> Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt today made the bold > statement to renowned yay-Applers All Things Digital...
Oh good, it's about time we got some impartial analysis around here.
> Google's enjoying fantastic success with Android right > now -- and why shouldn't they: it's the best phone OS > there is right now. iOS is static and hasn't improved > since 2007...
oh, never mind.
Wow. You can say you're not impressed by iOS 6, or that the things it has now, it should have had all along, but to say it hasn't changed in 5 years is just so... I don't even know what it is. It's so wrong, "wrong" doesn't begin to cover it.
As if that weren't enough reason to stop reading, he spends half his piece breathlessly talking about how unbelievably great it's going to be to run every single Windows app EVAR on a Windows 8 tablet. Yeah. Let's revisit that in 12 months (and then again in 24, and 36) and see how they're doing. MS will move a lot of units, but 8 will be more like ME and Vista than XP or 7. The coming small spike in computer sales will be people desperately buying Win7 systems before they're gone. MS will do OK with OEM and business sales because of their huge market share and inertia, but Win8 tablets will affect iPad sales about as much as Windows Phone has impacted iPhone sales. It might even be down in Zune-vs-iPod levels.
He goes on and on about how Windows 8 will rule the world because businesses (the only people that matter) will be happy that they can keep running their legacy apps forever. Um, hello? There's this thing called "progress" that makes legacy apps less and less important every day. Smart businesses KNOW the future is in web-based and mobile apps and they will NOT accept crappy Win32 and IE6 apps forever. Even shitbags like SAP and ADP will eventually have to come around or else competitors WILL come along and eat their lunch.
> I just took the opportunity to bring up some tidbits you'd never hear > otherwise - not that anyone is particularly interested, but the New > Zealand economy is not often its own slashdot topic.
This is why I come to slashdot. Random cool stuff, written right now by actual humans (MS VB ShillBots aside) that I never would have heard about any other way. Good post, thanks.:-)
If you like Obama, "like" Romney. Romney's campaign runners will look at the numbers and think they're doing great and not work as hard as they could, Obama's will work harder, then BLAMMO! Come election day, four more years!
You want things to be equally bad for everyone, whereas I want things to be as good as possible for as many as possible. Sorry, but your way makes no sense. Presenting colorful icons to colorblind users does not harm them in any way, but its an enhancement for fully-sighted users. Colorful icons don't "not fit" colorblind users. (Sorry for the double negative there -- not proper English but there's not a word that's the opposite of "fit".) This isn't like the difference between sounds that are too loud or not loud enough, or words that are long and confusing versus short and clear. There is no downside to using colorful icons, but there is an upside, therefore they should be used, if you're going for maximum usability.
On a related note, I thought Toy Story was great because they did such an incredible job of mimicking the styles of certain types of toys. Now when kids see the movies, they just think "Hey, it's a movie about those toys I have."
Businessweek: What's possible at a billion-plus users that wasn't possible at, say, 500 million?
Mark Zuckerberg: There are two ways that I look at this. There's what we can build internally and then there's what can be built externally using Facebook. I'll start with the external stuff... when we were at half a billion people, you got these large-scale services like Skype or Netflix (NFLX) that also had big user bases. And we weren't yet at the point where the majority of their users were Facebook users, so they couldn't really rely on us as a piece of critical infrastructure for registration. A lot of startups did, but the bigger companies couldn't. Now really everyone can start to rely on us as infrastructure.
The problem isn't that the data exists. (As others are pointing out with phonebook analogies.) The problem is that the data--your data--isn't safe. Not that it's totally safe anywhere, but FB seems to have had more than their share of problems.
> Try taking one of your existing colourful setups, randomise the icon > positions, then see how quickly you get used to the new layout. I'd > wager there wouldn't be much difference between that and getting > used to the new grey icons.
I've already done that, effectively, and color is indeed key. I work with several rich text editors daily (personal blog, work CMS, school's LMS, and more, plus random web forms, blog comment forms, etc., in addition to Word, Excel, and other local apps) and each has a different layout. Having colors definitely helps me get around better. Switch them all to grey and I'd go nuts.
