Google's UI innovation is that people want the fucking UI to get out of the fucking way. People don't want the user interface innovated in new, exciting, and distracting ways. They want you to stick to what works, and make the back end work better. If they notice the user interface, you've failed.
Holy mother of marketing. They'd do better calling it "Microsoft Bling", at least it'd sound like something someone might actually want to use. This may be the worst product name since Bob.
I don't recognize that name, so maybe there were a couple of fucked up variants. Sometimes an idea doesn't take off because the guy who implements it first stuffs it up so badly that it takes years before someone goes back and tries again. Real years, not Internet Years, because you have to wait until actual humans manage to forget about it.
i remember reading about a startup in the dotcom days that allows users to annotate webpages in ways that can be shared. complete failure
why?
Because it was really badly implemented. It required an unreliable plugin, didn't stay up to date, and had a lousy user interface. Oh, and it had a really weird name that had nothing to do with the product (something like 'don't trust in TV').
There were a couple of better versions, college projects, that worked a lot better, without the need for browser plugins, and providing a uniform experience for their users... but the product you're referring to got the mindspace... because it was all dotcom-ish and this was in the dotcom boom of the late '90s.
The only IDE I use is XCode, and that only when I'm working on some Mac-only open source package that doesn't include a Makefile.
I guess there might be some IDE somewhere that works cleanly with Make, but they all seem to have a thing about replacing a common portable cross-platform tool with their own proprietary project files... and I've seen where that leads all too often.
In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.
I guess he never heard of the Betamax decision. Now what company was involved in that, again?
Not to mention the crises created by the invention of piano rolls, radio, and the cassette tape.
Speaking of which, why do you suppose the Sony Walkman was a roaring success, but Sony completely failed to come up with a credible competitor for the iPod? If Sony had run the "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign instead of trying to put guardrails on their music players, do you suppose history might have been a little different?
And my point is this: the major content businesses of the world and the most talented creators of that content -- music, newspapers, movies and books -- have all been seriously harmed by the Internet.
"That word, you keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means."
Labels, studios, newspapers, and book publishers are not "creators of content".
The creators of the content are actors, artists, composers, directors, writers, journalists... not the companies that distribute that content. The Internet makes distribution easier and cheaper, so of course it's going to cut into the business of less efficient distributors. That's going to happen no matter what guard-rails you put on the information superhighway.
If one, for the sake of discussion, were to accept the bad analogies in this message: don't forget that Sony are the ones who shipped CDs with that caused "severe tire damage" to people who didn't even touch them... without so much as a warning that they were going to install a rootkit on your computer. If Sony's proposing guard rails, be sure they'll be electrified to 270 kVA with spinning tungsten-carbide blades and proximity-fused claymores.
But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.
But with a complete absence of broken glass, property damage, or theft.
One doesn't have to condone copyright violations to object to lousy metaphors.
Gaikokujin in japan are either holidaymakers, students or university graduates, most of the time.
Indeed, they don't tend to be professionals permanently residing in Japan. That's rare enough to be remarkable. Odd that, no? Most prosperous countries seem to have a fairly substantial admixture of foreign-born nationals, and their descendants.
Into maintainable and supportable code that you can carry forward, or into something you can do a quick patch to work around a bug?
I was responding to this:
Most commercial software houses of any size are extremely loathe to release source for their products,
If that is the case, why then are they then so eagerly giving out a license to legally decompile their program?
Decompiling a program doesn't give you an opportunity to rip it off, modify it, and turn it into your own product, which is the usual reason given for not publishing source.
There's one program I have to use that's got some awesomely evil rules for what HTML is allowed in pasted text. It also uses one of those hacks to let you edit HTML in a text box as rich text. Combining these two features means that whenever you edit text on anything but IE, even if you don't need to use the rich text feature, it won't accept the text because it contains a non-allowed tag.
I'd suggest trying the hates-software website at we.hates-software.com, but the software crapped out over a year ago and the guy running the site can't be arsed tracking down the no doubt obscure bug in Mariachi and fixing it. Since all of the users are too busy hating software they have to work with to fix software they're not actually responsible for, it's probably never going to get fixed, which is hateful but somehow satisfying, in a kind of Zen way.
