And you're welcome to use metric units for your 4x8 sheets of plywood or 2x4 lumber as long as you don't insist on actually changing the actual wood to an integer number of centimeters.
In Europe, the base sizes for most lumber is still derived from the historical imperial forms. But you do realise your 2x4 isn't actually 2" by 4" in cross section, don't you? 2x4 is the sawn cross-section size, not the dressed size -- it's significantly smaller after dressing. In the UK, your metric measure is typically the dimensions after the wood has been dressed, so it's a more accurate measure anyhow.
By the way, the physicists would like to know if you're ok with them using electron volts and light years or whether your hard line attitude requires discontinuing the use of those non-SI units as we'll.
If you're complaining about lightyears, then you're complaining about ever measure of time other than the second.
The government can consult with independent experts and industry to find the best standard for citizens. Industry will pick the best standard for itself, which is often consumer-hostile. This is exactly what we want our governments to do for us.
Or to put it another way, the government represents the people, AKA "consumers", who are on the demand side of the equation. I as a consumer wanted an iOS device that could be charged from a standard USB charger. I as an individual consumer could not obtain such a thing. I need to be part of a collective or corporate body for my personal wishes to matter a damn, which is why I need to be represented by regulators, unions and the like. The public body that represents all of European citizens took a decision in the interests of it's representees, making a compromise that adequately served all our demands.
The laws of supply and demand require some sort of parity between buyer and seller power, which individuals will never get in mainstream markets.
I had a private landowner complaining to me ten years ago about the way people were using rights-of-way on her land to go out for walks for pleasure. It was her assertion that rights of way only existed to allow workers to get to their place of employment...
The "Free Market" has no monopolies (including no patents, no copyrights, and no proprietary standards -- obviously, since all of those are "you can't make/sell this" restrictions) and an infinite number of competing companies producing any particular product
You're mixing up the definition of a free market with consequences of free markets and common economic assumptions when analyzing free market models.
But you have to do that, otherwise you come to the paradox that the free market uses market forces to create closed markets where market forces don't apply. If you can't apply free market economics to the free market, how can it be a free market?
While governments can sometimes interfere with the price of goods, monopolies are guaranteed to interfere because they can set the supply (and therefore the price) to whatever is most profitable.
Luckily, free markets do not produce stable monopolies.
A: assuming this is true, in the case of proprietary chargers that makes free markets wasteful by definition -- closed standards dictated by unstable monopolies become obsolete and up as pollution on a garbage pile.
B: I'm typing this on a Windows machine. Aren't you...?
You got it backwards: the middle ages were characterized by a political ruling class (whose power was rooted in military strength) that enriched themselves through government coercion.
Except that in feudal societies, the "government" was set up by a powerful family who had taken what they wanted by force of arms and controlled the supply of land. They established local monopoly where the cost of finding a supplier elsewhere was high (ie. emigration). Crucially, though, immigration was rarely controlled, and anyone was theoretically free to move where they wanted and declare themselves as subjects of a new lord.
To me, that sounds like a market system.
Their oppressive rule was ended through increasing wealth from private businesses. Nobility forced to marry wealthy commoners became a common trope in the literature at the end of the Middle Ages and later.
Except that nobility marrying commoners was still about monopolies and monopsonies -- if a rich commoner wanted to get full access to society, he had to marry a noble, hence it was a lucrative business for the nobility: supply and demand. What ended oppressive rule was armed uprising. Countries which didn't have an armed bourgeois-democrat revolution only reformed out of enlightened self-interest -- no revolution meant no guillotine. Even then, the elites of those countries without revolution made sure to keep as much power as they could -- hence the continuance of hereditary peers to sit in the second chamber of the UK parliament for example.
Sorry to tell you this, but he bamboozled you, and you fell for it.
That's free marketism to the extreme. Many small businesses fail because they underestimate their costs when pricing their products. Advice about sensible pricing should always be welcome. The GP, like many small vendors, probably felt a pressure of guilt against charging decent prices -- the farmer alleviated that guilt by showing him how his pricing was fair.
In this case the GP was doing it as a hobby, and the point of the hobby was not to sell pumpkins, but to get some experience of what buying and selling is all about -- the farmer's advice was therefore essentially the most important aspect of the endeavour.
