spread out visually.
One screen, infinite recursive desktops, each representing one project, each working within the limitations of a feeble organic brain, the whole thing indexed every which way.
Am I the only one who notices that Microsoft are lanuching their own anti-spam solution, and suddenly we get "honest-and-unbiased" reporting on solutions like SpamAssassin?
In gross terms, you're right: blindly clicking on stuff can get you into trouble.
However, let's be clear about Microsoft's virus woes: the root of the problem is mixing everything with an overdose of insecure scripting, and the reason was not so much to improve the user experience as to bind him to Windows as the platform.
When you click on a URL, you don't worry about what application is behind it.
When you click on an email, you don't worry about what application is behind it.
When you click on a document on your desktop, you don't worry about what application will open it.
All these are natural acts: to open a document you should click on the document, not click on the 'Open Office' tool, then 'Open' and find the document name.
My model is not document centric, it's task centric. True, many tasks are documents, but some are URLs, programs, even devices. Tasks are what make my world work (as a creative person), and I rely on a very definite model to organize my tasks, and that model is "clutter".
There is no reason why clicking on a mote to launch an application should be inherently insecure any more than clicking on a file in a normal file manager.
As to "ignorance", very, very few people actually understand what goes on inside a computer. I believe I do (my training is CompSci and I've been a professional software designer for 20 years), but still, I do not like having to look in ten places for my "current list of tasks".
Why limit yourself to the functionality of real objects?
For the simple but vital reason that this is the way our minds work. Our brains are evolved to handle the world in terms of discrete objects, and we break even the most complex concepts down into models of "things".
The goal of a computer user interface should be the elimination of effort and suffering. Very zen. I believe this means making it work the way our minds work, not forcing us to use artificial models.
The mind most definitely uses multiple models, which is why the CLI is still so effective: we can remember things in terms of lists (= command history) and procedures.
But when it comes to organization, the hierarchical folder + multiple document view of the world is entirely false, except for archival purposes. Creative people just don't think that way: we use clutter, mess, organized chaos in which the important stuff rises to the top and the junk gets relegated to the distant background.
You should not need to learn a new interface. It should be totally obvious, natural, and evident. This does not mean that such an interface is easy to make, to the contrary, it takes a great effort to the complexity.
Nice idea, but no-one actually organized their thought processes using fishbowls. You're barking up the wrong tree, so to speak.
Take any creative person. Watch how they organize their work. Typically it's always the same: a physical layout on a desk or some other space, pieces of information organized as notes and documents, stacks and heaps, and matching the mental model of a project or projects.
It's not complex, simply allow people to stick arbitrary items onto a desktop and handle the whole so that new and often-used items remain larger and visible... The thing is that we're removing concepts from today's UI, not adding them.
Anyhow, we can all laugh at the thing when it's working.
We'll be here waiting once your "motes" idea crashes the same way others have...
This is very interesting: we also decided to use the term "motes" to describe our objects, finally.
Since you say this has been done before, perhaps you have some examples, or some explanation why a monitor cannot show a couple of hundred icons of various sizes with ease...
Slashdot Mirror
The trend seems to be towards two standard meta-distros:
- Debian for installations
- Knoppix for live-cds
Hehe, your link is unavailable:
"The page cannot be displayed"
Something crashed. Presumably it was not the hardware. The software, perhaps?
Why is that to the detriment of our worldview?
No-one is romanticising a particular culture. John Gray's argument (which I quite like, even if it's not 100% my own opinion) is this: western thought has been driven by a human-centered world view since the time of Plato. This world view has, indeed, been the basis for modern western life, but also the basis for seriously aggressive religions and many social problems.
The argument continues: the idea that humans are "special" leads to the myth of human perfectability, which flies in the face of scientific knowledge (all life is equal), and has been the cause of many of the disasters of the 20th century, including the "-isms". The Nazi ideas of perfectability, he argues, could only have arisen from a world view in which ideas could be disconnected from the natural world, and this requires a totally abstract alphabet.
