Why? hmm? Don't use the products that use advertising. Otherwise deal with the way people get paid for the stuff you use.
No, I'll just block all the ads instead.
If people want me to pay them, they can charge me money. If they're offering a paid version that doesn't include any ads, doesn't track me, and doesn't phone home, I always it.
If you're staying logged in on google services across several devices, then it clearly doesn't matter to you. You don't mind being tracked.
I avoid it on my phone by using Cyanogenmod (so I can selectively allow and deny specific access types to specific applications) and using a firewall so that google and other advertisers can't be reached. Pretty much the same way I do it on my laptop, desktop, and servers.
But a harm to liberty? Unless warrants are too easy to obtain, I'm not seeing it. And if the problem is that warrants are too easy to obtain
Warrants are too easy to obtain, but we don't even have to go there.
First, there is no real warrant requirement. If the service provider wants to share the texts with law enforcement, they can, warrant or no warrant. Second, once all this data is collected and costing the service providers money, they will mine it/sell it/monetize it somehow. It will also be available to hackers. Be it by law enforcement, governments, corporations, or hackers, this data will be abused.
And, in the end, it's nobody's business anyway. I think it's straight-up wrong that companies are required to retain communications like this, text messages or not. It's no different than if the post office were required to photocopy and file away every letter they deliver. I also think requirements to allow easy wiretapping are wrong, for exactly the same reasons.
Yes, I have. It's fine. there are some things better in Win 8 and some things worse (search, for instance, is much worse). On the whole, in terms of usability, it's a large step backwards for me.
Yes, I forgot to add the "on a desktop machine" caveat. I'm sure that it's quite acceptable on a phone or tablet.
You get used to it after a while, but I think it would remain annoying to most people and seems to reduce productivity.
I've been using it for quite a long time now (I have to as part of my job) and while it's true that I can operate it better now than at first, I can't honestly say that I've gotten used to it. It's painful on a desktop and absolutely reduces my productivity. For what it's worth, I'm part of a team of about 10 people and most of them have complaints similar to mine -- so I know it's not just me.
Part of that is the expectation that going forward devices will all have touch screens from the phone to the desktop.
And that they expect desktop systems to be touchscreen-centric is where they've completely lost their minds. Touchscreens can only work as a main input system in situations where you aren't holding your arm away from your body.
Problem is it's their new design philosophy is completely different from what people have come to expect.
I disagree. The problem is that core elements (not all) of their new design philosophy are unpleasant to use in common use cases. Touchscreen on desktops is the big example.
Most people get into their routine and don't want change.
True to an extent. And really, why should they? Change for change's sake is just as bad as failing to change when it's beneficial to do so. But people will change when there is a very clear benefit to doing so. Win 8 has two problems in this regard: it's a huge change, and (on the desktop) there is no readily perceivable benefit to making it -- at least not one that is big enough to counterbalance the pain of the change.
Yes, but I do have to do the math to convert it. Fortunately that's a really easy conversion.
Perhaps you can make use of the Celsius scale at least?
This is the most difficult of all for me, actually. Without doing math, I do have a vague sense of what a kilometer "means" (a bit more than half a mile), and what a meter means (a bit more than a yard), but I have exactly no sense of what the various Celsius numbers feel like. They all sound "cold" to me. I have to convert to Fahrenheit to understand them on a physical level.
None of this affects being able to use the metric system, of course. I've been using it for decades. It's just not instinctual.
After all, I know the mnemonic "30 is hot, 20 is nice, 10 is cold, 0 is ice"
As long as the director of the water treatment plant doesn't want to drive in to work at 3 am in the morning to press a button to fix a problem... yes. Good luck making the security through obscurity argument to that person.
I think you mean the engineer, not director. In any case, it's an easy argument to make: "This is one of the job requirements. Comply with it or be replaced."
No, a corporation's "life" is its corporate charter. A death sentence to a corporation is the revocation of the corporate charter. This used to be the way we punished even huge corporations that egregiously misbehaved. It's way past time to bring those days back.