Talking about hobbies, one of the problems in (literal) markets is that professionals often end up competing with hobbyists. If we're talking about crafts (eg crocheting beanie hats), most hobbyists set their prices based on material cost (yarn in the crocheted hat example) -- they see their time as zero-cost because they're engaged in their hobby anyway. But that undermines those who want to be pros because crafts are cheap in terms of material, but expensive in terms of time. Many hobbyists are open to increasing their prices out of sympathy to people who are trying to make a living doing something they truly love, and even those who aren't can often be convinced by explaining that they could do the same thing as long as they don't undermine the market in the meantime by setting people's expectations low.
Adam Smith argued for collectivisation, not capitalism. Smith's main argument was about the ownership of the means of production, and he put forward the idea that artisans (who throughout history had owned their own tools) should band together and industrialise as a collective. He was a nice guy, and it was good advicw for the artisans of the time; however, he failed to see the consequences of industrial economics which led to ownership of the means of production being in the hands of the money men. Smith's economics only held true for a very short slice of history, because the artisans were still working in a marketplace where they could generate the funds required to industrialise through practice of their craft through pre-industrial means. Once all crafts were industrialised, any new venture could only be funded through capital.
Recent decades have seen the reopening of certain markets to new entrants through cheap rapid prototyping (3D printing etc), and computing is still at a stage where you can build something valuable from scratch, but to start a new car company, you have to have capital on the scale of Elon Musk.
Objecting to government-mandated standards is not the same as objecting to standards. Having standard voltages and frequencies, safety standards, and measurement standards is a good thing, but there are many ways and better ways to provide those than through government coercion.
Rebuttal: ammonium cleaning of inedible meat to create "pink slurry" which is sold for human consumption. Most civilised countries banned this decades ago. The US light-touch regulators didn't. It took massive campaigning by celebrities to eventually get this practice stopped "voluntarily" by major food manufacturers.
Now if we bring is back to the mobile phone market, one of Apple's justifications for lock-in and certification is safety -- cheap chargers tend to catch fire... in places with little or no regulation. If you have no governmment-mandated safety laws, then your next-door-neighbour can buy a $/€/¥/£1 PoS that catches light after half-an-hour of use. Such things are far rarer in the EU, because... regulation!
In fact, Apple's policy actually caused more fires in the EU than it prevented, because anyone looking for a cheap adaptor was forced to import far-eastern knock-offs directly, bypassing the EU market entirely, thus missing the benefit of the protections of market regulation.
(Side note: in order to comply with EU regulations on charger compatibilty, Apple patched their firmware and/or software for EU users to allow any charger, but when connected to a Windows/Linux PC it only trickle charges. It turns out that e way to get round this is to use a charging-only cable -- iOS switches to default mode and will draw as much power as it can.)
Government mandated standards may or may not be a good idea, but they are certainly not "the basis of a free market" because they represent an intervention by government in the forces of supply and demand.
This is where free market economics becomes self-defeating, because we have the difference between "a" free market and "the" free market, and free market economics supoorts the latter at the cost of the former. "The" free market is a monolithic concept which allows bigger players to close markets for specific goods and/or services.
The problem then is that because "the" free market can restrict individual market places, free market economics do not apply in "the" free market. Paradoxical, but true.
Why can't the USB committee just standardize on Apple's lightning connector, instead of reinventing the wheel?
Aside from "It's Apple's IP," you mean? Well, the Lightning connector has the same engineered flaw as mini-USB and full-sized USB: retaining pins are in the device, not the cable. As the retaining pins are subject to mechanical stresses, they should be in the cable, not the device, as cables are expected to have a shorter lifecycle than devices. Apple cables already seem to have a short lifespan (the outer casing of my iPad charging cable started splitting months ago after two years' use, whereas I have mini and micro cables in regular use that are 5 to 10 years old) and so the retaining pins wouldn't shorten lifespan at all. But Apple really want you to update your device regularly, so devices breaking is hardly a concern for them (or most of their customers, who are keen to update anyway). In fact, Apple received praise from some of their customers for eliminating the retaining pins that the old long connector had, as they didn't really think about the trade-off -- engineering as marketing.
It would help if you said where your former colleague is from, but I doubt it's a language thing -- probably it's a case of "thinking too much" and of explicit teaching of frame of reference at school/university.
The examples all build on each other. I could see throwing in a frame of reference example. However, it would be *much* later in the lessons. Frame of reference is a pretty abstract concept. It means you are able to put yourself in someone elses shoes as it were. Many children are quite incapable of doing that for awhile. You could teach it to them true enough. But it would mean dedicating a rather large chunk lesson of time. Sometimes you need to walk before you can fly. What do I mean by that? I mean sometimes you need to pick your battles to just get in the lessons in that you want. Frame of reference is something I would personally toss in a heartbeat if crunched out for time and I was teaching someone programming.
