Everybody who badly wants those features already has them, either from OS X or Linux. The fact of the matter is that most people don't know that dragging windows can be smooth, they don't realize that it is possible to have large fonts and buttons without pixelization, they don't have multiple user accounts set up, they do own and administer their computer, they don't manually install or update any drivers, they can't multitask with the windows GUI (and neither can their programs), they don't run memory-bound programs, they don't know what a partition is, they don't care how old their graphics chip is, they can't be bothered with encryption, or any other security measures not pre-installed, they use a TV for their movie-watching, and they don't care how the desktop looks, so long as the colors are not distracting, and so long as they don't have to form new usage habits.
So, to summarize, No, vista has nothing worthwhile to offer to the majority of Windows users. And in fact, for the majority of customers, the transition to Vista will be a nuisance. The market of people who actually want to upgrade to Vista will have been depleted a few months from now, and MS will be falling back on OEM sales and other products.
The difference is that LaTeX tries to stop you from making the document unreadable, but PowerPoint offers you a simple 5-step wizard for butchering an opportunity to deliver a good presentation. Big difference. Of course, neither can stop you from cramming in too much data or misjudging the intelligence of your audience.
The way I read it, Norman is asserting that the "slides are written for the benefit of the speaker." He then follows it up with a valid question that his assertion raises, but he never actually gets around to addressing that question. He sets the stage, but then goes and talks about other things. When you point out a counter-argument, you are supposed to refute it.
By the way, I'm not trying to be a shill for Tufte. I just think that Norman's essay isn't the kind of thing to be holding up as good criticism of Tufte. And I don't think my quoting cut out the meaning of his statements. I quoted the introductory sentence of a paragraph, commented on it, then quoted the last sentence of that paragraph. (You should have finished reading my comment before calling me a shill.) I was not being intellectually dishonest. I simply commented on the most provocative portion of the essay, which also happens to be a totally unsupported claim.
If you get modded down, it should be for not reading my comment, not because the mods respect Tufte.
A dissenting opinion that seems to miss the point in several ways.
For example:
The slides are written for the benefit of the speaker. The above statement is absurd. Slides are for the audience to look at. Nothing should be on the slide that won't be helpful to the audience. The speaker's notes should either be in his hand or on the podium. Norman almost seems to understand this. He ends that paragraph with this:
The question is, if the slides are for the speaker, why does the audience have to be subjected to them? Unfortunately, he doesn't ever get around to answering the question.
One of Tufte's most important points is that most people tend to dumb down the data to fit the presentation, rather than adapt the presentation so that it can effectively convey all the information. Norman's response amounts to saying "No, you don't understand!" Instead, Norman should back up his assertion that presentations should go light on meaningful data.
Listeners cannot absorb too much information at once. Talks should be limited to getting across just a few critical points. The goal is to get the listener interested enough to explore the subject in more depth on their own, perhaps by reading, perhaps by conversation. If too much is packed into a talk, the listener becomes overloaded and is apt to remember less than if the talk were better paced with less information. Worse, the listener may simply give up and cease following. Perhaps even worse is that listeners might get interested and pause to pursue some implications mentally, only later to discover that they thereby missed other material.
This is one of the points Tufte has continually failed to grasp, not only in his diatribe against PowerPoint, but in almost all of his publications and talks. Tufte is a statistician and I suspect that for him, nothing could be more delightful than a graph or chart which can capture the interest for hours, where each new perusal yields even more information. I agree that this is a marvelous outcome, but primarily for readers, for people sitting in comfortable chairs, with good light and perhaps a writing pad. For people with a lot of time to spend, to think, to ponder. This is not what happens within a talk. Present a rich and complex slide and the viewer is lost. By the time they have figured out the slide, the speaker is off on some other topic.
The above paragraphs assume that a presenter who has developed his slides according to Tufte's ideals will still present them the way they would present lists of bullet points. If somebody takes the time to develop an effective chart, odds are that they will take the time to explain it and point out the more important trends that it reveals. It is not counterproductive if an audience member also notices a trend that you do not have time to talk about. To assume that it would be counterproductive, as Norman consistently does, it to assume that your audience is stupid, or at least slow on the uptake. With that condescending attitude, your presentation is guaranteed to be bad.
At the very least, Tufte's PowerPoint essay should be required reading before graduating from college. But I think anybody who will ever need to present quantitative information should be required to read some of his books. (Obviously including The Visual Display of Quantitave Information.)
