Sun Tzu, observing but not necessarily understanding the correlation between an increase in the money supply and inflation:
Presumably, the locals have wages fixed by law or tradition, which leaves little money for taxes once soldiers paid from afar bid up prices.
“Why do you question
When there’s no answer told?
Plain truth is nothing
You can’t buy it when it’s sold
Save all your money
And they won’t reason why
Why all the worry?
They’ll spend it when you die
Don’t look for something
Plain truth is nothing,
nothing but the plain truth”
-Gentle Giant, “Plain Truth”
On the cover sleeve of the album (Acquiring the Taste), they say:
“From the outset we have abandoned all preconceived thoughts of blatant commercialism.”
I guess that doesn’t include Hayek’s “19th century” liberal commercialism:
“Like most tools, rules are not part of a plan of action but rather equipment for certain unknown contingencies. Indeed, a great part of all our activities is also guided not by a knowledge of the particular ultimate needs which they serve, but by a desire to accumulate a stock of tools and of knowledge, or to manoeuvre for positions, in short to accumulate ‘capital’ in the widest sense of the term, which we think will come in useful in the kind of world in which we live. And this sort of activity seems indeed to become more prevalent the more intelligent we become. We adapt more and more, not to the particular circumstances, but so as to increase our adaptability to kinds of circumstances which may occur. The horizon of our sight consists mostly of means, not of particular ultimate ends.”
-Law, Legislation, and Liberty
I, too, have a pet little evil, to which in more passionate moments I am apt to attribute all the others. This evil is the neglect of thinking. And when I say thinking I mean real thinking, independent thinking, hard thinking.
You protest. You say men are thinking more now than they ever were. You bring out the almanac to prove by statistics that illiteracy is declining. You point to our magnificent libraries. You point to the multiplication of books. You show beyond a doubt that people are reading more now than ever before in all history…
Very well, exactly. That is just the trouble. Most people, when confronted with a problem, immediately acquire an inordinate desire to ‘read-up’ on it. When they get stuck mentally, the first thing such people do is to run to a book. Confess it, have you not often been in a waiting room or a Pullman, noticed people all about you reading, and finding yourself without any reading matter, have you not wished that you had some?—something to ‘occupy your mind’? And did it ever occur to you that you had within you the power to occupy your mind, and do it more profitably than all those assiduous readers? Briefly, did it ever occur to you to think?
Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a ScienceFamous for being the only philosopher in recorded history who wasn’t insufferably boring, Diogenes of Sinope used a combination of asceticism, sarcasm, and violence to demonstrate to the citizens of Athens their complete lack of virtue.
Diogenes based his Cynical philosophy on action and common sense, rejecting metaphysical constructs and thought “paradoxes”. According to the pro-Diogenes account, when Plato attempted to demonstrate the concept of an ideal philosophical “cup” from which all physical cups are derived, Diogenes characteristically accused the space between Plato’s ears of being the archetypal emptiness from which all emptiness is derived. When a student tried to prove one of Zeno’s paradoxes (“there is no motion”) to him, he walked away. Great as Diogenes was, however, I can’t reconcile his lovable antics with his response to the diamonds-water paradox.
The diamonds-water paradox goes something like this: since water is essential for survival and diamonds are irrelevant in this regard, the high price of diamonds relative to water is nonsensical, assuming people prefer life to death. Diogenes’ version might be called the grain-statue paradox, and his solution was this: people don’t value the very things required for life highly enough:
“Very valuable things, said he, were bartered for things of no value, and vice versa. At all events a statue fetches three thousand drachmas, while a quart of barley-flour is sold for two copper coins.” -Laertus
This is, of course, the very sort of philosophical navel-gazing which Diogenes was supposed to ridicule.
Nobody ever chooses between all the world’s grain and all the world’s statues or all diamonds and all water. We can only ever value the amount of something we’re being presented with, in the context of what we already have. If water is so plentiful you can bathe in it, what is that next glass of water worth to you? Almost nothing. If you’re in Athens where food is plentiful, grain is similarly worthless. You only ever decide whether to take the next handful of grain, not all grain that ever existed.
Diogenes also contradicts his objection to Plato’s ideal “cup” with his explanation. The idea that there is an inherent value to grain, separated from the price individuals are willing to pay for it, assumes that there is an ideal “grain”, maybe somewhere up in the sky (or between Diogenes’ ears), the metaphysics of which are violated when someone does the only thing that makes sense, selling at a price people will buy.
Diogenes ought to listen to himself:
“When behaving indecently in the marketplace, he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach.”
Well Diogenes, thanks to mass refusal to value grain at anything more than what it’s worth, it’s now extremely easy to alleviate one’s hunger. The price might not be as low as rubbing yourself indecently, but we’re getting there.
The icons on the original Macintosh were simple 32 x 32 grids of black and white pixels. Nevertheless, Susan Kare was able to create some of the most easily-recognizable icons of all time, including a frighteningly realistic Steve Jobs, under these harsh technological restrictions.
