I just think that people seem to spend more time learning how to work around MS software's limitations than actually making use of the computers its installed on. I am not using this to make a point about brand loyalty, I genuinely mean it when I say that I don't understand how anyone gets anything done on a Windows box. It just seems like the computer is constantly about to crash, and it often does. Simply not having to deal with a 100 ms delay on everything you do on your computer makes a big difference, and I see latent user interfaces on windows boxes constantly. People get so accustomed to that pause between a click and the intended action on Windows computers that they don't notice how much of a problem it is. It basically adds up to a significant portion of your time being spent waiting for a machine that can read millions of characters off of magnetic media in one second to finish doing the necessary calculations to display the word you just typed on the screen. It just seems like Microsoft could have tackled word-processing by now, given the hardware we have these days.
MS also seems to downgrade it's software from that of it's peers somehow. Macs allow you to scroll a window which isn't at the fore-front (something very useful windows definitely does not have as far as I can tell). So if you two finger scroll a window that is being partially obscured by another window, the scrolling occurs without the target window having to be brought to the forefront. Every piece of software I have ever used on my mac (including free beta software downloaded from some random project) can use this feature, with the exception of Microsoft Office. Seriously, I didn't believe it when I noticed it, but it is entirely the case. I am not a proponent of conspiracy theories, but it seems so ridiculous that it is almost surely intentional. In all my criticism of MS, I don't think they are that incompetent.
My computing experience is so pleasant (I have literally stopped screaming at my computer) since I switched over. It's really a completely different and worthwhile way to get things done. Our society spends entirely too much time on computers not to be more demanding of quality in their software. I think the reason most people think it is so difficult to learn how to use a computer is because it is difficult use them once you do learn. But it doesn't have to be, because I am currently typing this on an example of a computer that doesn't have these problems.
Apple could easily change it's slogan to "They actually work." or "Our computers don't have that problem." and not be the least bit intellectually dishonest in doing so.
I'm not a Microsoftie by a long shot - being a Linux admin and dba - but I do have to shoot down your example: MS has had a document indexing service for quite a while; and they can't really help it if the college administrators (I presume, you're talking about a professor) turn that off on their installs.
No one turned anything off, these professors had nothing to do with installing the OS they were using, and they are not really the types of people who are going to dig around in system settings. Also, my point was not that Microsoft hasn't attempted to have indexed searching, I am saying it doesn't work very well. Actually, it works so poorly, my professor gave up before it could finish. This is a sharp contrast to the search feature on OS X 10.6 that finishes (literally) before you can utter the phrase "this is taking too long". If my search took longer than 2 or 3 seconds, I would assume something was severely wrong* with my computer.
Umm... RTF *is* an MS format. Does nothing to invalidate your argument, just saying.
You may be right, but it only makes that situation more ridiculous. The thing that blows my mind is the fact that it cannot faithfully reproduce documents between two systems with the exact same version of MS Office installed, the fact that office needs additional plugins just to understand older versions of it's own highly proprietary format is an absurd technical problem. Whatever the cause for this may be, it's simply unacceptable for a product that costs so much and is regarded as standard. In the past standards came into existence because they worked, MS uses a business model that penetrates markets, but not through the merit of their software as much as the quality of their contract lawyers. Apple is certainly a very annoying company on many levels, but at least their success is driven (however, not entirely based) on the quality of what they produce. I really cannot stress how headache free my computer is, and (without having to reinstall my OS every 6 months and operate it with impeccable vigilance) my computer works exactly as well as the day I purchased it. There is a lot to be said for the POSIX style of organizing an OS, it's really quite elegant.
A good example of this is when I watched a professor I work with try to find a day old document on her W7 (installed within the last few weeks) computer. The search in the file manager was so amazingly slow we had to give up and find another way to locate it. Compare this experience to what I have to do on my own computer to find a file. The search includes the actual content of the file (which you can turn off very easily if it is getting in the way of finding your results) as well as any file names. This, in itself, is not anything to write home about, except that the whole process from hitting enter to getting the last result seems to happen instantaneously, as in, it has taken less than 1 second at most since I have gotten the machine. This is because my computer does all the indexing ahead of time when I am not using it, so that I don't have to wait on it when I need it. I am really not exaggerating when I say that most work takes me about a half to quarter as long on my mac than it would on any other system I have used thus far in my life.
I personally couldn't care less which computer people choose to use. But if the world 'runs' on Microsoft, the world is a sucker of the lowest order. It's really absurd how short MS products fall of the bar set by the rest of the industry.
I have not seen many phones which can properly format a moderately complex.docx file as of now - this is where Windows Mobile 7 can enter the market and capture it.
