I must be unlucky: I don't have good web access everywhere. Not on planes, not in fast trains, not really at my parents' house deep in the country (they get spotty mobile signals). My web access is several orders of magnitude more problematic than my devices' reliability.
As far as trusting a provider's security, I'm not sure. there have been plenty of breaches at banks, which one would assume to be fairly security-oriented, and you never really know what goes on inside, what 3rd world country's subcontractor's trainee does have the means to hack into their servers.
I'd rather have one relatively versatile box than 5 specialized ones, the same way I bought an HD2 with a huge screen and removable battery instead of an MP3 player + ebook reader + PDA + mobile phone.
I don't want to clutter my appartment with a console, a TV, a stereo, a desktop, a monitor, an HTPC...
Don't misunderstand me, I'd much rather everything were Free and Libre. But
MS revenues are still up. I guess it's a case of smaller slice of a bigger pie, which can indeed be a concern if the main driver is network effects, which are being eroded, or available workforce, which is slowly widening.
Depending on which side you look at, there are other reasons to stick with MS, though.
On the client, I know first-hand that Windows is still sturdier, easier to reliably install on a wide range of hardware, better documented/supported, and that more people are familiar with it, than MacOS or Linux. Also, Office is still better than OOo, and most documents are still in Office proprietary formats.
On the server, the situation is indeed more volatile. MS is trying like hell to leverage Sharepoint to create lockin; WinServer, Outlook, MSSQL, IIS... are not horrendous products, but rarely compelling by themselves. They mesh together somewhat nicely though.
I'm all for synching between different devices, and a fallback web access. Pure cloud, or even cloud + local backup, is not enough for me. Taking your gmail example, I'd much rather have a local store, read and compose my emails offline, and connect for a minute a few times a day instead of having to pay for much more online time and do everything directly off the web.
The key to me is my ASS: Availability, Safety, Security. Local seems much better of all 3 cheeks.
the idea is that once startups get locked into a bundle of word docs, or, even worse, Sharepoint, it would be such a pain to switch that they'll stay hooked... and start paying the big bucks.
a bit like a pusher giving you your first week supply for free...
how is that worse than Apple's model that actually siphons off 30% of all content and apps you install on your iDevice, and censors what apps and content are allowed, and takes a cut of wireless contracts ?
the issue for MS is that they DON'T make money on content, software and services sold for their machines... but that's also the cause for their success ?
I'm wondering if all those devices are replacing desktops, or complementing them. I personally have 2 desktops as pretty much always; a smartphone has recently replaced my trusty PalmTX, and I'm thinking of getting a tablet and/or laptop... but the 2 PCs are staying. They may soon be running Linux instead of Windows though, and are already running OOo instead of MS Office... not that I ever had to buy it, with work licenses.
I'm still very leery of The Cloud though, I much prefer to have local apps, data, and backups.
I haven't played with USB3 yet, but USB2 has its issues: - still some compatibility issues - high CPU usage (higher than SATA and FW for sure) - lower throughput (again, esp. vs SATA and FW) - very glitchy hubs
I really hope USB3 turns out better, but as far as I know Intel is already putting the finishing touches to its Apple-commissioned successor: Light Peak (http://www.intel.com/go/lightpeak/), and that one is targetted at everything, and should replace USBx, SATA, DVI/HDMI/DP, FW, even ethernet.
Hum, I'm not forgetting anything, I was just responding to your strange point that a $600 PC was not twice as expensive as a $300 one ? My point is that Office PCs are $300-$500, and gaming PCs twice that, ie $600-$1.000.
If you want to talk about sweet spot, my current understanding is that 1- performance rises more slowly than price 2- prices drop faster at the high end than at the low end 3- upgrades are a bit costly (need to buy a whole new card + take a loss on the old one), and a bother.
So my take is that one should always buy hardware that will be "good enough" for a couple of years, and avoid bleeding edge stuff unless looking for bragging rights.
I actually kinda get his point. It's been a long time since anything really interesting happened on the Internet, via the Internet, or Thanks to the Internet. Nowadays, it seems more a of time waster for the socially needy, who NEED to know within 10s if Michael Jackson has died or not, Facebook their holiday photos, and twit their lunch menu.
All that time spent in social reinforcement (how much of that can we possibly need ?) and media consumption is time not spent actually doing, learning, achieving anything...
