C64 certainly never will die, not as long as people enjoy playing those old games. But the hardware will wear out eventually, and nobody's making any more, so it's off to emulation land. Or do true blue C64 hackers sneer at emulators?
... An Ask Slashdot that doesn't give us enough info to answer the question. You say you've gotten away from themes (thank God for that!) and are using a "utilitarian" scheme. (I think you mean "functional"; "utilitarian" is a kind of ethics.) And you say your users find it confusing. But what is the scheme and why do your users find it confusing?
And while we're talking about communicating ideas: it's hard to imagine a DNS scheme making that much difference to user comprehension. It doesn't matter whether a server is called "Baltar" or "PrintersEast", all the user needs to understand is that it's the name of something they have to connect to. If your users are all confused, it probably has more to do with how you're communicating procedures to them than what your systems are called.
0 offtopic implies that he had a karma bonus as opposed to not being logged in
No it doesn't. The rules are the same both for logged-in and not-logged-in ACs. Either way, it's easy enough to get 0-offtopic: 1 offtopic mod, 1 underrated mod.
PETA displays a lack of compassion for the realities of life...
And then you cite a bunch of examples of how they don't understand the realities of life. And you know, I 100% agree that they don't. But "lack of understanding" and "lack of compassion" are not the same things. They're both negative, but that doesn't make them the same.
Finally, I do think that the members of PETA are a bunch of idiots...
Whatever. We're not talking about their intelligence.
There's a persistent fallacy in this discussion. It probably has a fancy latin name, but I don't know what it is. It goes like this: if you can say enough negative things about somebody, anything you say about them that's negative must be true.
Yes, and the Roe in Roe v. Wade is now against abortion. People are allowed to change their opinions.
I'll say it one last time, then move on: I'm not defending anything about PETA. I'm simply pointing out the stupidity of the claim that they "lack compassion". It's a standard cop-out, designed to dehumanize the people you disagree with.
Right. If somebody pisses you off or does something you think is wrong, you have no obligation to understand them. Not a mature attitude but whatever works for you. Just be prepared for nitpickers like me when your sloppy thinking leads you to sloppy language.
Then you have to teach grandma how to use Thunderbird. OK, you'd probably enjoy doing it, but most grandmas don't have a friendly geek handy. Hence the 8.7 million.
Look at it this way: after all the CDs and floppies they sent out, they have a retention rate of 0.00000000001%!
No need to supply citations. What you just said sounds completely consistent with other views I've heard from the PETA world.
I thoroughly disagree with their demand that we give animals the same moral stature we give people. But saying that their moral imperatives are bad is not the same thing as saying they "lack compassion". Indeed, you could argue that they have too much compassion, since they are so determined to mitigate the suffering of animals that they're willing to let humans suffer for it.
Any PETA person would tell you that they're showing compassion for the dead animal who provided the fur. You can argue that there's something wrong with showing more compassion for animals than for people. But that's not evidence of "lack of compassion". Rather the opposite.
And before you launch into the usual ad hominem bullshit: I am not a member of PETA, I disagree with them on many points (especially about their harassing people who disagree with them), and I'm wearing leather shoes as I write this. It's just that disagreeing with somebody doesn't give you the right to turn off your brain when you're talking about them. I think I speak for most people when I say that demonizing people you disgree with is a tired concept, much abused by the mentally lazy.
There are many lame things about PETA. But what exactly about them shows a "lack of compassion"? Because they'd ban animal testing? That's not a choice I'd agree with, but it has legitimate moral arguments.
Finally, look at purchasing a pair of glasses. Even if you have "borderline" vision, like I do, they may ease eye fatigue. At first, they will probably bother you, until you get used to using them.
Sound advice, but something you need to do through an optometrist. (I think you meant that, but it needs to be spelled out, since "reading glasses" are available without a prescription.) Even if you don't need glasses for most things, a good optometrist can prescribe glasses that will make using a computer a lot less straining. They'll also give you advice on arranging your workspace.
