but that doesn't mean that it's content-free. No, it doesn't actually have to do with scientifically established property of retinas, nor does it magically reach out and paint your retinas with pleasant fairy dust.
But the marketing department uses "retina" to indicate a very high resolution display. To those of us that like them, that is a feature, which makes the term useful, though any word designating the same feature would have had the same information function in the end.
But I do use vim on a regular basis for little things and have had no issues in iTerm, so it may depend (for the benefit of info for others) on the level at which you use Vim. If it's just to bung on text files here and there, it might be Good Enough[TM] for many. (It is for me—no issues.)
Sounds like for serious Vim users (I was always in the Emacs camp instead for big work) iTerm, too, may be lacking.
But on desktop side, one of the things that's often behind are support for common desktop file formats and standards, and amongst the most common management issues are hardware support bugs and instabilities. In hopes of getting features and bug fixes, you run updates to relevant packages. Those packages then depend on other packages—to get the bug fix or the feature/support you're happy to see has been implemented, you end up either:
(1) Spending time trying to figure out dependencies yourself, disconnect other dependencies with your own configuration and compiles, and only upgrade those packages that absolutely must be upgraded to get the updates you want.
(2) Updating everything to save the time otherwise spent doing (1), but then dealing with shifting filesystem standards, codebases, infrastructure implementations, etc. and having to essentially manage your own projects/code/work in relation to these in order to get your system back to the functional state it was in just before you ran the update. And there are often regressions.
It's a sort of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't phenomenon on the Linux desktop; either way you're going to . These days I tell people:
- If you install Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. and immediately find every last thing that you need and a well-supported system, great. Linux may be for you.
- If you feel as though you're "almost there" and are just waiting for those one or two precious updates that will fulfill your needs, steer clear. You'll probably never get there, and you'll spend a lot of time tracking the evolution of the codebase(s) and doing system management as you wait.
that initially helped me to transition to Mac OS.:-)
Not wanting to shell out for a Mac without being sure I could acclimatize to the environment that I was thinking about switching to, I dual-booted a hacked up T60p with Linux+Hackintosh partitions. Still a great machine, and there are some ways in which it definitely outclassed my MacBook Pro (albeit not in the area of OS X compatibility, alas...)
This is not to suggest that you *ought* to do this (time is valuable, particularly for working professionals), but it is possible to get much of the free software and even the GNU command line environment for Mac OS. I do it via MacPorts though I know there are other alternatives as well.
When I was contemplating the switch from Linux it took me about two months to become convinced that I could be satisfied with it. Most important factors were some critical free software standards, a GNU environment, a decent terminal, and better focus and window management.
I settled on iTerm which is actually a damn fine terminal for my purposes, better than either the GNOME or KDE offerings for my day-to-day use, but it took me a while to find it, and I didn't like any of the alternatives.
MacPorts brought the GNU environment and utilities, applications like ImageMagick and graphical Emacs (which I used extensively in Linux but has actually fallen by the wayside in my Mac use, supplanted by Sublime Text) and a number of other standards.
The focus and window management issues were solved with apps, as you point out (Divvy deserves a special mention here as an app with great configurability but without making it unmanageable).
Appearance configurability (things like the dock and icons) were a bugaboo at first but it turns out that many applications store their graphics as PNG files and you can just drop replacements in. Not ideal, but not much different from what I always ended up doing in Linux, with the benefit that I've only had to do it once in most cases, as opposed to having to do it with every application or desktop element point release in Linux, and the file names and positions seem not to be subject to so much churn on the Mac.
The multimonitor support I agree with—I don't like the way it's done. On the other hand, it is *predictable* and stable within the bounds of what can be done, which never happened to me on Linux (not only did I invariably find myself getting into the guts and scripting it myself in a kludgy way, but once again every other point release would leave me with a mess that I'd have to clean up at the console because graphics would fail to start because my script had been rendered incompatible in some way).
The development environment is a valid gripe but a small one. XCode is easy enough to get ahold of, and gcc is also there with minimal fuss.
My experience of switching has been that once the initial two-month learning curve was over:
(1) All of my existing scripts worked (2) My development environment was surprisingly easy to bootstrap (3) The command line feels just like my old Linux command line did (4) There are a few niggles in the UI that I don't like, but they're not major (5) My desktop is sufficiently visually and workflow customized for my needs and has remained so without effort (6) I spent little to no time now on system administration for my own system (compared with 20% of my work time in Linux, with unpredictable breakages)
One thing that I still haven't mastered:
Mac cursor movement by keyboard with the same level of proficiency I had in Linux/Windows. But, against the tradeoff of that 20% I think I'm still far more productive and feel (frustratedly) interrupted by my system much less.