Indeed, the Tech Report's Econobox is at $550, the Utility player at $850, w/o screen, windows, kbmse. I was assuming people would not go for the lowest, I'm probably wrong.
An HTPC can use a $50 CPU (-70), 2GB RAM (-50), no vidcard (-130), no windows (-30 to 100) = -280 to 350 with your prices.
I don't quite agree with the one-size fits all though. A gaming PC will be bigger, noisier, hotter, more power hungry... I've got 1 single PC right now that does everything, as you describe, but is indeed noisy and hot and big-ish. I'm looking forward to replacing it with 1 very silent 24x7 server (maybe even a $100 GuruPlug) and a very underpowered $300 nettop hidden behing my monitor. No more gaming for me, I'm getting old.
1- the LCD-based iPad, e-Ink Kindle, and paper book all scored basically the same. Would a Retina or PixelQi screen score even higher, or does that mean that existing screens are good enough, and further enhancements are superfluous ?
2- The study is lacking is several aspects: no variation in lighting, no information on the setting (bed ? desk ? john ? public transport ?), no information on retention either (I've read somewhere else than proofreading is much more accurate on paper than on-screen)
3- 17 min is a very short time, I often read for hours at a time. Eye fatigue sets in over time, not after a quarter of an hour.
a good run-of-the-mill PC, for Office, internet, HTPC... can be had for $300-500. A gaming PC needs more CPU and GPU horsepower, and probably more RAM and HD, which can easily double the price. You've got to buy a whole lot of games to amortize that.
Indeed, Hotmail started working better this morning... a few days after I upgraded to 10.60... weird... server-side changes maybe... I still get the Windows "busy" mouse pointer on any Opera page as long as I have Hotmail open, even in the background, and some weirdness (stuff deselecting itself from time to time, mainly on the Hotmail page), but it's much better than it was a week ago.
As far as I know, I don't have any UserJavascript running, I'm not running anything but bare Opera. The one tweak is my custom HOSTS file, and custom colors in USER mode, which is off by default, I use it for HTML ebooks.
Yep, Link is screwy, which is sad because it's a very nice feature.
I love that kind of feedback. It's aggressive, besides the point, over-generalizing...
First, you need to look up the definition of rose-tinted glasses.
Does Opera 10 work fine for "most people" (citation needed), or for you ? you segue from one to the other rather quickly.
Also, I'm not talking about crashes, I'm talking about features not working, so I don't know what you're on to about stability ? Are other people complaining about stability ?
Other people may have complained about 9, I didn't, so I don't quite see your point. Specifically, I never said the quality has been going down since the first version, but since 10.x. It's written right there in my post.
All software does have bugs. All software does NOT have unfixed bugs for about a year, and all software does not have year-old bugs on features I use constantly.
As for it being my fault, shuuuuuure. Tell me what I did wrong, apart from updating Opera to each new version ? Tell me how I ran into the same bugs right after reinstalling my PC from scratch when I swapped HDs ? Or maybe you're just shooting in the dark ?
Other than that, your post is quite good. Oh, wait...
I'll try the uninstall reinstall. Never had the issue prior to 10.x though, and my 9.64-usb still works fine.
Autoscroll is: when you have a very long web page to read, middle-click, drag the mouse down a bit, the page starts scrolling down without you having to roll the scrollwhell nor click the verticla slider (very convenient), and should continue scrolling until you middle-click again, or move the mouse back up. Only it doesn't, and stops after 1-5 seconds.
Opera link is not supposed to randomly overwrite my -recent- main PC's bookmarks with my -old- backup PC's (that haven't changed at all since I last booted it up a month ago).
Indeed that's weird, and it would feel better if the issues were the same for everyone. They aren't, but the buggy areas seem to be.
I just checked, I can use Hotmail with my 9.64-usb. WIth 10.x, I go into some refresh loop for a while after each page load, I have to click on random stuff for it to stop, sometimes after stopping it's usable, sometimes it's not and I have to refresh and retry.
