Even given noise, a long-term trend should still be visible over a period of 10 years or so, especially when we're talking about ocean levels. That is a far different kind of phenomenon than temperature data... and while hard to measure, it is getting easier.
The fact is that we have not been seeing trends as predicted. What AGW proponents often forget is that the argument that you won't necessarily see a trend in as short a period as 10 years works both ways: if that is true, then the warming that they claim has happened may not, in fact, have happened.
It has changed in just the last few years with far better satellite telemetry than we had before. More accurate data, based on a vastly increased number of data points, has taken a lot of the "noise" out of the data. By no means all, of course. I'm just saying it's better.
No, you idiot, we are not. Because I am not talking about "a flood coming in", or the last 2 minutes. I am referring to past predictions that oceans would be (and claims that they are) in just the last few years.
Perhaps it is YOU who don't know how to look at the data? Satellite telemetry over the last few years is vastly more accurate than past readings from a limited number of test stations. In effect, they multiply the number of geographic locations tested by thousands of times, and they are very accurate.
It isn't like even 10 years ago, when you were lucky if you got 30 readings at various points around any given ocean, at different times.
Believe me, I do understand about variability, and cycles, and noise. That does not alter the fact that models predicted the oceans to be above the levels they are now.
For the second time, I WASN'T EXPECTING TO SEE A TREND!
Given the predictions that have been made over the last ten years, and the claimed temperature rises and meltings over just the last few, then ocean levels should have risen over the last 2 years, DESPITE ANY LONG TERM TREND.
That's true. All I really meant was that a "cache" is supposed to be temporary in nature, and should expire after a time. As opposed to, for example, an archive.
However, I must say that as far as I know, Google's use of the term "cache" is pretty loose and may in fact be technically incorrect, if I understand what they are actually doing. (I am presuming here that you mean how they make pages that are no longer normally available via a "cached" link.) I am not 100% certain, but I am pretty sure that those are actually copies of sites that are in long-term storage, not actual caches at all.
I suppose, if you really wanted to split hairs, a "cache" could last for 2 years, and still be a "cache", which is to say a temporary store, as long as it did expire at some point. But I'm not sure Google's use of it really meets the definition of a computer cache.
I disagree with the earlier poster who said it was difficult to delete data once it was cached. That is not true. A data "cache" by its very nature is transitory; once the cache is routinely updated, "cached" data that has been deleted goes away.
If it doesn't, then it isn't "cached" at all... it is stored. That is a different matter. Like the WayBack machine that was used as a (bad) example. WayBack doesn't "cache" data, it stores it for long term.
But none of that has any real relevance for "social networks", except for items that are explicitly made public. Certainly it is true that nobody has a right to expect privacy or exclusivity to data that has been deliberately made public.
What this really affects is your private communications and connections to other people, and what you have stored on some social network that ISN'T public. I happen to agree that somebody should have the right to delete such "personal" or "private" data, and that when it is deleted, it should go away... permanently.
We all know that Facebook reserves the right to store data permanently. Your deleted data is truly deleted, but their TOS explicitly says that they have no obligation whatever to delete data from their archives. That would indeed run afoul of the European data protection laws... but so what? That's Facebook's problem. There is nothing that says a perfectly good and legitimate social network could not be built that conforms to those laws.
"Over the last couple of years? Do a Google image search on "ocean levels graph" and you can see numerous versions of graphs that show the ocean levels going up and down for individual years, but the average over time keeps increasing. To choose a "couple of years" to prove that the predictions are wrong is simple cherry picking data to give a false impression of what is happening."
I wasn't trying to "prove" anything, nor was I discussing any kind of long-term trend. I stated, and I will repeat: I am waiting for any of their predictions to come true. According to past predictions, up to and INCLUDING recent claimed "temperature" data, variations or no, the levels should still have risen over the last couple of years. They have not. That has nothing to do with what you assumed I was trying to say.
Actually, as their own standard of living has risen, their own birth rate has fallen in proportion. If the current rate of change is maintained, third world countries will not have high birth rates for much longer.
"I think you are confusing 3 different topics:..."
No, I am not. The question was whether Microsoft was "forward thinking". That is what I was responding to. Not personal preference, but my opinion (and those of others) about how "forward thinking" it is.
"The.NET compiler is an example of heavy innovation in compiler design. That has nothing to do with it being popular, nor much to do with the criteria for which you like Ruby on Rails."
Nonsense. The.NET compiler was an example of heavy innovation 11 years ago, which is the point I was making. The "criteria" for which I "like" Ruby on Rails is directly relevant to the discussion, because those criteria are: (1) it is an implementation of a newer-technology, dynamic language, and (2) it is being actively and rapidly improved by a growing user base. There is no "confusion" there.
"Further desktop application development is extremely expensive, and most of the work is outsourced to the 3rd world at this point"
That is false on both counts. First, desktop application development is cheaper than ever due to open-source tools (unless you are developing with Microsoft tools, of course), and second, while outsourcing was big for many years, that trend has already begun to reverse. So for someone speaking about "new and innovative" things, you are surprisingly behind the times.
