The mattblog that ate Cypherpunks

[mattd]

A novel metaphor called Scopeware, software that automatically arranges
your computer files in chronological order and displays them on your
monitor with the most recent files featured prominently in the foreground.
Scopeware is far more sweeping than a simple rearrangement of icons,
however: in effect, it transfers the role of file clerk from you to the
computer, seamlessly ordering documents of all sorts into convenient,
time-stamped files.
If you have ever forgotten what you named a file or which folder you put it
in, you probably will agree that it's time for a change. The desktop
metaphor is decades old, arising from early-1970s work at Xerox's fabled
Palo Alto Research Center, and was never intended to address today's
computing needs. Indeed, the product that brought the metaphor to
mass-market attention was Apple Computer's 1984 Macintosh; it had no
built-in hard drive, and its floppy disks each stored only 400 kilobytes of
information. Today we're using the same metaphor to manage the countless
files on our ever more capacious hard drives, as well as to access the
virtually limitless information on the Web. The result? Big, messy
hierarchies of folders. Favorites lists where you never find anything
again. Pull-down menus too long to make sense of.
In other words, the desktop metaphor puts the onus on our brains to juggle
this expanding collection of files, folders and lists. Yet "our neurons do
not fire faster, our memory doesn't increase in capacity and we do not
learn to think faster as time progresses," notes Bill Buxton, chief
scientist of Alias/Wavefront, a leading maker of graphic-design tools.
Buxton argues that without better tools to exploit the immense processing
power of today's computers, that power is not much good to us.
That's why many researchersat universities and startups like Gelernter's
Mirror Worlds as well as giants like Microsoft and IBMare searching for
alternatives. They're examining metaphors taken from other media, such as
books or diaries or film; 3-D schemes that use our sense of spatial
orientation to create the illusion of depth on-screen, so that documents
look closer or farther away depending on their importance to us;
alternatives that borrow from video games the notion of having an
intelligent guide, or avatar, to help us find what we're looking for; or
even theories that radically change the notion of what a "computer" is, so
that we no longer think of devices as computers at all and are therefore
open to new ways of interacting with them.
"The desktop metaphor made assumptions about how we use computers that just
aren't true anymore," asserts Don Norman, cofounder of the Nielsen Norman
Group, famed critic of computer design and author of The Design of Everyday
Things. "It's time to throw away the old model."
Learning Esperanto
Cont at http://www.unifr.ch/econophysics/