I don't know about the flashblocker, since I have flash mostly off, and use a custom HOSTS file on top of that. I see very few ads.
and I'm on the verge of changing browsers. I paid for Opera back when the choice was between IE, Netscape, and Opera. Been using Opera as my main browser, and very happy with it, since then... must be quasi 10 years now. I'm very sad to see Opera dropping the ball that bad, and not fixing it:
- basically, 10.x versions are much lower quality than 9.x and before. An occasional hiccup can be understood, but 10.x is kinda old by now, there have been several point releases, and the issues that bother me still are there. - broken feature 1: mouse gestures. One a large screen, with the mouse set for high velocity and high acceleration, mouse gestures don't register 9 out of 10 times. Chrome does not have that issue. It's probably kinda easy to fix (9.x has the issue, but not as badly). - broken feature 2: autoscroll. 10.x goes out of autoscroll after a (random) handful of seconds. I've taken to copy-pasting URLs of long documents into Opera 9x, but that's cumbersome. - broken feature 3: Opera Link keeps overwriting my main PCs bookmarks with stuff from PCs I haven't touched in ages. I'm back to synching bookmarks with backups and restore, and re-doing the rest (custom searches...) by hand. - broken feature 4: cursor in text boxes. I routinely have issues getting my cursor back into rich-text edit boxes. I actually had the problem right now, and had to click on my comment's title then tab back into my text... this is cumbersome after a while. - Broken feature 4: some sites that used to work perfectly no longer do. Hotmail is the main one, ZD sites are kinda screwy (the comments section)
I'm a bit disheartened. I've been a Opera fan and advocate for long, and now I feel they've dropped their focus on code quality to chase feature checklists and performance benchmarks. I personnaly don't care if my browser does WebM, or if it's 50% faster at javascript, if I can't use Hotmail, synch my PCs, scroll pages, and otherwise navigate with my mouse. These have been bugs since 10.0 beta, I've reported them, Opera hasn't moved on them.
I used to recommend Opera, I no longer do, and after enduring 10.x for months, I'm ready to leave, too. Chrome's mouse gestures and autoscroll work fine on my PC, as do Hotmail and text boxes...
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i use a keyboard with integrated touchpad, and monitor with integrated webcam ... but Marilyn Monroe agrees with you... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21B3NRhxmeE
safety means backups, backups and more backups :-p
I must be unlucky: I don't have good web access everywhere. Not on planes, not in fast trains, not really at my parents' house deep in the country (they get spotty mobile signals). My web access is several orders of magnitude more problematic than my devices' reliability.
As far as trusting a provider's security, I'm not sure. there have been plenty of breaches at banks, which one would assume to be fairly security-oriented, and you never really know what goes on inside, what 3rd world country's subcontractor's trainee does have the means to hack into their servers.
I'd rather have one relatively versatile box than 5 specialized ones, the same way I bought an HD2 with a huge screen and removable battery instead of an MP3 player + ebook reader + PDA + mobile phone.
I don't want to clutter my appartment with a console, a TV, a stereo, a desktop, a monitor, an HTPC...
Don't misunderstand me, I'd much rather everything were Free and Libre. But
MS revenues are still up. I guess it's a case of smaller slice of a bigger pie, which can indeed be a concern if the main driver is network effects, which are being eroded, or available workforce, which is slowly widening.
Depending on which side you look at, there are other reasons to stick with MS, though.
On the client, I know first-hand that Windows is still sturdier, easier to reliably install on a wide range of hardware, better documented/supported, and that more people are familiar with it, than MacOS or Linux. Also, Office is still better than OOo, and most documents are still in Office proprietary formats.
On the server, the situation is indeed more volatile. MS is trying like hell to leverage Sharepoint to create lockin; WinServer, Outlook, MSSQL, IIS... are not horrendous products, but rarely compelling by themselves. They mesh together somewhat nicely though.
I'm all for synching between different devices, and a fallback web access. Pure cloud, or even cloud + local backup, is not enough for me. Taking your gmail example, I'd much rather have a local store, read and compose my emails offline, and connect for a minute a few times a day instead of having to pay for much more online time and do everything directly off the web.
The key to me is my ASS: Availability, Safety, Security. Local seems much better of all 3 cheeks.
most people work because it pays the bill, at least after their professional honeymoon, which ususally ends around the time kids pop up.
Android devs would love for their API to change only once every two years... is Android not hip ?
the idea is that once startups get locked into a bundle of word docs, or, even worse, Sharepoint, it would be such a pain to switch that they'll stay hooked... and start paying the big bucks.
a bit like a pusher giving you your first week supply for free...