Why is it that such simple forms can communicate what an icon represents so efficiently, while high-resolution and photo-realistic representations of real objects are often not immediately recognizable?
About 7 minutes into this UI and Us interview, Wil Shipley explains what makes an icon iconic. in his words, “An icon is supposed to be the minimum number of elements that suggests something.”
UIandus.com Interview with Wil Shipley from Keith Lang on Vimeo.
One example Shipley uses is the “Picasso” Mac logo. But along with Susan Kare’s icons, the only good examples of “iconic” icons so far are as old as the Mac itself. What are some more recent examples?
Leopard’s new folders, for all of their flaws, are very iconic in the sense of using few elements to represent their contents. In addition, each “stamp” into the folders can be represented with very few pixels, which allows Apple to use the same symbols for the smallest representation of each icon (16 pixels square).
An even better modern attempt comes from David Lanham in the form of Sticker Icons. Among the most radical reinventions of famous icons are Flash, Photoshop, and Preview:
That Torrent icon isn’t bad either. Small raindrops making up a larger one is both easily recognizable as a play on the word “torrent” and as a visual metaphor for what torrent applications actually do.
Such icons aren’t well-recieved in all corners of the Mac community. Using a simple, memorable design instead of a photorealistic metaphor for what an application does is often seen as overt branding.
Adam Betts had the following to say about Yojimbo’s icon, which he was given and asked to “gloss-ize:”
“I do understand that they were only looking for pure branding logo and not standard icon but personally I strongly believe that this kind of app is better suited for standard design […] The icon they went with is ugly as hell in my opinion. […] But do they work well as a brand? I’m afraid so.”
In this case, the “standard design” is a photo-realistic icon of a journal, which could represent a huge variety of things, one of which is Yojimbo.
BareBones carries this icon philosophy over from their resolution-limited “Classic” Mac days, when they sold BBEdit with a similarly iconic icon. Note that TextMate, a competing product created after the rise of Mac OS X, uses a photo-realistic pen and paper metaphor for its icon (one that bears similarity to TextEdit, Property List Editor, and nearly every other document-editing application on OS X).
Before I end this post, I’d like to give a dishonorable mention to what may be the least iconic icon I’ve ever seen attached to an application:
Hmm… what exactly am I looking at? I understand Brent Simmons made this icon himself, and I’m assuming that means it’s temporary, but it’s a bit ridiculous to expect a user to recognize your application by a monochrome close-up of the desktop icon (that blob on the left is supposed to be the top of South America, if you’ve never seen NNW before).
How could we make this a bit more iconic? Well, there’s already a universally-recognized symbol for RSS feeds, and with a little NewsGator branding and 3 minutes in an image editor, you get something like this:
I am by no stretch of the imagination a graphic artist, but I’m assuming you get the general idea.
Of course, icons are a bad way to represent applications and commands in the first place, and we’d all be better off dropping them for simple words, but while icons are the entrenched platform standard, they might as well be a bit more iconic.
Update: NetNewsWire for iOS has a new icon, much more iconic than the old one, I’m happy to say:
Everyone says the Finder should be more spatial. But that’s a bit vague—what does it even mean? Here’s an everyday example of why spatiality is nice.
I have several folders on my Mac devoted to solely to images from the internet. Since such images usually have gibberish filenames and the content is what’s important, Cover Flow is perfect for viewing these folders in the Finder. But doing so effectively requires a big Finder window. This is a problem, since most of my Finder windows are small (a folder with, say, ten sub-folders is still a relatively tiny window). The normal browser-like behavior of the Finder is to replace the contents of the front window with the contents of the folder you open. Let’s see how that works for my Wallpapers folder, which I’ve set to always open in Cover Flow (in Show View Options).
My Pictures folder:
And opening Wallpaper:
Ooh, not good. Cover Flow gets squished into that tiny window. I’d have to manually resize it and then do the reverse every time. Now let’s try the same thing under old-school spatial mode (click the pill button on the top right).
Once again, the Pictures folder:
And Wallpaper:
My viewing preferences for this window were preserved from where I left it last. Beautiful.
So what’s the problem? Why don’t I just keep on going in old-school mode for the rest of my days? Unfortunately, the Finder exhibits browser-like behavior for the different views (icon, list, etc.) even when it looks old-school. So if I switch one folder to Cover Flow, then open another that used to be in icon view, that folder will also show up in Cover Flow. The Finder treats the views as a switch for newly opened folders: off or on.
To get the desired effect above, I had to go into View Options and set it manually as I described. New users are never going to see this option, and without it, old-school mode is exactly like browser mode except without the toolbar. In short, it looks inherently worse at face value. Not to mention the annoyance of opening that palette all the time.
Note: The information in this post is out of date. Aspyr has released a newer version of KotOR on the Mac App Store that I haven’t played.