Indeed. I was replying to the AC who was equating licenses with users. In any case, the bulk of the Win 8 licenses are OEM licenses, which aren't as profitable as end user licenses and have a lower correlation to real users. Real users are more valuable to Microsoft than the revenue from the licenses themselves anyway.
I wonder how much of this is just visualization problems.
I'm an old fart who was taught from a young age to measure things in inches, pounds, etc. I understand metric units just fine and use them almost daily, but still when I'm given a measurement in metric, I don't have an instinctive feel for how much the measurement is. i have to convert to the old units to be able to picture it.
Same for things like gigameters. Yes, I know what that means, but it's not a unit that is commonly used and so there's no immediate visualization of it. If I hear that a start is 2 million kilometers away, I have (once I roughly convert to miles, anyway) a kind of "feel" for that. If I hear that it's 2 gigameters away, then I have to do an extra conversion -- to kilometers -- before I can get that sense.
Well, let's see... here's an incomplete list: going out with friends, pretty much anything online, playing games, reading, watching movies already in my collection, hobby activities (for me, robotics, programming, cooking, flying r/c helicopters, but yours will differ). There's too much to list here. My urge is to reply "life", but that sounds snarky and I don't mean it to be.
If you plan to stop watching movies, what do you plan to do to fill that time instead?
If only there were entertainment options besides movies...
Truly, I have no plans to go to blu-ray, and if the day comes when that's the only way to watch movies, I'll have no problem with not watching the movies at all. As it is, I have to make time for a movie anyway.
Well, yes, I block scripting as well. But that's a different issue (with a large overlap in the Venn diagram). Blocking scripting does nothing against web bugs, for instance.
My point is that the argument that people should love ads because they want free services is not universally true.
By the way, just going to pay sites (when there exists such an alternative) doesn't solve the "problem," as most of those sites have ads as well. What would solve the problem is if sites offered a real way to opt out of advertising entirely with a pay option -- so long as the opt-out is complete (in other words, not just that I don't see the ads, but that the ad servers are not even notified of my presence). Some do, and I love them for it.
Sure, that Metro interface for tablets needs some works and more apps. But it's good, just need some work.
Metro is a reasonable interface for tablets. It is not even remotely a reasonable interface for desktops. This, more than anything else, is Microsoft's error: trying to make a single interface that works on radically different form factors. If Microsoft wants to cede the desktop to other OS's and become a tablet/phone OS company, this decision makes sense. I suspect that's not what they want to do, however.
I am truly baffled by their design decision here. They could have separated the UI from the OS, and provided Metro for those platforms where it makes sense, and also provided the tried-and-true UI for the desktop. Keeping the "legacy desktop" in the way they did doesn't count -- all they did was make what worked on the desktop work less well and in a more irritating manner.
Me too. But being used to it and knowing how to use it doesn't mean that it's good.
It is 2012 and it says more about people who are stubborn and middle aged who hate change than a poor quality inferior UI.
I see. So anyone who doesn't like a UI that you like must be stubborn and/or old? Got it.
Study after study shows Ribbon is superior and users now use more functionality.
Not quite. Study after study shows that the ribbon lets you perform common tasks with fewer clicks. That's a cry from being "superior". There are also a lot of studies that show the ribbon is markedly worse for certain kinds of things.
In the end, it's like any other UI: it works well for some people, and it doesn't for others. For most of the people I know, it introduces daily frustration. These aren't old people stuck in their ways, but a large group of developers working on cutting edge software.
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I, too, use the start button for a lot more than search and shutdown. So, now he knows 2.
Why? hmm? Don't use the products that use advertising. Otherwise deal with the way people get paid for the stuff you use.
No, I'll just block all the ads instead.
If people want me to pay them, they can charge me money. If they're offering a paid version that doesn't include any ads, doesn't track me, and doesn't phone home, I always it.
If you're staying logged in on google services across several devices, then it clearly doesn't matter to you. You don't mind being tracked.
