Xerox was uninterested in fixing them, and chose to prevent us, so we were forced to accept the problems. They were never fixed.
Isn't that the point where you start looking for another vendor? Or, is this a "never got fired for buying IBM" problem, or a "no competition" problem?
Isn't the whole point to paying a company to make a product is so you don't have to do it yourself? People aren't willing to chastise companies for making bad products, and demand certain features to ensure loyalty? Freedom isn't worth much to people who lack willpower.
It never ceases to amaze me that graphic programs usually have horrible GUIs. GIMP has so much wasted vertical space in its GUI, which is idiotic given that widescreen monitors are so popular these days. Why can't I get rid of tools I don't use? Letting me get rid of whole panels isn't good enough, because I still end up with 7 panels on the screen, and use only 10% of each one! With all this object-oriented crap going on, why are developers still stamping widgets in one place?
Photoshop isn't much better, of course. A horizontal bar holds all the brush defaults? I can't lock any panels? The brush and pencil tool are combined into one icon and I have to click-hold-select to choose between the two? To really appeal to artists, people need to stop doing half-assed clones of Photoshop simply because it is popular, and take a few hints from projects like ArtRage II, which are truly successful in terms of design.
Every web browser should have a development mode where it will tell you about simple syntax problems with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and so on. This should have been standard since day one! I mean, really simple things that won't bloat the browser. Complex things like validation can be handled with extensions, like the Web Developer and HTML Validator extensions for Firefox.
Most people I know who do web development aren't aware of a simple typo here and there, and it's hard to validate whole pages when people are making web sites using a mess of templates that requires logins and sessions. You can't use external tools for everything while debugging, and you can't do anything that would risk the end user getting a blank screen or a ton of error messages (as the W3C is trying to do). IMO, web browsers have all done a horrible job of this stuff. Firefox was the first browser I know to even allow debugging of any sort, and even then, everything has to be done with extensions, even though internally, the browser needs to validate everything, anyway.
Nobody can take a browser seriously as a platform (or even as -- *ugh* -- an OS) unless it offers even the most essential debugging tools. Web browsers have done a horrible job of this in the past, and even today the simplest of testing requires a bunch of 3rd party extensions that are usually out of date when new browsers are released. The severe minimalist design of Chrome drives me nuts, too, because it really goes out of its way to hide even the simplest of development features, like View Source, under a complex tree of drop-down menus. WTF? Opera takes development more seriously than other browsers, particularly with image support and limited screen space, but it still lacks many essential validation features.
People can blame IE all they want for standards-compliance issues, but all browsers are to blame for poor web development practices.
Three days ago I was working on my dad's computer, and IE gave me a warning telling me that something had messed with its search defaults, and the browser brought up a selector so I could choose/verify the search defaults. Bing was selected as the default, so I chose Google and clicked "set default". The list didn't update. So, I did it again, and restarted.
IE gave me another warning about something changing the default, and Bing is still the default. I clicked the checkbox titled, "Prevent programs from suggesting changes to my default search provider", and tried to set Google to the default again. No dice. I tried looking for any rouge IE extensions (under "All add-ons") to see if there was anything messing up IE. I could find no 3rd-party tool that would be messing with IE's configuration. I checked all the Windows startup options and background services and found nothing unusual. No matter what I do, IE refuses to even acknowledge me choosing Google, let alone actually set it to the default. Not even changing the search engine listing order works.
I'm going to try this on another machine to confirm. I am 100% sure I don't have mal-ware on my backup computer, and I'm pretty sure that IE is doing something funny, and I'm sure Microsoft would just claim this is a "bug" of some sort.
BTW, my dad does business-related stuff on his computer, so he won't switch to Firefox. That makes this issue all that much more annoying.
They are content to let works just "rot in the vault".
Yeah, hardly any software is officially blessed as "abandonware" for the same reason. No matter how obscure or meaningless an old IP is, someone out there is hoping that it will be marketable again... someday.
