#1 reason why I own a manual transmission and never use cruise control. I don't trust myself. It may be decidedly un-American to have a compact car with few gadgets and gizmos, but I always know how fast I'm going in my car with a manual transmission. When I drive automatics, I speed, and when I use cruise control, I zone out.
Emergency response features sound useful, but I don't want a car with half-assed automation. If they car is supposed to drive itself, either do it completely and properly, or not at all.
It depends on your fingers. No matter how long I use any laptop, I can never type as fast on them as I can on a "real" keyboard. It's also the same reason I have a keyboard with Cherry brown switches, because I type slower on keyboards with red switches, despite them having the same amount of travel. I went through quite a few keyboards before I settled on one I like.
That's why having choices is important. You personally may type faster on a laptop, even "most" people (according to gossip) may type faster, but it's stupid to assume everyone is the same. It's never worth defending a company that forces a single choice on to the public, especially when they do something really weird and then just tell every critic the reason they don't like it is because they're holding it wrong.
I've heard some people say the keyboards are great and they love them. Hey, to each their own, and there's nothing wrong with being different.
What bugs me about Apple (and always has for 30+ years) is that they only offer one option -- take it or leave it. That's tough when a company has such an aggressive vertical monopoly. I had to take a serious double-take when they started bundling laptop chicklet keyboards with their high-end desktop machines, because it's obvious that a professional workstation has the same usability requirements as a laptop.
Secretly, I'm glad they didn't bundle a keyboard or mouse with my PPC Mini when I bought it a long time ago, since what they were offering was crap. I used a PC keyboard and mouse instead. Of course, I had a heart attack when I found out I can't customize the mouse acceleration, making the GUI nearly impossible to use, regardless of what mouse I used. I got rid of that machine rather quickly and have since sworn I'll never buy an Apple product again. Some people may like them, but I need more choices, because one size does NOT fit all.
The massive, aggressive shift away from documents to full-blown "apps" is why I quite web development entirely.
I remember when everyone was screaming about standards compliance and usability when MS was in charge. Then Chrome took over and NOW everyone is perfectly okay with pretty and shiny and developing for name-brand browsers only.
Bonus points for dental and vision insurance for being separate from regular insurance in the first place. You can't even have a tooth extracted by a dentist anymore -- you need to go to a specialist: the oral surgeon. Gotta add more middlemen to go along with those insane price scams.
It's every level of the healthcare system, though, not just hospitals. I used to work in a warehouse that shipped medical supplies, and sometimes I got a peek at our invoices. It was an eye opener to see not only what the manufacturers charge, but the various markups among all the middlemen (including us).
Oh, and almost all American medical products are imported. Support hardware like tubes, trays, and crutches come from China, of course, but the expensive stuff, like drugs and sutures, come from Eastern Europe. For some reason, Romania, Poland, and Estonia are particularly dominant. Even at these insane prices, manufacturers save every penny they [legally] can by outsourcing. One of the few American-made products we carried was... cheap, fuzzy cotton towels (not gauze, which came from Mexico, if I remember correctly).
But remember... it's all the fault of FDA regulation! Get rid of the regulation and it'll all get fixed. We swear.
Also known as CGA (when adjusted to make the pixels square). Most computers in the 80's used this format, though they stretched the screen to make it fit into a 4:3 aspect ratio. Back in my Amiga days, I hated the fact that circles looked like ovals, so I adjusted the vertical scaling so NTSC always displayed in wide 16:10 format. I liked it that way. When I was doing graphics, I'd just switch to PAL mode and get a 320x240 display, which is conventional 4:3.
Interestingly enough, I currently have a 1680x1050 monitor, which is the same 16:10 aspect ratio I used in 1985.
It's not just the use cases that gets to me, it's the fact that it was killed for all the wrong reasons.
People whine about security in Flash, yet never point out that browsers and OSes have a lot of trouble sandboxing their own resources, let alone plugins. Ad blockers are a thing because advertisers insist on their 3rd-party code running on web sites and tracking the hell out of everyone. Why did anyone think that running code right off the Internet was a good idea? HTML5 did nothing to keep CPU usage and battery status in check, and actually made the problem worse by multi-threading as much as possible. Badly written Javascript with tight loops and no event states will bring your browser to its knees, just like badly written Flash, and well-written Flash will work just fine. At least Flash could be disabled, but there's nothing you can do about Javascript. Browsers are not implementing or enforcing sanity limits, and even now are only starting to address muting background tabs or preventing auto-playback. Flash was a centralized player that could easily be updated by the user, and now each web site has its own proprietary players that may not be updated for years. Almost all the problems we had with Flash are very much present in web standards... but nobody cares about that. It was always about the marketing, not the technology or its usage.