If order to pick your battles, you have to pick your battlefield. If you include "point left" and "point right", you have already stepped onto the frame-of-reference battlefield.
If you don't want to teach something, don't pick an example set that relies on it.
That's not a failure in instruction, it's a test to see if the person is egocentric or not. People who are egocentric will think of themselves and their own point of view by default, without taking into consideration the subject, unless specified otherwise.
That's Piaget's theory, certainly, but Piaget was wrong. Try reading Margaret Donaldson's book Children's Minds, which quite nicely summarises all the research against Piaget. It places a big emphasis on the role of task wording in Piaget's results and suggests that the failure to "decentre" in Piaget's test subjects was the result of questions which failed to connect with intuition. Crucially, much of Piaget's scenarios didn't realise any concepts of motive or agency. Dancers are people, so even young children can ascribe agency to them and appreciate their unique frame of reference.
Yep, and I also believe that throwing this ambiguity at them early is a good thing. Esp. if it gets them thinking about the difference between different reference frames.
Only if the ambiguity is discussed and made into an explicit teaching point, which doesn't appear to be the case here. Just throwing in a particular interpretation of an ambiguous case doesn't count -- it frustrates some by being counterintuitive, and simultaneously doesn't challenge those whose intuition matches the chosen interpretation.
Port and starboard are explicitly referenced to the object's "forward", i.e. object's left and object's right respectively. So in this case port is the turtle's left no matter which way they face. That's why they use it on boats and planes and things where some might be facing backwards.
Only if the object in question is the vessel. If you were using port and starboard, you would still have to address the question of whether the turtle is the vessel or a passenger.
Yeah. They should have some sort of thing for handling 32-bit colours in native silicon. Maybe you could even use 8 of the bits for a transparency channel. Someone get on that.
I don't think you understand how hardware sprites worked in the good old days. Hardware sprites typically had a limited number of colour slots. If you had 4-colour hardware sprites, your pixels would have values of 00 (blank), 01 (colour 1), 10 (colour 2) and 11 (colour 3). What the colours 1, 2 and 3 are is then controlled by separate memory locations, ie colour1=green, colour2=red, colour3=black. Colour swapping of hardware sprites just mean redefining colour1, colour2 and colour3.
You can't do this with modern bitmaps, because each pixel is given an absolute value -- a fixed colour. You can't just change one value and have the entire sprite change -- you have to change every single dot one-by-one. It's easier to prerender the colour-swaps in your image editor than to do it computationally every time and then delete them again.
statistics is not math. It uses math but it's not math any more than physics is math. It is a method of modeling the world for analysis.
Excuse me, but are you saying that mathematics is not a method of modelling the world for analysis...? Or are you saying that geometry isn't mathematics...? Or algebra...? Or fractions...?
Intuition is good for math, but bad for statistics. Just search for how bad even statisticians are at answering common problems like the Monty Hall problem. We just suck at it, primarily because we can not imagine combinatorics well.
"We're bad at X" is not a reason for not teaching X, but a damn good reason for actually teaching it.
There's no doubt that some got goofy with it, but abandoning it is like throwing the bby out with the washwater..
++disagree
Now the thing about processing icons cognitively. I don't really need to process icons. They are just what I use to access the programs I want. What I want from my desktop is something attractive to look at.
Of course you have to process the icon cognitively -- how can you use the icon to access the program you want if you don't know what icon you're looking at?
The point behind the move against skeuomorphism was that operating a computer is about working with abstractions, and the more realistic the operating environment becomes, the more you have to actively reason. Fluent computer use is symbolic in mature, even when there are spacial relations involved. UI elements are words, not physical controls.
Now we are into an entirely different field of ambiguity. Since I find flat squares with a little text inside soul suckingly boring, and artless, I don't want to look at them. Others might find them beautiful. All a matter of taste.
Well such flat squares have low iconicity, which is precisely what I was saying about many "flat" interfaces missing the point.
The reason is always the same : how can we sell you the same crap over and over again ? Answer : we redesign the UI and pronto, we've got a new product on our hands.
Slashdot Mirror
And you're welcome to use metric units for your 4x8 sheets of plywood or 2x4 lumber as long as you don't insist on actually changing the actual wood to an integer number of centimeters.