Everyone isn't going to just up and abandon all of that investment and knowledge just because something new has appeared.
Yes, they will, because that is the "old", and that doesn't sell, anymore. The "new" is the only thing that needs to be included with the machine. Of course, the "old" will always be available separately as a mandatory option, along with the new new which is what the new should have been in the first place (like MotionPlus).
I'll never understand why just because a controller has 12 buttons means every single one needs to be used in a game, strengthening the whole argument that games are too complicated. That probably follows the same logic where you can only choose a limited set of control layout for almost all console games, rather than doing things the PC way by mapping a button to whatever function you want. It's all image and marketing (with a dash of stupidity and a whole lot of arrogance).
I love console games, but really... I don't need to be forced to use a gimped controller for my own good. Some companies make a huge business out of forcing people to use gimped controls because "that's all you need".
Well, it's about time somebody does something. For years JavaScript has been an on/off affair, and it's been driving me nuts both as a web surfer and a developer.
They can do whatever they want for Joe Average to ensure advertisers won't complain, but please, can I have the ability to allow scripts to run only from the same domain as the originating page? Please? Just a simple checkbox will do, thank you.
If people don't have a clear idea of why they need innovation, just changing things for the sake of making them different does not make the product better. Linux people have a very hard time understanding this, and it probably explains why many (but not all) things in the Linux community are designed to look and feel as much like Windows and OSX in the first place. Linux is hardly a source for good, progressive innovation.
Personally, I see Linux-based desktops as one of the biggest disappointments since the Amiga.
And recovery time from failure? Almost zero in the case of Linux. People just keep on keepin' on.
GUI-driven versions of GNU/Linux have been around for more than 10 years, and Linux itself has been around for quite a lot longer. After all this time, Linux is still struggling to gain even a fraction of market share, despite being free and readily available to practically everyone. And, of course, Linux users keep complaining that Linux is ready for the desktop and should be much more popular among casual computer users.
Unless Linux is meant exclusively for geeks, I don't see much success, let alone recovery time.
Apple has no moral authority to set these rules at all.
For all effective purposes, they do. Morality is a social construct of the public. If the Apple community tolerates it, then Apple will do it, and they will get away with it.
Either the Apple community needs to complain about this (unlikely), or developers need to complain to the Apple community and convince them to complain about it (good luck).
You people seem to have passively accepted it.
Yes, the Apple community is pretty damn good at that. That's why my Java applets don't work correctly on PPC Macs. Java on the Mac? Bah, who needs it?
What about those SUVs that shut off come of the cylinders when the engine isn't working hard? Do they actually do some fancy stuff by cutting the spark, or do they burn fuel, too?
Linux distros on netbooks were pathetic and often broken. They sold inbred horses with zebra stripes painted on them.
Seriously, these are called "netbooks" because they are designed to be cheap Internet surfing machines. If they don't run every piece of Windows software out there, then that probably isn't a big deal. If Linux can't break into that kind of market, than it's obvious that the companies that prepared Linux did a horrible job, rather than faced anti-competitive pressure from MS, or faced retaliation from users who wanted Windows apps.
This happens over and over again to Linux. Every time, it's the same excuses.
It would also help if PHP had a decent built-in template engine. PHP is supposed to be a template language, but (supposedly) up to PHP 6, it can't even handle UTF-8 encoding.
Anything in PEAR isn't much use, either, because my scripts are designed to be redistributed and run on shared servers. These servers usually don't have any PEAR modules installed.
OCZ Apex 60GB, the one with dual JMicron controllers. It also got rave reviews when it was released, but the real-world usability is rubbish.
Even now, there are still too many SSDs based on the JMicron controller, and the newest drives based on this design have large caches and are better than the old ones, but they still have problems. My personal opinion is that the companies who made/are making these drives should have known better than to release the products at all, because the problems are so explicit. There's no way at all they could have unleashed these drives and thought they were appropriate for the market. Apparently, 150+MB read speed benchmarks work very well to sell poorly tested products. It didn't take much research for me to see that these drives were not acceptable.