Oh, not to mention the fact that I have no choice in the matter. What if I want to run Flash (or Java applets)? Nope, the web browser developers make those decisions, now, and they decided that I shouldn't have any technology they can't control. I don't like Adobe, but it's pretty bullshit that Adobe can't keep supporting a platform they created and soon I won't be able to use it at all, because Google/Mozilla decided to pull the plug. It's one thing for the open-source community to cheering the slow death of a product that isn't open, but it's something else when they openly advocate that it should be killed by force to make sure people can't use it even if they want to. That's just massive hypocrisy.
I would recommend using your time to do something else.
This got voted insightful? Really? I guess there's not many artists on Slashdot.
It's a stupid waste of time, and ultimately not very important in the grand scheme of things.
So is almost everything in life, including posting on the Internet. If Earth were to blow up tomorrow, the universe wouldn't give a toss. Loosen up and live a little.
Technologies always take a long time to die when they're still useful, and were killed for political reasons, not technical.
I'm an artist and regularly hang out on gallery web sites. There are still tons of people creating new Flash animations every day because there is still simply NO web-standard replacement for what Flash can do.
This is because removing a person from society costs society more than just the lost economic value of that one person.
But that's okay if there's a real profit involved. America has an incentive to incarcerate people at the expense of society, as long as it results in money being funneled into the pockets of private prison owners. Bonus points if you can somehow force the incarcerated to do labor, resulting in more profit for the prison owners.
My life in a nutshell when I was working in a medical warehouse. With the introduction of voice picking, the company decided to raise our minimum quota to 87% of whatever the computer told us we should be doing. That's like failing a class if you get a B.
Nobody was getting 100% even under the best of conditions, and it was hard to work at all with mandatory 14-15 hour shifts every day. That's especially hard with voice recognition so bad the system couldn't tell the difference between "yes" and "no". The headphone volume would dynamically change on its own, so the speaker constantly varied between a whisper to a lawnmower-like scream. The dynamic volume adjustment (to account for background noise) pissed me off the most. The computer would scream so loud I was afraid it would literally damage my hearing. There was no way to configure the system to have a consistent volume.
After 10 years with the company, I was told my performance was below 87%, and I had two weeks to improve it or I'd be fired. I quit on the spot.
In the Windows 3.1 era, that may have been the case. However, once Win95 became available, it completely spanked the Mac in every possible way, including reliability and window management. Apple made no headway on Copland and aggressively defied adapting a taskbar or similar mechanism for window management to avoid the stigma of copying Microsoft. By 1995, productivity was way, way higher on a PC as Apple refused to adapt to new ways of working, and continued pushing their views of apps using fixed amounts of memory and having multiple windows open per app, a la Desk Accessories. That just covered the usability, mind you -- I don't even talk about performance per dollar. It was a mess, and every student at my university saw Macs as a joke. Only the teachers were die-hard Apple fans.
It was actually school policy that our departments were only allowed to buy Macs, no matter how much we begged the school to let us buy PCs. It was much easier and faster for me to leave class, go to my dorm, do my assignment on my $800 PC, print everything out, and walk back to class than to do the work in the lab on a brand new $5,000 Mac.
Having recently seen Amiga die, I was certain Apple would also be out of business by the end of the century. That very nearly happened, had Apple not reached an epiphany: they finally accepted they couldn't design or maintain their own OS, and they should give up and buy someone else's. Classic Macs were a trainwreck.
I've encountered a multitude of devices that won't even power on when given rechargeable batteries, as they expect a voltage over 1.2V to "reset" the battery meter.
A particularly annoying example was my first music player, as I explicitly bought a device powered by an AAA battery since I wanted it to last for a long time and didn't want to bother with a device with a built-in battery. Turns out, only alkaline AAA batteries would work. A freshly charged NiMH battery always threw a low battery warning and the device wouldn't even turn on. I also encountered many [early] digital cameras that had the same problem.