"There are no good IDE's for dynamic languages, that cross over to the static languages. IBM / Eclipse has the same problem, and remember IBM owns rational so they are even larger, as did Embarcadero (the old Borland people)."
Again, complete nonsense. The open-source Radrails (now part of Aptana Studio 3), which was built on Eclipse, has been a very successful IDE for Ruby and Rails development. As have NetBeans and several others.
Are you saying that huge companies like Microsoft and IBM can't build effective IDEs for dynamic languages, but that Open Source developers can? Hmmm...
There isn't any particular problem with creating IDEs for dynamic languages. Most who develop with dynamic languages -- most of those who aren't beginners, anyway -- simply prefer not to use them.
"Now if you mean Rails is a better framework for development of light apps than Microsoft..."
What do you define as a "light app"? Twitter? Revolution Health? YellowPages.com? IBM Global Services is building enterprise applications for its clients using Ruby, and sometimes Rails. And so is ThoughtWorks. Here is a partial list of organizations that use not just Ruby but Rails for many of their enterprise-level applications.
"When they did: VBScript and ActiveX were extremely impressive technologies."
Yes, they were. 11 years ago.
"Essentially for Microsoft to do what you would want regarding Ruby, they would fork Visual Basic further away from C#. That is not a technology or innovation problem they just don't want to create applications with no easy migration path."
Not at all. They made great (if difficult) progress with IronRuby, to the point of actually producing some alpha releases that were largely compliant with Ruby specs. Then they just dumped it. My friend who worked on the project could not give me an actual technical reason for their decision: apparently it was just something Microsoft decided not to pursue any longer.
"I think the idea there is that scrollbars are much less important than they used to be, now that people use scroll wheels or trackpad gestures to scroll rapidly."
But rapid scrolling does not account for at least 3 other features of scrollbars: the ability to see the place in your document at a glance (this was severely impeded by narrowing the scrollbar and making it grey, so it is now much harder to see), the ability to scroll very large amounts with one motion, and the ability to scroll to precise positions in the document. All of these have been made more difficult by the recent changes.
"...but the whole take-home lesson from the iPad's success is that desktop functionality doesn't work on smaller devices: "
So? That just reinforces my point: neither do smaller-device interfaces work effectively for the desktop. I understand that they want more consistency, but trying to take one and shoehorn it into the other was probably not the best idea. Here's a radical idea for you: maybe include them both and let the user choose which they prefer.
I can appreciate the fact that a large part of Apple's revenue is now from mobile devices. However, they should not degrade the existing base of desktop environments merely to increase mobile sales.
"... and adding OS-level automatic versioning and auto-save doesn't seem like a 'lowest common denominator' to me."
I should not have included that part in my "lowest common denominator" comment. I don't know if that feature was already in mobile devices. But I don't care for it. It offers few if any advantages over well-practiced use, except that it might catch the occasional mistake that is caused by a file save when there should not have been one. On the other hand, as I stated before it is very annoying and actually impedes my work flow.... I often have to use CTRL-Z to revert changes to a file before quitting, or else must re-open the file and "revert" it to its former state later, when I didn't want the changes to be saved in the first place. In my work with graphics I often have to do that a lot (make changes and export them, but not change the original file). So as a feature, for me this one is far more trouble and time-consuming than it is worth.
I can see how it could be useful for those who use their machines in a more casual (e.g., not for daily work) manner, but for me it's a big step backward. Being able to turn off the autosave would be great.
In fact, from a developer's standpoint, the "upgrade" to Lion made a lot of blunders, from reducing their support of MacRuby, to waffling about their distribution of Xcode (and flubbing the first release) to the decidedly lower-end-market changes they made to Final Cut.
For the most part, you are only confirming what I have been saying. True enough, however: Apache always was ahead of MS in server space, and nginx is doing pretty well.
"I pointed you to their research group. Take a look. For that matter the.NET compiler is the most sophisticated compiler on the market used by a major platform. Their kernel is excellent and continues to be innovative.... I see lots of innovation, admittedly they are conservative and have a conservative user base but I think there is a lot of bright spots. Similar to IBM 20 years ago, lots of dead weight but lots of interesting innovations."
On this I have to disagree. It is hard to find reliable statistics related to development platforms, but there has been something of a mass exodus away from.net over the last 7 or 8 years, and I am one of them. Obviously this is only anecdotal evidence, still this is my observation:
While there are still plenty of.NET jobs out there, IMHO that is mainly due to the massive base of existing applications. 10 years ago, admittedly MS Visual development tools were the hot things, and then came.NET... and they were immensely popular, for good reason. But that was then. I was an MS developer at that time, too, and I liked the tools very much.
