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So if I'm at home AND I'm in the same room with it AND I don't have my phone in my pocket AND it's otherwise quiet in the room, I can totally ask it stuff. SIGN ME UP!

This will be so great for all those times that I'm standing alone in my living room with my hands full and I suddenly need to know "what's 28 degrees fahrenheit in celsius?"

Seriously, Amazon, just throw this useless piece of shit into the bargain bin with the Microsoft Kin and the Google Nexus Q and the Facebook Phone and oh yeah the Amazon Fire Phone. Call me in a few months when they announce what the write-down is on this turd.

> Er...what exodus?

Haven't you been paying attention? No-one's buying Windows PCs any more!

http://parislemon.com/post/47719786064/the-year-of-windows

Microsoft are going to have to wring as much money out of their corporate muppet cash cow over the next 18 months because after that they're fucked.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/using-a-social-media-rating-to-help-people-not-judge-them/
http://parislemon.com/post/29563509395/under-the-influence-of-klout
http://uncrunched.com/2012/08/16/why-i-changed-my-mind-on-klout-and-invested/

Yes? Then ignore and move on.

It seems to me like Microsoft isn't exactly losing anything by bowing out.

It's not so much CES that's on the way out as Microsoft that's on the way out as far as a consumers are concerned. Microsoft didn't decide to "bow out", in fact CES decided to not invite them to do the keynote for 2013. After all it's been a long time since they were amongst the most influential consumer technology companies.

http://parislemon.com/post/14590185649/fuck-me-no-fuck-you
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/21/mystery-who-killed-the-microsoft-ces-keynote/

It might be tempting to draw a parellel, however it's a false one.

Apple decided to stop being a part of the MacWorld convention. Both Keynote and Stand.

Microsoft on the other hand were not invited to do another Keynote for 2013, and withdrew their plans to have a stand in response. to that.

Apple jumped, Microsoft were pushed.

http://parislemon.com/post/14590185649/fuck-me-no-fuck-you
http://gigaom.com/2011/12/21/mystery-who-killed-the-microsoft-ces-keynote/

It seems like Google has been having problems communicating within its own departments lately. They're just doing too many things at once. It's like watching a sleep-deprived juggler get thrown a few extra chainsaws during their act - not a pretty sight.

Is this any surprise after Larry Page restructured the organization to resemble more (in the words of the linked article) "a confederacy". The last line of the article may have been prophetic:

As far as internal practices go, the new model appears to give more autonomy to the business heads and let them do most of the interacting with only a little centralized leadership from the top.

This confederate model may work well for Google, but keeping a cohesive company focus will remain challenging for the new CEO.

It seems like Google has been having problems communicating within its own departments lately. They're just doing too many things at once. It's like watching a sleep-deprived juggler get thrown a few extra chainsaws during their act - not a pretty sight.

Most users don't even understand what that little arrow next to a toolbar button means, they don't realize it means there are more options.

That doesn't mean it's a bad interface. It's a highly discoverable interface. The first time they click it, they see the menu pop up. Now they know that there are more options. The hard part is naming the button so that they understand what options are likely to be in it. Assuming you choose which options to group in this way correctly, even this aspect should not be all that hard. If it is, the mistake is not in using a button with a menu, but rather in your naming and/or grouping. (Okay, in extreme cases, this could mean that using it was a mistake if the right number of things to group together happened to be "none of them", but you know what I mean.)

By removing the group labels, you add confusion as to why things are grouped the way they are, which makes it harder to cognitively remember them.

In my experience, if you need labels on groups of buttons, it generally means that you didn't pick good enough labels or icons for the buttons within the group. Things that are conceptually similar should have names that sound conceptually similar, and their icons should be visually distinct such that even those dividers are unnecessary, much less named labels on groups of icons.

Further, if those labels are useful, that means that the user doesn't actually understand what those buttons do, and this typically indicates that the user in question should not have been exposed to those controls in the first place.

Rarely used features are more important to make visible, not less visible.. because people don't know they're there otherwise.

That's wrong at a fairly fundamental level. The goal of a user interface is not to show off every feature of an app. The goal of a user interface is to make it as easy as possible for users to discover the things they need in order to do their job. In other words, its main purpose is to get out of the way of the user. If a user interface is trying to highlight obscure features that the user probably will not need, the UI is an epic fail. Finding rarely used features is what help systems are for, not to mention the ability to search through menus by words in the name. (Or is that just a Mac OS X thing?)

Remember, the ribbon is not for power users. It's for regular people, just as the Vista and 7 UI's were. Power users use keyboard shorcuts and context menus.

If it's for regular users, then the ribbon for something like this should have roughly four buttons:

• Cut
• Copy
• Paste
• Share

At most, add one more button for "preferences". That's it. Everything else there is unnecessary and confusing for regular people. What I'm seeing here is not designed for ordinary users. It is designed to try to show those ordinary users everything that power users might potentially want to do, which quite frankly is just about the worst offense you can possibly commit as a UI designer short of making all your controls hot pink on neon green....

Put another way, I think this blog post sums it all up nicely.

Besides continuous Slashdot harvesting, 90+ percent of their content seems to be taken from other sites. Look here:

http://parislemon.com/2008/05/another-classic-rip-off-job-by-ars.html

http://www.ipdemocracy.com/archives/002984ars_technica_has_no_shame_but_thats_nothing_new.php

These days they will put a little link at the bottom if they think they might get caught, but basically Fisher takes stories from other sites, writes them again, and publishes them (or has his lackeys do it) and then whines about not getting ad revenue. Having not read Ars in years due to the shameless ripping off, I find it quite unsurprising that he had to sell off the site, and if the comments below are at all insightful, he probably does have a performance-based contract. But even years ago, Ars would beg people to click the ads and put up with interstitials and other nonsense.

Ken Fisher is just another leech on the rear end of society. Nothing of value will be lost.

(Yes, I am posting anonymously, as Ars fans have obviously been "moderating" this Slashdot discussion, and I don't wish to have my unrelated posts modded down as a result of this post in this discussion)

True enough on that point, but as I wrote about last week this still shows a complete and utter failure in meshing Google's contact management system with their newly implemented social features. Many of my contacts are not only not my friends, but people I'd rather not have on my contact list as they are only there after exchanging nasty emails with. Google definitely needs to rethink this.

http://www.parislemon.com/2007/12/your-google-friends-may-or-may-not-be.html