It's hard enough to translate source code from one language to another and end up with a maintainable code base, and there you have all comments, high level control structures, classes, and templates or macros intact. Decompilation, even if you reverse-engineer the low level control structures and detect unrolled loops and other optimizations, doesn't leave you with something that you can take forward long term... and I don't see that changing.
There has always been a drive for featurism in the marketplace. I think it stems from the fact that many purchasers are uncertain about choosing technical products.
There's a marketplace for features, to be sure, but there's also a marketplace for "good enough".
1. The difference in price between "features" and "good enough" was more than a factor of two. 2. Palm's ARM-based entry into the market cost more and had fewer features than the Windows Powered competition.
Palm OS could NEVER compete with Windows CE on features. The fundamental design of the OS was too different. What they COULD compete on was price and application support. They threw away price and some major applications, when they switched to ARM. Now they've thrown away the rest of their legacy application compatibility. They have abandoned all their advantages for a game where they were crippled from the word go.
Palm lost the plot years ago, when they decided they wanted to make a laptop replacement to compete with the Pocket PC... even though they were kicking the Pocket PC 4:1 in the market even years after the iPaq allegedly "legitimized" the Windows Powered handheld.
They could have had Palm handhelds PROFITABLY for sale for $40-$50 in every grocery store in the US, if they'd followed the price-performance curve down to mass market levels. They could have sold entry level models for cost to school districts and replace the Ti-83 and equivalents in classrooms, and everyone would be using Palms and Palm Powered cellphones... but no, Compaq/HP had the ARM-based Pocket PCs and Palm wanted that last 20% of the market... and lost it all.
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Well, I suspect the oldest device is the air conditioner in my 40 year old house. :)
The oldest computer related gadget I have is probably an Intellivision, since I had to get rid of my PDP-11. :(
Dear Paul:
Google's UI innovation is that people want the fucking UI to get out of the fucking way. People don't want the user interface innovated in new, exciting, and distracting ways. They want you to stick to what works, and make the back end work better. If they notice the user interface, you've failed.
Love, Peter.
Holy mother of marketing. They'd do better calling it "Microsoft Bling", at least it'd sound like something someone might actually want to use. This may be the worst product name since Bob.
I don't recognize that name, so maybe there were a couple of fucked up variants. Sometimes an idea doesn't take off because the guy who implements it first stuffs it up so badly that it takes years before someone goes back and tries again. Real years, not Internet Years, because you have to wait until actual humans manage to forget about it.
So it's probably time to try again now...
i remember reading about a startup in the dotcom days that allows users to annotate webpages in ways that can be shared. complete failure
why?
Because it was really badly implemented. It required an unreliable plugin, didn't stay up to date, and had a lousy user interface. Oh, and it had a really weird name that had nothing to do with the product (something like 'don't trust in TV').
There were a couple of better versions, college projects, that worked a lot better, without the need for browser plugins, and providing a uniform experience for their users... but the product you're referring to got the mindspace... because it was all dotcom-ish and this was in the dotcom boom of the late '90s.
Like encoding the message in whether you request a retransmission of the packet or not.
The only IDE I use is XCode, and that only when I'm working on some Mac-only open source package that doesn't include a Makefile.
I guess there might be some IDE somewhere that works cleanly with Make, but they all seem to have a thing about replacing a common portable cross-platform tool with their own proprietary project files... and I've seen where that leads all too often.
Usenet was way more efficient than modern P2P networks. And at its peak Usenet was bigger than the Internet of its day.
The oldest information-bearing material we know of are fossil stromatolites over three billion years old.
ZigBee Pro vs "6lowpan"? No contest, mate.
In no other realm of our society have we encountered so widespread and consequential a failure to put in place guidelines over the use and growth of such a major industry.
I guess he never heard of the Betamax decision. Now what company was involved in that, again?
Not to mention the crises created by the invention of piano rolls, radio, and the cassette tape.
Speaking of which, why do you suppose the Sony Walkman was a roaring success, but Sony completely failed to come up with a credible competitor for the iPod? If Sony had run the "Rip, Mix, Burn" ad campaign instead of trying to put guardrails on their music players, do you suppose history might have been a little different?
"That word, you keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means."
Labels, studios, newspapers, and book publishers are not "creators of content".