I have seen printed ads showing $600 laptops, with screens showing off various features of Aero. That is false advertising. Those machines are far from Aero-capable. Microsoft and the retailers in question deserve to be sued.
Any company that loses source code for a critical application deserves all of the consequences, and then some. No "trade secret" mentality should trump backing up critical data.
I was using NeXT as an example of a platform that was used mostly for custom business apps. Even after all these years, those custom business apps can be made to run on modern hardware and operating systems, without rewriting them. That kind of portability should be sought after by any company looking to avoid vendor lock-in. (Yes, you still are picking a single vendor's API, but it is an open spec with a decent GNU implementation.)
Ever heard of NeXT? There were lots of custom apps written for that platform. They can pretty much all be complied with Xcode on OS X, on powerPC or intel, even though many of those apps were written to run on 68k.
If Microsoft wanted to encourage the development of portable software, they could. If Microsoft were to declare that new features of Windows were only to be accessible through.NET (and maybe DirectX), then most apps would end up fairly portable within a decade.
It worked for Apple and NeXT. Apple cut the Classic API down to Carbon so that it could be modernized. NeXT has always provided unix functionality, but by using the AppKit (now Cocoa), you could make your app much more portable. Now both APIs have been available on 68k, PowerPC, and Intel. Old apps can be recompiled without extensive modifications. The only thing stopping Apple from making another architecture switch is the third-party proprietary software vendors.
No. Turn in your UID now for one at least 100 times larger. The Answer is 42. The question was "what do you get if you multiply six by nine". Chapter 33, The Restuaruant at the End of the Universe.
"The ships hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don't."
There's a special, reserved place in heaven for anybody who can turn a phrase like that. Even for atheists. We can go on all night with our favorite quotes. I have my omnibus edition within arm's reach.
I think it is great that Douglas Adams continues to appeal to younger audiences. With sci-fi, there is the risk of the real world catching up to the point that the sci-fi sounds quaint. Not so with Adams, partly because of the satire inherent in his work. Even kids who have grown up with Harry Potter can appreciate the Hitchhiker novels.
And, for those who don't remember, the Paul Simon inspiration mentioned at the end of part 2 of the article is the album One Trick Pony. It was mentioned in the acknowledgments for "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe".
It seems to me that projects fork far too often when they should just create an experimental branch. egcs is one of the few examples with a happy ending. Forks can produce a lot of animosity, and they almost always result in code bases diverging to the point that un-forking is not worth the effort. Yes, there have been some justified forks over technical matters, but those usually result from developers having nearly opposite goals (eg. targeting embedded vs. desktop machines).
So what? The entire music industry has been built on the practice of selling the same music over and over. This is the first time Jobs has done something like this, and it offers real benefits over what they've been selling.
I can think of situations where one would want to sort vectors by magnitude, direction, or component-wise. No one of those should be set as a hard-to-override, somewhat ambiguous default comparison operation. The set of complex numbers is not, and cannot be expressed as an ordered field. That means that there is no consistent way of ordering arbitrary complex numbers. Any boolean comparisons between complex numbers should be done with dedicated operators or functions, not with the standard greater-than and less-than symbols.
Sure, but this is still a zero-day exploit for everybody who hasn't upgraded to Vista, and everybody who hasn't turned on IE7 Protected Mode. (The MS website seems to imply that IE7 Protected Mode is not the default). That leaves at least 95% of the installed base of desktops vulnerable.
Somebody smart enough to install an email server on a company workstation, but dumb enough to think that it is okay, is dangerous to the company and should be fired.
What part of "Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code." do you not understand? This is a hole that lets crackers do a lot more than crash your computer.
The Japanese conquest in civ3 was always my favorite. They did a great job of recreating the entire game to fit the Shogun era history. Even the music was a well done in that mod. And the ninjas were great because they were invisible like spies.
First of all, a PC game developer would be used to having effectively unlimited storage space to work with, and thus would be most affected by the limitations of the DVD medium. But the GPP's point about disc capacity is valid. The largest single player game I have played was Myst 4, which came on two DVDs, and it was a pre-rendered game. Its sequel was rendered in realtime, and even though was a longer game, it fit on three CDs. If you fanboys are to believed, the 360/PS3 would never need to resort to pre-rendered graphics. When a console game has a soundtrack big enough to fill the better part of a DVD, let me know.
If the PS3 survives its games will end up looking a lot more impressive than 360 games of the same vintage. Now that is funny. The PS3 just had the greatest console launch in history in Europe. No, the PS3 just had the best European launch of a console. That is not the same as "the best launch in history" with an implied comma and then "in Europe."