I avoid it on my phone by using Cyanogenmod (so I can selectively allow and deny specific access types to specific applications) and using a firewall so that google and other advertisers can't be reached. Pretty much the same way I do it on my laptop, desktop, and servers.
A free society is nearly impossible without encryption. It's always been that way.
They may obtain said text messages with a warrant obtained legally.
Irrelevant to the problem.
This is how we do things in America. We are not a police-state. We are not a military-state.
To the extent that true (and it's less true every year), it's because we citizens stand up against efforts like this one.
But a harm to liberty? Unless warrants are too easy to obtain, I'm not seeing it. And if the problem is that warrants are too easy to obtain
Warrants are too easy to obtain, but we don't even have to go there.
First, there is no real warrant requirement. If the service provider wants to share the texts with law enforcement, they can, warrant or no warrant. Second, once all this data is collected and costing the service providers money, they will mine it/sell it/monetize it somehow. It will also be available to hackers. Be it by law enforcement, governments, corporations, or hackers, this data will be abused.
And, in the end, it's nobody's business anyway. I think it's straight-up wrong that companies are required to retain communications like this, text messages or not. It's no different than if the post office were required to photocopy and file away every letter they deliver. I also think requirements to allow easy wiretapping are wrong, for exactly the same reasons.
It's a nice OS, just the force fed metro/touch interface is the problem.
I largely agree with this. Although without metro, it's really just Win 7 with some performance enhancements.
Yes, I have. It's fine. there are some things better in Win 8 and some things worse (search, for instance, is much worse). On the whole, in terms of usability, it's a large step backwards for me.
Yes, I forgot to add the "on a desktop machine" caveat. I'm sure that it's quite acceptable on a phone or tablet.
You get used to it after a while, but I think it would remain annoying to most people and seems to reduce productivity.
I've been using it for quite a long time now (I have to as part of my job) and while it's true that I can operate it better now than at first, I can't honestly say that I've gotten used to it. It's painful on a desktop and absolutely reduces my productivity. For what it's worth, I'm part of a team of about 10 people and most of them have complaints similar to mine -- so I know it's not just me.
Part of that is the expectation that going forward devices will all have touch screens from the phone to the desktop.
And that they expect desktop systems to be touchscreen-centric is where they've completely lost their minds. Touchscreens can only work as a main input system in situations where you aren't holding your arm away from your body.
Problem is it's their new design philosophy is completely different from what people have come to expect.
I disagree. The problem is that core elements (not all) of their new design philosophy are unpleasant to use in common use cases. Touchscreen on desktops is the big example.
Most people get into their routine and don't want change.
True to an extent. And really, why should they? Change for change's sake is just as bad as failing to change when it's beneficial to do so. But people will change when there is a very clear benefit to doing so. Win 8 has two problems in this regard: it's a huge change, and (on the desktop) there is no readily perceivable benefit to making it -- at least not one that is big enough to counterbalance the pain of the change.
For you. For a lot of people, even very computer literate people (developers and power users), it's substantially more difficult.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. :)
Can you use a 24-hour clock system?
Yes, but I do have to do the math to convert it. Fortunately that's a really easy conversion.
Perhaps you can make use of the Celsius scale at least?
This is the most difficult of all for me, actually. Without doing math, I do have a vague sense of what a kilometer "means" (a bit more than half a mile), and what a meter means (a bit more than a yard), but I have exactly no sense of what the various Celsius numbers feel like. They all sound "cold" to me. I have to convert to Fahrenheit to understand them on a physical level.
None of this affects being able to use the metric system, of course. I've been using it for decades. It's just not instinctual.
After all, I know the mnemonic "30 is hot, 20 is nice, 10 is cold, 0 is ice"
Oooh, I learned a new mnemonic! Thank you.
As long as the director of the water treatment plant doesn't want to drive in to work at 3 am in the morning to press a button to fix a problem... yes. Good luck making the security through obscurity argument to that person.
I think you mean the engineer, not director. In any case, it's an easy argument to make: "This is one of the job requirements. Comply with it or be replaced."
