It occurs to me that HP has seen Windows 8... Has seen consumer reaction to it. Has seen M$ trying to build their own hardware, and has seen the success of Android and iPad.
Basically M$ had the world by the balls because of the Windows infrastructure. Now they are: o Building an OS that is fundamentally incompatible with that infrastructure. o Screwing their business partners by building their own hardware.
HP (and everyone with a clue) knows M$ ALWAYS screws up everything they touch. (We have already seen this... Apps already disappearing on the new surface. The OS taking most of the system resources.).. and maybe.. just maybe has figured they better look for a better future. Maybe we just might see HP and maybe someone like Ubuntu partner to produce a reasonable alternative to Windows 8. I mean given the availability of Chrome, Skype, and Libre' Office. Ubuntu might be as compatible with Windows as Windows 8 is... If the users and businesses REALLY HATE the horribly ugly and dysfunctional Windows 8 systems... Maybe HP can say... here buy this instead and it MIGHT just catch this time.
Of course... I don't much like the "new" (can something two years old still be called new?) Ubuntu desktop either, but I think it beats Windows 8.
I've just about had it. Slashdot used to be news for Nerds. Now it's almost entirely mindless bullshit, and the last straw is when spammers are permitted to confiscate the site, and Slashdot management allows it. As if it's my job to waste my mod points to mark this crap as Troll.
I am logging off, and deleting Slashdot from my home page. Have at it trolls. All yours now.
A 'Cloud-Based' world? WTF??? The real question should be simply.. will Windows 8 succeed. I think not. It is Microsoft's latest 'Vista' disaster.
After this fails and Microsoft can no longer give their versions names because of 'Vista', and cannot give them numbers because of Windows 8... Can we switch to Linux or Mac???
What??? 7-Eleven is few and far between? What part of the US do you live in? I spend a great deal of time both in southern California and southern Florida, and I have a 7-Eleven on every corner.
It is not that I am set in my ways. It is that I don't want my PC to be a tablet. I have a programs folder that is three columns long, and I don't want all that stuff as 7 pages of huge ugly square boxes. My Mac does not have a start button, but it does not fill my desktop with ugly garbage either. Windows 8 looks like a DOS machine running Lotus Notes, and works the same too. Actually it's uglier! Notes Icons were more colorful.
Tablets are for airports and living room couches. Computers are for serious stuff. I am not going to do my taxes on my iPad, and I am not going to carry my Desktop with me when I go to the airport. Microsoft is trying to turn the desktop into a Tablet because their revenue is slipping and they are desparate. Their revenue is slipping because everyone has a PC and they are in a stable, not an expanding market, and because Windows Vista and Window 7 are less capable than XP was. People are switching to Mac in droves, and the rest are just buying replacements.
I call B.S. on Windows being any useful comparison at all. That is a complete historical rewrite. When Windows won, there was no Windows and there was no Mac OS - in the same sense there is today. Windows won over Mac OS because Bill Gates is a marketing genius and Steve Jobs had not yet learned that skill. Steve Jobs was still a hippie, and Windows was DOS. At the time when the choice was being made, Neither Mac OS nor "Windows" (Which was little more than a vaporware App for DOS) was the best of breed. Best of breed at the time was the Commodore Amiga. 32 bit multi-tasking, 4096 colors, NTSC (PAL in Europe) video output, quadrophonic Sound (with stereo outputs), and real-time animation against DOS's 'beep' and 16 colors 'Ascii Art' and Mac OS's 64 shades of grey and monophonic MIDI 'sounds'. The best software of the day was being written for it. Electronic Arts was born and started selling games. Disney Animator begat "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", and "Max Headroom" (who was messed up on purpose to emphasize the fact that he was computer generated) and nobody had anything to compare with that. The business world did not really use these things yet. A few forward looking business gave them to secretaries, but there were Macintoshes and PC's both at this time. High end business (like law offices) tended to use Apple because it supported Postscript, and good looking printed output was possible, and low end businesses tended towards PC's running DOS because they were cheaper, and descent printed out was achieved with daisy wheel printers because laser printers needed Postscript, and DOS didn't support it (plus the laser printer cost more than the PC did). Bill Gates was able to manipulate the market to his advantage and nobody else saw it coming until it was too late. To his advantage was indeed an open hardware spec, but none of the companies involved at the time made anything to really compete with the Amiga. Adding peripherals to even try was very expensive, and nobody really tried very hard. Commodore lost by refusing to sell their machines through the toy stores for fear they would not be taken seriously where the Commodore 64 had a virtual lock on the market at the time (The Commodore 64 still holds the record for outselling any single model of computer ever), and insisting on SELLING their demo units to computer retailers, which were all independents at the time and refused to pay for them. So customers had a photograph of a better system in a