Doing things selectively is a great way to get reasonable sample data with the benefit of avoiding detection/controversy. Usage habits may flag some people as better candidates for extra tracking than others. How many times have you heard someone complain about a problem, only to be bombarded with comments similar to, "I've never had that happen! It works fine for ME!"
Refer to Microsoft's tactic of staged roll-outs and treating users like guinea pigs while having minimal (if any) options to opt in or out. If something goes wrong and the company can't claim innocence, they can just say, "It only affected a small number of people."
GUIs are driven more by taste than tech, so backwards compatibility with GUIs is far more difficult and impressive.
Even 20 years ago, many UN*X systems didn't even have a GUI, let alone have a decent one, let alone a set of standards. As a semi-power user, the lack of a good GUI is what always kept me away from Linux, and for the most part, it still does.
...therefore if you post something related to your own health there on your own Facebook page
The most pressing concern is that Facebook is getting info on people that DON'T post things on Facebook on their own. With Facebook talking to hospitals directly, isn't there a bit of a concern as to HOW they collect data on people without their knowledge, let alone consent?
There is something to be said for the quantity of screw-ups. Apple is very quickly catching up with Microsoft in terms of quality of screw-ups, too.
...abnormally passionate, visceral hatred of Apple.
Most people will generally support the underdog, even if they won't buy from them. It might be worth accepting that the passionate hatred of Apple (which existed long before the iPhone, iPod, etc.) might have some truth to it. I gave up on Apple for good after an OS update removed a bunch of features from my Mini and rendered it useless.
WeChat is like SMS, voice mail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Skype, Facetime, PayPal, plus a lot more, all rolled into one app.
Sounds like the very definition of single point of failure. Do I really want my money, biometrics, family contacts, social media lumped together in one convenient database?
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#1 reason why I own a manual transmission and never use cruise control. I don't trust myself. It may be decidedly un-American to have a compact car with few gadgets and gizmos, but I always know how fast I'm going in my car with a manual transmission. When I drive automatics, I speed, and when I use cruise control, I zone out.
Emergency response features sound useful, but I don't want a car with half-assed automation. If they car is supposed to drive itself, either do it completely and properly, or not at all.
It depends on your fingers. No matter how long I use any laptop, I can never type as fast on them as I can on a "real" keyboard. It's also the same reason I have a keyboard with Cherry brown switches, because I type slower on keyboards with red switches, despite them having the same amount of travel. I went through quite a few keyboards before I settled on one I like.
That's why having choices is important. You personally may type faster on a laptop, even "most" people (according to gossip) may type faster, but it's stupid to assume everyone is the same. It's never worth defending a company that forces a single choice on to the public, especially when they do something really weird and then just tell every critic the reason they don't like it is because they're holding it wrong.
I've heard some people say the keyboards are great and they love them. Hey, to each their own, and there's nothing wrong with being different.
What bugs me about Apple (and always has for 30+ years) is that they only offer one option -- take it or leave it. That's tough when a company has such an aggressive vertical monopoly. I had to take a serious double-take when they started bundling laptop chicklet keyboards with their high-end desktop machines, because it's obvious that a professional workstation has the same usability requirements as a laptop.
Secretly, I'm glad they didn't bundle a keyboard or mouse with my PPC Mini when I bought it a long time ago, since what they were offering was crap. I used a PC keyboard and mouse instead. Of course, I had a heart attack when I found out I can't customize the mouse acceleration, making the GUI nearly impossible to use, regardless of what mouse I used. I got rid of that machine rather quickly and have since sworn I'll never buy an Apple product again. Some people may like them, but I need more choices, because one size does NOT fit all.
The massive, aggressive shift away from documents to full-blown "apps" is why I quite web development entirely.
I remember when everyone was screaming about standards compliance and usability when MS was in charge. Then Chrome took over and NOW everyone is perfectly okay with pretty and shiny and developing for name-brand browsers only.
Bonus points for dental and vision insurance for being separate from regular insurance in the first place. You can't even have a tooth extracted by a dentist anymore -- you need to go to a specialist: the oral surgeon. Gotta add more middlemen to go along with those insane price scams.
It's every level of the healthcare system, though, not just hospitals. I used to work in a warehouse that shipped medical supplies, and sometimes I got a peek at our invoices. It was an eye opener to see not only what the manufacturers charge, but the various markups among all the middlemen (including us).