Maybe they can work on it after they decide on a standard for.docx, because I can't seem to get two copies (of the same version of word) to reliably display the same file in the same way on two different machines. I wish what I saw on the screen matched what people would see when they get it. I would personally use LaTex and.rtf formats for everything, but 'the world runs on windows' and when I send an.rtf to one of my bosses, they are so overwhelmed by the cascade of prompts and dialog boxes needed to tell Word that you want to use to open an.rtf, they usually just tell me that their 'computer can't read it' (seriously). User ineptness aside, I really don't understand how the world runs on windows. Most projects where I am forced to use Microsoft products because that is the only thing the recipient uses take 5 to 10 times as long as they need to. Despite it's excessive features, Word (and other MS Office products) seem utterly incapable of making small aesthetic changes to a document without throwing the rest of it in complete formatting chaos. As someone who witnesses and experiences this problem, I would estimate my academic department/ university would easily double if not triple it's productivity if we would start using more appropriate software for what we need to do with it. This would not outright exclude software like office, but it would certainly require us to use microsoft software as a tool rather than a standard. It's very amazing how many more problems a Windows user experiences on a daily basis.
I have stopped screaming at my computer since I started using a mac (with the exception of using office). Let me also say that I am no technological slouch, and my issues with Office are not a byproduct of my lack of understand like it can be with others. To put it another way, I actually run 4 operating systems on my computer (VMware versions of windows on a mac seem to work better than natively installed copies of windows on the same system, no joke, I was even able to register the machine to a Microsoft Active Directory to use an institutional copy of SPSS). When I got my current mac I installed windows on it in a dual boot with a mac partition (using a utility supplied by apple with the OS). I had purchased the Mac for the hardware (a MacBook Air) rather than the OS. I started out using windows for everything, but over several months I had naturally (not consciously) switched over entirely to the mac side. My point in all this, is that Windows is like an abusive boyfriend (I ripped this simile off of a post from a different thread, but it's more than perfect), you don't really understand how dysfunctional it is until to get out of the relationship and find a less destructive partner. It's hard to like Microsoft products, trust me, I tried. I really am not saying this as an Apple fanboi (because I am definitely not one). I am saying this as person who researches the efficacy of information technology in educational settings. In case you are curious about what I am figuring out (if you haven't already) is that technology tends to be selected for all the wrong reasons, and tends to fall so short of the mark, that no one ever uses it. I see classrooms with >$10k Smartboard installations that are completely unusable and collecting dust rapidly because there is a very poorly manufactured and barely functional Windows machine at the heart of it. When I was in 7th grade, my school system blew $15k a classroom into devices like laser disc players and Windows 3.11 boxes with token ring networks (which were obsolete before they were taken out of the box) by the time I graduated 5 years later, I had witnessed one actual use of anything but the television, and that was by a teacher who was responding to a student's challenge him on whether the laserdisc machines actually worked!
Who said they weren't? And there certainly were plenty of rallies condemning Bush. Who do you think put Obama in the White House in the first place?
Randian Objectivist did not put Obama in office.
and
I am saying they weren't condemning Bush, because they didn't (unless you count the last year of his presidency, which really doesn't count because he was already in office at that point). Even if they did before then, most of them voted for Bush both times anyway and I don't count buyers remorse as political vigilance, people need to make good decisions before they elect people into public office. You are exhibiting the exact type of delusional thought I see in almost every political conversation I have with t-bags. There is a lot of unsubstantiated negation, and most arguments are based anecdotal evidence instead of actually trying to defend the basis of your world view. T-baggers hate republicans because they are not callous enough for their taste, also republicans at least understand their own world view enough to defend it properly. However, (and this a classic logical fallacy that libertarians looooove to commit) is that somehow a common enemy makes two groups alike in thought. WRONG! I don't have anything in common with libertarians, I am a special education teacher, libertarians don't believe in my profession, and if you disagree with that, go back to your Rand books, because without altruism public education doesn't even begin to make sense, especially when the student may not be up to the Randian ideal of being self-made and self-reliant. Everyone accepts charity at some point in their life (everyone), it's absurd to deny it to others. It's like T-bags never learned the golden rule.
It's nice to think that everyone should support all the charitable needs of the world independent of government intervention, but people don't now and they wouldn't if it was like that. And people's lack of charitibility has nothing to do with their taxes being high, it has everything to do with the selfishness of the human condition. Libertarians/T-baggers/Randians don't understand the importance of social programs and how much they indirectly benefit from them because they are children, which was my original point.
Kohlberg, stage 2, look it up (I know this is the last thing a libertarian would ever do with their time, political rallies with no clear point take a lot of planning)
Where were the Tea Partiers when he was in office. Where were the rallies condemning him from the Conservatives?
They were too busy calling those who dissented "traitors". I guess Tea-baggers change their mind a lot about what is right or wrong. Especially depending on how the idea serves their desires. Which is why I will never get along with any Randian Objectivist. If you think altruism is intrinsically worthless, you are morally less sophisticated than a 3 year-old. I am not kidding. I am basing this on currently excepted and nearly universally taught theories on human development. Look into Kohlberg's stage 2 of moral development, this is the developmental stage T-bags are operating in. Most people leave that stage around 4 years of age.