The PS3 is selling at a faster rate in the US. That statement is meaningless. Faster than what? Faster than in Europe or Japan? Faster than the Wii?
People are asking who do they have to kill to get into the Home beta. Only people at least as demented as you. And presumably as young or younger than you.
Every single developer who supported the 115+ million selling PS2 is making games for the PS3. That is not saying much. What matters is how many games they are making for the PS3, and how many are exclusive to the PS3, as compared with the development scene for the 360 and to a lesser extent, the Wii.
Sony's first party developer lineup is stronger than both Nintendo and Microsoft combined - there are over 150 first party games alone in development. Finally, some good (though uncited) information. But still, I have to wonder how many of those games will make it to the market, and how many are at all original. And you failed to provide any data about Microsoft and Nintendo to back up your claim that the are not being as prolific game developers.
Even PC developers are looking to the PS3 for their games as the pc game market continues to die. That sure seems to be a totally baseless claim. In fact, I think it is probably totally wrong. First of all, not many developers would go through the trouble of porting a game from the PS3 to a platform that is dying faster. Second, the PC gaming market is not dying. Third, the portion of the PC gaming market that is composed of PS3 ports is, and always will be, very small.
The PS3 has turned out to be the most reliable console ever made. By what measure? Sure, it seems to have gotten much less press about it's problems than the 360, but that doesn't make it the gold standard. Certainly the hardware can't be all that reliable, given the extreme complexity compared to the other consoles on the market. For example, the Cell processor in the PS3 has an SPU disabled because they can't produce the whole processor at mature yields. And the PS3 has not been on the market long enough to compare with, say, the GameCube. Also, with the exception of the wrist strap issue arising from improper but foreseeable usage, I expect the Wii to be the most reliable of the consoles, given the simplicity of its hardware and the fact that it is mostly already proven.
Yeah, if the PS3 'survives'... The PS3 is by no means destined to come out on top or even in second. No games for any of the three platforms are out yet that were developed after feedback from the launch titles. And they still have been on the market for less than a year. For a product with an expected lifetime of at least five years, this is way too early to be making judgments with that level of confidence.
Oh wait. You are referring to how Sony had to divert manufacturing capacity in last month from the US to Europe for the launch and there were low NPD numbers... It has been well documented that the PS3 has been in excess supply in many of the biggest markets in the US. With or without the European launch, Sony needed to divert production capacity away from the US. And I have yet to see any evidence that that diversion has caused any shortages in the US.
But here's the catch: When you plug it in to inaugurate it, the whole thing will fold up and sink, weeping, into the mire. So there! I've gone and changed it into a Hitchhiker joke.
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Everybody who badly wants those features already has them, either from OS X or Linux. The fact of the matter is that most people don't know that dragging windows can be smooth, they don't realize that it is possible to have large fonts and buttons without pixelization, they don't have multiple user accounts set up, they do own and administer their computer, they don't manually install or update any drivers, they can't multitask with the windows GUI (and neither can their programs), they don't run memory-bound programs, they don't know what a partition is, they don't care how old their graphics chip is, they can't be bothered with encryption, or any other security measures not pre-installed, they use a TV for their movie-watching, and they don't care how the desktop looks, so long as the colors are not distracting, and so long as they don't have to form new usage habits.
So, to summarize, No, vista has nothing worthwhile to offer to the majority of Windows users. And in fact, for the majority of customers, the transition to Vista will be a nuisance. The market of people who actually want to upgrade to Vista will have been depleted a few months from now, and MS will be falling back on OEM sales and other products.
The difference is that LaTeX tries to stop you from making the document unreadable, but PowerPoint offers you a simple 5-step wizard for butchering an opportunity to deliver a good presentation. Big difference. Of course, neither can stop you from cramming in too much data or misjudging the intelligence of your audience.
The way I read it, Norman is asserting that the "slides are written for the benefit of the speaker." He then follows it up with a valid question that his assertion raises, but he never actually gets around to addressing that question. He sets the stage, but then goes and talks about other things. When you point out a counter-argument, you are supposed to refute it.
By the way, I'm not trying to be a shill for Tufte. I just think that Norman's essay isn't the kind of thing to be holding up as good criticism of Tufte. And I don't think my quoting cut out the meaning of his statements. I quoted the introductory sentence of a paragraph, commented on it, then quoted the last sentence of that paragraph. (You should have finished reading my comment before calling me a shill.) I was not being intellectually dishonest. I simply commented on the most provocative portion of the essay, which also happens to be a totally unsupported claim.
