I agree with your first point, but the second and third are a little silly. It's true that neither of those features were shown in the video, but it doesn't seem far-fetched to add those back in through apps or updates. Tagging could be as simple as writing in a special 'title' field, or tapping and holding on a word in the document, then selecting 'make this a tag' from the pop-up menu. With theoretically sufficient OCR, you could even search through the whole thing. Similarly, creating forms and organizing into folders are pretty minor tasks. Given that the only material ever presented was a couple of concept mockups, it's not surprising that they focused on the unique highlights rather than pragmatic details.
But that being said, targeting artists and visually creative people was a very big point of why Courier was so brilliant. Instead of trying to target a completely different audience from Apple, the Courier would have slipped in and stolen Apple's primary target market away from them, leaving them with a restrictive, crappy consumer device as their flagship portable computer. In politics such an incredibly perfect opportunity to steal mindshare and audience away from your competitor rarely happens. Instead MS has gone after Apple's current direct target with a consumer-oriented device, and is trying to break into a market already dominated by a well-supported product, the exact thing that's protected Windows on the PC from being displaced by competitors. It's suicide; they've been trying to market tablet PCs running Windows "for the other 50% of the people out there" for twelve years now, and no one wants them.
So have I—only more seriously. I built a crude imitation of the NeXT UI for Windows in tribute four years ago and I can't live without it. Tiles for icons was a Good Idea.
Sadly, as far as the topic goes: Microsoft had their chance to revolutionize the tablet market, with the Courier, and they dumped it in favour of Windows 8. That train has already left the station. It would have completely decimated iPad sales if it had been released; when it appeared, the gadget geeks fawned over it as much as consumers later obsessed over the iPhone 4. Unfortunately MS thought the market segment was too narrow, and Billy G finally dismissed it on the grounds that it didn't have fucking Exchange integration, which is both ridiculous and could have been fixed in a later software patch. It was everything the Newton was, and so much more.
In grade eleven, my chemistry teacher was a nice old fellow on the verge of retirement. He had been teaching for an untold number of years, and had quite a long and illustrious career in research before that, even doing his Masters at Chalk River. This long teaching career meant that he had a lot of spare photocopies and other documents lying around; for one exam he had us fill out scantron forms very carefully with a #2 HB pencil, gave us some specific ID numbers to use, and then hand-marked them.
When we got to the unit on stoichiometry, the first thing he handed out was a set of copies from a colouring book about—you guessed it—those wonderful, fuzzy little moles, clearly intended for five-year-olds. It was a good class.
Albertans. Imagine Texas with snow, and you have Alberta. Culturally the province is more conservative than most of the US: oil, attempts at privatized health care, silly hats, rodeos, fear of taxation, the whole shebang. Sometimes even the accent!
The opening scene of the film Brazil is a terrorist bombing perpetrated by the government. By the end of the film, it's revealed that the extent of the terrorists' actual activities extend little further than making unauthorized repair work.
In the past twelve months there have been not one but two cases where the DHS has claimed that a SCADA system has been taken down by foreign hackers, only to be refuted by actual analyses that point the blame at contractor ineptitude.
And yet the blame continues to be heaped on the humble idiots of Anonymous, most of whom excel primarily at picketing and guessing luggage combinations. Their primary accomplishment has been embarrassing the self-important and those unwilling to admit their mistakes.
It is our fault that we are here; our fault for not living up to the conviction of our great grandparents, people like Edward R. Murrow, and fighting against this blatant corruption. Some day, I hope, the light of reason and honesty will shine again. Some day.
Of course I know what an order of magnitude is. It's a secret society of knights that dates back to medieval times, dedicating to raising prime numbers and other common radicals to various exponents. The most famous orders are the Power of Two and the Power of Ten, although some people, mostly retired Russian computer scientists, speak in hushed whispers of the Power of Three (though officially the Power of Three doesn't think they belong, since balanced ternary is quite different from true ternary computing.) The Power of Two used to have two junior orders, the Power of Eight and the Power of Sixteen, but Eight is pretty much defunct these days.