I knew someone would bring this up. No, it's not much of a burden, but if color makes it better for fully-sighted people (who, by the way, greatly outnumber people with any amount or kind of color blindness -- not that we're therefore more important, it's simply a question of what does the most good for the most people) then why not leave it in? Plus it's not like I'm advocating making a TV louder, which would help a hearing-impaired person watch a show but would cause discomfort for others. If something helps one group and has no impact on another, why not do it?
Totally blind people can't see icons at all. Does that mean the icons should be replaced with BOLD ITALIC UNDERLINE STRIKETHROUGH NUMBERED LIST BULLETED LIST INDENT OUTDENT SUBSCRIPT SUPERSCRIPT TEXT COLOR HIGHLIGHT COLOR MAKE LINK BREAK LINK LEFT ALIGN CENTER RIGHT ALIGN so you have the same experience a blind person has with a screen reader? After all, it's not much of a burden on you, right?
That's what separates something that is merely "usable" from things that are truly "good" -- a thousand little details, all adding up to a better experience. Is this the end of the world? No. Is it a step backwards? Yes.
Not many smartphones have physical keyboards with four arrow keys, control, escape, and tab. ALL tiny devices generally aren't good at text-heavy operations but software keyboards (especially well-designed, application-specific ones) DO have some advantages.
Thank $DEITY this is an option. (It is an option, right?) A bit of color is a GOOD thing. With monochromatic icons, you need to inspect each icon carefully to discern its shape. With color, your eyes can quickly jump to the right one, especially if you've used it for a while. It just becomes automatic, like muscle memory.
The old icons were great. The ones that were just for text were black (bold, ital, underline, left/right/center). Text+decoration were black and colored (lists, indent, super/subscript). Separate functions (import from Word, clean up, spellcheck, table) were colorful. (As were "text color" and "highlight", FFS.)
This is NOT progress.:-|
Side note: Today I learned that "Noooooooooo" in a subject is OK, but one more "o" results in "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: Too much repetition." Remember: Ten "O"s, kids. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Ah yes, so it is. See, I didn't RTFA in the first place:-) but I went with the assumption that they wouldn't just go with the letters-over-numbers thing because that would be too limiting. But I did RTFA (and then I watched TFV) and yes, that's all it is. Even worse. So now **SARAH (**72724), as shown in the ad, knocks out 242 (3^5-1) other possible combinations. Instead of 26^5 possible combinations of 5-letter names, there are only 9^5.
The article is worth reading (just kidding) for this funny bit: "It's a quirky service, but letting users give out easy-to-remember aliases instead of 7-digit phone numbers is a terrific idea." Wow. Yes, a terrific idea nearly a hundred years ago. Sprint is right there on the cutting edge.
Phone numbers were not so usually strictly numeric until the mid-1960s. From the 1920s until then, most urban areas had "exchanges" of two letters, followed by numbers, e.g., EDgewood, IVanhoe.
The service costs $2.99 per month... Currently, **Me will only accept calls from Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and other Sprint customers, and doesn't accept text messages yet.
So, it's almost useless and costs just $2.99/mo, PLUS the confusion of explaining to people that they need to dial with ACTUAL letters and not the letters that overlay the numbers that we've been using for decades? SIGN ME UP!
Seriously, what moron thought this up? When I get someone's number, I dial it ONCE. If I don't create a new contact right away, I press the little '>' next to their number in "recents" and save it later. Usually you can depend on companies to snatch up a few good names in schemes like this but what's the point? "To order, call **OXICLEAN from your Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, or Sprint mobile phone TODAY! But not **69425326 -- dial star star, then switch keyboards (if your phone lets you*) and dial letter O, letter X, letter I..." Yeah. Good luck with that.
* as far as I can tell, it's not even possible to enter plain old letters with an iPhone.
> If I am a handset manufacturer, now the only game in town is Google's Android, > since the Microsoft is considering moving into hardware on this front.
Did you miss that Google has already moved into the hardware with their purchase of Motorola Mobility?
I wish TNW would have made it easier to compare the two images. I brought it into Photoshop and moved it so the new one is on top of the old one and lined them up. If you show and hide the top layer, it is easy to see that the 4S washes out the branches more. The area directly above the 'i' in 'iPhone 4S' is totally purple in the 4S's image and it's correct in the iPhone 5's image.
It's almost as if there's more to good design than meets the eye... as if Apple actually did some hard work before they introduced the MacBook Air four years ago, rather than just looking at a competitor's product and saying "Thin, silver, wedge-shaped... yeah, we can do that!" and popping out some piece of shit a few months later. And careful, strategic supply-chain planning and management doesn't enter into it at all.