But after having used.NET for a while, I became familiar with some newer and different technologies (like Ruby and Rails for example), and after becoming somewhat familiar with them, I dropped.NET like a not potato. In comparison to Ruby development, I can no longer stand the constraints and limitations of.NET development. And I have a great many friends and colleagues who feel the same way.
There are whole industries now being built around dynamic and functional languages that.NET cannot hope to match. In fact, we have seen.NET attempt to copy many of the same principles (MVC, for example) with some but limited success. Attempting to incorporate a form of Ruby into.NET met with failure: MS gave up on the attempt. (A friend of mine was among the early and senior developers involved with the IronRuby project.)
I admit that I am no longer a.NET developer, nor do I desire to be one, so I am no authority on the subject. Nevertheless, my perception is that.NET progress has somewhat stagnated in recent years, and there has been a lot of attrition in the.NET ranks.
"To which I have to ask: how is it easier when you hide stuff which was formerly visible? How does that help discoverability? The whole point behind the scrollbar was supposed to be that you could tell your position in the document at a glance."
Mod up. Precisely my point. You don't take interface principles that have been hard-won over years of good research into what works best, then just toss them out the window because of some random idea that "I like this better". Change for the sake of change, indeed.
"I think you are missing the point. Scrollbars are essentially a passive way of dealing with the window. It comes from a paradigm that the window is passive relative to the mouse. That doesn't have to be the case, think about all the activity that occurs in an IDE; or even the mouse overs in many web applications. What Apple is moving away from is passive windows."
I'm not missing the point at all. You are.
I am quite familiar with human interface principles, thank you very much, and I have made a point of studying the research that has gone into them during the last 10 years and before. What you are missing is that it is natural (thus the OS X setting for "natural scrolling") on a mobile interface that is responsive to your finger to behave as though it were a dynamic object held in your hand: it moves as your finger does. People naturally react to it that way.
However, in a desktop setting it is NOT "natural", at all. From a human interface standpoint, people are much more efficient with desktop interfaces when they treat them as though it is a STATIC object, and you are looking through a "window" at it. Therefore you don't move the object being viewed, but your window in relation to it.
This is all very basic human interface stuff, and the recent changes by Apple completely ignored them, to the detriment of their OS on the desktop.
"That's going to be the norm across the board. They are moving away from notion of explicit save and moving towards explicit version naming and automatic saves. The idea being that with SSD the user has an experience of all of their applications always being in a fully running state. There is no distinction between a running and a non running application."
I'm not disputing the trend; I'm just saying it's a stupid idea. As the whole topic of this conversation is supposed to be: change simply for the sake of change is not a good thing. This arguably doesn't improve anything, and in fact it has impeded my workflow. Not because I'm not used to it; I am by now. But simply because it's actually slower because of all the times you have to "revert" due to the OS trying to "help" you in ways you don't want. And their revert process is unnecessarily primitive and slow. The whole thing is actually a worse way to "help" users than Microsoft's infamous "Clippy". They should have left well enough alone, rather than making it worse based on internal opinion as opposed to proven interface design.
"Apple has been moving towards less garish and more grey with every version. They are moving from "insanely great" to "subtle elegance". Apple doesn't have as much to prove. And the contrast with the garishness of the Aero works in their favor."
Again, you miss the point: it isn't "elegant" if it flies in the face of absolutely elementary, basic interface principles: elements are supposed to be EASY to tell apart. Colors make it easy. Grayscale makes it hard. This is measurable by the time it takes the eye to track, and has been known for at least 30 years. When you gray things down, you reduce efficiency and increase the time it takes to complete tasks.
So, you can argue aesthetics all you want, but the point I was making is that from an actual usable human interface point of view, it's still terrible, no matter how "pretty" you think it is.
But all of these comments, from my original comment down to here, are kind of off-topic because what I was saying was that the user interface was WORSE than in the previous version.
It doesn't matter where you pick your starting point. Worse is still worse.
I should have clarified, but I meant "losing market share" in the home and developer markets, specifically. I was not implying that Microsoft was going broke, or anything of the sort.
As for home desktops, OS X and Linux have made significant inroads. Is Windows still dominant? Sure. For now. But you have to admit there have been trends: IE is seriously behind the curve when it comes to everyone else, to the point that people are even ceasing to even care about supporting Microsoft's browsers on the web anymore. (I know... I am a professional web developer and I catch the business buzz going around.) It started with the popular campaign to abolish IE 6 but has continued since 7 and 8 have only been incrementally better, and even IE9 does not support some features that others have for at least 2 years.
More and more, people are using Google Docs and Open Office instead of Word. Why? Word is grossly overpriced and you can get the same functionality elsewhere for almost nothing.
By now, Apache and MySQL have long been dominant over IIS and SQL Server in the Web server world... which is a significant portion of IT space today. Heck, some claim that even Apache and MySQL are starting to look long in the tooth.
It's nice that Microsoft has been able to weather the storm and survive even though other companies are besting them in so many areas that they once dominated. I have nothing personal against Microsoft. Heck, I was a Microsoft developer for most of my development history.