In Europe, the base sizes for most lumber is still derived from the historical imperial forms. But you do realise your 2x4 isn't actually 2" by 4" in cross section, don't you? 2x4 is the sawn cross-section size, not the dressed size -- it's significantly smaller after dressing. In the UK, your metric measure is typically the dimensions after the wood has been dressed, so it's a more accurate measure anyhow.
By the way, the physicists would like to know if you're ok with them using electron volts and light years or whether your hard line attitude requires discontinuing the use of those non-SI units as we'll.
If you're complaining about lightyears, then you're complaining about ever measure of time other than the second.
The government can consult with independent experts and industry to find the best standard for citizens. Industry will pick the best standard for itself, which is often consumer-hostile. This is exactly what we want our governments to do for us.
Or to put it another way, the government represents the people, AKA "consumers", who are on the demand side of the equation. I as a consumer wanted an iOS device that could be charged from a standard USB charger. I as an individual consumer could not obtain such a thing. I need to be part of a collective or corporate body for my personal wishes to matter a damn, which is why I need to be represented by regulators, unions and the like. The public body that represents all of European citizens took a decision in the interests of it's representees, making a compromise that adequately served all our demands.
The laws of supply and demand require some sort of parity between buyer and seller power, which individuals will never get in mainstream markets.
I had a private landowner complaining to me ten years ago about the way people were using rights-of-way on her land to go out for walks for pleasure. It was her assertion that rights of way only existed to allow workers to get to their place of employment...
You're mixing up the definition of a free market with consequences of free markets and common economic assumptions when analyzing free market models.
But you have to do that, otherwise you come to the paradox that the free market uses market forces to create closed markets where market forces don't apply. If you can't apply free market economics to the free market, how can it be a free market?
While governments can sometimes interfere with the price of goods, monopolies are guaranteed to interfere because they can set the supply (and therefore the price) to whatever is most profitable.
Luckily, free markets do not produce stable monopolies.
A: assuming this is true, in the case of proprietary chargers that makes free markets wasteful by definition -- closed standards dictated by unstable monopolies become obsolete and up as pollution on a garbage pile.
B: I'm typing this on a Windows machine. Aren't you...?
You got it backwards: the middle ages were characterized by a political ruling class (whose power was rooted in military strength) that enriched themselves through government coercion.
Except that in feudal societies, the "government" was set up by a powerful family who had taken what they wanted by force of arms and controlled the supply of land. They established local monopoly where the cost of finding a supplier elsewhere was high (ie. emigration). Crucially, though, immigration was rarely controlled, and anyone was theoretically free to move where they wanted and declare themselves as subjects of a new lord.
To me, that sounds like a market system.
Their oppressive rule was ended through increasing wealth from private businesses. Nobility forced to marry wealthy commoners became a common trope in the literature at the end of the Middle Ages and later.
Except that nobility marrying commoners was still about monopolies and monopsonies -- if a rich commoner wanted to get full access to society, he had to marry a noble, hence it was a lucrative business for the nobility: supply and demand. What ended oppressive rule was armed uprising. Countries which didn't have an armed bourgeois-democrat revolution only reformed out of enlightened self-interest -- no revolution meant no guillotine. Even then, the elites of those countries without revolution made sure to keep as much power as they could -- hence the continuance of hereditary peers to sit in the second chamber of the UK parliament for example.
Sorry to tell you this, but he bamboozled you, and you fell for it.
That's free marketism to the extreme. Many small businesses fail because they underestimate their costs when pricing their products. Advice about sensible pricing should always be welcome. The GP, like many small vendors, probably felt a pressure of guilt against charging decent prices -- the farmer alleviated that guilt by showing him how his pricing was fair.
In this case the GP was doing it as a hobby, and the point of the hobby was not to sell pumpkins, but to get some experience of what buying and selling is all about -- the farmer's advice was therefore essentially the most important aspect of the endeavour.
Talking about hobbies, one of the problems in (literal) markets is that professionals often end up competing with hobbyists. If we're talking about crafts (eg crocheting beanie hats), most hobbyists set their prices based on material cost (yarn in the crocheted hat example) -- they see their time as zero-cost because they're engaged in their hobby anyway. But that undermines those who want to be pros because crafts are cheap in terms of material, but expensive in terms of time. Many hobbyists are open to increasing their prices out of sympathy to people who are trying to make a living doing something they truly love, and even those who aren't can often be convinced by explaining that they could do the same thing as long as they don't undermine the market in the meantime by setting people's expectations low.
Did you really only refer to Hillary by her sexual organs with a straight face? I'm not a Hillary fan but that's fucked up.
