From: Pat (patudelan@goalsnet.com.pe)
Date: Sat Apr 10 2004 - 23:08:16 MDT
QUE TAL SI EXISTE UN TECNICO QUE SEPA EVITAR TODO LOS VIRUS DE ESTE AÑO Y
LOS DEMAS QUE VENDRAN CON TAN SOLO RENOVARLOS , DE ACUERDO= OK
At 10:02 p.m. 10/04/04 -0600, you wrote:
>Emerging Technology
>Beauty and the Beastly PC
>Microsoft discovers that software should be—surprise!—a thing of beauty.
>By Steven Johnson
>DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 05 | May 2004 | Technology
>
>I’m sitting in a darkened conference room in Microsoft’s vast campus in
>Redmond, Washington, talking to a team of software developers as they
>flash images from their latest operating system onto a wall-size screen.
>We’re not talking about the usual Microsoft subjects—the company’s
>prodigious market share, the value of its stock, or the number of lines of
>code in the latest version of Office.
>
>We’re talking about beauty.
>
>The Microsoft team is showing off some new tools for managing digital
>photos stored in ordinary home computers. Instead of spreading the photos
>across the screen as if they were on a light table, the software organizes
>them like shirts on a dry cleaner’s motorized rack. As the photos
>approach, they grow larger and then shrink back down as they revert to the
>bottom of the stack (where they are still partially visible). It’s a
>delightful effect, the kind of visual trick you want to see again and
>again. And it’s a surprising departure for Microsoft.
>
>For decades Bill Gates and company have made products that emphasize
>function over form, leaving the aesthetics to rival Apple Computer. Such
>niceties never seemed worth the trouble. Apple’s elegant Macintosh
>operating system may have elevated software design to an art form, but it
>attracted only a tiny fraction of the audience that gravitated to
>Microsoft’s flagship Windows operating system.
>
>Skeptics might view Microsoft’s new conversion to the cult of high-tech
>beauty as just another case of following the latest trends for fashion’s
>sake. Those same cynics might dismiss dancing photographs as mere eye
>candy. In the world of Microsoft, software has traditionally turned
>personal computers into an extension of an office environment, where they
>are used for such utilitarian tasks as crunching numbers, tracking
>billable hours, and sending memos. But a new awareness of digital artistry
>is emerging, thanks to research by cognitive scientists that shows the
>extent to which aesthetically rich experiences enhance our mental
>faculties. Eye candy turns out to be nutritious after all.
>
>The connection between cognitive science and software design dates back to
>the birth of the graphic interface in the late 1970s. Researchers studying
>the brain’s attention and memory systems noticed that our visual memory
>was different from our textual memory. Our primate ancestors learned to
>use their sense of sight to navigate complex spaces millions of years ago,
>but humans have been reading words for only a few thousand years. So
>software designers hit upon a way to tap into those innate visual skills:
>Represent commands and data on-screen with visual icons, not strings of text.
>
>Something comparable is afoot today with software aesthetics. This time
>brain research is focusing on our emotional responses as well as our
>attention and memory systems. Contemplating beautiful objects puts us in a
>good mood—or what brain scientists describe as “a state of positive
>affect.” These nice feelings change the way the brain processes
>information. If you’re under stress or feeling beaten down by your
>environment, your brain hunkers down and focuses on details and the body’s
>most pressing needs: physical safety, hunger, and so on. But if you’re in
>a relaxed, cheerful mood, your brain is likely to enter into a creative,
>exploratory state, seeking out new connections and new experiences in your
>environment.
>
>“I started out as an engineer, and I thought that what was really
>important was that something worked,” says longtime interface guru Don
>Norman of the Nielsen Norman Group, whose latest book, Emotional Design,
>describes his conversion to aesthetics. “Appearance—how could that matter?
>And yet for some reason, I would still buy attractive things, even if they
>didn’t work as well as the less attractive ones. This puzzled me. In the
>last two years, I’ve finally come to understand that it’s a result of the
>extremely tight coupling between emotion and cognition. Emotion is about
>judging the world, and cognition is about understanding. They can’t be
>separated.”
>
>This is not a matter of superficial sex appeal. Beautiful design has an
>effect on our mental states—we think differently under the sway of beauty.
>“The brain has been wired through evolution to be attracted by good
>things,” Norman says. “When we see things that are pleasurable, when we’re
>enjoying ourselves, it makes us more willing to explore, more imaginative.
>It’s part of our wiring.”