Oh, and almost all American medical products are imported. Support hardware like tubes, trays, and crutches come from China, of course, but the expensive stuff, like drugs and sutures, come from Eastern Europe. For some reason, Romania, Poland, and Estonia are particularly dominant. Even at these insane prices, manufacturers save every penny they [legally] can by outsourcing. One of the few American-made products we carried was... cheap, fuzzy cotton towels (not gauze, which came from Mexico, if I remember correctly).
But remember... it's all the fault of FDA regulation! Get rid of the regulation and it'll all get fixed. We swear.
Also known as CGA (when adjusted to make the pixels square). Most computers in the 80's used this format, though they stretched the screen to make it fit into a 4:3 aspect ratio. Back in my Amiga days, I hated the fact that circles looked like ovals, so I adjusted the vertical scaling so NTSC always displayed in wide 16:10 format. I liked it that way. When I was doing graphics, I'd just switch to PAL mode and get a 320x240 display, which is conventional 4:3.
Interestingly enough, I currently have a 1680x1050 monitor, which is the same 16:10 aspect ratio I used in 1985.
Benoit Mandelbrot himself declared that the "roughness" of the coastline was a more important metric than the interpretation of its length.
It's not just the use cases that gets to me, it's the fact that it was killed for all the wrong reasons.
People whine about security in Flash, yet never point out that browsers and OSes have a lot of trouble sandboxing their own resources, let alone plugins. Ad blockers are a thing because advertisers insist on their 3rd-party code running on web sites and tracking the hell out of everyone. Why did anyone think that running code right off the Internet was a good idea? HTML5 did nothing to keep CPU usage and battery status in check, and actually made the problem worse by multi-threading as much as possible. Badly written Javascript with tight loops and no event states will bring your browser to its knees, just like badly written Flash, and well-written Flash will work just fine. At least Flash could be disabled, but there's nothing you can do about Javascript. Browsers are not implementing or enforcing sanity limits, and even now are only starting to address muting background tabs or preventing auto-playback. Flash was a centralized player that could easily be updated by the user, and now each web site has its own proprietary players that may not be updated for years. Almost all the problems we had with Flash are very much present in web standards... but nobody cares about that. It was always about the marketing, not the technology or its usage.
Oh, not to mention the fact that I have no choice in the matter. What if I want to run Flash (or Java applets)? Nope, the web browser developers make those decisions, now, and they decided that I shouldn't have any technology they can't control. I don't like Adobe, but it's pretty bullshit that Adobe can't keep supporting a platform they created and soon I won't be able to use it at all, because Google/Mozilla decided to pull the plug. It's one thing for the open-source community to cheering the slow death of a product that isn't open, but it's something else when they openly advocate that it should be killed by force to make sure people can't use it even if they want to. That's just massive hypocrisy.
I would recommend using your time to do something else.
This got voted insightful? Really? I guess there's not many artists on Slashdot.
It's a stupid waste of time, and ultimately not very important in the grand scheme of things.
So is almost everything in life, including posting on the Internet. If Earth were to blow up tomorrow, the universe wouldn't give a toss. Loosen up and live a little.
Technologies always take a long time to die when they're still useful, and were killed for political reasons, not technical.
I'm an artist and regularly hang out on gallery web sites. There are still tons of people creating new Flash animations every day because there is still simply NO web-standard replacement for what Flash can do.
This is because removing a person from society costs society more than just the lost economic value of that one person.
But that's okay if there's a real profit involved. America has an incentive to incarcerate people at the expense of society, as long as it results in money being funneled into the pockets of private prison owners. Bonus points if you can somehow force the incarcerated to do labor, resulting in more profit for the prison owners.
Yeah, it's not like embedding 3rd-party advertising script code with FULL ACCESS to the main site's data has been a thing since forever.
Can we now get web browsers to block all 3rd-party scripts by default? Please?
My life in a nutshell when I was working in a medical warehouse. With the introduction of voice picking, the company decided to raise our minimum quota to 87% of whatever the computer told us we should be doing. That's like failing a class if you get a B.
Nobody was getting 100% even under the best of conditions, and it was hard to work at all with mandatory 14-15 hour shifts every day. That's especially hard with voice recognition so bad the system couldn't tell the difference between "yes" and "no". The headphone volume would dynamically change on its own, so the speaker constantly varied between a whisper to a lawnmower-like scream. The dynamic volume adjustment (to account for background noise) pissed me off the most. The computer would scream so loud I was afraid it would literally damage my hearing. There was no way to configure the system to have a consistent volume.