Funny story: I'm graduating college now, I was fourteen at the time, and I remember the controversy clearly. He passed up an opportunity to illuminate and gave no indication that he had bothered to look into it. If I were publishing on a news site, I would have looked that sort of thing up before mentioning it, and I somewhat suspect you might too. I guess it's just too much to ask tech journalists to remember anything they don't have to, unless it's about the flavour of Kool-Aid. (Or, for that matter, as anyone who's anyone in the world of pedantry knows, Flavor Aid.)
...although, you have me on the context. I swear that 'Some tips are better than others' was one paragraph further up. Oh well. Have a good evening.
The offence stems from drawing attention to something that should be obvious and well-known to a person of his profession. For example, in Indiana, it is (technically) illegal for a server to bring alcohol into a restaurant. This sounds somewhat less absurd when you know that the full text of the law is supposed to be about patrons, but doesn't actually specify who is prohibited from doing so. If you were operating a restaurant in Indiana, this is something you would obviously have to know. McAllister and his audience should both be versed in the story that LA had banned the master/slave terminology, and it's deeply disappointing that he took the chance to exploit it for a chance to rib Microsoft instead of doing the applicable research—or at least being more cautious about it.
That's a fair criticism, but the prohibition was originally about IDE, and it was pretty widely known when it happened. One should always hesitate and do research before publishing a suggestion that something is absurd or outlandish.
This howler stuck out, in particular: "JScript is the Microsoft implementation of the ECMAScript scripting language specification, an open standard. Do not refer to it as 'JavaScript,' which is the corresponding implementation by Time Warner." Huh?
Netscape named their implementation of ECMAScript as 'JavaScript' as the result of a cross-promotional stunt with Sun. Netscape was bought by AOL. AOL merged with Time-Warner. This merger was the largest acquisition in business history. I can't believe you don't know this.
Sincerely,
Thinking You Were Born Yesterday, Or Perhaps Last Week At The Earliest
Similarly, the relationship between USB peripherals could be described as "master/slave," but these terms could also be considered offensive. (The "Microsoft Manual of Style" says such language is prohibited in "at least one U.S. municipality.")
You're probably aware of all this, but just to anyone who happens by and gets confused: these mainframes are not exactly dinosaurs; the z9 series was introduced seven years ago and uses totally custom 64-bit CISC silicon designed to give the top of the line performance for the day. The hardware is essentially optimized to run VM hypervisors, and one of the major guest OSes for it is Linux. Essentially what the price tag fetches you—very much unlike a pile of PS3s strung together—is ungodly amounts of vendor support. As documentation-fearing folk, we Slashdotters don't generally think about dependability on the scale that IBM does, but there's a very clear market for it, and that's really been the marketing point of Big Blue for at least the past twenty years or so, much moreso than legacy software lock-in.
The irritating protectionism of Canadian content has been going on for quite some time now; indeed, traditional broadcasters are restrained by a requirement to play at least a certain percentage of can-con. Personally, I can't stand anything remotely folksy, and it seems the too much of the cultural output in this country is destined to be forever tainted with wolves, forests and beaver trappers, or otherwise ineptly idolizing its heritage. It's no wonder that stations need to be forced to play the stuff: anything profitable or progressive moves to the US for tax purposes.
One vaguely wonders, with some amusement, if the courts would have tried to force ISPs to obey the can-con requirement if this ruling went the other way. Of course this ruling was really only a question about forcing them to pay another tax, but the concept of applying broadcaster requirements to the Internet quickly becomes amusing. ("Your computer must now play the national anthem at least once every 24 hours...")
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a corrected link to the actual article.
I agree with your first point, but the second and third are a little silly. It's true that neither of those features were shown in the video, but it doesn't seem far-fetched to add those back in through apps or updates. Tagging could be as simple as writing in a special 'title' field, or tapping and holding on a word in the document, then selecting 'make this a tag' from the pop-up menu. With theoretically sufficient OCR, you could even search through the whole thing. Similarly, creating forms and organizing into folders are pretty minor tasks. Given that the only material ever presented was a couple of concept mockups, it's not surprising that they focused on the unique highlights rather than pragmatic details.