corner of the store (Amiga), a better, but more expensive, piece of hardware with little software to take advantage of it (Apple), and cheaper hardware with little software to take advantage of it (DOS). "Windows" was useless at this point. There was also Atari, but they were somewhere between Apple and Commodore, and got squeezed out by being a bit too expensive with not quite enough hardware goodies to attract attention. If Commodore had had any marketing sense at all they could have killed everyone at this point, but they missed the boat. Then Apple kicked Steve Jobs out and replaced him with John Scully who made a complete mess of the company, and started losing market share faster than Nokia in the phone market. Steve finally woke up from his LSD infested dream and realized he screwed up. Steve Jobs created NeXT and wrote what is essentially the Mac OS of today, and got Apple back when it was almost completely bankrupt. By this time, Bill Gates had done some very underhanded, illegal, and anti-competitive things in the marketplace, mostly fixed Windows to look like a useful GUI OS, bought the components for Office (all of which were Mac based!), released Mac Office to generate interest in the business world that computers could actually be useful after all, and started porting Office to Windows. Steve Jobs came back to a marketplace John Scully had already lost. Microsoft owned the OS, and was able to write little bugs into Windows to break or slow down things like DR-DOS, Word Perfect, and Lotus 123... and add hooks to their advantage for Offic
... is not that Ford is updating software in cars; it is that USB sticks and US mail to million of owners is now cheaper than paying the mechanic to plug-in the car and flash the radio.
Eye Candy is fine. Unity turns my PC into a tablet. There is just a ton of stuff you can no longer do. It is about dumbing down the interface until morons can work it. Then intelligent people can't get their work done.
Tablets are fine, but they are not PCs. I don't want a 5 pound wrist watch that can watch movies, and I don't was a PC that can ONLY surf the web.
I am not sure that is quite true. Bill Gates is the one that was 'really good at PR'. Not to belittle Steve. He was good too (indeed he may have learned from Bill because he got better as he went along), but Steve actually had a better idea. M$ has never had ANYTHING that wasn't stolen. Windows only exists because they copied the Mac (or tried to), and yet Gates seemingly had the ability to sell eyeglasses to a blind man. As for Dennis. Indeed, he is the one who deserves the praise, but were it not for Steve, only the people on this blog would know what a computer was, because my father would never have an MS-DOS or a UNIX machine. The Commodore Amiga deserved the crown, but Commodore couldn't market eyesight to a blind man. M$ would not have built Windows without the Mac, because M$ has no vision at all. It is possible that without Steve, Commodore might have stumbled into the spotlight by accident, but I doubt they could have marketed their way to success because from a marketing point of view they did absolutely everything wrong. These guys tried to SELL their demo units to the reviewers!!
Anyway.. Happy Dennis Ritchie Day. He deserves the praise. Without him I might be a Cab driver.
Apple's Siri is not necessarily 'State of the Art', but like just about everything Apple does... It just works. Siri is causing a splash because... unlike Android. It works properly. I don't use voice on my Android because it is worthless to me. I say 'Call my wife' It says. 'Calling Lowes Home Center'. It NEVER EVER gets it right. I have several friends with Androids and only one friend with that perfect voice that can get it to understand him, and even he often has to ask it twice . My wife HATES my Android and never bothered with a Smart phone before because she did not really like them. Too big and bulky. Her phone finally broke and she bought the 4S.
Like everything else Apple does. It just works. She talks to it. It understands every word. I talk to it... It understands every word... and it ALWAYS seems to say something appropriate in response. True that the Android voice can do more than Siri. But I would rather have a voice that can do less properly than one that can do lots of stuff wrong. The only thing I find the Android voice useful for is a good laugh. I fire it up occasionally and ask it something and get a chuckle with just how wrong it gets my request. When she got Siri, we had a house full of people that evening and we passed my Android around playing with the voice. It did not once get anything right anyone said. 7 different voices asking it stuff and not once was it even close. Siri understood everyone perfectly.
So the Android voice is useless. Siri is useful. Therein lies the difference.
As the CTO of a small startup. My first programming mistake would be to hire someone who would build a car with no lock because the original drawing had no dot where the assumed lock would go. My old boss would love you. He thought 'programming' meant writing a thousand page Word document that got debated and revised over several months of meetings and finally coded by a 'clerk typist' with a degree in languages. Our department was disbanded because in a year, we did not manage to produce anything but 5,000 pages of MS Word. I got dinged on my review because the only thing we produced in that time was one program I wrote where the users told me what they wanted and I wrote it in a few days. He thought I was writing Word. When I showed it working... he hit the ceiling. The user's loved it.