Some optometrists try to cater to computer users with something called "task glasses", which help you precisely focus on your monitor. I'm guessing these work fine for people like key-entry operators who spend all day staring at their monitors. But my experience with them is negative, because as soon as I look away from my monitor and try to read a piece of paper on my desk, they become useless.
Why not Stradivarius was the best violin craftsmen?
Because Antonio Stradivari (Stradivarius is the latinized form of his name, and usually refers only to the violins he made) lived 350 years ago. Thousands have violin makers have lived since then, and it were just a matter of skill, one or more of them should have produced a violin of equal quality.
Some experts believe that modern violin makers actually have done just that.
So, there's some big mystery about Strads that makes them sound better than other violins? Or do people just think they sound better, because a single Strad goes for millions of dollars? Jon Rose adheres to the second theory:
As any honest violin dealer will tell you (and there are a few) the sound of a violin can be priced in a range from $50 (bad, but playable), to $10,000 (good-sounding) to $20,000 (extremely good tone and projection) to $100,000 (simply over-priced). The rest is snotty-nosed hubris. As has been proven on a number of occasions, most notably by the BBC in 1975, a well-made, top modern violin can sound just as good if not better than the prized golden age models. In a recording studio, behind a screen, the violins of Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman and Charles Beare were played back to them. The instruments were a Strad, a Guarneri del Gesu, a Vuillaume, and a Ronald Praill (a modern instrument less than a year old). None of the esteemed violin experts really had a clue which violin was which. Furthermore, two of them couldn't even tell which was their own instrument. They were left mumbling platitudes about the personal relationship between fiddle and player — bloody obvious if you spend most years of your life playing the violin.
In other words, they did it because they wanted to move people from email view to online viewing. OK, that makes sense, though it's not exactly what you said originally.
I would argue that if the boring stuff like QA isn't getting done, they actually do not care about quality.
You're confusing indifference with self-delusion. You have to distinguish between people who honestly don't care about something and people who do care, but con themselves into believing their own shit doesn't smell.
The software world is full of people who do really crappy work, but tell themselves that they're great overachievers. And I do believe my hero-worship of Google ended the day certain people I knew personally to be in that category accepted job offers from them.
It sounds like you just contradicted yourself there. The loss of feasibly mineable zinc deposits will spell disaster for applications that use it.
I think when he was talking about the "the amount we consume" he was referring to dietary zinc. If that disappeared we would indeed be in big trouble. Fortunately, an adult only needs about 12 milligrams of zinc a day.
There, I disagree. An application like Microsoft Word shouldn't break just because you're using an ethernet adapter that Microsoft didn't test. There are more QA issues with the kind of software Microsoft develops than there are with Google's. But Microsoft can afford to spend a lot of money on QA, and does.
Google's testing issues are simpler, but not for the reasons you state. I very much doubt that anybody does an IE/Firefox/Opera runthrough every time an application gets a new feature. Browser-specific issues are handled by the AJAX layer, and Google's is pretty solid. In effect, that's a single platform that all their applications are coded against.
That does lower the QA bar significantly, but it's obvious that Google's QA effort doesn't even reach that lowered bar. Not because they can't afford it or because they don't care about quality. It's because their corporate culture has no room for the people who see that boring stuff like QA gets done.
Differences between newer and older versions of Windows, Office and the development apps, some of which appear to be there for no other reason than to be different, cause incredible headaches.
I utterly agree, except maybe I'd user a nastier word than "headaches". But here's the important difference. Changes in Microsoft products happen as a result of announced upgrades, and the kinds of issues you describe can be avoided by not buying the upgrade. And if you have to buy the upgrade anyway, at least the changes don't go in before they're analyzed, tested, and documented.
By contrast, a change to a Google app can appear at any time. They don't seem to have anything like a formal QA process, nor is there anybody who's job it is to say, "is this change really necessary?" If the change is documented at all, it's in some blog somewhere. It's as if the entire Google application suite were a kind of Wikipedia of software.