I personally assumed he was referring to Donald Trump....
"a regulated market, not a free market."
Why do you hate Adam Smith?
Adam Smith argued for collectivisation, not capitalism. Smith's main argument was about the ownership of the means of production, and he put forward the idea that artisans (who throughout history had owned their own tools) should band together and industrialise as a collective. He was a nice guy, and it was good advicw for the artisans of the time; however, he failed to see the consequences of industrial economics which led to ownership of the means of production being in the hands of the money men. Smith's economics only held true for a very short slice of history, because the artisans were still working in a marketplace where they could generate the funds required to industrialise through practice of their craft through pre-industrial means. Once all crafts were industrialised, any new venture could only be funded through capital.
Recent decades have seen the reopening of certain markets to new entrants through cheap rapid prototyping (3D printing etc), and computing is still at a stage where you can build something valuable from scratch, but to start a new car company, you have to have capital on the scale of Elon Musk.
Objecting to government-mandated standards is not the same as objecting to standards. Having standard voltages and frequencies, safety standards, and measurement standards is a good thing, but there are many ways and better ways to provide those than through government coercion.
Rebuttal: ammonium cleaning of inedible meat to create "pink slurry" which is sold for human consumption. Most civilised countries banned this decades ago. The US light-touch regulators didn't. It took massive campaigning by celebrities to eventually get this practice stopped "voluntarily" by major food manufacturers.
Now if we bring is back to the mobile phone market, one of Apple's justifications for lock-in and certification is safety -- cheap chargers tend to catch fire... in places with little or no regulation. If you have no governmment-mandated safety laws, then your next-door-neighbour can buy a $/€/¥/£1 PoS that catches light after half-an-hour of use. Such things are far rarer in the EU, because... regulation!
In fact, Apple's policy actually caused more fires in the EU than it prevented, because anyone looking for a cheap adaptor was forced to import far-eastern knock-offs directly, bypassing the EU market entirely, thus missing the benefit of the protections of market regulation.
(Side note: in order to comply with EU regulations on charger compatibilty, Apple patched their firmware and/or software for EU users to allow any charger, but when connected to a Windows/Linux PC it only trickle charges. It turns out that e way to get round this is to use a charging-only cable -- iOS switches to default mode and will draw as much power as it can.)
Government mandated standards may or may not be a good idea, but they are certainly not "the basis of a free market" because they represent an intervention by government in the forces of supply and demand.
This is where free market economics becomes self-defeating, because we have the difference between "a" free market and "the" free market, and free market economics supoorts the latter at the cost of the former. "The" free market is a monolithic concept which allows bigger players to close markets for specific goods and/or services.
The problem then is that because "the" free market can restrict individual market places, free market economics do not apply in "the" free market. Paradoxical, but true.
Why can't the USB committee just standardize on Apple's lightning connector, instead of reinventing the wheel?
Aside from "It's Apple's IP," you mean? Well, the Lightning connector has the same engineered flaw as mini-USB and full-sized USB: retaining pins are in the device, not the cable. As the retaining pins are subject to mechanical stresses, they should be in the cable, not the device, as cables are expected to have a shorter lifecycle than devices. Apple cables already seem to have a short lifespan (the outer casing of my iPad charging cable started splitting months ago after two years' use, whereas I have mini and micro cables in regular use that are 5 to 10 years old) and so the retaining pins wouldn't shorten lifespan at all. But Apple really want you to update your device regularly, so devices breaking is hardly a concern for them (or most of their customers, who are keen to update anyway). In fact, Apple received praise from some of their customers for eliminating the retaining pins that the old long connector had, as they didn't really think about the trade-off -- engineering as marketing.
It would help if you said where your former colleague is from, but I doubt it's a language thing -- probably it's a case of "thinking too much" and of explicit teaching of frame of reference at school/university.
The examples all build on each other. I could see throwing in a frame of reference example. However, it would be *much* later in the lessons. Frame of reference is a pretty abstract concept. It means you are able to put yourself in someone elses shoes as it were. Many children are quite incapable of doing that for awhile. You could teach it to them true enough. But it would mean dedicating a rather large chunk lesson of time. Sometimes you need to walk before you can fly. What do I mean by that? I mean sometimes you need to pick your battles to just get in the lessons in that you want. Frame of reference is something I would personally toss in a heartbeat if crunched out for time and I was teaching someone programming.
If order to pick your battles, you have to pick your battlefield. If you include "point left" and "point right", you have already stepped onto the frame-of-reference battlefield.