But that being said, targeting artists and visually creative people was a very big point of why Courier was so brilliant. Instead of trying to target a completely different audience from Apple, the Courier would have slipped in and stolen Apple's primary target market away from them, leaving them with a restrictive, crappy consumer device as their flagship portable computer. In politics such an incredibly perfect opportunity to steal mindshare and audience away from your competitor rarely happens. Instead MS has gone after Apple's current direct target with a consumer-oriented device, and is trying to break into a market already dominated by a well-supported product, the exact thing that's protected Windows on the PC from being displaced by competitors. It's suicide; they've been trying to market tablet PCs running Windows "for the other 50% of the people out there" for twelve years now, and no one wants them.
So have I—only more seriously. I built a crude imitation of the NeXT UI for Windows in tribute four years ago and I can't live without it. Tiles for icons was a Good Idea.
I feel like I should spam this.
You may find this agreeable.
Sadly, as far as the topic goes: Microsoft had their chance to revolutionize the tablet market, with the Courier, and they dumped it in favour of Windows 8. That train has already left the station. It would have completely decimated iPad sales if it had been released; when it appeared, the gadget geeks fawned over it as much as consumers later obsessed over the iPhone 4. Unfortunately MS thought the market segment was too narrow, and Billy G finally dismissed it on the grounds that it didn't have fucking Exchange integration, which is both ridiculous and could have been fixed in a later software patch. It was everything the Newton was, and so much more.
In grade eleven, my chemistry teacher was a nice old fellow on the verge of retirement. He had been teaching for an untold number of years, and had quite a long and illustrious career in research before that, even doing his Masters at Chalk River. This long teaching career meant that he had a lot of spare photocopies and other documents lying around; for one exam he had us fill out scantron forms very carefully with a #2 HB pencil, gave us some specific ID numbers to use, and then hand-marked them.
When we got to the unit on stoichiometry, the first thing he handed out was a set of copies from a colouring book about—you guessed it—those wonderful, fuzzy little moles, clearly intended for five-year-olds. It was a good class.
I knew there was something off-putting about Manitoba...
Don't be silly. You can't profit from tearing down curtains!
Seriously: the minister probably has a stake in a privacy invasion company.
Albertans. Imagine Texas with snow, and you have Alberta. Culturally the province is more conservative than most of the US: oil, attempts at privatized health care, silly hats, rodeos, fear of taxation, the whole shebang. Sometimes even the accent!
The opening scene of the film Brazil is a terrorist bombing perpetrated by the government. By the end of the film, it's revealed that the extent of the terrorists' actual activities extend little further than making unauthorized repair work.
In the past twelve months there have been not one but two cases where the DHS has claimed that a SCADA system has been taken down by foreign hackers, only to be refuted by actual analyses that point the blame at contractor ineptitude.
And yet the blame continues to be heaped on the humble idiots of Anonymous, most of whom excel primarily at picketing and guessing luggage combinations. Their primary accomplishment has been embarrassing the self-important and those unwilling to admit their mistakes.
It is our fault that we are here; our fault for not living up to the conviction of our great grandparents, people like Edward R. Murrow, and fighting against this blatant corruption. Some day, I hope, the light of reason and honesty will shine again. Some day.
Of course I know what an order of magnitude is. It's a secret society of knights that dates back to medieval times, dedicating to raising prime numbers and other common radicals to various exponents. The most famous orders are the Power of Two and the Power of Ten, although some people, mostly retired Russian computer scientists, speak in hushed whispers of the Power of Three (though officially the Power of Three doesn't think they belong, since balanced ternary is quite different from true ternary computing.) The Power of Two used to have two junior orders, the Power of Eight and the Power of Sixteen, but Eight is pretty much defunct these days.
It's really more of a huge amount of line. Cubic light years, of course, are another story.
And that's why we invented scientific notation. After all, what's an order of magnitude between friends?
It flew through the orbit of Uranus on March 18, 2011.
Scientists at NASA reported that it made a "woosh" noise as it did so, despite the vacuum. They then started a petition to rename Uranus to Urectum.