After 10 years with the company, I was told my performance was below 87%, and I had two weeks to improve it or I'd be fired. I quit on the spot.
Inferiour to a Windows PC, most definitely not.
In the Windows 3.1 era, that may have been the case. However, once Win95 became available, it completely spanked the Mac in every possible way, including reliability and window management. Apple made no headway on Copland and aggressively defied adapting a taskbar or similar mechanism for window management to avoid the stigma of copying Microsoft. By 1995, productivity was way, way higher on a PC as Apple refused to adapt to new ways of working, and continued pushing their views of apps using fixed amounts of memory and having multiple windows open per app, a la Desk Accessories. That just covered the usability, mind you -- I don't even talk about performance per dollar. It was a mess, and every student at my university saw Macs as a joke. Only the teachers were die-hard Apple fans.
It was actually school policy that our departments were only allowed to buy Macs, no matter how much we begged the school to let us buy PCs. It was much easier and faster for me to leave class, go to my dorm, do my assignment on my $800 PC, print everything out, and walk back to class than to do the work in the lab on a brand new $5,000 Mac.
Having recently seen Amiga die, I was certain Apple would also be out of business by the end of the century. That very nearly happened, had Apple not reached an epiphany: they finally accepted they couldn't design or maintain their own OS, and they should give up and buy someone else's. Classic Macs were a trainwreck.
I've encountered a multitude of devices that won't even power on when given rechargeable batteries, as they expect a voltage over 1.2V to "reset" the battery meter.
A particularly annoying example was my first music player, as I explicitly bought a device powered by an AAA battery since I wanted it to last for a long time and didn't want to bother with a device with a built-in battery. Turns out, only alkaline AAA batteries would work. A freshly charged NiMH battery always threw a low battery warning and the device wouldn't even turn on. I also encountered many [early] digital cameras that had the same problem.
One screenshot isn't. 50 screenshots from different sources can be cross-referenced.
Doing things selectively is a great way to get reasonable sample data with the benefit of avoiding detection/controversy. Usage habits may flag some people as better candidates for extra tracking than others. How many times have you heard someone complain about a problem, only to be bombarded with comments similar to, "I've never had that happen! It works fine for ME!"
Refer to Microsoft's tactic of staged roll-outs and treating users like guinea pigs while having minimal (if any) options to opt in or out. If something goes wrong and the company can't claim innocence, they can just say, "It only affected a small number of people."
"Do not confuse incompetence with malice."
That implies that you should investigate first before reaching a conclusion. Always assuming incompetence is just as bad as always assuming malice.
I don't think Apple intentionally wants to upset this many premium customers.
Apple has been this way since the company was founded decades ago. They very much understand their customers and how much they will tolerate.
GUIs are driven more by taste than tech, so backwards compatibility with GUIs is far more difficult and impressive.
Even 20 years ago, many UN*X systems didn't even have a GUI, let alone have a decent one, let alone a set of standards. As a semi-power user, the lack of a good GUI is what always kept me away from Linux, and for the most part, it still does.
...therefore if you post something related to your own health there on your own Facebook page
The most pressing concern is that Facebook is getting info on people that DON'T post things on Facebook on their own. With Facebook talking to hospitals directly, isn't there a bit of a concern as to HOW they collect data on people without their knowledge, let alone consent?
I voted independent.
Of course, other people mocked me for "throwing away my vote", and then voted Democratic and Republican. It still got worse.
Look at how much stuff broke on Vista, despite two years advanced notice.
There is something to be said for the quantity of screw-ups. Apple is very quickly catching up with Microsoft in terms of quality of screw-ups, too.
...abnormally passionate, visceral hatred of Apple.
Most people will generally support the underdog, even if they won't buy from them. It might be worth accepting that the passionate hatred of Apple (which existed long before the iPhone, iPod, etc.) might have some truth to it. I gave up on Apple for good after an OS update removed a bunch of features from my Mini and rendered it useless.
WeChat is like SMS, voice mail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Skype, Facetime, PayPal, plus a lot more, all rolled into one app.
Sounds like the very definition of single point of failure. Do I really want my money, biometrics, family contacts, social media lumped together in one convenient database?