If you don't want to teach something, don't pick an example set that relies on it.
That's not a failure in instruction, it's a test to see if the person is egocentric or not. People who are egocentric will think of themselves and their own point of view by default, without taking into consideration the subject, unless specified otherwise.
That's Piaget's theory, certainly, but Piaget was wrong. Try reading Margaret Donaldson's book Children's Minds, which quite nicely summarises all the research against Piaget. It places a big emphasis on the role of task wording in Piaget's results and suggests that the failure to "decentre" in Piaget's test subjects was the result of questions which failed to connect with intuition. Crucially, much of Piaget's scenarios didn't realise any concepts of motive or agency. Dancers are people, so even young children can ascribe agency to them and appreciate their unique frame of reference.
Every played any game (2D or 3D)? Tell me O wise one, which direction does your character move, when the "left" and "right" arrow keys are pressed?
Tell me, O wise one, are we talking about Pacman or Asteroids...?
Yep, and I also believe that throwing this ambiguity at them early is a good thing. Esp. if it gets them thinking about the difference between different reference frames.
Only if the ambiguity is discussed and made into an explicit teaching point, which doesn't appear to be the case here. Just throwing in a particular interpretation of an ambiguous case doesn't count -- it frustrates some by being counterintuitive, and simultaneously doesn't challenge those whose intuition matches the chosen interpretation.
Port and starboard are explicitly referenced to the object's "forward", i.e. object's left and object's right respectively. So in this case port is the turtle's left no matter which way they face. That's why they use it on boats and planes and things where some might be facing backwards.
Only if the object in question is the vessel. If you were using port and starboard, you would still have to address the question of whether the turtle is the vessel or a passenger.
What an uninspired POS... i guess this is what communist gaming looks like.
No. This is what communist gaming looks like.
Yeah. They should have some sort of thing for handling 32-bit colours in native silicon. Maybe you could even use 8 of the bits for a transparency channel. Someone get on that.
I don't think you understand how hardware sprites worked in the good old days. Hardware sprites typically had a limited number of colour slots. If you had 4-colour hardware sprites, your pixels would have values of 00 (blank), 01 (colour 1), 10 (colour 2) and 11 (colour 3). What the colours 1, 2 and 3 are is then controlled by separate memory locations, ie colour1=green, colour2=red, colour3=black. Colour swapping of hardware sprites just mean redefining colour1, colour2 and colour3.
You can't do this with modern bitmaps, because each pixel is given an absolute value -- a fixed colour. You can't just change one value and have the entire sprite change -- you have to change every single dot one-by-one. It's easier to prerender the colour-swaps in your image editor than to do it computationally every time and then delete them again.
It won't even start on my Windows box.
statistics is not math. It uses math but it's not math any more than physics is math. It is a method of modeling the world for analysis.
Excuse me, but are you saying that mathematics is not a method of modelling the world for analysis...? Or are you saying that geometry isn't mathematics...? Or algebra...? Or fractions...?
Intuition is good for math, but bad for statistics. Just search for how bad even statisticians are at answering common problems like the Monty Hall problem. We just suck at it, primarily because we can not imagine combinatorics well.
"We're bad at X" is not a reason for not teaching X, but a damn good reason for actually teaching it.
and it will get them thinking there might be more to this statistics thing than boring numbers.
which is - of course - sadly, untrue.
Not so. Take a look at the birthday paradox -- the effects of stochastic distributions can be intriguing.
There's no doubt that some got goofy with it, but abandoning it is like throwing the bby out with the washwater..
++disagree
Now the thing about processing icons cognitively. I don't really need to process icons. They are just what I use to access the programs I want. What I want from my desktop is something attractive to look at.
Of course you have to process the icon cognitively -- how can you use the icon to access the program you want if you don't know what icon you're looking at?
The point behind the move against skeuomorphism was that operating a computer is about working with abstractions, and the more realistic the operating environment becomes, the more you have to actively reason. Fluent computer use is symbolic in mature, even when there are spacial relations involved. UI elements are words, not physical controls.
Now we are into an entirely different field of ambiguity. Since I find flat squares with a little text inside soul suckingly boring, and artless, I don't want to look at them. Others might find them beautiful. All a matter of taste.
Well such flat squares have low iconicity, which is precisely what I was saying about many "flat" interfaces missing the point.
The reason is always the same : how can we sell you the same crap over and over again ? Answer : we redesign the UI and pronto, we've got a new product on our hands.
Except that Windows 10 is a free upgrade.