When you don't sponsor your own R&D department they start looking for cooperation on the street corner. It's hard to complain about NASA befriending China when the Chinese government is more willing to pay for our space program. The world works like this: nothing in, yields nothing out and garbage in, yields garbage out.
If Microsoft or anyone else were capable of certifying a computer to be malware free, and being right about it, malware wouldn't be much of a problem, now would it?
File under "Dumb Ideas"
I think you are giving Microsoft too much credit for even caring about the user experience, I think Microsoft could do something about malware and spyware, but that would involve actually spending their time and resources developing their own product instead of developing the world for their product. Microsoft loves to shift responsibility over on the user for their hole-ridden software.
I love how Microsoft's answer to their own security holes is to force you to stop using your own computer. Proving once again, that Microsoft has no interest in engineering.
Putting the taskbar on the left, as wide as the buttons normally are on the bottom, means you can actually see what the heck you've got going on when you have 20+ things open at a time. In that environment, though, what drives me bonkers are modal dialogs and message boxes that exclude themselves from the taskbar while leaving their owning window disabled, so you have to dig through the whole stupid Z-stack on every monitor to find what you did with it. Even worse, sometimes it winds up underneath a disabled window from the same app. (This isn't supposed to happen if the owner window is set correctly, but it still happens.)
Disclaimer: Three 4:3 monitors are required to make sense of that much going on!
I never have this problem on my mac, when I loose track of a dialog box I just hit the dedicated F key that shows me every window open in a giant grid. When I say Macs are better than windows, I am not talking about how fast a web page loads, I am talking about this kind of stuff. When a company cares enough to consider the user experience, people tend to complain less about the user experience. I swear I have tripled my personal productivity by switching over to mac, not for any one reason, but for thousands of reasons like the spacing of the keys on the keyboard and the use of (intuitive) gestures on the track pad. And the work flow features of the interface! Like being able to hit the space key and get an (literally) instant preview of whatever document you are browsing in the file manager. It really is absurd how much more thought-out my computer is than nearly any device I have ever owned. Built in print to pdf, in the box developers kit, backlit keys, lack of unnecessary third party software, no anti-virus ads popping up out of seemingly nowhere, no virus scares... do I need to go on?
Didn't apple put one of those out a few years ago? You tilted it on it's axis to get a landscape or portrait view?
A company called Axis made a 16-bit greyscale monitor like that for layout on Apples in the early 1990's, I use to have one, it was cool, but the extra mounting hardware it used for that feature had to be so heavy duty it made the thing very lumpy and big, and there really wasn't any good place to put it on a desk. My mother used it until it broke in the early 2000's for writing. I hated and loved that thing. The high quality of the image mixed with the lack of color gave it a very charming worthlessness. Like an IBM Selectric typewriter, in that, it is outdated and all of it's virtues are pointless next to modern technology and it has none of the romance of an Underwood or Brother manual, but it still has weird character that is hard to deny it.
Thankyou! It sounds like your grandchildren have a Grandad/Grandma who definitely loves them, which all kids really need when you get down to it. I see some very tragic situations on a daily basis, and the one thing they have in common is not enough love, or love in the wrong form, it sounds like your babies* have everything they need.
*All the older ladies I work with call their students this, I have started using it the same way, hehe.
P.S. it was nice having such a civilized conversation on this website, it reminds me of the multi-week discussions that use to take place on BBS's back in the day, not to say there wasn't a fair amount of trolling back then as well.
I can relate to two of things you mentioned. I also worked in a (medium in my case) 'integrated' computer lab around the same era (early 2000's), and it was absurd how much people preferred them, even though half of the windows machines hardly worked because they were choked up with 100+(not exaggerating) copies of Bonzai Buddy installed. It was horrible to look at that troop of gorillas everyday. I tried to manage the spyware garbage as well as I could, but the university consistently ignored requests for administrative software that would allow me to keep that lab in better shape. Despite the decrepid nature of the windows machines, days would pass where not a single walk in would attempt to use a mac, despite the lines for everything else. The macs were not steller machines either, 1st gen imacs, but at least the screens did not contain dancing monkeys and machine-gun style pop-up advertising when nothing (seemed) to be running.
The second thing was that I had to do the exact same thing for my sister yesterday because she was having trouble with open office. I love Open Office for many reasons, I use it, but it needs to get out of Beta testing soon*, because it's astoundingly buggy.
* Yes, I know it's not actually in the beta stage.
P.S.
I learned about the nightmare that is Vista in the process.