Of course it's a more elegant explanation than I can give here, and one that is anything but romantic. Find the book, read it, you will not regret it.
John Gray, author of Straw Dogs, one of the best books you could read this year, suggests that the Latin alphabet, with its complete abstraction from physical objects, has been the basis of western philosophical models, mainly to the detriment of our view of the world. He suggests that Chinese iconography, in contrast, helped the establishment of a worldview in which humans played less of a central role.
Paper, the way we describe our world, the way we describe ourselves... the impact on the way we think can be enormous.
As for "technology", everything we make has been radical new technology at some point. People are so impressed that chip prices fall every 18 months. But this applies to all technological products when you're climbing the S curve.
"K" refers to kilobits, not kilobytes. Speed measured in optimal circumstances, not all users may achieve similar results. Figures may include sum of up/download speeds. Weather may impact throughput. Excess ozone or solar flare activity may impact throughput. Figures are provided for information purposes only and do not constitite a contractual obligation or guarantee of any kind. User equipment may impact network throughput. Compatible with all compatible equipment, non-compatible equipment may cause performance degredation. Not for use outdoors. Not for use by minors. Not end-user serviceable: any attempt to reverse-engineer software or hardware internals is contrary to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DCMA) of 1999, sections 2b and 3a. May cause fatal electrocution. Not for indoor use. May not be exported to the following countries: Afghanistan through Zimbabwe. Not for use in Canada.
The scene... a silently rusting space station, somewhere in near Earth orbit.
"Honey,..."
"Yeah?"
"... I think I crashed the space station"
"WHAT?!!"
"Look, it wasn't my fault. Some space junk came out without stopping and I ran right into it!"
"Honey, baby, how often have I told you, DON'T DRIVE MY SPACE STATION. Sorry, I got a little emotional there."
"We're insured, aren't we?"
"Not over international territory. Right now we're about over Afghanistan. No coverage."
"I'm so sorry, I'll make it right..."
"OK, suit up, we're going out"
"No, I meant I'll bake some cookies"
"OK, get me a beer while you're at it."
The idea that businesses are "run" is somewhat of a illusion. In fact, businesses run themselves once they get beyond a basic size, and they follow rules (like Zipf's law) which (appear to)govern their size and market position.
Of course a business has a culture, and this affects the way it works, but a culture is like a strategy: theft, honesty, quality, exploitation... all choices made in order to improve the odds of winning at what is always a gamble.
No surprise that as Google gets larger, its culture would change: it is entering new domains, needs to adapt, has many new people, each with their ideas and influence.
The "give the customer what they want" culture is very strong at Google, and is the reason for their success up to now. But it is only a successful strategy when it makes a difference. When Google find themselves needing to defend a captive market (of advertisers), fight off hostile intruders (like Microsoft), and change its definition of "customer" (from people doing the searches to people placing adverts), it will also change as a company. This is what is happening now.
Zipf's Law is fun, BTW. It explains the relationship between size and power, in summary it states that in a self-adjusting system, power is balanced out at all levels. I.e. in a market, the largest business will be about twice as large as the two second-largest businesses, about three times as large as the next three businesses, and so on.
The same kind of organic maths applies to cities, earthquakes, and natural languages.
You're an ignorant bastard and you should RTFA instead of spouting your half-cooked opinions.
(Help, moderators, mod me "-1 Insane in the membrain", I'm flaming myself!)
One of the first things I learned as a computer scientist was the impossibility of proving a piece of software "correct".
Still, I always found it an interesting concept.
Then, one day, watched a Eureka (EU) team build a formal verification suite based on Z. One of my friends was on the team. One of the best programmers I ever knew, he decided the whole venture was a fraud, said so, and was fired.
My opinion? Formal proofs are a holy grail, unreachable, and the reality of software is that small, testable, interworking pieces is the only way to assure "correctness". That, and code generation, the wizard's wand of software.
