Um, what?

This is one of the most horrible posts (not saying "article" because it's not- it's just a giant diatribe) I've ever seen on Slashdot. Why the hell is this shit on the front page?

I'm a graphics designer for a living (yes, I live off the income generated from my work). Reading this crap makes me think that this guy is either trolling or too goddam moronic to comprehend what he's trying to talk about. I haven't seen a floppy disk "save" icon in ages, radio buttons are NOT ICONS (they're widgets- it's like comparing a scroll bar to an icon- it's not, it's a goddam scrollbar), and I don't know what his beef is with everything else.

If he's so goddam brilliant, why isn't he offering suitable replacements instead of just saying "lol is teh sux0r 4 old people 4 sure1111111"?

Oh, wait, he thinks we should replace folders with giant abstract squares. That'll totally look better then a manilla folder for sure. Just look at the public outrage Adobe's icons cause every successive release- they've gone from those nice pre-CS icons (like the feather for Photoshop- what was up with that? Who cares, it looked good) to squares. With letters. In horrible colours with the complexity of something drawn in MS Paint.

I suppose in his ideal computing world, everything is that ugly. No thanks, I'll stick with my modern OS.

-AC

It doesn't actually matter if a kid has never seen a reel-to-reel tape player. The thing about symbols is, eventually they can stop being metaphors and start to have meaning in *themselves*.

Take for example the ampersand, &. It's a stylized, abbreviated form of the Latin word "et", meaning "and". You probably didn't know that, but you don't need to know Latin to understand that & means "and". The Latin letter "B" comes from the Phoenecian letter "bet" [wikipedia.org] which also means "house", possibly because the letter once looked a bit like one. At this point the symbol is so far removed from its origin that we're not sure, but nobody cares. The Japanese katakana and hiragana writing systems work in a similar way: they're simplified versions of characters derived from Chinese symbols, and originally represented a word that starts with a certain sound. But now they just stand for the sound itself.

The same thing is happening with icons. 200 years from now, nobody will know what magnetic tape was, but so long as my new phone uses the same symbol for "voicemail" that my last one did, I'll be able to use it just fine.

What the shit kind of haphazard article was this?
I can see how the fast pace of technological evolution can make other things seem glacial, but some of those things were a fucking stretch beyond measure.

Does he think we already live in a paperless society?
Because clipboards, manila folders, envelopes, and calendars all still exist and are commonplace.

And taking issue with binoculars and magnifying glasses? I guess as a technologically advanced people, we've replaced basic optics with what, psychic powers to conveniently amplify the size of things for our comprehension?
He goes on to make a statement about how they are confusing and whatnot (no they aren't, Sherlock Holmes used a magnifying glass to search for clues and shit), but how does that even deal with his preface of the article, which is about anachronism?

And I can see how the phone's silhouette is one that isn't QUITE the most modern thing... but honestly what would you update it with? A little metal rectangle to represent the candy-bar phones we have now? Honestly the next best thing is probably the Motorola-Brick, which is iconic as a cell-phone, but existed concurrently with those phone silhouettes anyway.

Other no-duh's include Studio mics (vs. what else would you use? A pinhole to represent the integrated mic in a webcam?), and who the fuck doesn't recognize a gear or a screwdriver as the innards of something?

And finally, regarding

given http://searchdatamanagement.rl.techtarget.co.uk/detail/RES/1320101138_161.html [techtarget.co.uk] that article, I'm not so sure this guy even understands the world beyond just what he himself specifically sees and touches.

Basically, he tried to justify a full blown article based on his observation of: Floppies, and Radio Buttons.

No one has the slightest idea what the icons are. Now that screens have higher resolutions, they cant see them anyway.

What we need is drop down menus with words in and not that blasted Unity crap.

To be fair, the Unity HUD thing is pretty nifty (the HUD, not the Dash- which is still not nifty). You hit Alt and you get a small text entry box. You type, and it returns every menu item in the programme you're using that matches the words. Surprisingly useful way of not having to deal with the drop-down menus.

I still don't understand why we have to "Save" documents in today's computer age. What's wrong with Auto-save and Undo? Undo is a simply red arrow pointing counter clockwise. Redo is green and clockwise.

Search icons are not necessary either. Have a text field with localized text "Search" that goes away when you activate the field.

As far as I'm concerned Folders/Directories can just be squares containing other squares.

>But like the controls on cars, once the manufacturers standardised, it meant anyone who could drive, could quickly adapt to any new model

That's true, the usability of an icon is determined by two numbers: N and M and their ratio, where N is the number of times where icon means what most people expect and M is the number of times where icon means something else. And for situation you've described:

>The current trend towards highly generic mono outline icons, different in nearly every program even on the same platform, is completely counter-productive.

N=1 and M is not.

Tip: use a tip (mouseover), that's what I do anyway. Without mouseover, to me the icons are just colorful decorative addition to the menu bars because the author was fond of Maya civilization.

Although it has gone down - a couple years ago, 15" could be 1920x1200 easily, and seven years ago, if you had lots of cash, it could be 2048x1536.

I've actually built a laptop around a mix of ThinkPad components (15" 2048x1536 LCD equivalent to the one used in medical configurations of the R50p, chassis from a 15" T60, and motherboard+ancillaries from a 14.1" 4:3 T61p (talk about unobtanium)) just to get a 2048x1536 screen with 8 gigs of RAM, spending over $1000 to do it (and I already had the screen and a couple of the ancillaries) when I could get a just as fast laptop for $500, purely because of the screen.

What exactly does an illiterate person do with a PC?

Fact: The standards, Unicode in particular, do not specify one or two lines in the "currency symbol". That is left to the font to decide.

I learned this while setting up a currency database. Apparently Brazil (I think it was Brazil) uses the double-barred symbol for *their* currency, and the single-barred for "US Dollars", which are also in relatively common use. Pretty decent idea for distinguishing currencies, IMO - is sure beats US$ vs CA$, or using ISO 4217 codes.

Some years ago, I read an interesting take on this by a French researcher. He explained why he publishes all his papers in English rather than in French, although French is his native language.

His explanation was a more detailed version of the above quote. He commented that if he were to publish in French, he would be subject to the Académie française [wikipedia.org], which has full legal control over the French language. They could criticise his (mis)use of words and block publication or force recall of his papers.

But, he observed, an important part of any scientific field of researchers is the need for the participants to work out precise terminology to describe what they are learning. If a word for a new concept is needed, they must find or invent a word, else they can't discuss the concept in the rigorous manner required by successful science. The Académie can (and does) block this process.

But, he continued, the English language has no such legal authority. Researchers publishing in English can invent new terms, borrow them from another language, or propose a more precise definition of an existing word to be used within their field. In English, they can discuss terminology openly, and can agree among themselves on the precise definition of a word to be used within their field.

His argument was that this process isn't optional; successful science requires it. If researchers don't have control over the precise definitions used in their specialty, they can't produce valid scientific publication. In French this is not allowed. In English, it is allowed, because there is no legal control over use of the language (except in the field of law itself, of course ;-). So he and his colleagues publish in English.

The fact that it's the language with the most readers in the world (many of whom can't speak it well) is a further argument in English's favor. But the important fact about English is that there is no legal body in any English-using country with the power to control researcher's use of their own field's jargon. So, despite all its obvious faults, English is the preferred technical language nearly everywhere.

Now if we could only get the English-using media to stop garbling the meanings of technical terms ...

(But that would probably require some sort of official Académie Anglaise, so we're probably better off with all the corruption of our technical terms by the ignorant. ;-)