It is unfortunate that they are to some extent more expensive, but I think that it's a result of not cutting corners rather than any type of marketing inflation (the iPod is a very different story however). They just build computers the way I would build them. I work with children with Autism, and you would be amazed at what kind of havoc the sounds of computers wreak on the average sensory-oriented classroom (they are special-ed classrooms with certain sound and tactile features modified for Autism Spectrum Disorders). A low-quality computer fan can really be the difference between a good and bad day. I like my MB-Air because it never makes noise (unless you cover the vent holes and get it hot enough to kick the fan on).
Actually, I have a Macbook Air that I run OS X, XP (this is only for access to SPSS via an Active Directory system I need for work), and BackTrack 4. I use each one for various purposes.
If Linux ever gets as large of a customer base, you too, will be needing AV.
I have heard this argument before, and I don't entirely agree with it. I think there would be plenty of security holes and viruses if another OS became as dominant as windows, but I think that the way Windows is set up at the deepest levels, it allows non-users far more access to the internal workings than any of it's competitors.
I don't think viruses or security problems would disappear if everyone switched to a Posix-style OS, but I certainly think a far smaller percentage (as in orders of magnitude) of computers in the world would be loaded down with viruses, worms, bots, etc.. And the biggest problem with windows is just how poorly legitimate software runs to begin with, and how easily and often it will install ancillary garbage you never asked it to install ("Bonzai Buddy" comes to mind).
It's easy to blame the user for these things, but why should the user have to think about security to begin with, the flexibility of computers and the process that produces their designs dictates that reasonable level of security can be made simple and easy for the user to keep up with without the addition of inadequate third-party solutions to the problem.
Microsoft is really bad about drowning the user with obtuse warning messages that cause them to generally ignore the important ones. From a behaviorism-oriented perspective on how they set everything up (I'm a behaviorists, so this is just how I look at things), it's a miracle that it works at all. And if the Windows boxes in my office are any indicator, most people just get by with partially functional computers for the most part.
This is just the tip of my very large rhetorical iceberg on this matter, but I appreciate the intelligent response to my less than intelligent comment, hehe.
Looking at the posts in this thread makes me very glad I don't have to do any of this to keep my computer functional. Windows is a complete joke, I don't think anyone has to put up with more bullshit in computing than the average Windows user, I do genuinely feel bad that these people waste so much time and money on such poorly built technology. It's really very tragic.
This is really a discussion of significant digits versus standard deviations. The measurable accuracy is far more precise than it's usefulness at that precision. First, most of the gaps in the performance numbers were orders of magnitude greater than their lowest decimal place, so using that level of accuracy really accomplishes nothing, it just looks really officially technical to people. The point of SI unit 'multipliers' is so you don't have to include a bunch of numbers that don't matter, making it easier to read.
For example
22.5 is easier to compare to 2.25 than.0000000225 to.00000000225
When you use bad numbering you can get a bad interpretation of results.
I believe you, I am just saying that the presence of a phone and SMS makes them more different then you are implying. Not to mention, price and contractual commitments are involved with phones. The iPod is still more of a 'smart' MP3 player than a 'dumbed-down' cellular phone.
Here! Here! Seriously though, TEX is great, and most TEX suites output in PDFs anyway. I like PDFs, but I cannot stand the direction Adobe has gone in recent years.
This exploit is currently melting the email servers at a (very) major corporation which I will leave unnamed. According to someone currently dealing with that, the virus can send 250k messages an hour. It's basically the Ebola Zaire of viruses. It's funny in all the hoopla about Apple vs. Microsoft, people seem to not fathom that their is a real advantage in not having to worry about Microsoft security holes. I am not even vaguely worried about this, my computer doesn't have that problem, or any that I know of. Headache free operation is severely underrated.
It's interesting that my apple (running quick time) has none of these problems. I guess it's their shitty engineering that makes my computer so stable and operational. If you think Apples are less conducive to nerdery and functionality compared to most other options, you are amazingly unobservant. If you think Microsoft has any advantage to either of those two qualities, you are stupid and gullible. If you think 90% of the world's population has any chance of successfully installing, using, and maintaining any stable distro of Linux, you should try to help my grandmother find the word count on her computer sometimes, it will open your eyes to what level most of the worlds people compute on.
Your post shows a complete lack of understanding of the human condition. I am not certain where theologians come into an argument about the fundamental obtainability of scientific truth.
I was mostly just using the subject to troll about a greater point of philosophy. I didn't get that deep into anything into the article because I have been too busy editing an IRB request and checking the statistical correlations between syntactic indices on the writings of children. The indices themselves being provided by an experimental computational linguistic analysis system. I could talk about the textbook I am writing with several professors, but it's pretty boring stuff. I work primarily with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. An IRB request is a request to proceed with human (in this case) research, just in case you aren't familiar with that term.