If you guys keep screwing up the interface, it will soon not be for anyone. The world needs to stop dumbing everything down. My father finally figured out how to work the PC, and now it's all broken to him again because his menus go away, and the tabs keep moving around and the look and feel is different between every application. Kids today know how to work PCs and now even old people do. So naturally we all follow Microsoft's and Google's lead and break the user interface. Microsoft has the WORST track record in the industry for UI innovation, and Google is known for taking keep it simple to extremes. Firefox was fine. Stop fixing it. My father is calling me on the phone because he does not understand what happened to 'his pc'.
STOP IT! We don't need a new version every week with the user interface broken in a different way each time.
I have PCs, and Macs, and fix peoples PC problems, and their Routers and Droids and iPhones, and... You name it, I am the geek with too many 'normal' friends.
All these comments say Motorola is to blame for crappy products, no updates, and crappy support. People this is a PHONE!!! there's no support! Not that there shouldn't be, but it is a fact of life. At least Motorola provided an update to the original droid to 2.2., and they even tested it first! What thanks did they get??? Script kiddies that got upset because it did not come out they day it was released. Even more that got upset because they said the hardware didn't support tethering. Sorry... it really doesn't. Motorola didn't lie. There are apps out that that fake out the Bluetooth to do pseudo tethering, but it's not done right. So Motorola did not back port broken tethering to a device that didn't have the right chip and some third party hacked it into partial submission. Again. Not Motorola's fault.
How many other vendors have provided ANY updates? very few. gee! Is my Droid loaded to the max with preloaded junk? no. Are many of the others? yes.
My droid works. It always has. It screws up with garbage apps that break it, and some apps drain the battery. Uninstall them. This is not a Motorola problem.
I am not saying there is not better hardware out there, but there is plenty of WORSE hardware out there, and I would go so far as to say MOST hardware out there is no better or worse, and most of the other vendors provide fewer updates, even worse support and bloatware you can't uninstall.
The iPhone is better hardware, and an easier to use interface, but you have to drink the Apple cool aid to have it. I like Apple's stuff, and I buy it, but their phone is missing some stuff I don't want to miss (like Google Maps and GMail integration).
Anyway.. I am not trying to say Motorola doesn't suck, but basically they all suck to some degree, and Motorola is not anywhere near the bottom of the pile.
um.. no actually they're dumber than that. AT&T went bankrupt, SBC bought them.. Who's SBC??? Then after marketing themselves for a year and impressing nobody. They got this great idea. "HEY WE BOUGHT AT&T!!! EVERYONE'S HEARD OF THEM!!!" So they changed their name with big fanfare. Any CEO that didn't think of that in the first 2 seconds of the acquisition should have been fired on the spot for incompetence. But the whole company is dumber than that.
Look at this. Is it any wonder Windows replaced/etc/init.d with a database, daemons with Services, and the syslog with EventViewer? Obviously unnecessary complexity is essential to any good modern unmaintainable OS design. Between David Cutler's idea that people belong to files and this guy... no Wonder Windows is such a mess.
I'm making dinner honey. It will be done in 2 weeks.
I use Ubuntu because it is the 'Apple' of Linux distributions.... it just works... I even violate my Linux roots sometimes and configure stuff through the GUI. I think it is Steven Vaughan-Nichols who is not relevant. And it it were not for Debian, there would be no Ubuntu.
Yes, yes, I know that Red Hat works too, but it just doesn't DO anything. RPMs that won't install. An ugly incoherent out of date GUI. configured for security... meaning you should consider yourself privileged that it actually lets you login.
Sorry Mister developer guy, but it really does not matter what you do with the status bar any more. Firefox started freezing three PC's in my house like a year ago if I left it open for more than a day. Chrome is an exercise in overdone minimalism, and IE stinks. So I was forced to switch to Safari, and gee... it just works like most of Apple's stuff... and it has a status bar.
Never mind AT&T's data network. Normal telephone calls drop in their garbage network. I guess it surprised them that people actually wanted to make phone calls too. Their network has been horrible forever. When I lived in L.A. and had AT&T service. I complained to their customer service about the constant call drops and was told.. "but hey! We have the best coverage of any carrier in Barstow!". Nice to know that both families that live in Barstow can call each other, because user's who live in America's biggest cities cannot.