>
>A growing awareness of the inextricable connection between emotion and
>cognition sparked Microsoft’s push toward aesthetically pleasing software.
>For many years their products were the virtual equivalent of the barren
>cubicle mazes of many modern offices: functional, but devoid of life, of
>personality. Neglecting aesthetics might have made a kind of cruel sense
>in an older, assembly-line context, in which work revolved around
>mindless, repetitive labor. Factory owners didn’t want to inspire
>creativity among their employees; they wanted to drill it out of them. But
>the keyboard jockeys of the information age—precisely the people using
>Microsoft Windows—do their best work when they’re rewarded, rather than
>discouraged, for creativity and mental agility.
>
>You can see the beginnings of the company’s new appreciation for the
>mind’s appetite for beauty in its default background image for Windows XP:
>a vista of rolling, grassy hills, with puffy white clouds hovering against
>a blue sky overhead. Evolutionary psychologists have long suspected that
>the human perceptual system has an innate fondness for landscapes with
>wide, open views, thanks to the millions of years our forebears spent on
>the savannas of Africa. Re-creating that ancestral homeland on our
>computer monitors evokes a primitive sense of well-being and
>contentedness—particularly compared with the screens of old, with their
>garish corporate logos or monochrome emptiness. The monitor goes from
>being an empty vessel to a room with a view.
>
>But some computers running Windows XP, Microsoft’s most stylized effort to
>date, force us to sit through a series of unappealing command-line screens
>during the start-up routine, as if we’ve time-traveled back to the
>text-only displays of the early 1980s. We wouldn’t accept this kind of
>visual disruption when we sit down to watch television—The West Wing
>doesn’t begin with a string of time codes and copyright notices—but
>somehow we’re supposed to take it for granted on a computer screen.
>
>Part of Microsoft’s goal with its next-generation operating system,
>code-named Longhorn, is to eliminate such discontinuities. “We want to
>make the OS much more seamless aesthetically,” says Tjeerd Hoek, head of
>Microsoft’s user experience design group. “We want things to flow.” This
>aspiration is apparent from the moment you log on to the system. An
>opening screen offers you a set of user names, each with an attractive
>icon beside it. Select one and the icon appears to drift across the
>screen, depositing itself in the bottom left-hand corner as the rest of
>the screen fills with applications and documents. Instead of those jarring
>opening images you can get from Windows XP, the Longhorn opening sequence
>has a charming fluidity; it’s as though the two initial screens are
>melding into one another.
>
>There are limits to the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure, of course. The
>Longhorn demo includes screen images that pulse with glowing patterns,
>like the shimmering, translucent sea creatures in James Cameron’s movie
>The Abyss. They are quite lovely, but if you want to concentrate on
>anything else—your work, for instance—the repetitive movement would no
>doubt be distracting. This, too, is a side effect of biology: The neural
>circuitry for peripheral vision is weak at detecting fine-grained
>information but adept at detecting movement. You can be staring intently
>at an e-mail message, but your peripheral vision wants to draw your pupils
>toward that moving shape on the other side of the screen.
>
>The most fascinating new Microsoft software tools are a marvelous fusion
>of aesthetic charm and genuine utility. Microsoft research scientists
>Curtis Wong and Steven Drucker showed me one prototype of the
>photo-manipulation software that automatically arranges photos into
>clusters based on the date and time they were taken. If you take 10
>consecutive shots of a sunset, the software will recognize that all those
>pictures were snapped within a matter of minutes and pull them into a
>single stack. The organizational scheme is logical enough, but what makes
>the software impressive is the visual appeal of all the images flying
>across the screen to stack themselves up into an orderly pile. (The effect
>is not unlike that created by an expert blackjack dealer plying his trade
>at a table in Vegas.) File management is not normally something that
>brings a smile to my face, but Wong and Drucker’s photo tool had me
>leaning into the screen.
>
>Prototype software from Microsoft includes a variety of new tools for
>organizing photographs in a flash. With one click, you can automatically
>divide your snapshot collection into indoor and outdoor images. You can
>also have the software select all photos that contain human faces. That
>pleasure is not to be underestimated. If you want people to use their
>computers for creative ends, then you might as well start by giving them
>something beautiful to look at. “We’ve got all this graphics-processing
>power on modern PCs that we’re not using most of the time,” Wong says.
>“It’s a waste not to do something fun with it!”
>
>
>
>----
>This message was posted by Walter Watts to the Virus 2004 board on Church
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