I'll probably buy it to replace both my phone and my current iPad in one device. I use Google Voice + Talkatone on my iPad already when I'm stationary, but a 10" tablet is just too big to carry around—for example—to the grocery store. But at 7" I'd make the leap and do away with the phone form factor altogether.
Kindle anyway. Slow, cumbersome, difficult to search. Purely a "use only when absolutely necessary" feature. I suspect (just a speculation based on my experience and the experiences of several colleagues) that most Kindle users buy books on Amazon.com using their computer, and only use the Kindle device/app for *reading*.
But nobody right now has Amazon's selection, or (just as big an asset) review infrastructure and data.
For the serious reader (several books a week, academic or specialty books, etc.) Amazon is currently the only choice by a large margin.
And I doubt the iPad Mini (or whatever) will have any effect on Kindle Fire sales, since Amazon advertises is as a "reader" much more than in the "tablet" space. The Kindle Fires is my social circles were all bought by people that use them for reading and reading only. They really had no other ambitions for the device, which is how they ended up with a Kindle Fire in the first place.
Even if they knew that you could do other things with one, I'm not at all sure they'd be interested in actually doing those things. I suspect that the marketing differences will keep these two devices in different and only slightly overlapping market segments.
That's my point. The questions on their own don't have clear answers for most people, much less memorable ones. The more likely they are to be clear and memorable, the more likely it is that other people know that about them as well.
(These are real questions, BTW. As a part of work not so long ago I created test accounts on a bunch of new web services and saved some examples of challenge questions that I thought were stupid.)
When a company loses value on the NYSE, this is not the same as saying that this poor company makes it a policy to see their stock value decline.
Companies can be held liable and accused of failure in meeting their goals. This is a separate issue from suggesting that they have the wrong goals.
Similarly, a single employee can represent a point of failure in meeting company goals. This is different from suggesting that all company employees are unable to contribute to meeting company goals.
those with memorable answers are precisely those most likely to be very important (i.e. likely public or easily accessible) information.
You're stuck with "What is your mother's maiden name?" (visit an Genealogy website and search for the person to find out) or the alternative, "What was the phone number of the first person you ever dated?" (Something you yourself likely can't find.)
I've noticed a sharp rise in these kinds of difficult-information questions in recent months. The problem is that if I have to go digging through my personal archives to find the information (if I can even find it at all), it's quite possible that I won't be able to find it when I need it later on, and likely that I won't simply remember it offhand.
I know people that have taken to generating secure random passwords and using these as the answers to questions, then keeping a spreadsheet with (a) domain, (b) questions, and (c) the random password generated for each question. But of course then there's a spreadsheet hanging around that contains this information, and the labor overhead involved becomes a disincentive to take the questions seriously at all (which is why I also know a person that answers every single security question they're asked to answer with "None".)
But seriously, at the practical level, who can answer:
What was the first name of your third grade teacher? What was the nearest cross street to the home you lived in as a child? Who was your sports or other hero at eight years old? What was the name of your boss on your first job?
All of these kinds of questions dig back into obscure things that haven't been important to most people in many years, not to mention that many people wouldn't have known in the first place, and/or the answers could be so ambiguous that you'll struggle to remember what you entered ("Superman?" "My dad?" "Neil Armstrong?") given the ambiguities and categorial thinking involved.
I tend to think that the answer to security is a social one—calculate the risks and use "good enough" security, then assume that some percentage of security cases will fail and maintain resources/insurance to address the resulting cases in a way that allows you to continue to do business and gain users/customers. More or less what happens with banking right now.
People are willing to work for a good salary or a good hourly rate.
Drop the hourly rate and the benefits to below living wage, and they have no incentive to work full time, particularly if they can satisfy needs better with the social safety net. Why work if you're still going to bo bankrupt?
Of course, we then say "well then let's drop the value of the safety net so that it's below the wages that are available."
But then you risk another rational choice: criminal activity. Why work legally and go bankrupt if you can work in the gray or illegally and survive? That's where spammers and drug dealers come from.
Most people don't see any particular task as beneath them, but they do see some wage levels as pointless thumb-twirling. You want people to scrub toilets? Pay them an annual wage above the federal poverty level and they'll be happy to. Pay them twice the federal poverty level and they'll whistle while they do it. Pay them at minimum wage or below, and there are very few jobs you can get them to do.