I used to think it was really cool the way Google would deploy ground-breaking applications without so much as an announcement. But now their constant bit-twiddling drives me crazy.
Not that Microsoft is immune to bit-twiddling either. In the past they've been even worse than Google, though I think they've done better in recent years.
I agree with your excremental assessment of Microsoft's web presence. But the rivalry between Google and Microsoft is about a lot more than web applications.
And far from being FUD, a lot of the criticisms of Google and its products are spot on. I'm no MS fanboy, and indeed if there's a Microsoft way to do something and a Google way, the Google way is always the one I prefer.
But the fact remains that too much of Google's software is poorly tested, haphazardly documented, and always introducing irritating feature changes without notice. That's not a sign of a company that's well-run.
You mean between fans and critics of the two companies. The people who actually work at Google and/or Microsoft have gone out of their way to be civil about the whole thing.
It's true the Internet has stolen most of TV's younger audience. (Then again, I'm over 50, and the Internet has seduced me away from TV too. But I'm not significant, statistically or otherwise.) But that doesn't mean that TV is going to change its programming to cater to older viewers. It might very well have the opposite effect. Because older viewers don't buy stuff, so selling their eyeballs isn't very profitable.
When I was a kid, there were a lot of westerns on TV. Some of them got good ratings. But starting in the early 70s, the networks started canceling them, because their main audience was pre-boomer types who had relatively little disposable income. So all those westerns got replaced by shows that catered to a younger, hipper crowd. Ratings declined, but advertising revenue grew.
The networks must be tearing their hair out over the loss of younger viewers to the Internet. They'd sell their families into slavery to get them back. So expect a lot of pandering-to-youth programming. Won't work of course. Internet programming is more popular because it's more creative and risk-taking. Networks just don't know how to do those things.
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C64 certainly never will die, not as long as people enjoy playing those old games. But the hardware will wear out eventually, and nobody's making any more, so it's off to emulation land. Or do true blue C64 hackers sneer at emulators?
... An Ask Slashdot that doesn't give us enough info to answer the question. You say you've gotten away from themes (thank God for that!) and are using a "utilitarian" scheme. (I think you mean "functional"; "utilitarian" is a kind of ethics.) And you say your users find it confusing. But what is the scheme and why do your users find it confusing?
And while we're talking about communicating ideas: it's hard to imagine a DNS scheme making that much difference to user comprehension. It doesn't matter whether a server is called "Baltar" or "PrintersEast", all the user needs to understand is that it's the name of something they have to connect to. If your users are all confused, it probably has more to do with how you're communicating procedures to them than what your systems are called.
0 offtopic implies that he had a karma bonus as opposed to not being logged in
No it doesn't. The rules are the same both for logged-in and not-logged-in ACs. Either way, it's easy enough to get 0-offtopic: 1 offtopic mod, 1 underrated mod.
PETA displays a lack of compassion for the realities of life ...
And then you cite a bunch of examples of how they don't understand the realities of life. And you know, I 100% agree that they don't. But "lack of understanding" and "lack of compassion" are not the same things. They're both negative, but that doesn't make them the same.
Finally, I do think that the members of PETA are a bunch of idiots...
Whatever. We're not talking about their intelligence.
There's a persistent fallacy in this discussion. It probably has a fancy latin name, but I don't know what it is. It goes like this: if you can say enough negative things about somebody, anything you say about them that's negative must be true.
Yes, and the Roe in Roe v. Wade is now against abortion. People are allowed to change their opinions.
I'll say it one last time, then move on: I'm not defending anything about PETA. I'm simply pointing out the stupidity of the claim that they "lack compassion". It's a standard cop-out, designed to dehumanize the people you disagree with.
Right. If somebody pisses you off or does something you think is wrong, you have no obligation to understand them. Not a mature attitude but whatever works for you. Just be prepared for nitpickers like me when your sloppy thinking leads you to sloppy language.
