Its not so much tool use that seems a defining characteristic, but tool description in symbolic form, where by manipulating the symbols you manipulate the tool without needing to actually build each iteration. And of course, meetings - lots of meetings
simply not true. Helvetica Bold Expanded and Helvetica Light Condensed are different fonts but same typeface. Significantly different appearance. That ship hasn't sailed at all. Design isn't random, its as specific as engineering in its way. We wouldn't confuse a class with an instance of that class would we?
Phoenix AND Houston. My sympathies. Only lived in Phoenix for a year but couldn't really imagine riding a bike there (the heat, the sprawl), and thought it was filled with not exactly obese, but "doughy" people. Mostly girls I recall. Mostly on Mill Ave
just because its old doesn't mean its useless. The situation with Hubble isn't anything like a PC, which are after all commodity items. My feeling has been that you can never have too many telescopes in space, or on the ground.
amazed by your short-sightedness. It may simply be that what you read about features Hubble images, used as desktop bakgrouinds, etc. Rest easy. The Hubble is also used for science. That's sort of considered its primary purpose. Not sure where you'd get the impression that astronomers "don't care".
If we were to wait for all the "problems" on Earth, all the discoveries of "genuine value" on Earth to be figured out before looking up, we'd be a nation of lawyers, accountants and middle managers.
we can multitask! We can kill & explore & educate & entertain all at the same time. The $400 million or whatever spent on a single unmanned probe is money well spent; not cheap, but not out of scale with any number of public or private projects. If we must, lets sacrifice 3 summer blockbusters each year and funnel the money "saved" to pay for the missions.
I want to need 3D on the desktop, I really do, but have yet to see a compelling reason for it. Multiple overlapping planes of essentially flat data in an arbitrary 3D space is entertainment, not usability. Even when using 3D animation software, 2D views are a necessary abstraction for precise manipulation of geometry, etc. on a 2D display.
A useful 3D interface would use both hands (the entire hand, not just a finger tip). It would be highly gestural, to the point of being sculptural. Personally I've always hoped for a scenario where 3L33T mastery of the machine was like mastery of a martial art. That might just be science fiction. I can't tell anymore.
Currently, the only 3D information spaces the man in the street navigates effectively seem to be video games. The nature of the activity in these spaces are a clue (some kind of clue anyway) to what "personal computing" in a 3D domain is all about.
The surface presentation of the GUI is the very least of it. Its hugely important, but reasonable interface design decisions necessarily reflect the input devices we use and the data we manipulate - which is largely serial in nature. In that respect, I'd say UI design for the desktop hasn't changed significantly since the 1980's regardless of platform.
ah, but the same argument applies for CS, mathematics or other traditionally "intelligent" fields. Analytic intelligence (whatever that is) isn't a controllable function of the nervous system either. A background in a specific field of study is clearly a necessary attribute for technical competence, but there are significant differences between knowledge, understanding and insight.
Intelligence testing is inherently flawed (though not useless) because we don't actually know what we're testing. At best we can say that standardized intelligence testing measures how well you score on standardized intelligence tests.
I am a working artist and have worked with artists all my life. I'm sitting in a facility with no fewer than 200 artists (many kinds) right now. What I see are curious people. Passionate people. Thoughtful people. Hard workers. Far more interesting to me than the public at large.
Not to belabor the point, but this "tormented artist" myth is simply not a universal principle. After studying art history both in college and personally for research, I must say again, this idea of "torment" is not a valid one. In fact, it only appears as part of the (Western) Romantic tradition, which was itself a response to the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that, it wasn't spoken of.
I won't deny that often things are created in response to troubled feelings, but couldn't you say that about anyone? Things are just as often created in response to intellectual ideas, or quite frankly, joy. That's sort of the human condition in a nutshell.
absolute nonsense. grotesque. Well, performance artists... yes. you've got a valid point for them. Seriously though, some generic label - "artist", is really so broad as to be meaningless. Like calling anyone who works with computers a "programmer".
continues to surprise me how prevalent that belief is, even among artists. Making good art, or at least interesting art is like anything else. Lots of hard work and serendipity involved. Intentionality and courage are helpful. "Civilians" look at finished pieces and see an object, a product, an experience, or whatever - like it came from nowhere fully formed. The artist looks at it and sees a history of decision making, the many roads not taken, next steps.
totally agreed. As cool as the Minority Report technology looked, using it day to day would be impractical. I wince thinking of the eyestrain caused by translucent displays for hours. Although I will admit I loved the physicality of transferring short term data from one system to another - the utter lack of filenames for the assets for example.