If you get modded down, it should be for not reading my comment, not because the mods respect Tufte.
For example: The slides are written for the benefit of the speaker. The above statement is absurd. Slides are for the audience to look at. Nothing should be on the slide that won't be helpful to the audience. The speaker's notes should either be in his hand or on the podium. Norman almost seems to understand this. He ends that paragraph with this: The question is, if the slides are for the speaker, why does the audience have to be subjected to them? Unfortunately, he doesn't ever get around to answering the question.
One of Tufte's most important points is that most people tend to dumb down the data to fit the presentation, rather than adapt the presentation so that it can effectively convey all the information. Norman's response amounts to saying "No, you don't understand!" Instead, Norman should back up his assertion that presentations should go light on meaningful data.
The above paragraphs assume that a presenter who has developed his slides according to Tufte's ideals will still present them the way they would present lists of bullet points. If somebody takes the time to develop an effective chart, odds are that they will take the time to explain it and point out the more important trends that it reveals. It is not counterproductive if an audience member also notices a trend that you do not have time to talk about. To assume that it would be counterproductive, as Norman consistently does, it to assume that your audience is stupid, or at least slow on the uptake. With that condescending attitude, your presentation is guaranteed to be bad.
At the very least, Tufte's PowerPoint essay should be required reading before graduating from college. But I think anybody who will ever need to present quantitative information should be required to read some of his books. (Obviously including The Visual Display of Quantitave Information.)
I have seen printed ads showing $600 laptops, with screens showing off various features of Aero. That is false advertising. Those machines are far from Aero-capable. Microsoft and the retailers in question deserve to be sued.
Any company that loses source code for a critical application deserves all of the consequences, and then some. No "trade secret" mentality should trump backing up critical data.
I was using NeXT as an example of a platform that was used mostly for custom business apps. Even after all these years, those custom business apps can be made to run on modern hardware and operating systems, without rewriting them. That kind of portability should be sought after by any company looking to avoid vendor lock-in. (Yes, you still are picking a single vendor's API, but it is an open spec with a decent GNU implementation.)
Ever heard of NeXT? There were lots of custom apps written for that platform. They can pretty much all be complied with Xcode on OS X, on powerPC or intel, even though many of those apps were written to run on 68k.
.NET (and maybe DirectX), then most apps would end up fairly portable within a decade.
If Microsoft wanted to encourage the development of portable software, they could. If Microsoft were to declare that new features of Windows were only to be accessible through
It worked for Apple and NeXT. Apple cut the Classic API down to Carbon so that it could be modernized. NeXT has always provided unix functionality, but by using the AppKit (now Cocoa), you could make your app much more portable. Now both APIs have been available on 68k, PowerPC, and Intel. Old apps can be recompiled without extensive modifications. The only thing stopping Apple from making another architecture switch is the third-party proprietary software vendors.
No. Turn in your UID now for one at least 100 times larger. The Answer is 42. The question was "what do you get if you multiply six by nine". Chapter 33, The Restuaruant at the End of the Universe.
There's a special, reserved place in heaven for anybody who can turn a phrase like that. Even for atheists. We can go on all night with our favorite quotes. I have my omnibus edition within arm's reach.
I think it is great that Douglas Adams continues to appeal to younger audiences. With sci-fi, there is the risk of the real world catching up to the point that the sci-fi sounds quaint. Not so with Adams, partly because of the satire inherent in his work. Even kids who have grown up with Harry Potter can appreciate the Hitchhiker novels.
And, for those who don't remember, the Paul Simon inspiration mentioned at the end of part 2 of the article is the album One Trick Pony. It was mentioned in the acknowledgments for "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe".
It seems to me that projects fork far too often when they should just create an experimental branch. egcs is one of the few examples with a happy ending. Forks can produce a lot of animosity, and they almost always result in code bases diverging to the point that un-forking is not worth the effort. Yes, there have been some justified forks over technical matters, but those usually result from developers having nearly opposite goals (eg. targeting embedded vs. desktop machines).
So what? The entire music industry has been built on the practice of selling the same music over and over. This is the first time Jobs has done something like this, and it offers real benefits over what they've been selling.
Nope. Read the summary! You get higher quality sound too. 256kbps > 128kbps.
I can think of situations where one would want to sort vectors by magnitude, direction, or component-wise. No one of those should be set as a hard-to-override, somewhat ambiguous default comparison operation. The set of complex numbers is not, and cannot be expressed as an ordered field. That means that there is no consistent way of ordering arbitrary complex numbers. Any boolean comparisons between complex numbers should be done with dedicated operators or functions, not with the standard greater-than and less-than symbols.