Yes, this picture is incompatible with our macroeconomic situation. But microactors don't care about macroeconomics. They care about making ends meet and accounting to those to whom they are accountable (creditors, utilities, and dependents first amongst these, not "the system").
Wow, only 15 years too late to matter at all
on
CDE Open Sourced
·
· Score: 1
(if we are generous about things).
I would have killed for CDE on Linux in 1996. But now?
What could possibly be the point? And Motif next? Seriously?
Both my wife and my sister have very nice laptops ca. 2009-2010. I used to do an ongoing and significant amount of Windows tech support for both of them.
Nothing in about 2 years. What they have in common: both have iPhones.
I don't live with my sister, so I don't know whether this is absolutely true in her case, but my wife hasn't even opened her laptop in months. I regularly see her using her iPhone for web browsing, Facebook, email, etc. (As in, for several hours a day.) And I have recently done iPhone-related tech support for both (sister: how to upgrade iOS 4 -> iOS 5 to install an app that she needed; wife: replace an iPhone battery that she basically wore out).
I do know that my sister is active on Facebook and she does communicate with me via email, so I'm making the assumption that she and my wife followed basically the same path: get an iPhone and never really use the computer again.
A lot of Slashdotters could really stand to read some Human Factors and HCI research before they spout off. Humans are not deterministically programmable. They don't have APIs. They do, othe other hand, have fingers and eyes and cultural assumptions.
Experience is ceretainly not subjective, it is a large area of empirical research and a professional specialization that pays big bucks and it does this for a reason--because good UI/UX design returns big profits because the consumers of any consmer electronics device are (drumroll) people.
Capacative touch was *the* killer feature of the original iPhone. No other legitimately mass-market device of any kind from a major retailer or carrier had it when the iPhone was launched, and the alternatives (resistive touch, button-based navigation, etc.)
Capactivite touch basically makes possible the current generation of mobile devices and the practicability of their basic UI model.
Your dismissal isn't just uninformed but it in fact sounds just plain silly.
People say that you can't get "real work" done on an iPad but I'm an academic and use it as a primary tool for my research and writing. Here's what I use most:
Sente for iPad (academic reference, citation, and PDF database and annotating manager, syncs to the cloud and desktop database) DevonThink to Go (the anything database, syncs to desktop database) Textastic (Syntax-aware cloud-capable text editor similar in many ways to SublimeText) Notability (Notepad/note archiving application)
There are a bunch of other apps that also get put through their paces from time to time—Pages, Numbers, Things, etc.
Thanks to Talkatone, my iPad is also my primary phone and text messenger.
I tried a Samsung Android tablet for a couple of weeks as I was getting ready to upgrade from a 16GB original iPad to a 64GB iPad 2. I hit up my friends and colleagues for input on replacement apps and academic productivity apps in general.
I couldn't get a single one of the apps above satisfactorily replaced in the Android ecosystem. So I returned the Samsung and got the iPad 2. It's not that Android itself sucks (though it is less smooth and polished) but that the apps really suck when it comes to getting real work done.
I routinely put in many-hours-long sessions of real daytime work on the iPad, basically whenever I don't need to do anything with SPSS or large datasets or final write-ups, because the iPad interface is so much more transparent and the iPad is so much more mobile than my laptop. But what I've seen so far doesn't suggest to me that Android could be used for the same serious work in the way that I use the iPad, and it's not about the intrinsic capability of the device (the hardware is nearly as good) but more about the general half-assedness of the Android ecosystem in general.
I want to work on my work, not work on getting my tablet to do what I want.
Their in-store service was always good, and you had a 50/50 chance of getting really good service on a support call.
I had been with them 10 years by the time I left and midway through (around year 5) I could call and get an upgrade 6-8 months early for having been a "longtime customer." Just had to ask and they'd do it.
In a way, by offering even better service (making iPhone unlocks available) they lost me—the moment they started doing unlocks, I paid the early termination fee for every line, unlocked all of the iPhones in house (which AT&T did without hassle) and went to T-Mobile's $30/month unlimited no-contract data plan with them, with Talkatone and Google Voice+Chat for making all in-house calls via WiFi.
We'll save a goodly amount, we have unlocked iPhones for less than the retail cost, and we now are not bound by any contract.