A company's... ahem... "life" would be money
No, a corporation's "life" is its corporate charter. A death sentence to a corporation is the revocation of the corporate charter. This used to be the way we punished even huge corporations that egregiously misbehaved. It's way past time to bring those days back.
Indeed. I was replying to the AC who was equating licenses with users. In any case, the bulk of the Win 8 licenses are OEM licenses, which aren't as profitable as end user licenses and have a lower correlation to real users. Real users are more valuable to Microsoft than the revenue from the licenses themselves anyway.
I wonder how much of this is just visualization problems.
I'm an old fart who was taught from a young age to measure things in inches, pounds, etc. I understand metric units just fine and use them almost daily, but still when I'm given a measurement in metric, I don't have an instinctive feel for how much the measurement is. i have to convert to the old units to be able to picture it.
Same for things like gigameters. Yes, I know what that means, but it's not a unit that is commonly used and so there's no immediate visualization of it. If I hear that a start is 2 million kilometers away, I have (once I roughly convert to miles, anyway) a kind of "feel" for that. If I hear that it's 2 gigameters away, then I have to do an extra conversion -- to kilometers -- before I can get that sense.
Licenses != users
Well, let's see... here's an incomplete list: going out with friends, pretty much anything online, playing games, reading, watching movies already in my collection, hobby activities (for me, robotics, programming, cooking, flying r/c helicopters, but yours will differ). There's too much to list here. My urge is to reply "life", but that sounds snarky and I don't mean it to be.
If you plan to stop watching movies, what do you plan to do to fill that time instead?
If only there were entertainment options besides movies...
Truly, I have no plans to go to blu-ray, and if the day comes when that's the only way to watch movies, I'll have no problem with not watching the movies at all. As it is, I have to make time for a movie anyway.
Well, yes, I block scripting as well. But that's a different issue (with a large overlap in the Venn diagram). Blocking scripting does nothing against web bugs, for instance.
My point is that the argument that people should love ads because they want free services is not universally true.
By the way, just going to pay sites (when there exists such an alternative) doesn't solve the "problem," as most of those sites have ads as well. What would solve the problem is if sites offered a real way to opt out of advertising entirely with a pay option -- so long as the opt-out is complete (in other words, not just that I don't see the ads, but that the ad servers are not even notified of my presence). Some do, and I love them for it.
And I counter that I don't want free content if the cost is advertising as it exists today.
The problem isnt advertising. The problem is F***ing obnoxious advertising! FLASHFLASHFLASH HEY THING ITS HEY THING!
For me, the bigger problem is the tracking that goes along with the ads. If no advertising did tracking, I probably wouldn't bother to block them.
Sure, that Metro interface for tablets needs some works and more apps. But it's good, just need some work.
Metro is a reasonable interface for tablets. It is not even remotely a reasonable interface for desktops. This, more than anything else, is Microsoft's error: trying to make a single interface that works on radically different form factors. If Microsoft wants to cede the desktop to other OS's and become a tablet/phone OS company, this decision makes sense. I suspect that's not what they want to do, however.
I am truly baffled by their design decision here. They could have separated the UI from the OS, and provided Metro for those platforms where it makes sense, and also provided the tried-and-true UI for the desktop. Keeping the "legacy desktop" in the way they did doesn't count -- all they did was make what worked on the desktop work less well and in a more irritating manner.
It took me a good week to get used to the ribbon.
Me too. But being used to it and knowing how to use it doesn't mean that it's good.
It is 2012 and it says more about people who are stubborn and middle aged who hate change than a poor quality inferior UI.
I see. So anyone who doesn't like a UI that you like must be stubborn and/or old? Got it.
Study after study shows Ribbon is superior and users now use more functionality.
Not quite. Study after study shows that the ribbon lets you perform common tasks with fewer clicks. That's a cry from being "superior". There are also a lot of studies that show the ribbon is markedly worse for certain kinds of things.
In the end, it's like any other UI: it works well for some people, and it doesn't for others. For most of the people I know, it introduces daily frustration. These aren't old people stuck in their ways, but a large group of developers working on cutting edge software.