When Longhorn release, Linux got end. 3507

Yes they do. Ask one of the cognitive psychologists near you.

You are trying to conflate objective reality and real life. It doesn't work - give it up.

Yes they ARE! But the symbols of that language are drawn from part of your "real-life" experience, is the difference. And the events you see too.

Maybe you see a cupboard on the screen, and in the cupboard, when you "open" the cupboard "door", are things hanging on pegs or hooks. What all that MEANS is for you to learn (the language), but you don't have to learn the lexicon, because it's drawn from "real life". You know about cupboards, openingü closing, pegs, hooks, the idea of having vision obscured by a door, perspective, and so on. Thse things when vieed trigger immediate recognition and familiarity in your brain, and you know how to interact with them. What you don't know is what those things mean and what interacting with them means in the new setting.

Suppose that opening a door amounts to uncompressing an archive. Suppose that taking something off a peg amounts to preparing to load it. That's the language which you have to learn, but you manipulate the symbols of that language well already! In other words, you don't have to learn to read the symbols.

When I learned russian at school, I first had to learn to read the russian alphabet, and read russian words. Same for japanese. I had to learn what symbols meant individually, together, placed together in various ways. All that is what you jump over by having a desktop metaphor drawn from "real-life".

I think a 3-D metaphor has some merit! No longer do you have to explain "open a window" or "double click" (that one really end me - my mother cannot double click! She goes "click", pause, "click". She hasn't the motor skill).

Yes it is. You do not have to have seen something for it to be real-life. You do not even have to be able to see it for it to be real-life. Think of Socrates and his definition of "is". If it looks and behaves and feels like something, then it IS that thing. Real-life IS what looks and behaves and feels like real-life. Your experience is always secondary, so why should you care if the photons arriving on your retina come by reflection or emission.

It does ...

It does ...

Because that is "real-life".

That's the same thing to you - you only ever see metaphors in your head. If you were to see "real-life" as it "really" were, you'd be looking at photons, or possibly 10-D quantum sea, or whatever. All you ever see in your head are concepts trigered by externals. I see no need to quibble over whether you are looking at a real cupboard or a computer-generated cupboard when discussing what is shown on the screen. It's a cupboard, and that's real-life enough for me.

Yes it does. Or we wouldn't be able to handle it!

Oh, I see. I thought you were asking how an gui with metaphors drawn from a dump truck driver's life could relate to your desk experience!

Well, when you want to start writing, you have to engage first gear. When you save your document you have to drive to the tip and amake a "deposit".

Or something. But we're both being silly.

Your desktop has plenty of room to go 3-D.

Ummph. Maybe. I guess so. Maybe we could walk through a zoo or a garden and open the cages of animals (or pick flowers) that correspond to what we need. There's the GNU!

There are tasks which would be well-represented by 3-d analogues. Having old versions of your docs located "further away in the distance", for example, seems to me to be a good idea.

Peter -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter T. Breuer MA CASM PhD. Ing., Prof. Ramon y Cajal Dpto. Ingenieria Tel: +34 91 624 91 80 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Fax: +34 91 624 94 30-65 Spain