simonsquiff

Oops that was meant to be 'definately wasn't started by time travellers' obviously!

Great idea brilliantly executed.

Not only is this guy a fantastic designer he's also a very strong copy writer. The advert headline and copy is really nicely crafted.

I think a company copy style where they constantly profess things like "our company definitely was started by time travellers 33 years in the future" is a wonderful idea to actually use in real life for some high tech firm. Cheeky and playful it would get a lot of attention.

I've done some quick rescaling examples. Rescaled are to the right on the iOS ones, above for the OSx ones.

http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/8020/iosicons.png

http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/6851/osxicons.png

The iOS ones aren't the best example - it's not a complex icon - but you can still see the hand crafted ones are better, e.g. some of the lines on the rescaled items are not the desired 1 or 2 px widths and so look blurry (e.g. the ipad icon); you don't have the texture; and you lose the corner line definition (e.g. see ipad settings).

The OSx ones are better examples as it's more complex. The scaled icons look rubbish.

We're not there yet. You still need to tweak icons so they look good at various sizes - subtle things like 1px lines or highlights still need to manual tweaking. Pixels too small to see doesn't make the problem go away, you still want to optimise for resolution so you match the pixel grid for sharp definition. Some people don't have that attention to detail (and those devs can just rescale them) but many do - and personally I think it's worth it. And I appreciate having the opportunity to hand craft rather than have the OS just scale it for me.

I think it's more likely that the iPad will do a similar x2 increase in resolution, i.e. go from 1024x768 to 2048x1536...

You don't need the same level of DPI on the iPad and it would just take too much grunt to push the same DPI as the iPhone on that screen.

That's genuinely very very impressive.

I think all the web commentary about whether the pixels are visible or not are missing the point. The point is that thinks that were not readable (or resolvable) now are. For instance on the NYT page, on the 3gs screenshot only the main headlines are readable. On the 4 phone, everything is. That's a huge usability improvement. Additionally a number of the stylist elements on the iphone don't look that great at lower resolution but amazing at the higher one. The obvious one is the inset text effect used for the browser header (i.e. the white inset on text),it almost looks like ghosting on the 3gs whilst on the 4 it looks like a crisp inset. The same goes for the inset icons at the bottom. I have to look hard to see pixels on my 3gs; things looking less pixely isn't the news, things being more resolvable is.

Psychotherapy is very different to psychology. Psychotherapy is much more old school, classic conversational therapy as derived from Freud. Here in the UK (but much less so in the US) it has a poor reputation as unscientific and with weak research evidence. Psychology is generally a more experimentally driven, more science based approach, and shouldn't be lumped in the same category. Essentially, psychological treatment can help when psychotherapy has not; all the same this appears to be physiological rather than mental.

Not the best analogy - you can throw away the envelope and with the letter being signed you still know who it is from, putting your name at the end does serve a purpose.

You're assuming most children are planned :)

These massive project just don't work. 1) Pay consultants vast money to 'spec' out an insanely complex requirement. 2) Go through very long winded and expense tender exercise, with the usual suspects - all expensive and with many failed projects under their belt 3) Company builds from scratch to the spec. 4) Spec is obviously incomplete, discover too late, company asks for lots more money to fill the gaps. 5) Rinse and repeat (minus the tender)

You end up with something that has taken 10 years, and is delivering a 'requirement' that is 10 years old and now not relevant (even less relevant than the imperfect 10 year old spec).

The only real way to do this is to break these projects up - either in scope or in size - ideally get something as off the shelf as possible and iterate it until it suits the needs, and then roll out wider. I.e. get well away from a waterfall process of massive scope.

For example, instead of trying to put in place an NHS wide system (which then fails at great expense), get each individual Trust to go on their own with off the shelf suppliers or at least smaller, cheaper bespoke organisations. Smaller, more manageable and cheaper. You can define interoperability standards if that's needed; you can buy enterprise licenses if one supplier does end up being obviously better.

Part of the problem is the ridiculous procurement processes that the government departments make you go through. The cost of sale is therefore amazingly large, which leads to large project costs for the few companies that are willing to put up with this process, while erecting a barrier of entry for smaller and cheaper organisations.

Except you can use any language or tools you want to develop your 360 games.

That would take them how long? Buying Palm they get that now.

>Are you trying to discourage people from trying to solve it?

Not at all, the complete opposite. It's a fascinating area but I feel the expectations are completely out of whack with reality. Most of the articles like this have people saying we're only a decade or two away from proper AI, when I'm arguing that that is just not backed up at all - and people are underestimating what work is involved here.

When expectations are set wrong, and people eventually realise it, it can damage research in this area as people don't take it seriously any more. Ref the'AI Winter' - the dramatic cut in funding when governments realised most of the experts in the field had massively over-promised and under-delivered.

I think we need to break this down into smaller chunks of bounded problems. There is some amazing research around using human like neural networks and similar processes steps for machine vision - e.g. for object recognition, trying to mimic what happens in nature. This is greatly achievable.

Trying to model the entire human brain, with talk about how this will lead in the near future to intelligent, reasoning - even sentient AI - is fun but for the reasons I outlined needs an expectation reboot.

This is complete fantasy unfortunately.

They make this sound like AI is just a hardware problem, waiting to be solved by the wonder of Moore's Law. It's not. The human brain has 100 billion neurons, and 100 trillion synapses (wikipedia) - but it is the connections between them that make it do what it does. The possible connections are just mind boggling. Let's say you build hardware with those numbers (utterly non-trivial) - how does it connect together? How to we get it to structure in a way that those networks do anything? You can't expect it to wire itself into anything useful.

We have no idea how the brain does anything of significance (merging of senses into a coherent whole; memory; consciousness etc). We can't even define consciousness let alone understand how it comes about. We can't 'program' a neural network of any complexity. Even things that we take utterly for granted like object recognition is immensely complicated, let alone things that we know are 'difficult' like sentience. We can't expect this stuff to magically appear from a large neural network; nor can we program it (as we don't understand it); nor can we train it as we don't know what intermediate steps to train for.

Then, what are the inputs into it (and how are those interpreted by the hardware), and how do we get any output out of it? Let's say you solve both the hardware and the wiring problem - so you have a perfect replica human brain in a jar - how do you tell it what to do? How do you get any sense out of it?

We're fumbling in the dark here. To think those fumbles will achieve intelligence in any form in the foreseeable future is unfortunately fantasy.

I've seen Solver used by a number of accountants to say 'I need my profit to be this number, what figures do I need to change to hit that?'. Solver is a life saver for those looking to cook the books (sadly far too many people).

It's amazing the effect a first drinking session make for a new employee. Countless times I've seen the difference after that 'first night out' for new staff - the next day they really are much more accepted into the team, and much less 'the new guy'.

If you've recently started somewhere, and feeling a little disconnected from the rest of the team, get down the pub or bar with them and you will definitely notice the difference the next day. It's also true to say the heavier the session the more the bonding.

In that situation with only 8-12 people you just need to pick up the phone and personally invite them. Will take all of an hour and you'll know the picture instantly, as well as make people feel wanted.

When I'm having a dinner party, or even a small party, I still call everyone personally. The difference it makes to getting people to come is enormous, it makes people feel wanted. Failing that, a personal email (rather than a batch send) also makes a big difference.

I agree that this works both ways - people are getting lazier at inviting people in the same way people are getting lazier at responding.