But I have to say that when people ask about going to a carrier, I still recommend AT&T if they want a subsidized phone. They were reasonable enough that I stayed for a decade. (Trivia: Before that in the late '90s we were using Verizon and it was a disaster, customer service and billing wise, bad enough that even now I wouldn't consider them.)
is "substantive freedom," i.e. freedom that actually makes you, the individual, feel more free in your life, given your preferences.
The lack of substantive freedom, which is commonly sacrificed for a kind of de novo freedom, is a thread that runs through all of society right now. With free software you're free to do a lot of things in theory, but in practice (i.e. in your daily life) your range of actual choices/opportunities is actually much smaller with free software than with "un-free" software.
The same thing is happening in our political and economic life. So many are desperate to protect freedoms they never plan to use or will never practically have the opportunity to use, and are willing, in order to protect them, to sacrifice the practical everyday choices and opportunities that they would gain with (say) more regulation, changes in the tax code, increases in public health or safety, etc.
Idealism can be the greatest tyrant of them all when it causes individuals to limit their choices to almost nil in order to preserve theoretical freedoms that they will likely (statistics tell us) never be in a position to use.
Only the choice increasingly, for the list of things that end users expect computers to do in 2012, isn't just about games.
The choice is not "free software or paid software"
The choice is "paid software or no software"
Linux is a reasonable OS (though the GNOME and KDE foibles in recent years have put a very large dent in its reasonableness), but the fact is that for an end user most of the things that one might want to do with a computer can't be done on Linux without much more expense (assuming that labor time has value and that this is equivalent to expense).
Where is the Creative Suite equivalent for the college arts students? Where is the Garage Sale equivalent for online sellers? Where is the DevonThink equivalent for information library managers? Where is the Scrivener equivalent for writers?
Nowhere. And don't give me GIMP, Firefox, PostgreSQL, and OpenOffice as "replacements." Ask the college arts students, online sellers, information library managers, and writers whether they're equivalent. They're not and the claims that they are exemplify the disconnect between open source developers and end users that has existed since the beginning.
So far, in 19 years of Linux, that solution is not forthcoming. Which means that it is no solution at all.
Given the choice between a solution and no solution, most sane people would prefer the former.
The fact is, outside of TeX, various hunks of server software, and a bunch of development environments, there really isn't much stellar software available for Linux at all. OpenOffice and Firefox and GIMP are about all that there is. And of those, only GIMP is even really passable (and just barely, at that) as world-class software.
It's not 1993 any more. While the Linux world has continued to develop piss-all for end users, most of us that have to do real work have found that there's an entire universe of fabulous software out there now for almost any particular task. No, it's not the "one wrench for all nuts" kind of tool that, say, BASH scripting is, but in fact the extra focus, polish, and thoughtfulness in UI design make the non-coding/non-IT work that the rest of us have to do go that much more smoothly and efficiently.
And that's why people are leaving Linux on the desktop—because "no solution yet" keeps coming up against the "several solutions to choose from on non-Linux platform X" for task (or entertainment need) Y.
The reason people are leaving GNOME and Linux in droves is because they already have learned to use it—only to find that revision N+1 makes all of the learning they already did useless.
Linux and the open source community re-invent every wheel over and over again, each time with a completely new man page (or info page, or GNOME help page, or KDE help page—Q.E.D.).
They are moving to platforms where they can learn it once and move on to the things they wanted a computer for in the first place, rather than spending a large chunk of their life essentially stuck in the ever-changing Linux user manual (which must be collected from multiple sources, all of which also change on a regular and ongoing basis).
This would not have been true of Windows, and it was less and less true of Linux, ironically.
Meanwhile, you spout off about Apple lacking at the high end above, then contradict yourself by saying that the today's desktops are the high end below. Either Apple can't do real UNIX because it doesn't to high-end computing today, or desktops are the equivalent of your archetypal high-end UNIX systems from the '80s.
You can't have it both ways. (Or rather, I'm perfectly willing to let you, but it looks foolish.)
Slashdot Mirror
but that doesn't mean that it's content-free. No, it doesn't actually have to do with scientifically established property of retinas, nor does it magically reach out and paint your retinas with pleasant fairy dust.
But the marketing department uses "retina" to indicate a very high resolution display. To those of us that like them, that is a feature, which makes the term useful, though any word designating the same feature would have had the same information function in the end.
don't see the issues that you experienced.
But I do use vim on a regular basis for little things and have had no issues in iTerm, so it may depend (for the benefit of info for others) on the level at which you use Vim. If it's just to bung on text files here and there, it might be Good Enough[TM] for many. (It is for me—no issues.)