I just loaded Maverick Meerkat on my Linux machine last week, and despite the fact that my Nvidea video card did not have proper support. (Ubuntu should have posted a "NOTICE: Nvidea Users Do Not Upgrade At This Time!!!"), but anyway; the machine is long since too old to run Windoze at all, so I cannot complain too loudly that my ancient hardware is starting to have issues. I was really quite surprised at how usable Ubuntu has become. I have switched back and forth between KDE and Gnome over the years as each became too annoying to put up with for one reason or another, and abandoned Red Hat in favor of [K]Ubuntu because Solaris 8 was more user friendly. RhythmBox is broken, but overall. There is now a tool to do just about everything without a console. I am normally a 'just edit the file' kind of guy, and I find myself USING the GUI tools because they work. Open Office reads docs better than ever before, and most of the tools are really quite good.
In the end, I think Linux has FINALLY arrived. At least for the Debian team and Ubuntu in particular. Red Hat is dreadful today.
Yes Windows 7 sucks less than all of the other Operating systems they have ever released, and slightly less annoying than Vista to use. There's an achievement! Of course Linus wrote Linux because DOS sucked, and passed them YEARS ago even with all their money and resources. It is the commercial software support that keeps them in front. From what I can see from the outside looking in, it is the jewel in the crown of mediocrity. Oh and Steve Ballmer is a moron. Bill was a crook, but I could respect his savvy. He got tired of it, and gave it to Steve because he was next in line and Steve can't even be a competent crook. If he didn't know Bill, he would be one of those guys on America's Dumbest Criminals.
The earliest one I know of was by the smartest man I ever knew (and the strangest). He was my mentor. In the IBM 360 days this guy used to write code.. COMPLEX code in binary on the roller bars on the front of the console because he was too lazy to logon. He made IBM's code more efficient by eliminating all modularization. It was more efficient to just have one big super efficient kernel, so he redesigned their system, and got something like 140% efficiency out of the hardware (40% greater than theoretical possibility) by IBM's own benchmarks, and found a security hole in their code in the process.. as he put it "bit enough to drive an 18 wheeler through", which he reported to them. They told him it was his hacking, he broke something... NOT OUR CODE!!! IBM CODE CAN'T BE BROKEN!!! So he went to their 'demo center' and fed in a deck of punch cards.
On the IBM Selectric console in the IBM demo center, it printed.
"May I please have a cookie?"
The operator ignored it.
8 hours later during shift turnover It printed
"I never got my cookie"
The two operators looked at it, shrugged, and ignored it. The dayshift operator went home.
4 hours later the console printed.
"You're not a very nice operator either, I never did get my cookie"
The operator thought the guys upstairs were fooling around and ignored it.
2 hours later.
"WHERE IS MY COOKIE!"
hummm...
1 hour later.
"Dammit give me a cookie!"
30 minutes.
"I WANT A COOKIE!"
15 minutes... 7.5 minutes... eventually we get to 32 cookies this second.. 64 cookies this second... 128 cookies this second.
An IBM Selectric typewriter which is the main console for a 360/65 cannot print even the word cookie in a second, much less a whole sentence, and certainly not 128 of them! There was ONE way to crash a 360/65.. Fill up the console buffer. The system considered console messages to be important, and if the system couldn't print all of them, it halted.
Reboot... excuse me... Mainframe terminology here... "IPL" the system. First console message:
"You know, I never DIID get my cookie!".. and the process starts over.
Finally IBM called my mentor...
um... did you submit a job to the demo center?
Yes, but don't worry, it was just a simple 'unprivileged' process, and as you said, your security is flawless, so I am sure there is no danger.:-)
Sir, I think we are prepared to acknowledge that there MAY BE a security hole in our system somewhere. It seems that your job never finished and yet it does not seem to exist in the system anywhere. Our experts tell us we have to re-install the operating system to fix it. Do you have any alternative suggestions?
Just one... Go get the best operator you have and put him on the console and call me back.
Yes sir..... an hour later
Sir, this is king super operator, they just called me back in to work to assist you in solving our issue.
OK... now listen carefully. I am only going to say this once. Type carefully, and don't screw this up.. are you ready?
Yes sir.
Good type this... "c" "o" "o" "k" "i" "e"... now press "Enter"
Console prints . "Thank you that was good", and the job ends.
After that IBM never ever questioned it if my mentor reported a problem with IBM software ever again.
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... and the security guards have a target logo right over their heart. .. how inviting.
Gee and just after Microsoft decided to adopt the silly flat tile User Interface paradigm too. You would think its popularity would surge.
Unintuitive interface... check.
Nothing works quite right... check.
Square confusing tiles in a grid... check.