But "forward-thinking?" Maybe once. I don't see it today.
"If only individual people are allowed these rights then newspaper editorial boards cannot endorse a candidate."
Wow. Is that a s-t-r-e-t-c-h-! That is nothing at all like I said. If a newspaper editorial board wants to get together and say "WE (board member 1, board member 2, board member 3, etc...) together recommend this candidate"... there is nothing stopping them. They are still speaking as individuals AND as (publicly) acknowledged members of a group. That is not the same thing at all as corporate contributions to political campaigns. To try to equate them is a straw-man argument at best.
Political parties as we know them are now defunct as well. Who gave them the power to speak in endorsement for the people? Does the DNC or RNC only get to speak if their chosen person won 100% of the primary vote?
Bollocks. Another straw-man argument. They don't, in fact, have any power to speak for "the people". This stuff is way out of left field, dude.
"To say that an assemblage of people cannot pool their resources for speech borders on the absurd."
You're right. it would be. But that is not at all what I stated, and you have very grossly misunderstood my point.
No real point in going further, since we are obviously on completely different channels here.
Actually, no, software WAS feeling the "outsourcing pinch". That trend started to reverse last year and software outsourcing has been getting smaller and smaller.
Why? Because the US companies have found that they lose too much money to poor-quality product and unreliable or even non-delivery.
More and more, ads on the contractor boards have been saying "We are accpepting North American and European contractors only." And when you inquire about why, those are the kinds of answers you get.
Agreed. And one excellent example is OS X Lion. I have to wonder why it didn't make the list.
Lion represented a modest but decent upgrade in many respects. However, in their effort to bring the "benefits" of iOS to the desktop they rather dropped the ball.
Their new "Full Screen Mode" is great, I suppose, on an iPad. On a desktop system with two monitors, like my workstation, it is worse that useless because it fills one screen but blanks the other. I end up with less working space than I had when I began.
The new scrollbars are an interface disaster. You should never make scrollbars smaller and harder to see and use, but that's what they did. They are about half as wide as before, and gray instead of in color. Not only that, but by default they disappear after a few seconds, and you have to hover your mouse on the edge of the window to get it back. I'm sure that saves valuable space on a tiny screen but in a desktop work environment it's just plain bad design, and worse: a waste of time because you have to hover and wait for it all the time. In very long documents, people are used to looking at their scrollbar to keep track of where they are. With the default behavior, you can't do that anymore.
You can set the scrollbars to not disappear, but they're still narrow, gray, and hard to see.
They added a couple of gestures to the Magic Trackpad, but at the same time took a couple of my favorite gestures away.
For certain OS X applications, they changed the behavior to something far from the norm, by making documents auto-save, even when you don't want them to. Now, when you quit an app without saving changes (there are a great many scenarios that call for this), you may find that your changes were saved anyway, against your wishes. You can usually revert them back to the state you wanted, but that in itself is a maddeningly slow and unresponsive process, with a poor interface.
The Finder, which is the equivalent of Explorer in Windows or a file browser in Linux, is now not just significantly but aggravatingly slower than it was before. And another elementary interface blunder: the sidebar icons, which used to be in color, are now a washed-out shade of gray.
All in all, for the desktop, OS X Lion (10.7) is quite a bit less "user-friendly" than OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) was. All for the purposes of making their OS interfaces "more consistent". They should have worked harder to bring desktop functionality to their smaller devices, rather than dumbing down the desktop to the "lowest common denominator".
I hate to put it in these terms, but: I don't know how old you are, but that comment makes you appear to be either a kid or someone who just plain doesn't know what they're talking about.
Microsoft has been losing market share over the past decade or so precisely because it was not forward thinking! If you disagree, what other explanation do you have?
Microsoft, throughout most of its existence, has been known for being stodgy and conservative. Most of the new technology it picked up over the years was either bought or stolen (e.g., Stacker) from other companies that were, in fact, forward-thinking.
"My view is that they effectively inherit some rights from the People, but that observation remains wholly irrelevant to this case."
Only if you have moved the goalposts.
"Legal fiction == power structure granted to the People by the legislative branch."
If that's specifically what you meant by "granted" then no argument here.
"Another irrelevant observation."
No, it's not. The Constitution is a very specific document, covering very specific subjects. You are trying to read something into it that isn't mentioned so much as peripherally, or even implied, anywhere.
I fully understand your point about "appearing to have rights" because Congress is prohibited from doing something. I just think it's bullshit.
Let me put it a different way:
The 10th Amendment says that if something wasn't mentioned, then it was specifically left up to the States and to the People. Therefore, States can abridge the speech of corporations if they choose. Which means corporations have no Federally enforceable right -- or ability, if you prefer to put it that way -- of free speech.
Slashdot Mirror
"There's actually been enough flooding to show up as a small dip in the measure of ocean levels."
[Citation needed.]
If you think ocean level data is anything at all like temperature data, then I am not the one being an idiot here.