The scene: a smoky downtown office lit by one bare lightbulb. Mr D is sitting at his desk, studying his computer screen.
... silence
"Damn", he says, and picks up the phone. "Get your ass in here!", he shouts, and puts the receiver down again.
A sweaty figure stumbles into the room, sneezes, and puts his coke tin and bottle of JDs on the table. "Whazzup, boss?"
"Our stock fell by two points. We need to sue someone. Who's left?"
"Uh, I think we sued them all, boss. Uh, wait, how about Microsoft?"
"MORON!! They're the nice gentlemen we met this morning!"
"Sorry, boss, it's the coke, it's making me forget shit."
"Look, we need a name, and we need it fast."
"Boss, why not try Google?"
"BRILLIANT!!! WE'LL SUE GOOGLE!!!"
"Uh, I meant just try the search... oh, shit."
"Get on the line to our hacks. This is going to be so big. We can ask for $699 per search result. Per web page. Per pagerank. Whatever, so long as we get into twelve figures."
"OK, Boss, you're the boss..." (picks up JD, stumbles out)
sniff... sniff... SNEEZE!
Yes, but to fill the hole in the market we plan a series of upgrades that will include automatic Bluetooth device matching, high speed (USB 2.0 "full speed") transfers, and hot swapping with realtime anti-virus protection.
Version 1.0 may crash now and then but we believe version 1.2 will be rock steady. It will also come with customisable casings, including a neon blue "shines in the dark" version. Batteries not included.
Surprised that laws are being enacted
for the benefit of those in power?
Shocked that "right" and "wrong" do not
seem to have any stable meaning?
Scandalized that money buys influence
and influence buys money?
This is the modern social contract:
keep us safe from the unwashed hordes,
provide us with fuel for our SUVs, and
we will vote for you, make you wealthy,
and accept your regimes.
People get the governments they deserve
and sadly the US deserves this one: it's
the consequence of 25 years of "me 1st".
For once I agree with the fundamentalist Christians. Cranial credit card implants? What next... usb hard drives in finger tips, infrared laser eye lense replacements, 5.1 audio augmentations, keyboard tattoed onto left forearm, plug-and-play genitals,...
All this mucking about with technology has got to stop, and I for one have started a new web site (easy payments via cranial credit cards accepted) to distribute a new "down with technology" flash cartoon.
Uhm. WTF are those people smoking, and can I have some, please?
I'll report on progress in my journal. Our prototype is built using perl/gtk, and desktops are easily scripted as perl objects, so there will be ample opportunity to contribute to the project.
(Raises hand)
I think I understand the term, but does that mean it's a given that any application is built around a "framework"?
All well-constructed software is sliced into coherently-discrete layers that are solved as individual problems, but I believe the "framework" concept is largely a commercial concept designed by certain vendors to enable them to sell large, complex toolkits.
Are we not in danger of taking this commercial model and turning it into dogma, in which your application shall be built around a framework and the only choice is "which one?"
Other than web pages and e-mail, all of the other information I access on my computer is more abstract than a plain old document would be.
A "document" is just an entry point, it can be as low-level or as high-level as you like. For instance a web page is a "document" but it can be the main page for Slashdot, a high-level entry to a large amount of information.
I'm not defending the "document is everything" model, just pointing out that it's probably abstractable to any level.
What kinds of information are you talking about, and how do you access it?
I was aware of the Apple Piles concept, someone mentioned it after my original design post. However, my concept is not really based on piles, patented or not. This was one of the initial concepts but we have changed things somewhat since we began making a prototype. My second journal entry gives a more accurate picture.
(How on earth can one patent a "pile". Perhaps a specific implementation of a pile, yes. But "piles" in general? Anyhow...)
"Wasting time", also a nice concept given that we all live 24 hours per day and we all die and our works all become dust, patented or not. Time is only wasted when we suffer, and this not my case so far.
I'd like to thank Slashdot for the great feedback on this one. You've been cool!