Nah... Apple's success is just due to a) marketing and b) legions of fanbois and style-obsessed sheeple. Yeah. Just keep telling yourself that.
Remember when you were a kid and watched people who were good at stuff and it looked easy? And a grown-up told you "they're really good at it and they make it look easy"? Nope--all lies. If something looks easy, it is, and if they're successful, they're just lucky. No skill is needed at all to become a great artist, designer, surgeon, stunt cyclist, manager, president, juggler, programmer...
You seem to think that "flagship product of an expensive brand" means "perfect in every way." Flagship or not, it is just a $600 cellphone -- at the same level as everything else out there. The above-linked story at The Next Web says the effect "exists to a degree in almost all lenses -- including those used for point-and-shoot cameras and SLRs -- with the more expensive kinds minimizing the effect through careful coating and alignment."
Perhaps you've noticed that an iPhone 5 is a bit thinner than an SLR? There's only so much they can do in the space they have. Yes, Apple wants to put a good camera into the iPhone, but they're not going to pursue perfection in one area to the extent that it blows the size or price out of the water. They could have added a bigger battery or an awesome speaker, too, if they wanted to make it twice as thick. If anyone out there thinks there's a market for fantastically capable cellphones that weigh a half a pound, they are free to pursue it. I can guarantee you there will be no competition from Apple in that space. (Because of the skinny jeans, you see. Can't leave that contingent behind.)
I love how strong the anti-Apple sentiment has become. They never claimed to be perfect -- just the best.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's bootloaders all the way down!
> Google Chairman, Eric Schmidt today made the bold
> statement to renowned yay-Applers All Things Digital...
Oh good, it's about time we got some impartial analysis around here.
> Google's enjoying fantastic success with Android right
> now -- and why shouldn't they: it's the best phone OS
> there is right now. iOS is static and hasn't improved
> since 2007...
oh, never mind.
Wow. You can say you're not impressed by iOS 6, or that the things it has now, it should have had all along, but to say it hasn't changed in 5 years is just so... I don't even know what it is. It's so wrong, "wrong" doesn't begin to cover it.
As if that weren't enough reason to stop reading, he spends half his piece breathlessly talking about how unbelievably great it's going to be to run every single Windows app EVAR on a Windows 8 tablet. Yeah. Let's revisit that in 12 months (and then again in 24, and 36) and see how they're doing. MS will move a lot of units, but 8 will be more like ME and Vista than XP or 7. The coming small spike in computer sales will be people desperately buying Win7 systems before they're gone. MS will do OK with OEM and business sales because of their huge market share and inertia, but Win8 tablets will affect iPad sales about as much as Windows Phone has impacted iPhone sales. It might even be down in Zune-vs-iPod levels.
He goes on and on about how Windows 8 will rule the world because businesses (the only people that matter) will be happy that they can keep running their legacy apps forever. Um, hello? There's this thing called "progress" that makes legacy apps less and less important every day. Smart businesses KNOW the future is in web-based and mobile apps and they will NOT accept crappy Win32 and IE6 apps forever. Even shitbags like SAP and ADP will eventually have to come around or else competitors WILL come along and eat their lunch.
Wait, who? Oh, it's not them this time? OK. Carry on.
> I just took the opportunity to bring up some tidbits you'd never hear
> otherwise - not that anyone is particularly interested, but the New
> Zealand economy is not often its own slashdot topic.
This is why I come to slashdot. Random cool stuff, written right now by actual humans (MS VB ShillBots aside) that I never would have heard about any other way. Good post, thanks. :-)
> is that like turning smurfs into gold? cause
> remember you need six of em.
> Score:4, Informative
I <3 /.
If you like Obama, "like" Romney. Romney's campaign runners will look at the numbers and think they're doing great and not work as hard as they could, Obama's will work harder, then BLAMMO! Come election day, four more years!
You want things to be equally bad for everyone, whereas I want things to be as good as possible for as many as possible. Sorry, but your way makes no sense. Presenting colorful icons to colorblind users does not harm them in any way, but its an enhancement for fully-sighted users. Colorful icons don't "not fit" colorblind users. (Sorry for the double negative there -- not proper English but there's not a word that's the opposite of "fit".) This isn't like the difference between sounds that are too loud or not loud enough, or words that are long and confusing versus short and clear. There is no downside to using colorful icons, but there is an upside, therefore they should be used, if you're going for maximum usability.