Sounds like for serious Vim users (I was always in the Emacs camp instead for big work) iTerm, too, may be lacking.
is a win.
But on desktop side, one of the things that's often behind are support for common desktop file formats and standards, and amongst the most common management issues are hardware support bugs and instabilities. In hopes of getting features and bug fixes, you run updates to relevant packages. Those packages then depend on other packages—to get the bug fix or the feature/support you're happy to see has been implemented, you end up either:
(1) Spending time trying to figure out dependencies yourself, disconnect other dependencies with your own configuration and compiles, and only upgrade those packages that absolutely must be upgraded to get the updates you want.
(2) Updating everything to save the time otherwise spent doing (1), but then dealing with shifting filesystem standards, codebases, infrastructure implementations, etc. and having to essentially manage your own projects/code/work in relation to these in order to get your system back to the functional state it was in just before you ran the update. And there are often regressions.
It's a sort of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't phenomenon on the Linux desktop; either way you're going to . These days I tell people:
- If you install Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. and immediately find every last thing that you need and a well-supported system, great. Linux may be for you.
- If you feel as though you're "almost there" and are just waiting for those one or two precious updates that will fulfill your needs, steer clear. You'll probably never get there, and you'll spend a lot of time tracking the evolution of the codebase(s) and doing system management as you wait.
Your eyes will howl at a return to lower resolution displays. It'll make you feel like you need serious glasses.
You notice the difference at the end of the day—you really do.
that initially helped me to transition to Mac OS. :-)
Not wanting to shell out for a Mac without being sure I could acclimatize to the environment that I was thinking about switching to, I dual-booted a hacked up T60p with Linux+Hackintosh partitions. Still a great machine, and there are some ways in which it definitely outclassed my MacBook Pro (albeit not in the area of OS X compatibility, alas...)
This is not to suggest that you *ought* to do this (time is valuable, particularly for working professionals), but it is possible to get much of the free software and even the GNU command line environment for Mac OS. I do it via MacPorts though I know there are other alternatives as well.
When I was contemplating the switch from Linux it took me about two months to become convinced that I could be satisfied with it. Most important factors were some critical free software standards, a GNU environment, a decent terminal, and better focus and window management.
I settled on iTerm which is actually a damn fine terminal for my purposes, better than either the GNOME or KDE offerings for my day-to-day use, but it took me a while to find it, and I didn't like any of the alternatives.
MacPorts brought the GNU environment and utilities, applications like ImageMagick and graphical Emacs (which I used extensively in Linux but has actually fallen by the wayside in my Mac use, supplanted by Sublime Text) and a number of other standards.
The focus and window management issues were solved with apps, as you point out (Divvy deserves a special mention here as an app with great configurability but without making it unmanageable).
Appearance configurability (things like the dock and icons) were a bugaboo at first but it turns out that many applications store their graphics as PNG files and you can just drop replacements in. Not ideal, but not much different from what I always ended up doing in Linux, with the benefit that I've only had to do it once in most cases, as opposed to having to do it with every application or desktop element point release in Linux, and the file names and positions seem not to be subject to so much churn on the Mac.
The multimonitor support I agree with—I don't like the way it's done. On the other hand, it is *predictable* and stable within the bounds of what can be done, which never happened to me on Linux (not only did I invariably find myself getting into the guts and scripting it myself in a kludgy way, but once again every other point release would leave me with a mess that I'd have to clean up at the console because graphics would fail to start because my script had been rendered incompatible in some way).
The development environment is a valid gripe but a small one. XCode is easy enough to get ahold of, and gcc is also there with minimal fuss.
My experience of switching has been that once the initial two-month learning curve was over:
(1) All of my existing scripts worked
(2) My development environment was surprisingly easy to bootstrap
(3) The command line feels just like my old Linux command line did
(4) There are a few niggles in the UI that I don't like, but they're not major
(5) My desktop is sufficiently visually and workflow customized for my needs and has remained so without effort
(6) I spent little to no time now on system administration for my own system (compared with 20% of my work time in Linux, with unpredictable breakages)
One thing that I still haven't mastered:
Mac cursor movement by keyboard with the same level of proficiency I had in Linux/Windows. But, against the tradeoff of that 20% I think I'm still far more productive and feel (frustratedly) interrupted by my system much less.
I'll probably buy it to replace both my phone and my current iPad in one device. I use Google Voice + Talkatone on my iPad already when I'm stationary, but a 10" tablet is just too big to carry around—for example—to the grocery store. But at 7" I'd make the leap and do away with the phone form factor altogether.