Funny story: I'm graduating college now, I was fourteen at the time, and I remember the controversy clearly. He passed up an opportunity to illuminate and gave no indication that he had bothered to look into it. If I were publishing on a news site, I would have looked that sort of thing up before mentioning it, and I somewhat suspect you might too. I guess it's just too much to ask tech journalists to remember anything they don't have to, unless it's about the flavour of Kool-Aid. (Or, for that matter, as anyone who's anyone in the world of pedantry knows, Flavor Aid.)
...although, you have me on the context. I swear that 'Some tips are better than others' was one paragraph further up. Oh well. Have a good evening.
The offence stems from drawing attention to something that should be obvious and well-known to a person of his profession. For example, in Indiana, it is (technically) illegal for a server to bring alcohol into a restaurant. This sounds somewhat less absurd when you know that the full text of the law is supposed to be about patrons, but doesn't actually specify who is prohibited from doing so. If you were operating a restaurant in Indiana, this is something you would obviously have to know. McAllister and his audience should both be versed in the story that LA had banned the master/slave terminology, and it's deeply disappointing that he took the chance to exploit it for a chance to rib Microsoft instead of doing the applicable research—or at least being more cautious about it.
Sincerely,
Writing To An Imaginary Newspaper Advice Column
That's legalese for you.
That's a fair criticism, but the prohibition was originally about IDE, and it was pretty widely known when it happened. One should always hesitate and do research before publishing a suggestion that something is absurd or outlandish.
Then you use neutral terminology, like 'executive-level sex worker' and 'that one secretary who talks too much.'
This howler stuck out, in particular: "JScript is the Microsoft implementation of the ECMAScript scripting language specification, an open standard. Do not refer to it as 'JavaScript,' which is the corresponding implementation by Time Warner." Huh?
Addendum:
Huh?
Dear Neil McAllister,
Netscape named their implementation of ECMAScript as 'JavaScript' as the result of a cross-promotional stunt with Sun. Netscape was bought by AOL. AOL merged with Time-Warner. This merger was the largest acquisition in business history. I can't believe you don't know this.
Sincerely,
Thinking You Were Born Yesterday, Or Perhaps Last Week At The Earliest
Similarly, the relationship between USB peripherals could be described as "master/slave," but these terms could also be considered offensive. (The "Microsoft Manual of Style" says such language is prohibited in "at least one U.S. municipality.")
Dear Neil McAllister,
That terminology originally comes from disk drive buses, and the municipality is Los Angeles. Are you really a tech writer?
Sincerely,
Suspicious
You're probably aware of all this, but just to anyone who happens by and gets confused: these mainframes are not exactly dinosaurs; the z9 series was introduced seven years ago and uses totally custom 64-bit CISC silicon designed to give the top of the line performance for the day. The hardware is essentially optimized to run VM hypervisors, and one of the major guest OSes for it is Linux. Essentially what the price tag fetches you—very much unlike a pile of PS3s strung together—is ungodly amounts of vendor support. As documentation-fearing folk, we Slashdotters don't generally think about dependability on the scale that IBM does, but there's a very clear market for it, and that's really been the marketing point of Big Blue for at least the past twenty years or so, much moreso than legacy software lock-in.
My point is this: perhaps, but that's irrelevant as long as our culture is so preoccupied with canoes.
The irritating protectionism of Canadian content has been going on for quite some time now; indeed, traditional broadcasters are restrained by a requirement to play at least a certain percentage of can-con. Personally, I can't stand anything remotely folksy, and it seems the too much of the cultural output in this country is destined to be forever tainted with wolves, forests and beaver trappers, or otherwise ineptly idolizing its heritage. It's no wonder that stations need to be forced to play the stuff: anything profitable or progressive moves to the US for tax purposes.
One vaguely wonders, with some amusement, if the courts would have tried to force ISPs to obey the can-con requirement if this ruling went the other way. Of course this ruling was really only a question about forcing them to pay another tax, but the concept of applying broadcaster requirements to the Internet quickly becomes amusing. ("Your computer must now play the national anthem at least once every 24 hours...")