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I just think that people seem to spend more time learning how to work around MS software's limitations than actually making use of the computers its installed on. I am not using this to make a point about brand loyalty, I genuinely mean it when I say that I don't understand how anyone gets anything done on a Windows box. It just seems like the computer is constantly about to crash, and it often does. Simply not having to deal with a 100 ms delay on everything you do on your computer makes a big difference, and I see latent user interfaces on windows boxes constantly. People get so accustomed to that pause between a click and the intended action on Windows computers that they don't notice how much of a problem it is. It basically adds up to a significant portion of your time being spent waiting for a machine that can read millions of characters off of magnetic media in one second to finish doing the necessary calculations to display the word you just typed on the screen. It just seems like Microsoft could have tackled word-processing by now, given the hardware we have these days.
MS also seems to downgrade it's software from that of it's peers somehow. Macs allow you to scroll a window which isn't at the fore-front (something very useful windows definitely does not have as far as I can tell). So if you two finger scroll a window that is being partially obscured by another window, the scrolling occurs without the target window having to be brought to the forefront. Every piece of software I have ever used on my mac (including free beta software downloaded from some random project) can use this feature, with the exception of Microsoft Office. Seriously, I didn't believe it when I noticed it, but it is entirely the case. I am not a proponent of conspiracy theories, but it seems so ridiculous that it is almost surely intentional. In all my criticism of MS, I don't think they are that incompetent.
My computing experience is so pleasant (I have literally stopped screaming at my computer) since I switched over. It's really a completely different and worthwhile way to get things done. Our society spends entirely too much time on computers not to be more demanding of quality in their software. I think the reason most people think it is so difficult to learn how to use a computer is because it is difficult use them once you do learn. But it doesn't have to be, because I am currently typing this on an example of a computer that doesn't have these problems.
Apple could easily change it's slogan to "They actually work." or "Our computers don't have that problem." and not be the least bit intellectually dishonest in doing so.
I'm not a Microsoftie by a long shot - being a Linux admin and dba - but I do have to shoot down your example: MS has had a document indexing service for quite a while; and they can't really help it if the college administrators (I presume, you're talking about a professor) turn that off on their installs.
No one turned anything off, these professors had nothing to do with installing the OS they were using, and they are not really the types of people who are going to dig around in system settings. Also, my point was not that Microsoft hasn't attempted to have indexed searching, I am saying it doesn't work very well. Actually, it works so poorly, my professor gave up before it could finish. This is a sharp contrast to the search feature on OS X 10.6 that finishes (literally) before you can utter the phrase "this is taking too long". If my search took longer than 2 or 3 seconds, I would assume something was severely wrong* with my computer.
*Like a W7 partition lurking somewhere on it.
Umm... RTF *is* an MS format. Does nothing to invalidate your argument, just saying.
You may be right, but it only makes that situation more ridiculous. The thing that blows my mind is the fact that it cannot faithfully reproduce documents between two systems with the exact same version of MS Office installed, the fact that office needs additional plugins just to understand older versions of it's own highly proprietary format is an absurd technical problem. Whatever the cause for this may be, it's simply unacceptable for a product that costs so much and is regarded as standard. In the past standards came into existence because they worked, MS uses a business model that penetrates markets, but not through the merit of their software as much as the quality of their contract lawyers. Apple is certainly a very annoying company on many levels, but at least their success is driven (however, not entirely based) on the quality of what they produce. I really cannot stress how headache free my computer is, and (without having to reinstall my OS every 6 months and operate it with impeccable vigilance) my computer works exactly as well as the day I purchased it. There is a lot to be said for the POSIX style of organizing an OS, it's really quite elegant.
A good example of this is when I watched a professor I work with try to find a day old document on her W7 (installed within the last few weeks) computer. The search in the file manager was so amazingly slow we had to give up and find another way to locate it. Compare this experience to what I have to do on my own computer to find a file. The search includes the actual content of the file (which you can turn off very easily if it is getting in the way of finding your results) as well as any file names. This, in itself, is not anything to write home about, except that the whole process from hitting enter to getting the last result seems to happen instantaneously, as in, it has taken less than 1 second at most since I have gotten the machine. This is because my computer does all the indexing ahead of time when I am not using it, so that I don't have to wait on it when I need it. I am really not exaggerating when I say that most work takes me about a half to quarter as long on my mac than it would on any other system I have used thus far in my life.
I personally couldn't care less which computer people choose to use. But if the world 'runs' on Microsoft, the world is a sucker of the lowest order. It's really absurd how short MS products fall of the bar set by the rest of the industry.
I have not seen many phones which can properly format a moderately complex .docx file as of now - this is where Windows Mobile 7 can enter the market and capture it.