Even given noise, a long-term trend should still be visible over a period of 10 years or so, especially when we're talking about ocean levels. That is a far different kind of phenomenon than temperature data... and while hard to measure, it is getting easier.
The fact is that we have not been seeing trends as predicted. What AGW proponents often forget is that the argument that you won't necessarily see a trend in as short a period as 10 years works both ways: if that is true, then the warming that they claim has happened may not, in fact, have happened.
It has changed in just the last few years with far better satellite telemetry than we had before. More accurate data, based on a vastly increased number of data points, has taken a lot of the "noise" out of the data. By no means all, of course. I'm just saying it's better.
Correction:
"I am referring to past predictions that oceans would be (and claims that they are) higher than they have been over the last few years.
No, you idiot, we are not. Because I am not talking about "a flood coming in", or the last 2 minutes. I am referring to past predictions that oceans would be (and claims that they are) in just the last few years.
Perhaps it is YOU who don't know how to look at the data? Satellite telemetry over the last few years is vastly more accurate than past readings from a limited number of test stations. In effect, they multiply the number of geographic locations tested by thousands of times, and they are very accurate.
It isn't like even 10 years ago, when you were lucky if you got 30 readings at various points around any given ocean, at different times.
Believe me, I do understand about variability, and cycles, and noise. That does not alter the fact that models predicted the oceans to be above the levels they are now.
For the second time, I WASN'T EXPECTING TO SEE A TREND!
Given the predictions that have been made over the last ten years, and the claimed temperature rises and meltings over just the last few, then ocean levels should have risen over the last 2 years, DESPITE ANY LONG TERM TREND.
Are we clear now?
That's true. All I really meant was that a "cache" is supposed to be temporary in nature, and should expire after a time. As opposed to, for example, an archive.
Well, it depends on the intent.
However, I must say that as far as I know, Google's use of the term "cache" is pretty loose and may in fact be technically incorrect, if I understand what they are actually doing. (I am presuming here that you mean how they make pages that are no longer normally available via a "cached" link.) I am not 100% certain, but I am pretty sure that those are actually copies of sites that are in long-term storage, not actual caches at all.
I suppose, if you really wanted to split hairs, a "cache" could last for 2 years, and still be a "cache", which is to say a temporary store, as long as it did expire at some point. But I'm not sure Google's use of it really meets the definition of a computer cache.
I disagree with the earlier poster who said it was difficult to delete data once it was cached. That is not true. A data "cache" by its very nature is transitory; once the cache is routinely updated, "cached" data that has been deleted goes away.
If it doesn't, then it isn't "cached" at all... it is stored. That is a different matter. Like the WayBack machine that was used as a (bad) example. WayBack doesn't "cache" data, it stores it for long term.
But none of that has any real relevance for "social networks", except for items that are explicitly made public. Certainly it is true that nobody has a right to expect privacy or exclusivity to data that has been deliberately made public.
What this really affects is your private communications and connections to other people, and what you have stored on some social network that ISN'T public. I happen to agree that somebody should have the right to delete such "personal" or "private" data, and that when it is deleted, it should go away... permanently.
We all know that Facebook reserves the right to store data permanently. Your deleted data is truly deleted, but their TOS explicitly says that they have no obligation whatever to delete data from their archives. That would indeed run afoul of the European data protection laws... but so what? That's Facebook's problem. There is nothing that says a perfectly good and legitimate social network could not be built that conforms to those laws.
"Over the last couple of years? Do a Google image search on "ocean levels graph" and you can see numerous versions of graphs that show the ocean levels going up and down for individual years, but the average over time keeps increasing. To choose a "couple of years" to prove that the predictions are wrong is simple cherry picking data to give a false impression of what is happening."
I wasn't trying to "prove" anything, nor was I discussing any kind of long-term trend. I stated, and I will repeat: I am waiting for any of their predictions to come true. According to past predictions, up to and INCLUDING recent claimed "temperature" data, variations or no, the levels should still have risen over the last couple of years. They have not. That has nothing to do with what you assumed I was trying to say.
Exactly. I am waiting for even one of their predictions to come true. For example: ocean level has actually decreased over the last couple of years.
Actually, as their own standard of living has risen, their own birth rate has fallen in proportion. If the current rate of change is maintained, third world countries will not have high birth rates for much longer.
"I think you are confusing 3 different topics: ..."
No, I am not. The question was whether Microsoft was "forward thinking". That is what I was responding to. Not personal preference, but my opinion (and those of others) about how "forward thinking" it is.
"The .NET compiler is an example of heavy innovation in compiler design. That has nothing to do with it being popular, nor much to do with the criteria for which you like Ruby on Rails."
Nonsense. The .NET compiler was an example of heavy innovation 11 years ago, which is the point I was making. The "criteria" for which I "like" Ruby on Rails is directly relevant to the discussion, because those criteria are: (1) it is an implementation of a newer-technology, dynamic language, and (2) it is being actively and rapidly improved by a growing user base. There is no "confusion" there.