I don't get you point ?
how is that worse than Apple's model that actually siphons off 30% of all content and apps you install on your iDevice, and censors what apps and content are allowed, and takes a cut of wireless contracts ?
the issue for MS is that they DON'T make money on content, software and services sold for their machines... but that's also the cause for their success ?
I'm wondering if all those devices are replacing desktops, or complementing them. I personally have 2 desktops as pretty much always; a smartphone has recently replaced my trusty PalmTX, and I'm thinking of getting a tablet and/or laptop... but the 2 PCs are staying. They may soon be running Linux instead of Windows though, and are already running OOo instead of MS Office... not that I ever had to buy it, with work licenses.
I'm still very leery of The Cloud though, I much prefer to have local apps, data, and backups.
Is MS losing money ? retrenching ? no longer the biggest software company in the world ?
I wish I could lose the way you say they've lost !
I haven't played with USB3 yet, but USB2 has its issues:
- still some compatibility issues
- high CPU usage (higher than SATA and FW for sure)
- lower throughput (again, esp. vs SATA and FW)
- very glitchy hubs
I really hope USB3 turns out better, but as far as I know Intel is already putting the finishing touches to its Apple-commissioned successor: Light Peak (http://www.intel.com/go/lightpeak/), and that one is targetted at everything, and should replace USBx, SATA, DVI/HDMI/DP, FW, even ethernet.
did I at any time talk about consoles ?
Hum, I'm not forgetting anything, I was just responding to your strange point that a $600 PC was not twice as expensive as a $300 one ? My point is that Office PCs are $300-$500, and gaming PCs twice that, ie $600-$1.000.
If you want to talk about sweet spot, my current understanding is that
1- performance rises more slowly than price
2- prices drop faster at the high end than at the low end
3- upgrades are a bit costly (need to buy a whole new card + take a loss on the old one), and a bother.
So my take is that one should always buy hardware that will be "good enough" for a couple of years, and avoid bleeding edge stuff unless looking for bragging rights.
and 600 isn't the double of 300 ?
I actually kinda get his point. It's been a long time since anything really interesting happened on the Internet, via the Internet, or Thanks to the Internet. Nowadays, it seems more a of time waster for the socially needy, who NEED to know within 10s if Michael Jackson has died or not, Facebook their holiday photos, and twit their lunch menu.
All that time spent in social reinforcement (how much of that can we possibly need ?) and media consumption is time not spent actually doing, learning, achieving anything...
I'll get back to reading another forum now ^^
and $632+20+whatever is not more than twice $300 ?
Indeed, the Tech Report's Econobox is at $550, the Utility player at $850, w/o screen, windows, kbmse. I was assuming people would not go for the lowest, I'm probably wrong.
An HTPC can use a $50 CPU (-70), 2GB RAM (-50), no vidcard (-130), no windows (-30 to 100) = -280 to 350 with your prices.
I don't quite agree with the one-size fits all though. A gaming PC will be bigger, noisier, hotter, more power hungry... I've got 1 single PC right now that does everything, as you describe, but is indeed noisy and hot and big-ish. I'm looking forward to replacing it with 1 very silent 24x7 server (maybe even a $100 GuruPlug) and a very underpowered $300 nettop hidden behing my monitor. No more gaming for me, I'm getting old.
sorry, not about goatsee, move along now...
1- the LCD-based iPad, e-Ink Kindle, and paper book all scored basically the same. Would a Retina or PixelQi screen score even higher, or does that mean that existing screens are good enough, and further enhancements are superfluous ?
2- The study is lacking is several aspects: no variation in lighting, no information on the setting (bed ? desk ? john ? public transport ?), no information on retention either (I've read somewhere else than proofreading is much more accurate on paper than on-screen)
3- 17 min is a very short time, I often read for hours at a time. Eye fatigue sets in over time, not after a quarter of an hour.
yes, but
a good run-of-the-mill PC, for Office, internet, HTPC... can be had for $300-500. A gaming PC needs more CPU and GPU horsepower, and probably more RAM and HD, which can easily double the price. You've got to buy a whole lot of games to amortize that.
Indeed, Hotmail started working better this morning... a few days after I upgraded to 10.60... weird... server-side changes maybe... I still get the Windows "busy" mouse pointer on any Opera page as long as I have Hotmail open, even in the background, and some weirdness (stuff deselecting itself from time to time, mainly on the Hotmail page), but it's much better than it was a week ago.