There's also so many drives using the JMicron, it's nearly impossible to find anything else unless you visit a review site that has dared to photograph the inside of the drive. Many manufacturers won't tell you what's inside.
I'm considering a Samsung-based Corsair P128 as a replacement. Intel doesn't have anything between 80GB and 160GB, which is a shame.
Where are all the wonderful SSD/HD hybrid drives that were supposed to come out and prevent many of the problems SSDs have?
My dad bought me an SSD for my birthday, and it was one of those models that has horrible studdering issues (which, from what I'm reading, covers most SSDs). That was a lot of money for a drive that let me install drivers about 20 times slower than a hard drive would, and caused my machine to freeze for 20-40 seconds at a time while just surfing the web. That was after disabling all the NTFS caching and optimization nonsense, too.
I remember a long time ago talking to a guy about using a mix of fast and cheap memory in the same computer instead of a huge amount of memory running at one speed. Instead of talking about memory controller costs and OS design, he just told me, "There's no such thing as cheap memory". Well, I seem to see that SLC and MLC have a large difference in cost and performance. Is it at all practical to make a drive with a little SLC and a lot of MLC to aid in performance and wear-leveling issues? SSDs already utilize several megs of cache memory, so is it really that impractical to mix different flash technologies to solve the random-write problems?
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Xerox was uninterested in fixing them, and chose to prevent us, so we were forced to accept the problems. They were never fixed.
Isn't that the point where you start looking for another vendor? Or, is this a "never got fired for buying IBM" problem, or a "no competition" problem?
Isn't the whole point to paying a company to make a product is so you don't have to do it yourself? People aren't willing to chastise companies for making bad products, and demand certain features to ensure loyalty? Freedom isn't worth much to people who lack willpower.
Wait, no... reducing responsiveness is a feature. People go through a lot of trouble to prevent the infamous Flash of Unstyled Content.
So, the Internet would be like cable? Given the rise of broadband, that's about the most ironic thing I've heard all month.
Plus, there are plenty of other low-level things in our water, already. Anything radioactive is the least of the public's concerns.
Wait. The earth rotates with about 38% of the surface optimally bathed in sunlight at any given time.
Should be enough for the relatively same number of people who are awake at any given time.
You only really need to know the data structure. The rest is trivial with the right optics set-up. Perhaps a retinal scanner will suffice?
I think the docs on the DVD format will persevere far longer than whatever data you have on your super DVDs. I can't say the same about Blu-ray.
I suppose Apple doesn't have a good design yet for a mid-range Mac with expansion slots? People have wanted that for years, too.
It never ceases to amaze me that graphic programs usually have horrible GUIs. GIMP has so much wasted vertical space in its GUI, which is idiotic given that widescreen monitors are so popular these days. Why can't I get rid of tools I don't use? Letting me get rid of whole panels isn't good enough, because I still end up with 7 panels on the screen, and use only 10% of each one! With all this object-oriented crap going on, why are developers still stamping widgets in one place?
Photoshop isn't much better, of course. A horizontal bar holds all the brush defaults? I can't lock any panels? The brush and pencil tool are combined into one icon and I have to click-hold-select to choose between the two? To really appeal to artists, people need to stop doing half-assed clones of Photoshop simply because it is popular, and take a few hints from projects like ArtRage II, which are truly successful in terms of design.
I blame development tools.
Every web browser should have a development mode where it will tell you about simple syntax problems with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and so on. This should have been standard since day one! I mean, really simple things that won't bloat the browser. Complex things like validation can be handled with extensions, like the Web Developer and HTML Validator extensions for Firefox.
Most people I know who do web development aren't aware of a simple typo here and there, and it's hard to validate whole pages when people are making web sites using a mess of templates that requires logins and sessions. You can't use external tools for everything while debugging, and you can't do anything that would risk the end user getting a blank screen or a ton of error messages (as the W3C is trying to do). IMO, web browsers have all done a horrible job of this stuff. Firefox was the first browser I know to even allow debugging of any sort, and even then, everything has to be done with extensions, even though internally, the browser needs to validate everything, anyway.