It should be the Windows 8 standard!
It occurs to me that HP has seen Windows 8... Has seen consumer reaction to it. Has seen M$ trying to build their own hardware, and has seen the success of Android and iPad.
Basically M$ had the world by the balls because of the Windows infrastructure. Now they are:
o Building an OS that is fundamentally incompatible with that infrastructure.
o Screwing their business partners by building their own hardware.
HP (and everyone with a clue) knows M$ ALWAYS screws up everything they touch. (We have already seen this ... Apps already disappearing on the new surface. The OS taking most of the system resources.) .. and maybe .. just maybe has figured they better look for a better future. Maybe we just might see HP and maybe someone like Ubuntu partner to produce a reasonable alternative to Windows 8. I mean given the availability of Chrome, Skype, and Libre' Office. Ubuntu might be as compatible with Windows as Windows 8 is... If the users and businesses REALLY HATE the horribly ugly and dysfunctional Windows 8 systems... Maybe HP can say ... here buy this instead and it MIGHT just catch this time.
Of course... I don't much like the "new" (can something two years old still be called new?) Ubuntu desktop either, but I think it beats Windows 8.
I've just about had it. Slashdot used to be news for Nerds. Now it's almost entirely mindless bullshit, and the last straw is when spammers are permitted to confiscate the site, and Slashdot management allows it. As if it's my job to waste my mod points to mark this crap as Troll.
I am logging off, and deleting Slashdot from my home page. Have at it trolls. All yours now.
A 'Cloud-Based' world? WTF??? The real question should be simply .. will Windows 8 succeed. I think not. It is Microsoft's latest 'Vista' disaster.
After this fails and Microsoft can no longer give their versions names because of 'Vista', and cannot give them numbers because of Windows 8 ... Can we switch to Linux or Mac???
What??? 7-Eleven is few and far between? What part of the US do you live in? I spend a great deal of time both in southern California and southern Florida, and I have a 7-Eleven on every corner.
It is not that I am set in my ways. It is that I don't want my PC to be a tablet. I have a programs folder that is three columns long, and I don't want all that stuff as 7 pages of huge ugly square boxes. My Mac does not have a start button, but it does not fill my desktop with ugly garbage either. Windows 8 looks like a DOS machine running Lotus Notes, and works the same too. Actually it's uglier! Notes Icons were more colorful.
Tablets are for airports and living room couches. Computers are for serious stuff. I am not going to do my taxes on my iPad, and I am not going to carry my Desktop with me when I go to the airport. Microsoft is trying to turn the desktop into a Tablet because their revenue is slipping and they are desparate. Their revenue is slipping because everyone has a PC and they are in a stable, not an expanding market, and because Windows Vista and Window 7 are less capable than XP was. People are switching to Mac in droves, and the rest are just buying replacements.
I call B.S. on Windows being any useful comparison at all. That is a complete historical rewrite. When Windows won, there was no Windows and there was no Mac OS - in the same sense there is today. Windows won over Mac OS because Bill Gates is a marketing genius and Steve Jobs had not yet learned that skill. Steve Jobs was still a hippie, and Windows was DOS. At the time when the choice was being made, Neither Mac OS nor "Windows" (Which was little more than a vaporware App for DOS) was the best of breed. Best of breed at the time was the Commodore Amiga. 32 bit multi-tasking, 4096 colors, NTSC (PAL in Europe) video output, quadrophonic Sound (with stereo outputs), and real-time animation against DOS's 'beep' and 16 colors 'Ascii Art' and Mac OS's 64 shades of grey and monophonic MIDI 'sounds'. The best software of the day was being written for it. Electronic Arts was born and started selling games. Disney Animator begat "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", and "Max Headroom" (who was messed up on purpose to emphasize the fact that he was computer generated) and nobody had anything to compare with that. The business world did not really use these things yet. A few forward looking business gave them to secretaries, but there were Macintoshes and PC's both at this time. High end business (like law offices) tended to use Apple because it supported Postscript, and good looking printed output was possible, and low end businesses tended towards PC's running DOS because they were cheaper, and descent printed out was achieved with daisy wheel printers because laser printers needed Postscript, and DOS didn't support it (plus the laser printer cost more than the PC did). Bill Gates was able to manipulate the market to his advantage and nobody else saw it coming until it was too late. To his advantage was indeed an open hardware spec, but none of the companies involved at the time made anything to really compete with the Amiga. Adding peripherals to even try was very expensive, and nobody really tried very hard. Commodore lost by refusing to sell their machines through the toy stores for fear they would not be taken seriously where the Commodore 64 had a virtual lock on the market at the time (The Commodore 64 still holds the record for outselling any single model of computer ever), and insisting on SELLING their demo units to computer retailers, which were all independents at the time and refused to pay for them. So customers had a photograph of a