People often ask why nobody plays video games on the Mac. This is a post for those people.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has been out for a very long time (Sidenote: The sequel to KotOR is still not out on the Mac and probably never will be). But I did not start playing it until very recently because the game was originally released before the advent of Intel Macs and it was completely unplayable on my Macbook. Also, the Universal Binary, though available, is still not out of beta. Apple announced Intel in 2005, right? Just checking. This situation really isn’t Aspyr’s fault, since they don’t control what Apple does with its new hardware, but this isn’t a post about why Aspyr sucks. It’s a post about why playing KotOR on the Mac sucks.
This next point is also Apple’s fault: even with Universal Binary, I have to run the game with lowest settings to avoid slowdown. The Macbook, though a very expensive laptop, has an integrated graphics chip rather than a graphics card. Apparently, in Apple’s mind, professionals are the only people who ever play video games on their computers, and therefore the privilege of a graphics card is only available if you get a Macbook Pro for an additional $1,500 or so. That’s right, a grand and a half over an already high-end laptop just to play games with decent settings.
Next, a general video game problem that’s exacerbated by the obscurity of Macs: no-cd cracks. Seriously, people. This is 2007. I shouldn’t have to carry a DVD around with me because someone thinks that it somehow prevents piracy. Imagine if Photoshop required you to insert its CD every time you used it. KotOR actually required me to copy every file on the DVD onto my hard drive in order to play. It’s as if they’re mocking me, saying “we’re making it obvious that you don’t actually need files from the DVD to play, but we’re still forcing you to put it in.” Fortunately for Windows users, cracks to disable the check for discs on the game’s launch are widely available. But since Mac games are much rarer, it’s almost impossible to find no-cd cracks. So you just have to carry around the discs like an idiot.
Now we get to the crashes. And before I get emails about how the beta status of the Universal KotOR makes crashes a-ok, rest assured that all of these issues were also present when I tested them on the latest PPC version, which is not in beta. These issues are based on personal experience only.
Area loading crash: On Taris, about one of every three loading screens would crash on me when moving from area to area. I was literally saving the game before going through every single door, reloading after the inevitable crashes to roll the dice again. There is no excuse for this, and there is no fix available. Some areas would crash on every try unless I went to another area, came back, and tried the same door again. Sometimes they continued to crash every time. A misplaced quicksave inside a building with only one exit and a consistent crash on leaving resulted in an unplayable game. In rare cases, some areas outside of Taris would never load, such as the Tatooine swoop track.
Freezing: Dantooine has many flaws, one of which Aspyr fully admits to. Whenever I tried to move on the grassland areas, my character would freeze in place, and sometimes zoom into the distance as if I were holding onto the forward movement key. Other times the character would simply move in the wrong direction and then get stuck in place. Aspyr advises via their bug-tacking system to try editing an ini file or using a tip from the Inside Mac Games fourms that involves launching the game from OpenGL Profiler, one of the Mac OS X Developer Tools. Neither helped as far as I could tell.
Crash on Save: This set of crashes was separate from the area loading crashes and occurred mostly on Tatooine. They were particularly bad, as I could not load my savegames at all without crashing the entire application. I tried removing PARTYTABLE.res from my save folder (the file that seemed to be causing the problem). This let me load my game, but I was missing everything in that file, including quests and party members. But I could move a few feet, save, put the file back in, and everything would load up fine. But then the crashing started again, and this solution stopped working. After a lot of mucking around, I found that moving some of the files from the savegame’s folder to a different savegame would let me open my save from that game. I would have to redo this after every crash.
Ridiculous Artifacts: This one isn’t really a crash, but on every world but Taris so far, there have been huge and ridiculous visual artifacts that slow down gameplay. Sometimes they’re a web of random lines. Sometimes a plane of light blocks the player’s view completely. Sometimes there just aren’t textures where there should be.
Well, there you have it. Mac users don’t play games often because the games on the Mac suck hard. People often look at this issue from the wrong angle (“Why don’t publishers make games for the Mac?”), but the truth is that there would be a better market for Mac games if Mac users had any incentive to play them.
Daniel Jalkut, developer of MarsEdit, has issued a call for everyone to start blogging. So:
If you’re a mere mortal like me, you browse the Finder in icon view. Big icons are easy to recognize, and they let me use Fitts’ Law to click on things faster. Yes, the intuitive simplicity of icon view is truly a wondrous thing.
However, getting a file up one folder level is not. You need to create a seperate Finder window, navigate to one folder short of where your file is, and drag it over. Clearly, OS X has failed you. Or has it? Consider the following Applescript:
on run
tell application "Finder"
try
set the target of window 1 to the container of target of window 1
on error
display dialog "No parent folder exists." buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with icon caution
end try
end tell
end run
on open the_files
tell application "Finder"
try
move the_files to the container of target of window 1
on error
display dialog "No parent folder exists." buttons {"OK"} default button 1 with icon caution
end try
end tell
end open