Nobody can take a browser seriously as a platform (or even as -- *ugh* -- an OS) unless it offers even the most essential debugging tools. Web browsers have done a horrible job of this in the past, and even today the simplest of testing requires a bunch of 3rd party extensions that are usually out of date when new browsers are released. The severe minimalist design of Chrome drives me nuts, too, because it really goes out of its way to hide even the simplest of development features, like View Source, under a complex tree of drop-down menus. WTF? Opera takes development more seriously than other browsers, particularly with image support and limited screen space, but it still lacks many essential validation features.
People can blame IE all they want for standards-compliance issues, but all browsers are to blame for poor web development practices.
Three days ago I was working on my dad's computer, and IE gave me a warning telling me that something had messed with its search defaults, and the browser brought up a selector so I could choose/verify the search defaults. Bing was selected as the default, so I chose Google and clicked "set default". The list didn't update. So, I did it again, and restarted.
IE gave me another warning about something changing the default, and Bing is still the default. I clicked the checkbox titled, "Prevent programs from suggesting changes to my default search provider", and tried to set Google to the default again. No dice. I tried looking for any rouge IE extensions (under "All add-ons") to see if there was anything messing up IE. I could find no 3rd-party tool that would be messing with IE's configuration. I checked all the Windows startup options and background services and found nothing unusual. No matter what I do, IE refuses to even acknowledge me choosing Google, let alone actually set it to the default. Not even changing the search engine listing order works.
I'm going to try this on another machine to confirm. I am 100% sure I don't have mal-ware on my backup computer, and I'm pretty sure that IE is doing something funny, and I'm sure Microsoft would just claim this is a "bug" of some sort.
BTW, my dad does business-related stuff on his computer, so he won't switch to Firefox. That makes this issue all that much more annoying.
They are content to let works just "rot in the vault".
Yeah, hardly any software is officially blessed as "abandonware" for the same reason. No matter how obscure or meaningless an old IP is, someone out there is hoping that it will be marketable again... someday.
Everyone isn't going to just up and abandon all of that investment and knowledge just because something new has appeared.
Yes, they will, because that is the "old", and that doesn't sell, anymore. The "new" is the only thing that needs to be included with the machine. Of course, the "old" will always be available separately as a mandatory option, along with the new new which is what the new should have been in the first place (like MotionPlus).
I'll never understand why just because a controller has 12 buttons means every single one needs to be used in a game, strengthening the whole argument that games are too complicated. That probably follows the same logic where you can only choose a limited set of control layout for almost all console games, rather than doing things the PC way by mapping a button to whatever function you want. It's all image and marketing (with a dash of stupidity and a whole lot of arrogance).
I love console games, but really... I don't need to be forced to use a gimped controller for my own good. Some companies make a huge business out of forcing people to use gimped controls because "that's all you need".
Well, it's about time somebody does something. For years JavaScript has been an on/off affair, and it's been driving me nuts both as a web surfer and a developer.
They can do whatever they want for Joe Average to ensure advertisers won't complain, but please, can I have the ability to allow scripts to run only from the same domain as the originating page? Please? Just a simple checkbox will do, thank you.
Your user name reflects my original interpretation of the previous post.
Hey, don't knock it. Some of the iPhone people need to be enlightened.
So is all the innovation bad for Linux? Nope.
Innovation is simply change, not improvement.
If people don't have a clear idea of why they need innovation, just changing things for the sake of making them different does not make the product better. Linux people have a very hard time understanding this, and it probably explains why many (but not all) things in the Linux community are designed to look and feel as much like Windows and OSX in the first place. Linux is hardly a source for good, progressive innovation.
Personally, I see Linux-based desktops as one of the biggest disappointments since the Amiga.
And recovery time from failure? Almost zero in the case of Linux. People just keep on keepin' on.