better system in a corner of the store (Amiga), a better, but more expensive, piece of hardware with little software to take advantage of it (Apple), and cheaper hardware with little software to take advantage of it (DOS). "Windows" was useless at this point. There was also Atari, but they were somewhere between Apple and Commodore, and got squeezed out by being a bit too expensive with not quite enough hardware goodies to attract attention. If Commodore had had any marketing sense at all they could have killed everyone at this point, but they missed the boat. Then Apple kicked Steve Jobs out and replaced him with John Scully who made a complete mess of the company, and started losing market share faster than Nokia in the phone market. Steve finally woke up from his LSD infested dream and realized he screwed up. Steve Jobs created NeXT and wrote what is essentially the Mac OS of today, and got Apple back when it was almost completely bankrupt. By this time, Bill Gates had done some very underhanded, illegal, and anti-competitive things in the marketplace, mostly fixed Windows to look like a useful GUI OS, bought the components for Office (all of which were Mac based!), released Mac Office to generate interest in the business world that computers could actually be useful after all, and started porting Office to Windows. Steve Jobs came back to a marketplace John Scully had already lost. Microsoft owned the OS, and was able to write little bugs into Windows to break or slow down things like DR-DOS, Word Perfect, and Lotus 123... and add hooks to their advantage for Offic
... is not that Ford is updating software in cars; it is that USB sticks and US mail to million of owners is now cheaper than paying the mechanic to plug-in the car and flash the radio.
Eye Candy is fine. Unity turns my PC into a tablet. There is just a ton of stuff you can no longer do. It is about dumbing down the interface until morons can work it. Then intelligent people can't get their work done.
Tablets are fine, but they are not PCs. I don't want a 5 pound wrist watch that can watch movies, and I don't was a PC that can ONLY surf the web.
I am not sure that is quite true. Bill Gates is the one that was 'really good at PR'. Not to belittle Steve. He was good too (indeed he may have learned from Bill because he got better as he went along), but Steve actually had a better idea. M$ has never had ANYTHING that wasn't stolen. Windows only exists because they copied the Mac (or tried to), and yet Gates seemingly had the ability to sell eyeglasses to a blind man. As for Dennis. Indeed, he is the one who deserves the praise, but were it not for Steve, only the people on this blog would know what a computer was, because my father would never have an MS-DOS or a UNIX machine. The Commodore Amiga deserved the crown, but Commodore couldn't market eyesight to a blind man. M$ would not have built Windows without the Mac, because M$ has no vision at all. It is possible that without Steve, Commodore might have stumbled into the spotlight by accident, but I doubt they could have marketed their way to success because from a marketing point of view they did absolutely everything wrong. These guys tried to SELL their demo units to the reviewers!!
Anyway.. Happy Dennis Ritchie Day. He deserves the praise. Without him I might be a Cab driver.
Apple's Siri is not necessarily 'State of the Art', but like just about everything Apple does... It just works. Siri is causing a splash because ... unlike Android. It works properly. I don't use voice on my Android because it is worthless to me. I say 'Call my wife' It says. 'Calling Lowes Home Center'. It NEVER EVER gets it right. I have several friends with Androids and only one friend with that perfect voice that can get it to understand him, and even he often has to ask it twice . My wife HATES my Android and never bothered with a Smart phone before because she did not really like them. Too big and bulky. Her phone finally broke and she bought the 4S.
Like everything else Apple does. It just works. She talks to it. It understands every word. I talk to it ... It understands every word. .. and it ALWAYS seems to say something appropriate in response. True that the Android voice can do more than Siri. But I would rather have a voice that can do less properly than one that can do lots of stuff wrong. The only thing I find the Android voice useful for is a good laugh. I fire it up occasionally and ask it something and get a chuckle with just how wrong it gets my request. When she got Siri, we had a house full of people that evening and we passed my Android around playing with the voice. It did not once get anything right anyone said. 7 different voices asking it stuff and not once was it even close. Siri understood everyone perfectly.
So the Android voice is useless. Siri is useful. Therein lies the difference.
As the CTO of a small startup. My first programming mistake would be to hire someone who would build a car with no lock because the original drawing had no dot where the assumed lock would go. My old boss would love you. He thought 'programming' meant writing a thousand page Word document that got debated and revised over several months of meetings and finally coded by a 'clerk typist' with a degree in languages. Our department was disbanded because in a year, we did not manage to produce anything but 5,000 pages of MS Word. I got dinged on my review because the only thing we produced in that time was one program I wrote where the users told me what they wanted and I wrote it in a few days. He thought I was writing Word. When I showed it working... he hit the ceiling. The user's loved it.