Actually I felt the UI systems in the movie The Island were far more practical
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
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GUIs Get a Makeover
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It's not a habitual way of working, but for a spreadhseet I'll throw together in 5 minutes just to track, model or calculate something quickly, I do that all the time
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
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GUIs Get a Makeover
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· Score: 1
what overhead, machines aren't exactly getting slower. Even on a 4 year old PC w/ 1GB RAM I edit multilayered files >100MB with rasterized and antialiased type + vectors + layer effects + layer masks , etc. Often with After Effects running in the background.
Graphics software often requires you to see what you're doing.
Pray tell, what can you do in Windows that you can't do with a well-configured Linux box?
Photoshop, After Effects, Flash - at least 30 other software packages supportingthose 3 tools alone (plugins, utilities). Outlook, MindManager, 3 or 4 RAW image processing tools. In short - graphic design for the studio and external vendors that rely on a standardized set of tools, procedures and file formats.
Its just software. No reason AE couldn't run on Linux, for example - that would be awesome and cut out quite a bit of overhead. We run seats of Maya on Windows, Linux & Macintosh. We run a couple of quirky and specialized animation tools on the Mac that are no longer commercially available, but are still useful. We run tools on 360 & PS3 dev kits. We don't really care where our software runs and would run it on a super-abacus if that was the easiest choice, We only care that our toolset is easily maintained. Other than IT, nobody cares where their software runs, choosing to focus instead on end results. Much respect for IT - it is in fact their job to care, not mine.
Many of our proprietary studio apps run on either Linux or SGI boxes, but those days are ending and stuff is being refactored (finally!) and ported over to Windows for purposes of standardization and consolidating builds
such limited imaginations here on/.
Innovation = new ideas. You could make the same exact statements re: Sim City or the Sims, and you'd be equally wrong. I am so tired of fanboy hypocrisy. On the one hand, EA sux because they don't innovate, on the other hand when they innovate, the pessimism starts on how it will only appeal to a niche market.
I submit that the hardcore gamer/fanboy contingent IS the niche market. The rest of the world is waiting for something more imaginative than killing orcs, elves, terrists, covert operatives, thugs, robots, etc...
Hitchcock's disregard for actors is well known, so is Ridley Scott's. They've both made a couple of good films:) Lucas' real problem is unlimited access to everything. He's clearly done significantly creative (and human-centered) work in the past. Working for a while within the most restrictive constraints would do the man a world of good.
Previsualization itself is nothing new. Shakespeare did it, Ansel Adams did it, etc... The technology changes over time. Shouldn't it? Not sure why you think its a tool for mediocre directors, when artists (working solo & collaboratively) having been using previz techniques for centuries. The alternative is to "just do it" and hope it works out for the best.
The system won't be matching billions of vertices - that's not how the brain recognizes faces either. That level of granularity is used ONLY for visual effects/animation in a situation where content is being pushed thru the rendering pipeline using brute force methods without regard for what the content represents
The key here is deriving patterns & relationships (signatures if you will, to use the Trek lingo!) that describe a unique ID. The significance of mapping facial features to a 3D representation using a projected grid of data points is that environmental lighting is made irrelevant and that relationships can be derived without transforming 2D data into a 3D space
Pinker's book is not without interesting points, however I consider his qualification of "intelligence" highly questionable and in my opinion, simplistic. Eye color and other physical features are simply observed. Intelligence on the other hand is notoriously slippery. The behaviors (internal & external) we label as intelligence have everything to do with the context in which they occur.
As an example, I'd ask is someone with amazing drawing skills but lacking mathematical aptitude less intelligent than a mathematician who lacks the synaptic connections between hand & eye that lead to advanced drawing technique? Who is more intelligent - a computer scientist or a physicist? A theorectical physicist or an experimentalist?
