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On 20. feb. 2012 21:41, supernova wrote:
What can I say to argue this opinion, that according to me is too extreme?
There are extreme differences between words and commands. For instance, the HUD does not require exact matches. Since I use a Norwegian translation, I can use "nedlastinger" or "downloads". If your language is Chineese, you can use that. That is much better than ctrl+shift+Y, which is the pre-HUD way of doing the same thing.
You can also use synonyms, which means I can potentially use either "fuzz" or "distortion" to access the appropriate guitar effect in a program. Or "forvrengning". Another benefit of using words to communicate, is that it is much easier for people to understand what on earth it is you're talking about. Even people with severe memory loss, remember their languages. They can forget their names, where they live, their spouses face, what they do for a living or what they like to eat – but they're able to express it using words. In some cases, people do forget parts of their language, in which case they can make themselves understood by using different words. I would be willing to bet most people in that situation would not remember that you must use ctrl+T to get fixed width text style in Thunderbird.
Language is very special to humans. You can train a parrot to utter certain words, but you can never teach it to talk. People still talk to parrots. Why? You can train your dog to fetch your newspaper for you, but imagine one morning, instead of just following your command, it asks you "which one?" That's ridiculous. It will never happen. But imagine fifteen years ago, people were excited that they could send text from one computer to another. Not to mention music or video. Now, computers can read patterns directly from your mind and react appropriately to them. The technology that enables the HUD can use such technologies. Yes, you could use mindreaders to use traditional shortcuts as well, but shortcuts are not reusable. It is also unlikely that your brain would send an equally strong signal when thinking about a shortcut as it will when you're thinking about a word. Words are also extremely reusable. Otherwise, you could replace the entire English literature with a thick dictionary. "Downloads" mean exactly that, whether you're in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Transmission, Thunderbird or any other program. What does ctrl+shift+Y mean in Transmission, do you suppose?
At a very basic level, what the HUD does, is to enable the computer to adapt to the human, instead of forcing the human to adapt to the computer. Explain to me how that's not different from the computers of the 80s.
Jo-Erlend Schinstad
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