"Further desktop application development is extremely expensive, and most of the work is outsourced to the 3rd world at this point"
That is false on both counts. First, desktop application development is cheaper than ever due to open-source tools (unless you are developing with Microsoft tools, of course), and second, while outsourcing was big for many years, that trend has already begun to reverse. So for someone speaking about "new and innovative" things, you are surprisingly behind the times.
"There are no good IDE's for dynamic languages, that cross over to the static languages. IBM / Eclipse has the same problem, and remember IBM owns rational so they are even larger, as did Embarcadero (the old Borland people)."
Again, complete nonsense. The open-source Radrails (now part of Aptana Studio 3), which was built on Eclipse, has been a very successful IDE for Ruby and Rails development. As have NetBeans and several others.
Are you saying that huge companies like Microsoft and IBM can't build effective IDEs for dynamic languages, but that Open Source developers can? Hmmm...
There isn't any particular problem with creating IDEs for dynamic languages. Most who develop with dynamic languages -- most of those who aren't beginners, anyway -- simply prefer not to use them.
"Now if you mean Rails is a better framework for development of light apps than Microsoft..."
What do you define as a "light app"? Twitter? Revolution Health? YellowPages.com? IBM Global Services is building enterprise applications for its clients using Ruby, and sometimes Rails. And so is ThoughtWorks. Here is a partial list of organizations that use not just Ruby but Rails for many of their enterprise-level applications.
"When they did: VBScript and ActiveX were extremely impressive technologies."
Yes, they were. 11 years ago.
"Essentially for Microsoft to do what you would want regarding Ruby, they would fork Visual Basic further away from C#. That is not a technology or innovation problem they just don't want to create applications with no easy migration path."
Not at all. They made great (if difficult) progress with IronRuby, to the point of actually producing some alpha releases that were largely compliant with Ruby specs. Then they just dumped it. My friend who worked on the project could not give me an actual technical reason for their decision: apparently it was just something Microsoft decided not to pursue any longer.
"I think the idea there is that scrollbars are much less important than they used to be, now that people use scroll wheels or trackpad gestures to scroll rapidly."
But rapid scrolling does not account for at least 3 other features of scrollbars: the ability to see the place in your document at a glance (this was severely impeded by narrowing the scrollbar and making it grey, so it is now much harder to see), the ability to scroll very large amounts with one motion, and the ability to scroll to precise positions in the document. All of these have been made more difficult by the recent changes.
"...but the whole take-home lesson from the iPad's success is that desktop functionality doesn't work on smaller devices: "
So? That just reinforces my point: neither do smaller-device interfaces work effectively for the desktop. I understand that they want more consistency, but trying to take one and shoehorn it into the other was probably not the best idea. Here's a radical idea for you: maybe include them both and let the user choose which they prefer.
I can appreciate the fact that a large part of Apple's revenue is now from mobile devices. However, they should not degrade the existing base of desktop environments merely to increase mobile sales.
"... and adding OS-level automatic versioning and auto-save doesn't seem like a 'lowest common denominator' to me."
I should not have included that part in my "lowest common denominator" comment. I don't know if that feature was already in mobile devices. But I don't care for it. It offers few if any advantages over well-practiced use, except that it might catch the occasional mistake that is caused by a file save when there should not have been one. On the other hand, as I stated before it is very annoying and actually impedes my work flow.... I often have to use CTRL-Z to revert changes to a file before quitting, or else must re-open the file and "revert" it to its former state later, when I didn't want the changes to be saved in the first place. In my work with graphics I often have to do that a lot (make changes and export them, but not change the original file). So as a feature, for me this one is far more trouble and time-consuming than it is worth.
I can see how it could be useful for those who use their machines in a more casual (e.g., not for daily work) manner, but for me it's a big step backward. Being able to turn off the autosave would be great.
In fact, from a developer's standpoint, the "upgrade" to Lion made a lot of blunders, from reducing their support of MacRuby, to waffling about their distribution of Xcode (and flubbing the first release) to the decidedly lower-end-market changes they made to Final Cut.
"I pointed you to their research group. Take a look. For that matter the .NET compiler is the most sophisticated compiler on the market used by a major platform. Their kernel is excellent and continues to be innovative.... I see lots of innovation, admittedly they are conservative and have a conservative user base but I think there is a lot of bright spots. Similar to IBM 20 years ago, lots of dead weight but lots of interesting innovations."
On this I have to disagree. It is hard to find reliable statistics related to development platforms, but there has been something of a mass exodus away from .net over the last 7 or 8 years, and I am one of them. Obviously this is only anecdotal evidence, still this is my observation:
.NET jobs out there, IMHO that is mainly due to the massive base of existing applications. 10 years ago, admittedly MS Visual development tools were the hot things, and then came .NET... and they were immensely popular, for good reason. But that was then. I was an MS developer at that time, too, and I liked the tools very much.