The creators of the content are actors, artists, composers, directors, writers, journalists... not the companies that distribute that content. The Internet makes distribution easier and cheaper, so of course it's going to cut into the business of less efficient distributors. That's going to happen no matter what guard-rails you put on the information superhighway.
If one, for the sake of discussion, were to accept the bad analogies in this message: don't forget that Sony are the ones who shipped CDs with that caused "severe tire damage" to people who didn't even touch them... without so much as a warning that they were going to install a rootkit on your computer. If Sony's proposing guard rails, be sure they'll be electrified to 270 kVA with spinning tungsten-carbide blades and proximity-fused claymores.
But what has happened online is that if it is 'beyond store hours' and the shop is closed, a lot of people just smash the window and steal what they want.
But with a complete absence of broken glass, property damage, or theft.
One doesn't have to condone copyright violations to object to lousy metaphors.
Gaikokujin in japan are either holidaymakers, students or university graduates, most of the time.
Indeed, they don't tend to be professionals permanently residing in Japan. That's rare enough to be remarkable. Odd that, no? Most prosperous countries seem to have a fairly substantial admixture of foreign-born nationals, and their descendants.
Into maintainable and supportable code that you can carry forward, or into something you can do a quick patch to work around a bug?
I was responding to this:
Decompiling a program doesn't give you an opportunity to rip it off, modify it, and turn it into your own product, which is the usual reason given for not publishing source.
But it's golden if all you want is have a 64 bit version of a middleware of which you only have a 32 bit binary.
Ah, see, I was responding to a message suggesting that allowing decompilation was somehow a backdoor to getting source code.
There's all kinds of useful things you can do with a decompiler, to be sure.
Gah.
There's one program I have to use that's got some awesomely evil rules for what HTML is allowed in pasted text. It also uses one of those hacks to let you edit HTML in a text box as rich text. Combining these two features means that whenever you edit text on anything but IE, even if you don't need to use the rich text feature, it won't accept the text because it contains a non-allowed tag.
What's the tag?
<body>
I'd suggest trying the hates-software website at we.hates-software.com, but the software crapped out over a year ago and the guy running the site can't be arsed tracking down the no doubt obscure bug in Mariachi and fixing it. Since all of the users are too busy hating software they have to work with to fix software they're not actually responsible for, it's probably never going to get fixed, which is hateful but somehow satisfying, in a kind of Zen way.
So, what would be worse for your job prospects in Japan, being burakumin or gaijin?
It's hard enough to translate source code from one language to another and end up with a maintainable code base, and there you have all comments, high level control structures, classes, and templates or macros intact. Decompilation, even if you reverse-engineer the low level control structures and detect unrolled loops and other optimizations, doesn't leave you with something that you can take forward long term... and I don't see that changing.
There has always been a drive for featurism in the marketplace. I think it stems from the fact that many purchasers are uncertain about choosing technical products.
There's a marketplace for features, to be sure, but there's also a marketplace for "good enough".
1. The difference in price between "features" and "good enough" was more than a factor of two.
2. Palm's ARM-based entry into the market cost more and had fewer features than the Windows Powered competition.
Palm OS could NEVER compete with Windows CE on features. The fundamental design of the OS was too different. What they COULD compete on was price and application support. They threw away price and some major applications, when they switched to ARM. Now they've thrown away the rest of their legacy application compatibility. They have abandoned all their advantages for a game where they were crippled from the word go.
Palm lost the plot years ago, when they decided they wanted to make a laptop replacement to compete with the Pocket PC... even though they were kicking the Pocket PC 4:1 in the market even years after the iPaq allegedly "legitimized" the Windows Powered handheld.
They could have had Palm handhelds PROFITABLY for sale for $40-$50 in every grocery store in the US, if they'd followed the price-performance curve down to mass market levels. They could have sold entry level models for cost to school districts and replace the Ti-83 and equivalents in classrooms, and everyone would be using Palms and Palm Powered cellphones... but no, Compaq/HP had the ARM-based Pocket PCs and Palm wanted that last 20% of the market... and lost it all.
We totally need an MMO based on Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards.
Or Leather Goddesses of Phobos.
Or Planetfall.
Is this because he invented the Internet?