As an over the top example I'd say that solving linear equations on board a sinking ship instead of jumping on a life raft is spectacularly unintelligent.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not so much tool use that seems a defining characteristic, but tool description in symbolic form, where by manipulating the symbols you manipulate the tool without needing to actually build each iteration. And of course, meetings - lots of meetings
simply not true. Helvetica Bold Expanded and Helvetica Light Condensed are different fonts but same typeface. Significantly different appearance. That ship hasn't sailed at all. Design isn't random, its as specific as engineering in its way. We wouldn't confuse a class with an instance of that class would we?
sherriw: your simple point is well made, and is one that has eluded Nielsen for going on 10 years now.
the judeo-christian god no doubt.
Phoenix AND Houston. My sympathies. Only lived in Phoenix for a year but couldn't really imagine riding a bike there (the heat, the sprawl), and thought it was filled with not exactly obese, but "doughy" people. Mostly girls I recall. Mostly on Mill Ave
actually my hope is that the "iPhone" doesn't have buttons and instead uses a wheel for manual rotary dialing :)
strong words indeed from someone who doesn't have the balls/ovaries to back up his/her "strong words"!
How must it feel to be so certain and so wrong?
telescopic imaging continues to advance. But its not an either/or situation.
just because its old doesn't mean its useless. The situation with Hubble isn't anything like a PC, which are after all commodity items. My feeling has been that you can never have too many telescopes in space, or on the ground.
amazed by your short-sightedness. It may simply be that what you read about features Hubble images, used as desktop bakgrouinds, etc. Rest easy. The Hubble is also used for science. That's sort of considered its primary purpose. Not sure where you'd get the impression that astronomers "don't care".
If we were to wait for all the "problems" on Earth, all the discoveries of "genuine value" on Earth to be figured out before looking up, we'd be a nation of lawyers, accountants and middle managers.
we can multitask! We can kill & explore & educate & entertain all at the same time. The $400 million or whatever spent on a single unmanned probe is money well spent; not cheap, but not out of scale with any number of public or private projects. If we must, lets sacrifice 3 summer blockbusters each year and funnel the money "saved" to pay for the missions.
I want to need 3D on the desktop, I really do, but have yet to see a compelling reason for it. Multiple overlapping planes of essentially flat data in an arbitrary 3D space is entertainment, not usability.
Even when using 3D animation software, 2D views are a necessary abstraction for precise manipulation of geometry, etc. on a 2D display.
A useful 3D interface would use both hands (the entire hand, not just a finger tip). It would be highly gestural, to the point of being sculptural. Personally I've always hoped for a scenario where 3L33T mastery of the machine was like mastery of a martial art. That might just be science fiction. I can't tell anymore.
Currently, the only 3D information spaces the man in the street navigates effectively seem to be video games. The nature of the activity in these spaces are a clue (some kind of clue anyway) to what "personal computing" in a 3D domain is all about.
The surface presentation of the GUI is the very least of it. Its hugely important, but reasonable interface design decisions necessarily reflect the input devices we use and the data we manipulate - which is largely serial in nature. In that respect, I'd say UI design for the desktop hasn't changed significantly since the 1980's regardless of platform.
ah, but the same argument applies for CS, mathematics or other traditionally "intelligent" fields. Analytic intelligence (whatever that is) isn't a controllable function of the nervous system either. A background in a specific field of study is clearly a necessary attribute for technical competence, but there are significant differences between knowledge, understanding and insight. Intelligence testing is inherently flawed (though not useless) because we don't actually know what we're testing. At best we can say that standardized intelligence testing measures how well you score on standardized intelligence tests.
I am a working artist and have worked with artists all my life. I'm sitting in a facility with no fewer than 200 artists (many kinds) right now. What I see are curious people. Passionate people. Thoughtful people. Hard workers. Far more interesting to me than the public at large.
Not to belabor the point, but this "tormented artist" myth is simply not a universal principle. After studying art history both in college and personally for research, I must say again, this idea of "torment" is not a valid one. In fact, it only appears as part of the (Western) Romantic tradition, which was itself a response to the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that, it wasn't spoken of.
I won't deny that often things are created in response to troubled feelings, but couldn't you say that about anyone? Things are just as often created in response to intellectual ideas, or quite frankly, joy. That's sort of the human condition in a nutshell.
absolute nonsense. grotesque. Well, performance artists... yes. you've got a valid point for them. Seriously though, some generic label - "artist", is really so broad as to be meaningless. Like calling anyone who works with computers a "programmer".
continues to surprise me how prevalent that belief is, even among artists. Making good art, or at least interesting art is like anything else. Lots of hard work and serendipity involved. Intentionality and courage are helpful. "Civilians" look at finished pieces and see an object, a product, an experience, or whatever - like it came from nowhere fully formed. The artist looks at it and sees a history of decision making, the many roads not taken, next steps.