Dear developer at Mozilla,
If you guys keep screwing up the interface, it will soon not be for anyone. The world needs to stop dumbing everything down. My father finally figured out how to work the PC, and now it's all broken to him again because his menus go away, and the tabs keep moving around and the look and feel is different between every application. Kids today know how to work PCs and now even old people do. So naturally we all follow Microsoft's and Google's lead and break the user interface. Microsoft has the WORST track record in the industry for UI innovation, and Google is known for taking keep it simple to extremes. Firefox was fine. Stop fixing it. My father is calling me on the phone because he does not understand what happened to 'his pc'.
STOP IT! We don't need a new version every week with the user interface broken in a different way each time.
I have PCs, and Macs, and fix peoples PC problems, and their Routers and Droids and iPhones, and ... You name it, I am the geek with too many 'normal' friends.
All these comments say Motorola is to blame for crappy products, no updates, and crappy support. People this is a PHONE!!! there's no support! Not that there shouldn't be, but it is a fact of life. At least Motorola provided an update to the original droid to 2.2., and they even tested it first! What thanks did they get??? Script kiddies that got upset because it did not come out they day it was released. Even more that got upset because they said the hardware didn't support tethering. Sorry... it really doesn't. Motorola didn't lie. There are apps out that that fake out the Bluetooth to do pseudo tethering, but it's not done right. So Motorola did not back port broken tethering to a device that didn't have the right chip and some third party hacked it into partial submission. Again. Not Motorola's fault.
How many other vendors have provided ANY updates? very few. gee! Is my Droid loaded to the max with preloaded junk? no. Are many of the others? yes.
My droid works. It always has. It screws up with garbage apps that break it, and some apps drain the battery. Uninstall them. This is not a Motorola problem.
I am not saying there is not better hardware out there, but there is plenty of WORSE hardware out there, and I would go so far as to say MOST hardware out there is no better or worse, and most of the other vendors provide fewer updates, even worse support and bloatware you can't uninstall.
The iPhone is better hardware, and an easier to use interface, but you have to drink the Apple cool aid to have it. I like Apple's stuff, and I buy it, but their phone is missing some stuff I don't want to miss (like Google Maps and GMail integration).
Anyway.. I am not trying to say Motorola doesn't suck, but basically they all suck to some degree, and Motorola is not anywhere near the bottom of the pile.
2 cents.
um.. no actually they're dumber than that. AT&T went bankrupt, SBC bought them .. Who's SBC??? Then after marketing themselves for a year and impressing nobody. They got this great idea. "HEY WE BOUGHT AT&T!!! EVERYONE'S HEARD OF THEM!!!" So they changed their name with big fanfare. Any CEO that didn't think of that in the first 2 seconds of the acquisition should have been fired on the spot for incompetence. But the whole company is dumber than that.
... or change the drop-down box in Preferences->General->Import Settings to 'MP3' and buy real coasters instead of making your own.
Look at this. Is it any wonder Windows replaced /etc/init.d with a database, daemons with Services, and the syslog with EventViewer? Obviously unnecessary complexity is essential to any good modern unmaintainable OS design. Between David Cutler's idea that people belong to files and this guy... no Wonder Windows is such a mess.
I'm making dinner honey. It will be done in 2 weeks.
I use Ubuntu because it is the 'Apple' of Linux distributions. ... it just works... I even violate my Linux roots sometimes and configure stuff through the GUI. I think it is Steven Vaughan-Nichols who is not relevant. And it it were not for Debian, there would be no Ubuntu.
Yes, yes, I know that Red Hat works too, but it just doesn't DO anything. RPMs that won't install. An ugly incoherent out of date GUI. configured for security ... meaning you should consider yourself privileged that it actually lets you login.
Sorry Mister developer guy, but it really does not matter what you do with the status bar any more. Firefox started freezing three PC's in my house like a year ago if I left it open for more than a day. Chrome is an exercise in overdone minimalism, and IE stinks. So I was forced to switch to Safari, and gee... it just works like most of Apple's stuff. .. and it has a status bar.
It won't change usability at all. KDE is already unusable.
Never mind AT&T's data network. Normal telephone calls drop in their garbage network. I guess it surprised them that people actually wanted to make phone calls too. Their network has been horrible forever. When I lived in L.A. and had AT&T service. I complained to their customer service about the constant call drops and was told .. "but hey! We have the best coverage of any carrier in Barstow!". Nice to know that both families that live in Barstow can call each other, because user's who live in America's biggest cities cannot.