Ah, thanks to all the language lawyers who tell me about the 'j' being a vowel in Dutch.
Similarly, the Welsh town of "Llanrwst" only has one vowel in its name, however you pronounce the thing.
En in elk geval, ik ben nederlandstalig (onder andere), dit discussie is dus een beetje overbodig.
It's task centric because the 'fetch email' mote lives according to the same rules as any other mote.
I could have many 'fetch email' motes, the ones I use most often will show up larger, the others will get smaller.
The goal with the interface is to present each project in terms of the most important tasks that need to be done, which are generally those that are most often done and those that have most recently been dropped onto the desktop.
Documents are just a special kind of task.
I believe that's task centric. Like an 'inbox', but spread out visually.
Yes, this is pretty much exactly my vision.
One screen, infinite recursive desktops, each representing one project, each working within the limitations of a feeble organic brain, the whole thing indexed every which way.
Am I the only one who notices that Microsoft are lanuching their own anti-spam solution, and suddenly we get "honest-and-unbiased" reporting on solutions like SpamAssassin?
Who is kidding who here?
In gross terms, you're right: blindly clicking on stuff can get you into trouble.
However, let's be clear about Microsoft's virus woes: the root of the problem is mixing everything with an overdose of insecure scripting, and the reason was not so much to improve the user experience as to bind him to Windows as the platform.
When you click on a URL, you don't worry about what application is behind it.
When you click on an email, you don't worry about what application is behind it.
When you click on a document on your desktop, you don't worry about what application will open it.
All these are natural acts: to open a document you should click on the document, not click on the 'Open Office' tool, then 'Open' and find the document name.
My model is not document centric, it's task centric. True, many tasks are documents, but some are URLs, programs, even devices. Tasks are what make my world work (as a creative person), and I rely on a very definite model to organize my tasks, and that model is "clutter".
There is no reason why clicking on a mote to launch an application should be inherently insecure any more than clicking on a file in a normal file manager.
As to "ignorance", very, very few people actually understand what goes on inside a computer. I believe I do (my training is CompSci and I've been a professional software designer for 20 years), but still, I do not like having to look in ten places for my "current list of tasks".
One UI to rule them all. I think it's possible.
Hey, for fun, here's a mockup.
Why limit yourself to the functionality of real objects?
For the simple but vital reason that this is the way our minds work. Our brains are evolved to handle the world in terms of discrete objects, and we break even the most complex concepts down into models of "things".
The goal of a computer user interface should be the elimination of effort and suffering. Very zen. I believe this means making it work the way our minds work, not forcing us to use artificial models.
The mind most definitely uses multiple models, which is why the CLI is still so effective: we can remember things in terms of lists (= command history) and procedures.
But when it comes to organization, the hierarchical folder + multiple document view of the world is entirely false, except for archival purposes. Creative people just don't think that way: we use clutter, mess, organized chaos in which the important stuff rises to the top and the junk gets relegated to the distant background.
You should not need to learn a new interface. It should be totally obvious, natural, and evident. This does not mean that such an interface is easy to make, to the contrary, it takes a great effort to the complexity.
Nice idea, but no-one actually organized their thought processes using fishbowls. You're barking up the wrong tree, so to speak.
Take any creative person. Watch how they organize their work. Typically it's always the same: a physical layout on a desk or some other space, pieces of information organized as notes and documents, stacks and heaps, and matching the mental model of a project or projects.
It's not complex, simply allow people to stick arbitrary items onto a desktop and handle the whole so that new and often-used items remain larger and visible... The thing is that we're removing concepts from today's UI, not adding them.
Anyhow, we can all laugh at the thing when it's working.
We'll be here waiting once your "motes" idea crashes the same way others have...
This is very interesting: we also decided to use the term "motes" to describe our objects, finally.
Since you say this has been done before, perhaps you have some examples, or some explanation why a monitor cannot show a couple of hundred icons of various sizes with ease...