.NET for a while, I became familiar with some newer and different technologies (like Ruby and Rails for example), and after becoming somewhat familiar with them, I dropped .NET like a not potato. In comparison to Ruby development, I can no longer stand the constraints and limitations of .NET development. And I have a great many friends and colleagues who feel the same way.
.NET cannot hope to match. In fact, we have seen .NET attempt to copy many of the same principles (MVC, for example) with some but limited success. Attempting to incorporate a form of Ruby into .NET met with failure: MS gave up on the attempt. (A friend of mine was among the early and senior developers involved with the IronRuby project.)
.NET developer, nor do I desire to be one, so I am no authority on the subject. Nevertheless, my perception is that .NET progress has somewhat stagnated in recent years, and there has been a lot of attrition in the .NET ranks.
While there are still plenty of
But after having used
There are whole industries now being built around dynamic and functional languages that
I admit that I am no longer a
"To which I have to ask: how is it easier when you hide stuff which was formerly visible? How does that help discoverability? The whole point behind the scrollbar was supposed to be that you could tell your position in the document at a glance."
Mod up. Precisely my point. You don't take interface principles that have been hard-won over years of good research into what works best, then just toss them out the window because of some random idea that "I like this better". Change for the sake of change, indeed.
"I think you are missing the point. Scrollbars are essentially a passive way of dealing with the window. It comes from a paradigm that the window is passive relative to the mouse. That doesn't have to be the case, think about all the activity that occurs in an IDE; or even the mouse overs in many web applications. What Apple is moving away from is passive windows."
I'm not missing the point at all. You are.
I am quite familiar with human interface principles, thank you very much, and I have made a point of studying the research that has gone into them during the last 10 years and before. What you are missing is that it is natural (thus the OS X setting for "natural scrolling") on a mobile interface that is responsive to your finger to behave as though it were a dynamic object held in your hand: it moves as your finger does. People naturally react to it that way.
However, in a desktop setting it is NOT "natural", at all. From a human interface standpoint, people are much more efficient with desktop interfaces when they treat them as though it is a STATIC object, and you are looking through a "window" at it. Therefore you don't move the object being viewed, but your window in relation to it.
This is all very basic human interface stuff, and the recent changes by Apple completely ignored them, to the detriment of their OS on the desktop.
"That's going to be the norm across the board. They are moving away from notion of explicit save and moving towards explicit version naming and automatic saves. The idea being that with SSD the user has an experience of all of their applications always being in a fully running state. There is no distinction between a running and a non running application."
I'm not disputing the trend; I'm just saying it's a stupid idea. As the whole topic of this conversation is supposed to be: change simply for the sake of change is not a good thing. This arguably doesn't improve anything, and in fact it has impeded my workflow. Not because I'm not used to it; I am by now. But simply because it's actually slower because of all the times you have to "revert" due to the OS trying to "help" you in ways you don't want. And their revert process is unnecessarily primitive and slow. The whole thing is actually a worse way to "help" users than Microsoft's infamous "Clippy". They should have left well enough alone, rather than making it worse based on internal opinion as opposed to proven interface design.
"Apple has been moving towards less garish and more grey with every version. They are moving from "insanely great" to "subtle elegance". Apple doesn't have as much to prove. And the contrast with the garishness of the Aero works in their favor."
Again, you miss the point: it isn't "elegant" if it flies in the face of absolutely elementary, basic interface principles: elements are supposed to be EASY to tell apart. Colors make it easy. Grayscale makes it hard. This is measurable by the time it takes the eye to track, and has been known for at least 30 years. When you gray things down, you reduce efficiency and increase the time it takes to complete tasks.
So, you can argue aesthetics all you want, but the point I was making is that from an actual usable human interface point of view, it's still terrible, no matter how "pretty" you think it is.
But all of these comments, from my original comment down to here, are kind of off-topic because what I was saying was that the user interface was WORSE than in the previous version.
It doesn't matter where you pick your starting point. Worse is still worse.
I should have clarified, but I meant "losing market share" in the home and developer markets, specifically. I was not implying that Microsoft was going broke, or anything of the sort.
As for home desktops, OS X and Linux have made significant inroads. Is Windows still dominant? Sure. For now. But you have to admit there have been trends: IE is seriously behind the curve when it comes to everyone else, to the point that people are even ceasing to even care about supporting Microsoft's browsers on the web anymore. (I know... I am a professional web developer and I catch the business buzz going around.) It started with the popular campaign to abolish IE 6 but has continued since 7 and 8 have only been incrementally better, and even IE9 does not support some features that others have for at least 2 years.
More and more, people are using Google Docs and Open Office instead of Word. Why? Word is grossly overpriced and you can get the same functionality elsewhere for almost nothing.
By now, Apache and MySQL have long been dominant over IIS and SQL Server in the Web server world... which is a significant portion of IT space today. Heck, some claim that even Apache and MySQL are starting to look long in the tooth.