On a related note, I thought Toy Story was great because they did such an incredible job of mimicking the styles of certain types of toys. Now when kids see the movies, they just think "Hey, it's a movie about those toys I have."
Businessweek: What's possible at a billion-plus users that wasn't possible at, say, 500 million?
Mark Zuckerberg: There are two ways that I look at this. There's what we can build internally and then there's what can be built externally using Facebook. I'll start with the external stuff... when we were at half a billion people, you got these large-scale services like Skype or Netflix (NFLX) that also had big user bases. And we weren't yet at the point where the majority of their users were Facebook users, so they couldn't really rely on us as a piece of critical infrastructure for registration. A lot of startups did, but the bigger companies couldn't. Now really everyone can start to rely on us as infrastructure.
http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/74456-facebooks-next-billion-a-q-and-a-with-mark-zuckerberg
The problem isn't that the data exists. (As others are pointing out with phonebook analogies.) The problem is that the data--your data--isn't safe. Not that it's totally safe anywhere, but FB seems to have had more than their share of problems.
> Try taking one of your existing colourful setups, randomise the icon
> positions, then see how quickly you get used to the new layout. I'd
> wager there wouldn't be much difference between that and getting
> used to the new grey icons.
I've already done that, effectively, and color is indeed key. I work with several rich text editors daily (personal blog, work CMS, school's LMS, and more, plus random web forms, blog comment forms, etc., in addition to Word, Excel, and other local apps) and each has a different layout. Having colors definitely helps me get around better. Switch them all to grey and I'd go nuts.
I knew someone would bring this up. No, it's not much of a burden, but if color makes it better for fully-sighted people (who, by the way, greatly outnumber people with any amount or kind of color blindness -- not that we're therefore more important, it's simply a question of what does the most good for the most people) then why not leave it in? Plus it's not like I'm advocating making a TV louder, which would help a hearing-impaired person watch a show but would cause discomfort for others. If something helps one group and has no impact on another, why not do it?
Totally blind people can't see icons at all. Does that mean the icons should be replaced with BOLD ITALIC UNDERLINE STRIKETHROUGH NUMBERED LIST BULLETED LIST INDENT OUTDENT SUBSCRIPT SUPERSCRIPT TEXT COLOR HIGHLIGHT COLOR MAKE LINK BREAK LINK LEFT ALIGN CENTER RIGHT ALIGN so you have the same experience a blind person has with a screen reader? After all, it's not much of a burden on you, right?
That's what separates something that is merely "usable" from things that are truly "good" -- a thousand little details, all adding up to a better experience. Is this the end of the world? No. Is it a step backwards? Yes.
Not many smartphones have physical keyboards with four arrow keys, control, escape, and tab. ALL tiny devices generally aren't good at text-heavy operations but software keyboards (especially well-designed, application-specific ones) DO have some advantages.
Thank $DEITY this is an option. (It is an option, right?) A bit of color is a GOOD thing. With monochromatic icons, you need to inspect each icon carefully to discern its shape. With color, your eyes can quickly jump to the right one, especially if you've used it for a while. It just becomes automatic, like muscle memory.
The old icons were great. The ones that were just for text were black (bold, ital, underline, left/right/center). Text+decoration were black and colored (lists, indent, super/subscript). Separate functions (import from Word, clean up, spellcheck, table) were colorful. (As were "text color" and "highlight", FFS.)
This is NOT progress. :-|
Side note: Today I learned that "Noooooooooo" in a subject is OK, but one more "o" results in "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: Too much repetition." Remember: Ten "O"s, kids. It's not just a good idea, it's the law.
Ah yes, so it is. See, I didn't RTFA in the first place :-) but I went with the assumption that they wouldn't just go with the letters-over-numbers thing because that would be too limiting. But I did RTFA (and then I watched TFV) and yes, that's all it is. Even worse. So now **SARAH (**72724), as shown in the ad, knocks out 242 (3^5-1) other possible combinations. Instead of 26^5 possible combinations of 5-letter names, there are only 9^5.