Maybe they can work on it after they decide on a standard for .docx, because I can't seem to get two copies (of the same version of word) to reliably display the same file in the same way on two different machines. I wish what I saw on the screen matched what people would see when they get it. I would personally use LaTex and .rtf formats for everything, but 'the world runs on windows' and when I send an .rtf to one of my bosses, they are so overwhelmed by the cascade of prompts and dialog boxes needed to tell Word that you want to use to open an .rtf, they usually just tell me that their 'computer can't read it' (seriously). User ineptness aside, I really don't understand how the world runs on windows. Most projects where I am forced to use Microsoft products because that is the only thing the recipient uses take 5 to 10 times as long as they need to. Despite it's excessive features, Word (and other MS Office products) seem utterly incapable of making small aesthetic changes to a document without throwing the rest of it in complete formatting chaos. As someone who witnesses and experiences this problem, I would estimate my academic department/ university would easily double if not triple it's productivity if we would start using more appropriate software for what we need to do with it. This would not outright exclude software like office, but it would certainly require us to use microsoft software as a tool rather than a standard. It's very amazing how many more problems a Windows user experiences on a daily basis.
I have stopped screaming at my computer since I started using a mac (with the exception of using office). Let me also say that I am no technological slouch, and my issues with Office are not a byproduct of my lack of understand like it can be with others. To put it another way, I actually run 4 operating systems on my computer (VMware versions of windows on a mac seem to work better than natively installed copies of windows on the same system, no joke, I was even able to register the machine to a Microsoft Active Directory to use an institutional copy of SPSS). When I got my current mac I installed windows on it in a dual boot with a mac partition (using a utility supplied by apple with the OS). I had purchased the Mac for the hardware (a MacBook Air) rather than the OS. I started out using windows for everything, but over several months I had naturally (not consciously) switched over entirely to the mac side. My point in all this, is that Windows is like an abusive boyfriend (I ripped this simile off of a post from a different thread, but it's more than perfect), you don't really understand how dysfunctional it is until to get out of the relationship and find a less destructive partner. It's hard to like Microsoft products, trust me, I tried. I really am not saying this as an Apple fanboi (because I am definitely not one). I am saying this as person who researches the efficacy of information technology in educational settings. In case you are curious about what I am figuring out (if you haven't already) is that technology tends to be selected for all the wrong reasons, and tends to fall so short of the mark, that no one ever uses it. I see classrooms with >$10k Smartboard installations that are completely unusable and collecting dust rapidly because there is a very poorly manufactured and barely functional Windows machine at the heart of it. When I was in 7th grade, my school system blew $15k a classroom into devices like laser disc players and Windows 3.11 boxes with token ring networks (which were obsolete before they were taken out of the box) by the time I graduated 5 years later, I had witnessed one actual use of anything but the television, and that was by a teacher who was responding to a student's challenge him on whether the laserdisc machines actually worked!
Who said they weren't? And there certainly were plenty of rallies condemning Bush. Who do you think put Obama in the White House in the first place?
Randian Objectivist did not put Obama in office.
and
I am saying they weren't condemning Bush, because they didn't (unless you count the last year of his presidency, which really doesn't count because he was already in office at that point). Even if they did before then, most of them voted for Bush both times anyway and I don't count buyers remorse as political vigilance, people need to make good decisions before they elect people into public office. You are exhibiting the exact type of delusional thought I see in almost every political conversation I have with t-bags. There is a lot of unsubstantiated negation, and most arguments are based anecdotal evidence instead of actually trying to defend the basis of your world view. T-baggers hate republicans because they are not callous enough for their taste, also republicans at least understand their own world view enough to defend it properly. However, (and this a classic logical fallacy that libertarians looooove to commit) is that somehow a common enemy makes two groups alike in thought. WRONG! I don't have anything in common with libertarians, I am a special education teacher, libertarians don't believe in my profession, and if you disagree with that, go back to your Rand books, because without altruism public education doesn't even begin to make sense, especially when the student may not be up to the Randian ideal of being self-made and self-reliant. Everyone accepts charity at some point in their life (everyone), it's absurd to deny it to others. It's like T-bags never learned the golden rule.
It's nice to think that everyone should support all the charitable needs of the world independent of government intervention, but people don't now and they wouldn't if it was like that. And people's lack of charitibility has nothing to do with their taxes being high, it has everything to do with the selfishness of the human condition. Libertarians/T-baggers/Randians don't understand the importance of social programs and how much they indirectly benefit from them because they are children, which was my original point.
Kohlberg, stage 2, look it up (I know this is the last thing a libertarian would ever do with their time, political rallies with no clear point take a lot of planning)
Where were the Tea Partiers when he was in office. Where were the rallies condemning him from the Conservatives?
They were too busy calling those who dissented "traitors". I guess Tea-baggers change their mind a lot about what is right or wrong. Especially depending on how the idea serves their desires. Which is why I will never get along with any Randian Objectivist. If you think altruism is intrinsically worthless, you are morally less sophisticated than a 3 year-old. I am not kidding. I am basing this on currently excepted and nearly universally taught theories on human development. Look into Kohlberg's stage 2 of moral development, this is the developmental stage T-bags are operating in. Most people leave that stage around 4 years of age.