I just loaded Maverick Meerkat on my Linux machine last week, and despite the fact that my Nvidea video card did not have proper support. (Ubuntu should have posted a "NOTICE: Nvidea Users Do Not Upgrade At This Time!!!"), but anyway; the machine is long since too old to run Windoze at all, so I cannot complain too loudly that my ancient hardware is starting to have issues. I was really quite surprised at how usable Ubuntu has become. I have switched back and forth between KDE and Gnome over the years as each became too annoying to put up with for one reason or another, and abandoned Red Hat in favor of [K]Ubuntu because Solaris 8 was more user friendly. RhythmBox is broken, but overall. There is now a tool to do just about everything without a console. I am normally a 'just edit the file' kind of guy, and I find myself USING the GUI tools because they work. Open Office reads docs better than ever before, and most of the tools are really quite good.
In the end, I think Linux has FINALLY arrived. At least for the Debian team and Ubuntu in particular. Red Hat is dreadful today.
Yes Windows 7 sucks less than all of the other Operating systems they have ever released, and slightly less annoying than Vista to use. There's an achievement! Of course Linus wrote Linux because DOS sucked, and passed them YEARS ago even with all their money and resources. It is the commercial software support that keeps them in front. From what I can see from the outside looking in, it is the jewel in the crown of mediocrity. Oh and Steve Ballmer is a moron. Bill was a crook, but I could respect his savvy. He got tired of it, and gave it to Steve because he was next in line and Steve can't even be a competent crook. If he didn't know Bill, he would be one of those guys on America's Dumbest Criminals.
The earliest one I know of was by the smartest man I ever knew (and the strangest). He was my mentor. In the IBM 360 days this guy used to write code .. COMPLEX code in binary on the roller bars on the front of the console because he was too lazy to logon. He made IBM's code more efficient by eliminating all modularization. It was more efficient to just have one big super efficient kernel, so he redesigned their system, and got something like 140% efficiency out of the hardware (40% greater than theoretical possibility) by IBM's own benchmarks, and found a security hole in their code in the process .. as he put it "bit enough to drive an 18 wheeler through", which he reported to them. They told him it was his hacking, he broke something ... NOT OUR CODE!!! IBM CODE CAN'T BE BROKEN!!! So he went to their 'demo center' and fed in a deck of punch cards.
On the IBM Selectric console in the IBM demo center, it printed.
"May I please have a cookie?"
The operator ignored it.
8 hours later during shift turnover It printed
"I never got my cookie"
The two operators looked at it, shrugged, and ignored it. The dayshift operator went home.
4 hours later the console printed.
"You're not a very nice operator either, I never did get my cookie"
The operator thought the guys upstairs were fooling around and ignored it.
2 hours later.
"WHERE IS MY COOKIE!"
hummm...
1 hour later.
"Dammit give me a cookie!"
30 minutes.
"I WANT A COOKIE!"
15 minutes ... 7.5 minutes ... eventually we get to 32 cookies this second .. 64 cookies this second ... 128 cookies this second.
An IBM Selectric typewriter which is the main console for a 360/65 cannot print even the word cookie in a second, much less a whole sentence, and certainly not 128 of them! There was ONE way to crash a 360/65 .. Fill up the console buffer. The system considered console messages to be important, and if the system couldn't print all of them, it halted.
Reboot ... excuse me... Mainframe terminology here... "IPL" the system. First console message:
"You know, I never DIID get my cookie!" .. and the process starts over.
Finally IBM called my mentor...
um... did you submit a job to the demo center?
Yes, but don't worry, it was just a simple 'unprivileged' process, and as you said, your security is flawless, so I am sure there is no danger. :-)
Sir, I think we are prepared to acknowledge that there MAY BE a security hole in our system somewhere. It seems that your job never finished and yet it does not seem to exist in the system anywhere. Our experts tell us we have to re-install the operating system to fix it. Do you have any alternative suggestions?
Just one... Go get the best operator you have and put him on the console and call me back.
Yes sir... .. an hour later
Sir, this is king super operator, they just called me back in to work to assist you in solving our issue.
OK ... now listen carefully. I am only going to say this once. Type carefully, and don't screw this up .. are you ready?
Yes sir.
Good type this ... "c" "o" "o" "k" "i" "e" ... now press "Enter"
Console prints . "Thank you that was good", and the job ends.
After that IBM never ever questioned it if my mentor reported a problem with IBM software ever again.