The article is worth reading (just kidding) for this funny bit: "It's a quirky service, but letting users give out easy-to-remember aliases instead of 7-digit phone numbers is a terrific idea." Wow. Yes, a terrific idea nearly a hundred years ago. Sprint is right there on the cutting edge.
Phone numbers were not so usually strictly numeric until the mid-1960s. From the 1920s until then, most urban areas had "exchanges" of two letters, followed by numbers, e.g., EDgewood, IVanhoe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number#US_phone_number_history
The service costs $2.99 per month... Currently, **Me will only accept calls from Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and other Sprint customers, and doesn't accept text messages yet.
So, it's almost useless and costs just $2.99/mo, PLUS the confusion of explaining to people that they need to dial with ACTUAL letters and not the letters that overlay the numbers that we've been using for decades? SIGN ME UP!
Seriously, what moron thought this up? When I get someone's number, I dial it ONCE. If I don't create a new contact right away, I press the little '>' next to their number in "recents" and save it later. Usually you can depend on companies to snatch up a few good names in schemes like this but what's the point? "To order, call **OXICLEAN from your Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, or Sprint mobile phone TODAY! But not **69425326 -- dial star star, then switch keyboards (if your phone lets you*) and dial letter O, letter X, letter I..." Yeah. Good luck with that.
* as far as I can tell, it's not even possible to enter plain old letters with an iPhone.
I've been waiting eleven years for the end of this story.
Mars used to be cool, now it's gonna go downhill once all the idiots start going.
Quit whining. Just go to Settings -> Topics and uncheck "syrup" and you won't see these stories anymore. :-)
I'm from America. Can someone click that link for me and tell me what it says?
I don't remember the details of Contact, but that's pretty much what they did in the Arecibo message. (Which Contact might have referenced.)
And use the preview button (we have one here) and remember this is Slashdot, not [Reddit](http://www.reddit.com/) :-)
> If I am a handset manufacturer, now the only game in town is Google's Android,
> since the Microsoft is considering moving into hardware on this front.
Did you miss that Google has already moved into the hardware with their purchase of Motorola Mobility?
I wish TNW would have made it easier to compare the two images. I brought it into Photoshop and moved it so the new one is on top of the old one and lined them up. If you show and hide the top layer, it is easy to see that the 4S washes out the branches more. The area directly above the 'i' in 'iPhone 4S' is totally purple in the 4S's image and it's correct in the iPhone 5's image.
It's almost as if there's more to good design than meets the eye... as if Apple actually did some hard work before they introduced the MacBook Air four years ago, rather than just looking at a competitor's product and saying "Thin, silver, wedge-shaped... yeah, we can do that!" and popping out some piece of shit a few months later. And careful, strategic supply-chain planning and management doesn't enter into it at all.
Nah... Apple's success is just due to a) marketing and b) legions of fanbois and style-obsessed sheeple. Yeah. Just keep telling yourself that.
Remember when you were a kid and watched people who were good at stuff and it looked easy? And a grown-up told you "they're really good at it and they make it look easy"? Nope--all lies. If something looks easy, it is, and if they're successful, they're just lucky. No skill is needed at all to become a great artist, designer, surgeon, stunt cyclist, manager, president, juggler, programmer...
You seem to think that "flagship product of an expensive brand" means "perfect in every way." Flagship or not, it is just a $600 cellphone -- at the same level as everything else out there. The above-linked story at The Next Web says the effect "exists to a degree in almost all lenses -- including those used for point-and-shoot cameras and SLRs -- with the more expensive kinds minimizing the effect through careful coating and alignment."
Perhaps you've noticed that an iPhone 5 is a bit thinner than an SLR? There's only so much they can do in the space they have. Yes, Apple wants to put a good camera into the iPhone, but they're not going to pursue perfection in one area to the extent that it blows the size or price out of the water. They could have added a bigger battery or an awesome speaker, too, if they wanted to make it twice as thick. If anyone out there thinks there's a market for fantastically capable cellphones that weigh a half a pound, they are free to pursue it. I can guarantee you there will be no competition from Apple in that space. (Because of the skinny jeans, you see. Can't leave that contingent behind.)
I love how strong the anti-Apple sentiment has become. They never claimed to be perfect -- just the best. :-)
> "Ask a mason" would make an interesting /. interview
Been done, elsewhere.