Sure, but this is still a zero-day exploit for everybody who hasn't upgraded to Vista, and everybody who hasn't turned on IE7 Protected Mode. (The MS website seems to imply that IE7 Protected Mode is not the default). That leaves at least 95% of the installed base of desktops vulnerable.
Possibly. Marathon has been ported to run on top of SDL, so it does run on Linux and BSD. But why you would want to play Marathon, I don't know.
Somebody smart enough to install an email server on a company workstation, but dumb enough to think that it is okay, is dangerous to the company and should be fired.
Almost certainly, since he has made use of the product. The fact that he recommends it implies that he considers it well worth the cost.
What part of "Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code." do you not understand? This is a hole that lets crackers do a lot more than crash your computer.
I think it is more that Nintendo has already won the price war, by selling the hardware at a profit.
The Japanese conquest in civ3 was always my favorite. They did a great job of recreating the entire game to fit the Shogun era history. Even the music was a well done in that mod. And the ninjas were great because they were invisible like spies.
First of all, a PC game developer would be used to having effectively unlimited storage space to work with, and thus would be most affected by the limitations of the DVD medium. But the GPP's point about disc capacity is valid. The largest single player game I have played was Myst 4, which came on two DVDs, and it was a pre-rendered game. Its sequel was rendered in realtime, and even though was a longer game, it fit on three CDs. If you fanboys are to believed, the 360/PS3 would never need to resort to pre-rendered graphics. When a console game has a soundtrack big enough to fill the better part of a DVD, let me know.
The PS3 just had the greatest console launch in history in Europe. No, the PS3 just had the best European launch of a console. That is not the same as "the best launch in history" with an implied comma and then "in Europe." The PS3 is selling at a faster rate in the US. That statement is meaningless. Faster than what? Faster than in Europe or Japan? Faster than the Wii? People are asking who do they have to kill to get into the Home beta. Only people at least as demented as you. And presumably as young or younger than you. Every single developer who supported the 115+ million selling PS2 is making games for the PS3. That is not saying much. What matters is how many games they are making for the PS3, and how many are exclusive to the PS3, as compared with the development scene for the 360 and to a lesser extent, the Wii. Sony's first party developer lineup is stronger than both Nintendo and Microsoft combined - there are over 150 first party games alone in development. Finally, some good (though uncited) information. But still, I have to wonder how many of those games will make it to the market, and how many are at all original. And you failed to provide any data about Microsoft and Nintendo to back up your claim that the are not being as prolific game developers. Even PC developers are looking to the PS3 for their games as the pc game market continues to die. That sure seems to be a totally baseless claim. In fact, I think it is probably totally wrong. First of all, not many developers would go through the trouble of porting a game from the PS3 to a platform that is dying faster. Second, the PC gaming market is not dying. Third, the portion of the PC gaming market that is composed of PS3 ports is, and always will be, very small. The PS3 has turned out to be the most reliable console ever made. By what measure? Sure, it seems to have gotten much less press about it's problems than the 360, but that doesn't make it the gold standard. Certainly the hardware can't be all that reliable, given the extreme complexity compared to the other consoles on the market. For example, the Cell processor in the PS3 has an SPU disabled because they can't produce the whole processor at mature yields. And the PS3 has not been on the market long enough to compare with, say, the GameCube. Also, with the exception of the wrist strap issue arising from improper but foreseeable usage, I expect the Wii to be the most reliable of the consoles, given the simplicity of its hardware and the fact that it is mostly already proven. Yeah, if the PS3 'survives'... The PS3 is by no means destined to come out on top or even in second. No games for any of the three platforms are out yet that were developed after feedback from the launch titles. And they still have been on the market for less than a year. For a product with an expected lifetime of at least five years, this is way too early to be making judgments with that level of confidence. Oh wait. You are referring to how Sony had to divert manufacturing capacity in last month from the US to Europe for the launch and there were low NPD numbers... It has been well documented that the PS3 has been in excess supply in many of the biggest markets in the US. With or without the European launch, Sony needed to divert production capacity away from the US. And I have yet to see any evidence that that diversion has caused any shortages in the US.
But here's the catch: When you plug it in to inaugurate it, the whole thing will fold up and sink, weeping, into the mire. So there! I've gone and changed it into a Hitchhiker joke.
In many states it is already illegal to sell gasoline below cost.