As far as I know, I don't have any UserJavascript running, I'm not running anything but bare Opera. The one tweak is my custom HOSTS file, and custom colors in USER mode, which is off by default, I use it for HTML ebooks.
Yep, Link is screwy, which is sad because it's a very nice feature.
I love that kind of feedback. It's aggressive, besides the point, over-generalizing...
First, you need to look up the definition of rose-tinted glasses.
Does Opera 10 work fine for "most people" (citation needed), or for you ? you segue from one to the other rather quickly.
Also, I'm not talking about crashes, I'm talking about features not working, so I don't know what you're on to about stability ? Are other people complaining about stability ?
Other people may have complained about 9, I didn't, so I don't quite see your point. Specifically, I never said the quality has been going down since the first version, but since 10.x. It's written right there in my post.
All software does have bugs. All software does NOT have unfixed bugs for about a year, and all software does not have year-old bugs on features I use constantly.
As for it being my fault, shuuuuuure. Tell me what I did wrong, apart from updating Opera to each new version ? Tell me how I ran into the same bugs right after reinstalling my PC from scratch when I swapped HDs ? Or maybe you're just shooting in the dark ?
Other than that, your post is quite good. Oh, wait ...
I'll try the uninstall reinstall. Never had the issue prior to 10.x though, and my 9.64-usb still works fine.
Autoscroll is: when you have a very long web page to read, middle-click, drag the mouse down a bit, the page starts scrolling down without you having to roll the scrollwhell nor click the verticla slider (very convenient), and should continue scrolling until you middle-click again, or move the mouse back up. Only it doesn't, and stops after 1-5 seconds.
Opera link is not supposed to randomly overwrite my -recent- main PC's bookmarks with my -old- backup PC's (that haven't changed at all since I last booted it up a month ago).
Indeed that's weird, and it would feel better if the issues were the same for everyone. They aren't, but the buggy areas seem to be.
I just checked, I can use Hotmail with my 9.64-usb. WIth 10.x, I go into some refresh loop for a while after each page load, I have to click on random stuff for it to stop, sometimes after stopping it's usable, sometimes it's not and I have to refresh and retry.
I don't know about the flashblocker, since I have flash mostly off, and use a custom HOSTS file on top of that. I see very few ads.
and I'm on the verge of changing browsers. I paid for Opera back when the choice was between IE, Netscape, and Opera. Been using Opera as my main browser, and very happy with it, since then... must be quasi 10 years now. I'm very sad to see Opera dropping the ball that bad, and not fixing it:
- basically, 10.x versions are much lower quality than 9.x and before. An occasional hiccup can be understood, but 10.x is kinda old by now, there have been several point releases, and the issues that bother me still are there.
- broken feature 1: mouse gestures. One a large screen, with the mouse set for high velocity and high acceleration, mouse gestures don't register 9 out of 10 times. Chrome does not have that issue. It's probably kinda easy to fix (9.x has the issue, but not as badly).
- broken feature 2: autoscroll. 10.x goes out of autoscroll after a (random) handful of seconds. I've taken to copy-pasting URLs of long documents into Opera 9x, but that's cumbersome.
- broken feature 3: Opera Link keeps overwriting my main PCs bookmarks with stuff from PCs I haven't touched in ages. I'm back to synching bookmarks with backups and restore, and re-doing the rest (custom searches...) by hand.
- broken feature 4: cursor in text boxes. I routinely have issues getting my cursor back into rich-text edit boxes. I actually had the problem right now, and had to click on my comment's title then tab back into my text... this is cumbersome after a while.
- Broken feature 4: some sites that used to work perfectly no longer do. Hotmail is the main one, ZD sites are kinda screwy (the comments section)
I'm a bit disheartened. I've been a Opera fan and advocate for long, and now I feel they've dropped their focus on code quality to chase feature checklists and performance benchmarks. I personnaly don't care if my browser does WebM, or if it's 50% faster at javascript, if I can't use Hotmail, synch my PCs, scroll pages, and otherwise navigate with my mouse. These have been bugs since 10.0 beta, I've reported them, Opera hasn't moved on them.
I used to recommend Opera, I no longer do, and after enduring 10.x for months, I'm ready to leave, too. Chrome's mouse gestures and autoscroll work fine on my PC, as do Hotmail and text boxes...