Depression & angst have nothing to do with it.
totally agreed. As cool as the Minority Report technology looked, using it day to day would be impractical. I wince thinking of the eyestrain caused by translucent displays for hours. Although I will admit I loved the physicality of transferring short term data from one system to another - the utter lack of filenames for the assets for example. Actually I felt the UI systems in the movie The Island were far more practical
It's not a habitual way of working, but for a spreadhseet I'll throw together in 5 minutes just to track, model or calculate something quickly, I do that all the time
what overhead, machines aren't exactly getting slower. Even on a 4 year old PC w/ 1GB RAM I edit multilayered files >100MB with rasterized and antialiased type + vectors + layer effects + layer masks , etc. Often with After Effects running in the background. Graphics software often requires you to see what you're doing.
Photoshop, After Effects, Flash - at least 30 other software packages supportingthose 3 tools alone (plugins, utilities). Outlook, MindManager, 3 or 4 RAW image processing tools. In short - graphic design for the studio and external vendors that rely on a standardized set of tools, procedures and file formats.
Its just software. No reason AE couldn't run on Linux, for example - that would be awesome and cut out quite a bit of overhead. We run seats of Maya on Windows, Linux & Macintosh. We run a couple of quirky and specialized animation tools on the Mac that are no longer commercially available, but are still useful. We run tools on 360 & PS3 dev kits. We don't really care where our software runs and would run it on a super-abacus if that was the easiest choice, We only care that our toolset is easily maintained. Other than IT, nobody cares where their software runs, choosing to focus instead on end results. Much respect for IT - it is in fact their job to care, not mine.
Many of our proprietary studio apps run on either Linux or SGI boxes, but those days are ending and stuff is being refactored (finally!) and ported over to Windows for purposes of standardization and consolidating builds
such limited imaginations here on /.
Innovation = new ideas. You could make the same exact statements re: Sim City or the Sims, and you'd be equally wrong. I am so tired of fanboy hypocrisy. On the one hand, EA sux because they don't innovate, on the other hand when they innovate, the pessimism starts on how it will only appeal to a niche market.
I submit that the hardcore gamer/fanboy contingent IS the niche market. The rest of the world is waiting for something more imaginative than killing orcs, elves, terrists, covert operatives, thugs, robots, etc...
Hitchcock's disregard for actors is well known, so is Ridley Scott's. They've both made a couple of good films :) Lucas' real problem is unlimited access to everything. He's clearly done significantly creative (and human-centered) work in the past. Working for a while within the most restrictive constraints would do the man a world of good.
Previsualization itself is nothing new. Shakespeare did it, Ansel Adams did it, etc... The technology changes over time. Shouldn't it? Not sure why you think its a tool for mediocre directors, when artists (working solo & collaboratively) having been using previz techniques for centuries. The alternative is to "just do it" and hope it works out for the best.
The system won't be matching billions of vertices - that's not how the brain recognizes faces either. That level of granularity is used ONLY for visual effects/animation in a situation where content is being pushed thru the rendering pipeline using brute force methods without regard for what the content represents
The key here is deriving patterns & relationships (signatures if you will, to use the Trek lingo!) that describe a unique ID. The significance of mapping facial features to a 3D representation using a projected grid of data points is that environmental lighting is made irrelevant and that relationships can be derived without transforming 2D data into a 3D space
Pinker's book is not without interesting points, however I consider his qualification of "intelligence" highly questionable and in my opinion, simplistic. Eye color and other physical features are simply observed. Intelligence on the other hand is notoriously slippery. The behaviors (internal & external) we label as intelligence have everything to do with the context in which they occur.
As an example, I'd ask is someone with amazing drawing skills but lacking mathematical aptitude less intelligent than a mathematician who lacks the synaptic connections between hand & eye that lead to advanced drawing technique? Who is more intelligent - a computer scientist or a physicist? A theorectical physicist or an experimentalist?
As an over the top example I'd say that solving linear equations on board a sinking ship instead of jumping on a life raft is spectacularly unintelligent.