Then you have to teach grandma how to use Thunderbird. OK, you'd probably enjoy doing it, but most grandmas don't have a friendly geek handy. Hence the 8.7 million.
Look at it this way: after all the CDs and floppies they sent out, they have a retention rate of 0.00000000001%!
No need to supply citations. What you just said sounds completely consistent with other views I've heard from the PETA world.
I thoroughly disagree with their demand that we give animals the same moral stature we give people. But saying that their moral imperatives are bad is not the same thing as saying they "lack compassion". Indeed, you could argue that they have too much compassion, since they are so determined to mitigate the suffering of animals that they're willing to let humans suffer for it.
OK, they're stupid, and they show an inability to balance conflicting moral imperatives. Not the same thing as "not showing compassion".
Any PETA person would tell you that they're showing compassion for the dead animal who provided the fur. You can argue that there's something wrong with showing more compassion for animals than for people. But that's not evidence of "lack of compassion". Rather the opposite.
And before you launch into the usual ad hominem bullshit: I am not a member of PETA, I disagree with them on many points (especially about their harassing people who disagree with them), and I'm wearing leather shoes as I write this. It's just that disagreeing with somebody doesn't give you the right to turn off your brain when you're talking about them. I think I speak for most people when I say that demonizing people you disgree with is a tired concept, much abused by the mentally lazy.
There are many lame things about PETA. But what exactly about them shows a "lack of compassion"? Because they'd ban animal testing? That's not a choice I'd agree with, but it has legitimate moral arguments.
Demonizing people you disagree with is so 90s!
Finally, look at purchasing a pair of glasses. Even if you have "borderline" vision, like I do, they may ease eye fatigue. At first, they will probably bother you, until you get used to using them.
Sound advice, but something you need to do through an optometrist. (I think you meant that, but it needs to be spelled out, since "reading glasses" are available without a prescription.) Even if you don't need glasses for most things, a good optometrist can prescribe glasses that will make using a computer a lot less straining. They'll also give you advice on arranging your workspace.
Some optometrists try to cater to computer users with something called "task glasses", which help you precisely focus on your monitor. I'm guessing these work fine for people like key-entry operators who spend all day staring at their monitors. But my experience with them is negative, because as soon as I look away from my monitor and try to read a piece of paper on my desk, they become useless.
Why not Stradivarius was the best violin craftsmen?
Because Antonio Stradivari (Stradivarius is the latinized form of his name, and usually refers only to the violins he made) lived 350 years ago. Thousands have violin makers have lived since then, and it were just a matter of skill, one or more of them should have produced a violin of equal quality.
Some experts believe that modern violin makers actually have done just that.
Which is exactly why professional wine tasters use double-blind methods.
And they put the CD player behind a screen for what reason? I think you're misreading the sentence.
So, there's some big mystery about Strads that makes them sound better than other violins? Or do people just think they sound better, because a single Strad goes for millions of dollars? Jon Rose adheres to the second theory:
As any honest violin dealer will tell you (and there are a few) the sound of a violin can be priced in a range from $50 (bad, but playable), to $10,000 (good-sounding) to $20,000 (extremely good tone and projection) to $100,000 (simply over-priced). The rest is snotty-nosed hubris. As has been proven on a number of occasions, most notably by the BBC in 1975, a well-made, top modern violin can sound just as good if not better than the prized golden age models. In a recording studio, behind a screen, the violins of Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman and Charles Beare were played back to them. The instruments were a Strad, a Guarneri del Gesu, a Vuillaume, and a Ronald Praill (a modern instrument less than a year old). None of the esteemed violin experts really had a clue which violin was which. Furthermore, two of them couldn't even tell which was their own instrument. They were left mumbling platitudes about the personal relationship between fiddle and player — bloody obvious if you spend most years of your life playing the violin.
His full rant here.
In other words, they did it because they wanted to move people from email view to online viewing. OK, that makes sense, though it's not exactly what you said originally.
I would argue that if the boring stuff like QA isn't getting done, they actually do not care about quality.