GUI-driven versions of GNU/Linux have been around for more than 10 years, and Linux itself has been around for quite a lot longer. After all this time, Linux is still struggling to gain even a fraction of market share, despite being free and readily available to practically everyone. And, of course, Linux users keep complaining that Linux is ready for the desktop and should be much more popular among casual computer users.
Unless Linux is meant exclusively for geeks, I don't see much success, let alone recovery time.
Apple has no moral authority to set these rules at all.
For all effective purposes, they do. Morality is a social construct of the public. If the Apple community tolerates it, then Apple will do it, and they will get away with it.
Either the Apple community needs to complain about this (unlikely), or developers need to complain to the Apple community and convince them to complain about it (good luck).
You people seem to have passively accepted it.
Yes, the Apple community is pretty damn good at that. That's why my Java applets don't work correctly on PPC Macs. Java on the Mac? Bah, who needs it?
What about those SUVs that shut off come of the cylinders when the engine isn't working hard? Do they actually do some fancy stuff by cutting the spark, or do they burn fuel, too?
Cunning plan... to not make money?
Linux distros on netbooks were pathetic and often broken. They sold inbred horses with zebra stripes painted on them.
Seriously, these are called "netbooks" because they are designed to be cheap Internet surfing machines. If they don't run every piece of Windows software out there, then that probably isn't a big deal. If Linux can't break into that kind of market, than it's obvious that the companies that prepared Linux did a horrible job, rather than faced anti-competitive pressure from MS, or faced retaliation from users who wanted Windows apps.
This happens over and over again to Linux. Every time, it's the same excuses.
It would also help if PHP had a decent built-in template engine. PHP is supposed to be a template language, but (supposedly) up to PHP 6, it can't even handle UTF-8 encoding.
Anything in PEAR isn't much use, either, because my scripts are designed to be redistributed and run on shared servers. These servers usually don't have any PEAR modules installed.
OCZ Apex 60GB, the one with dual JMicron controllers. It also got rave reviews when it was released, but the real-world usability is rubbish.
Even now, there are still too many SSDs based on the JMicron controller, and the newest drives based on this design have large caches and are better than the old ones, but they still have problems. My personal opinion is that the companies who made/are making these drives should have known better than to release the products at all, because the problems are so explicit. There's no way at all they could have unleashed these drives and thought they were appropriate for the market. Apparently, 150+MB read speed benchmarks work very well to sell poorly tested products. It didn't take much research for me to see that these drives were not acceptable.
There's also so many drives using the JMicron, it's nearly impossible to find anything else unless you visit a review site that has dared to photograph the inside of the drive. Many manufacturers won't tell you what's inside.
I'm considering a Samsung-based Corsair P128 as a replacement. Intel doesn't have anything between 80GB and 160GB, which is a shame.
Never mind about the mixing of flash types. I did my research.
I still want to know where the hybrids are.
Where are all the wonderful SSD/HD hybrid drives that were supposed to come out and prevent many of the problems SSDs have?
My dad bought me an SSD for my birthday, and it was one of those models that has horrible studdering issues (which, from what I'm reading, covers most SSDs). That was a lot of money for a drive that let me install drivers about 20 times slower than a hard drive would, and caused my machine to freeze for 20-40 seconds at a time while just surfing the web. That was after disabling all the NTFS caching and optimization nonsense, too.
I remember a long time ago talking to a guy about using a mix of fast and cheap memory in the same computer instead of a huge amount of memory running at one speed. Instead of talking about memory controller costs and OS design, he just told me, "There's no such thing as cheap memory". Well, I seem to see that SLC and MLC have a large difference in cost and performance. Is it at all practical to make a drive with a little SLC and a lot of MLC to aid in performance and wear-leveling issues? SSDs already utilize several megs of cache memory, so is it really that impractical to mix different flash technologies to solve the random-write problems?
DOS was about the only thing worse than MacOS.
I know artists are supposed to suffer, but when I was using Macs based on OS8 back in college, I really suffered. I mean that.