It's nice that Microsoft has been able to weather the storm and survive even though other companies are besting them in so many areas that they once dominated. I have nothing personal against Microsoft. Heck, I was a Microsoft developer for most of my development history.
But "forward-thinking?" Maybe once. I don't see it today.
"If only individual people are allowed these rights then newspaper editorial boards cannot endorse a candidate."
Wow. Is that a s-t-r-e-t-c-h-! That is nothing at all like I said. If a newspaper editorial board wants to get together and say "WE (board member 1, board member 2, board member 3, etc...) together recommend this candidate"... there is nothing stopping them. They are still speaking as individuals AND as (publicly) acknowledged members of a group. That is not the same thing at all as corporate contributions to political campaigns. To try to equate them is a straw-man argument at best.
Political parties as we know them are now defunct as well. Who gave them the power to speak in endorsement for the people? Does the DNC or RNC only get to speak if their chosen person won 100% of the primary vote?
Bollocks. Another straw-man argument. They don't, in fact, have any power to speak for "the people". This stuff is way out of left field, dude.
"To say that an assemblage of people cannot pool their resources for speech borders on the absurd."
You're right. it would be. But that is not at all what I stated, and you have very grossly misunderstood my point.
No real point in going further, since we are obviously on completely different channels here.
Actually, no, software WAS feeling the "outsourcing pinch". That trend started to reverse last year and software outsourcing has been getting smaller and smaller.
Why? Because the US companies have found that they lose too much money to poor-quality product and unreliable or even non-delivery.
More and more, ads on the contractor boards have been saying "We are accpepting North American and European contractors only." And when you inquire about why, those are the kinds of answers you get.
Agreed. And one excellent example is OS X Lion. I have to wonder why it didn't make the list.
Lion represented a modest but decent upgrade in many respects. However, in their effort to bring the "benefits" of iOS to the desktop they rather dropped the ball.
Their new "Full Screen Mode" is great, I suppose, on an iPad. On a desktop system with two monitors, like my workstation, it is worse that useless because it fills one screen but blanks the other. I end up with less working space than I had when I began.
The new scrollbars are an interface disaster. You should never make scrollbars smaller and harder to see and use, but that's what they did. They are about half as wide as before, and gray instead of in color. Not only that, but by default they disappear after a few seconds, and you have to hover your mouse on the edge of the window to get it back. I'm sure that saves valuable space on a tiny screen but in a desktop work environment it's just plain bad design, and worse: a waste of time because you have to hover and wait for it all the time. In very long documents, people are used to looking at their scrollbar to keep track of where they are. With the default behavior, you can't do that anymore.
You can set the scrollbars to not disappear, but they're still narrow, gray, and hard to see.
They added a couple of gestures to the Magic Trackpad, but at the same time took a couple of my favorite gestures away.
For certain OS X applications, they changed the behavior to something far from the norm, by making documents auto-save, even when you don't want them to. Now, when you quit an app without saving changes (there are a great many scenarios that call for this), you may find that your changes were saved anyway, against your wishes. You can usually revert them back to the state you wanted, but that in itself is a maddeningly slow and unresponsive process, with a poor interface.
The Finder, which is the equivalent of Explorer in Windows or a file browser in Linux, is now not just significantly but aggravatingly slower than it was before. And another elementary interface blunder: the sidebar icons, which used to be in color, are now a washed-out shade of gray.
All in all, for the desktop, OS X Lion (10.7) is quite a bit less "user-friendly" than OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) was. All for the purposes of making their OS interfaces "more consistent". They should have worked harder to bring desktop functionality to their smaller devices, rather than dumbing down the desktop to the "lowest common denominator".
"Microsoft has always been."
I hate to put it in these terms, but: I don't know how old you are, but that comment makes you appear to be either a kid or someone who just plain doesn't know what they're talking about.
Microsoft has been losing market share over the past decade or so precisely because it was not forward thinking! If you disagree, what other explanation do you have?
Microsoft, throughout most of its existence, has been known for being stodgy and conservative. Most of the new technology it picked up over the years was either bought or stolen (e.g., Stacker) from other companies that were, in fact, forward-thinking.
"My view is that they effectively inherit some rights from the People, but that observation remains wholly irrelevant to this case."
Only if you have moved the goalposts.
"Legal fiction == power structure granted to the People by the legislative branch."
If that's specifically what you meant by "granted" then no argument here.
"Another irrelevant observation."
No, it's not. The Constitution is a very specific document, covering very specific subjects. You are trying to read something into it that isn't mentioned so much as peripherally, or even implied, anywhere.
I fully understand your point about "appearing to have rights" because Congress is prohibited from doing something. I just think it's bullshit.
Let me put it a different way:
The 10th Amendment says that if something wasn't mentioned, then it was specifically left up to the States and to the People. Therefore, States can abridge the speech of corporations if they choose. Which means corporations have no Federally enforceable right -- or ability, if you prefer to put it that way -- of free speech.