You're confusing indifference with self-delusion. You have to distinguish between people who honestly don't care about something and people who do care, but con themselves into believing their own shit doesn't smell.
The software world is full of people who do really crappy work, but tell themselves that they're great overachievers. And I do believe my hero-worship of Google ended the day certain people I knew personally to be in that category accepted job offers from them.
It sounds like you just contradicted yourself there. The loss of feasibly mineable zinc deposits will spell disaster for applications that use it.
I think when he was talking about the "the amount we consume" he was referring to dietary zinc. If that disappeared we would indeed be in big trouble. Fortunately, an adult only needs about 12 milligrams of zinc a day.
There, I disagree. An application like Microsoft Word shouldn't break just because you're using an ethernet adapter that Microsoft didn't test. There are more QA issues with the kind of software Microsoft develops than there are with Google's. But Microsoft can afford to spend a lot of money on QA, and does.
Google's testing issues are simpler, but not for the reasons you state. I very much doubt that anybody does an IE/Firefox/Opera runthrough every time an application gets a new feature. Browser-specific issues are handled by the AJAX layer, and Google's is pretty solid. In effect, that's a single platform that all their applications are coded against.
That does lower the QA bar significantly, but it's obvious that Google's QA effort doesn't even reach that lowered bar. Not because they can't afford it or because they don't care about quality. It's because their corporate culture has no room for the people who see that boring stuff like QA gets done.
Differences between newer and older versions of Windows, Office and the development apps, some of which appear to be there for no other reason than to be different, cause incredible headaches.
I utterly agree, except maybe I'd user a nastier word than "headaches". But here's the important difference. Changes in Microsoft products happen as a result of announced upgrades, and the kinds of issues you describe can be avoided by not buying the upgrade. And if you have to buy the upgrade anyway, at least the changes don't go in before they're analyzed, tested, and documented.
By contrast, a change to a Google app can appear at any time. They don't seem to have anything like a formal QA process, nor is there anybody who's job it is to say, "is this change really necessary?" If the change is documented at all, it's in some blog somewhere. It's as if the entire Google application suite were a kind of Wikipedia of software.
I used to think it was really cool the way Google would deploy ground-breaking applications without so much as an announcement. But now their constant bit-twiddling drives me crazy.
Not that Microsoft is immune to bit-twiddling either. In the past they've been even worse than Google, though I think they've done better in recent years.
I agree with your excremental assessment of Microsoft's web presence. But the rivalry between Google and Microsoft is about a lot more than web applications.
And far from being FUD, a lot of the criticisms of Google and its products are spot on. I'm no MS fanboy, and indeed if there's a Microsoft way to do something and a Google way, the Google way is always the one I prefer.
But the fact remains that too much of Google's software is poorly tested, haphazardly documented, and always introducing irritating feature changes without notice. That's not a sign of a company that's well-run.
You mean between fans and critics of the two companies. The people who actually work at Google and/or Microsoft have gone out of their way to be civil about the whole thing.
Netcraft says that all TV comes out of a proxy server in Holland.
It's true the Internet has stolen most of TV's younger audience. (Then again, I'm over 50, and the Internet has seduced me away from TV too. But I'm not significant, statistically or otherwise.) But that doesn't mean that TV is going to change its programming to cater to older viewers. It might very well have the opposite effect. Because older viewers don't buy stuff, so selling their eyeballs isn't very profitable.
When I was a kid, there were a lot of westerns on TV. Some of them got good ratings. But starting in the early 70s, the networks started canceling them, because their main audience was pre-boomer types who had relatively little disposable income. So all those westerns got replaced by shows that catered to a younger, hipper crowd. Ratings declined, but advertising revenue grew.
The networks must be tearing their hair out over the loss of younger viewers to the Internet. They'd sell their families into slavery to get them back. So expect a lot of pandering-to-youth programming. Won't work of course. Internet programming is more popular because it's more creative and risk-taking. Networks just don't know how to do those things.