When you don't sponsor your own R&D department they start looking for cooperation on the street corner. It's hard to complain about NASA befriending China when the Chinese government is more willing to pay for our space program. The world works like this: nothing in, yields nothing out and garbage in, yields garbage out.
If Microsoft or anyone else were capable of certifying a computer to be malware free, and being right about it, malware wouldn't be much of a problem, now would it?
File under "Dumb Ideas"
I think you are giving Microsoft too much credit for even caring about the user experience, I think Microsoft could do something about malware and spyware, but that would involve actually spending their time and resources developing their own product instead of developing the world for their product. Microsoft loves to shift responsibility over on the user for their hole-ridden software.
I love how Microsoft's answer to their own security holes is to force you to stop using your own computer. Proving once again, that Microsoft has no interest in engineering.
Fun with aspect ratios, in'nit?
Putting the taskbar on the left, as wide as the buttons normally are on the bottom, means you can actually see what the heck you've got going on when you have 20+ things open at a time. In that environment, though, what drives me bonkers are modal dialogs and message boxes that exclude themselves from the taskbar while leaving their owning window disabled, so you have to dig through the whole stupid Z-stack on every monitor to find what you did with it. Even worse, sometimes it winds up underneath a disabled window from the same app. (This isn't supposed to happen if the owner window is set correctly, but it still happens.)
Disclaimer: Three 4:3 monitors are required to make sense of that much going on!
I never have this problem on my mac, when I loose track of a dialog box I just hit the dedicated F key that shows me every window open in a giant grid. When I say Macs are better than windows, I am not talking about how fast a web page loads, I am talking about this kind of stuff. When a company cares enough to consider the user experience, people tend to complain less about the user experience. I swear I have tripled my personal productivity by switching over to mac, not for any one reason, but for thousands of reasons like the spacing of the keys on the keyboard and the use of (intuitive) gestures on the track pad. And the work flow features of the interface! Like being able to hit the space key and get an (literally) instant preview of whatever document you are browsing in the file manager. It really is absurd how much more thought-out my computer is than nearly any device I have ever owned. Built in print to pdf, in the box developers kit, backlit keys, lack of unnecessary third party software, no anti-virus ads popping up out of seemingly nowhere, no virus scares... do I need to go on?
Didn't apple put one of those out a few years ago? You tilted it on it's axis to get a landscape or portrait view?
A company called Axis made a 16-bit greyscale monitor like that for layout on Apples in the early 1990's, I use to have one, it was cool, but the extra mounting hardware it used for that feature had to be so heavy duty it made the thing very lumpy and big, and there really wasn't any good place to put it on a desk. My mother used it until it broke in the early 2000's for writing. I hated and loved that thing. The high quality of the image mixed with the lack of color gave it a very charming worthlessness. Like an IBM Selectric typewriter, in that, it is outdated and all of it's virtues are pointless next to modern technology and it has none of the romance of an Underwood or Brother manual, but it still has weird character that is hard to deny it.
I wish I still had that Axis monitor.
Thankyou! It sounds like your grandchildren have a Grandad/Grandma who definitely loves them, which all kids really need when you get down to it. I see some very tragic situations on a daily basis, and the one thing they have in common is not enough love, or love in the wrong form, it sounds like your babies* have everything they need.
*All the older ladies I work with call their students this, I have started using it the same way, hehe.
P.S. it was nice having such a civilized conversation on this website, it reminds me of the multi-week discussions that use to take place on BBS's back in the day, not to say there wasn't a fair amount of trolling back then as well.
I can relate to two of things you mentioned. I also worked in a (medium in my case) 'integrated' computer lab around the same era (early 2000's), and it was absurd how much people preferred them, even though half of the windows machines hardly worked because they were choked up with 100+(not exaggerating) copies of Bonzai Buddy installed. It was horrible to look at that troop of gorillas everyday. I tried to manage the spyware garbage as well as I could, but the university consistently ignored requests for administrative software that would allow me to keep that lab in better shape. Despite the decrepid nature of the windows machines, days would pass where not a single walk in would attempt to use a mac, despite the lines for everything else. The macs were not steller machines either, 1st gen imacs, but at least the screens did not contain dancing monkeys and machine-gun style pop-up advertising when nothing (seemed) to be running.
The second thing was that I had to do the exact same thing for my sister yesterday because she was having trouble with open office. I love Open Office for many reasons, I use it, but it needs to get out of Beta testing soon*, because it's astoundingly buggy.
* Yes, I know it's not actually in the beta stage.
P.S. I learned about the nightmare that is Vista in the process.
It is unfortunate that they are to some extent more expensive, but I think that it's a result of not cutting corners rather than any type of marketing inflation (the iPod is a very different story however). They just build computers the way I would build them. I work with children with Autism, and you would be amazed at what kind of havoc the sounds of computers wreak on the average sensory-oriented classroom (they are special-ed classrooms with certain sound and tactile features modified for Autism Spectrum Disorders). A low-quality computer fan can really be the difference between a good and bad day. I like my MB-Air because it never makes noise (unless you cover the vent holes and get it hot enough to kick the fan on).
My guess is your a Linux user
Actually, I have a Macbook Air that I run OS X, XP (this is only for access to SPSS via an Active Directory system I need for work), and BackTrack 4. I use each one for various purposes.
If Linux ever gets as large of a customer base, you too, will be needing AV.
I have heard this argument before, and I don't entirely agree with it. I think there would be plenty of security holes and viruses if another OS became as dominant as windows, but I think that the way Windows is set up at the deepest levels, it allows non-users far more access to the internal workings than any of it's competitors.
I don't think viruses or security problems would disappear if everyone switched to a Posix-style OS, but I certainly think a far smaller percentage (as in orders of magnitude) of computers in the world would be loaded down with viruses, worms, bots, etc.. And the biggest problem with windows is just how poorly legitimate software runs to begin with, and how easily and often it will install ancillary garbage you never asked it to install ("Bonzai Buddy" comes to mind).
It's easy to blame the user for these things, but why should the user have to think about security to begin with, the flexibility of computers and the process that produces their designs dictates that reasonable level of security can be made simple and easy for the user to keep up with without the addition of inadequate third-party solutions to the problem.
Microsoft is really bad about drowning the user with obtuse warning messages that cause them to generally ignore the important ones. From a behaviorism-oriented perspective on how they set everything up (I'm a behaviorists, so this is just how I look at things), it's a miracle that it works at all. And if the Windows boxes in my office are any indicator, most people just get by with partially functional computers for the most part.
This is just the tip of my very large rhetorical iceberg on this matter, but I appreciate the intelligent response to my less than intelligent comment, hehe.
Looking at the posts in this thread makes me very glad I don't have to do any of this to keep my computer functional. Windows is a complete joke, I don't think anyone has to put up with more bullshit in computing than the average Windows user, I do genuinely feel bad that these people waste so much time and money on such poorly built technology. It's really very tragic.
This is really a discussion of significant digits versus standard deviations. The measurable accuracy is far more precise than it's usefulness at that precision. First, most of the gaps in the performance numbers were orders of magnitude greater than their lowest decimal place, so using that level of accuracy really accomplishes nothing, it just looks really officially technical to people. The point of SI unit 'multipliers' is so you don't have to include a bunch of numbers that don't matter, making it easier to read.
For example
22.5 is easier to compare to 2.25 than .0000000225 to .00000000225
When you use bad numbering you can get a bad interpretation of results.
I believe you, I am just saying that the presence of a phone and SMS makes them more different then you are implying. Not to mention, price and contractual commitments are involved with phones. The iPod is still more of a 'smart' MP3 player than a 'dumbed-down' cellular phone.
Which is what makes it an iPhone as opposed to an iPod.
Here! Here! Seriously though, TEX is great, and most TEX suites output in PDFs anyway. I like PDFs, but I cannot stand the direction Adobe has gone in recent years.
I am with you on this, but the best part is that PDF is an ISO format, so we can keep using it, but without Adobe garbage.
This exploit is currently melting the email servers at a (very) major corporation which I will leave unnamed. According to someone currently dealing with that, the virus can send 250k messages an hour. It's basically the Ebola Zaire of viruses. It's funny in all the hoopla about Apple vs. Microsoft, people seem to not fathom that their is a real advantage in not having to worry about Microsoft security holes. I am not even vaguely worried about this, my computer doesn't have that problem, or any that I know of. Headache free operation is severely underrated.
It's interesting that my apple (running quick time) has none of these problems. I guess it's their shitty engineering that makes my computer so stable and operational. If you think Apples are less conducive to nerdery and functionality compared to most other options, you are amazingly unobservant. If you think Microsoft has any advantage to either of those two qualities, you are stupid and gullible. If you think 90% of the world's population has any chance of successfully installing, using, and maintaining any stable distro of Linux, you should try to help my grandmother find the word count on her computer sometimes, it will open your eyes to what level most of the worlds people compute on.
Your post shows a complete lack of understanding of the human condition. I am not certain where theologians come into an argument about the fundamental obtainability of scientific truth. I was mostly just using the subject to troll about a greater point of philosophy. I didn't get that deep into anything into the article because I have been too busy editing an IRB request and checking the statistical correlations between syntactic indices on the writings of children. The indices themselves being provided by an experimental computational linguistic analysis system. I could talk about the textbook I am writing with several professors, but it's pretty boring stuff. I work primarily with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. An IRB request is a request to proceed with human (in this case) research, just in case you aren't familiar with that term.