Kindle anyway. Slow, cumbersome, difficult to search. Purely a "use only when absolutely necessary" feature. I suspect (just a speculation based on my experience and the experiences of several colleagues) that most Kindle users buy books on Amazon.com using their computer, and only use the Kindle device/app for *reading*.
But nobody right now has Amazon's selection, or (just as big an asset) review infrastructure and data.
For the serious reader (several books a week, academic or specialty books, etc.) Amazon is currently the only choice by a large margin.
And I doubt the iPad Mini (or whatever) will have any effect on Kindle Fire sales, since Amazon advertises is as a "reader" much more than in the "tablet" space. The Kindle Fires is my social circles were all bought by people that use them for reading and reading only. They really had no other ambitions for the device, which is how they ended up with a Kindle Fire in the first place.
Even if they knew that you could do other things with one, I'm not at all sure they'd be interested in actually doing those things. I suspect that the marketing differences will keep these two devices in different and only slightly overlapping market segments.
That's my point. The questions on their own don't have clear answers for most people, much less memorable ones. The more likely they are to be clear and memorable, the more likely it is that other people know that about them as well.
(These are real questions, BTW. As a part of work not so long ago I created test accounts on a bunch of new web services and saved some examples of challenge questions that I thought were stupid.)
When a company loses value on the NYSE, this is not the same as saying that this poor company makes it a policy to see their stock value decline.
Companies can be held liable and accused of failure in meeting their goals. This is a separate issue from suggesting that they have the wrong goals.
Similarly, a single employee can represent a point of failure in meeting company goals. This is different from suggesting that all company employees are unable to contribute to meeting company goals.
those with memorable answers are precisely those most likely to be very important (i.e. likely public or easily accessible) information.
You're stuck with "What is your mother's maiden name?" (visit an Genealogy website and search for the person to find out) or the alternative, "What was the phone number of the first person you ever dated?" (Something you yourself likely can't find.)
I've noticed a sharp rise in these kinds of difficult-information questions in recent months. The problem is that if I have to go digging through my personal archives to find the information (if I can even find it at all), it's quite possible that I won't be able to find it when I need it later on, and likely that I won't simply remember it offhand.
I know people that have taken to generating secure random passwords and using these as the answers to questions, then keeping a spreadsheet with (a) domain, (b) questions, and (c) the random password generated for each question. But of course then there's a spreadsheet hanging around that contains this information, and the labor overhead involved becomes a disincentive to take the questions seriously at all (which is why I also know a person that answers every single security question they're asked to answer with "None".)
But seriously, at the practical level, who can answer:
What was the first name of your third grade teacher?
What was the nearest cross street to the home you lived in as a child?
Who was your sports or other hero at eight years old?
What was the name of your boss on your first job?
All of these kinds of questions dig back into obscure things that haven't been important to most people in many years, not to mention that many people wouldn't have known in the first place, and/or the answers could be so ambiguous that you'll struggle to remember what you entered ("Superman?" "My dad?" "Neil Armstrong?") given the ambiguities and categorial thinking involved.
I tend to think that the answer to security is a social one—calculate the risks and use "good enough" security, then assume that some percentage of security cases will fail and maintain resources/insurance to address the resulting cases in a way that allows you to continue to do business and gain users/customers. More or less what happens with banking right now.
People are willing to work for a good salary or a good hourly rate.
Drop the hourly rate and the benefits to below living wage, and they have no incentive to work full time, particularly if they can satisfy needs better with the social safety net. Why work if you're still going to bo bankrupt?
Of course, we then say "well then let's drop the value of the safety net so that it's below the wages that are available."
But then you risk another rational choice: criminal activity. Why work legally and go bankrupt if you can work in the gray or illegally and survive? That's where spammers and drug dealers come from.
Most people don't see any particular task as beneath them, but they do see some wage levels as pointless thumb-twirling. You want people to scrub toilets? Pay them an annual wage above the federal poverty level and they'll be happy to. Pay them twice the federal poverty level and they'll whistle while they do it. Pay them at minimum wage or below, and there are very few jobs you can get them to do.
Yes, this picture is incompatible with our macroeconomic situation. But microactors don't care about macroeconomics. They care about making ends meet and accounting to those to whom they are accountable (creditors, utilities, and dependents first amongst these, not "the system").
(if we are generous about things).
I would have killed for CDE on Linux in 1996. But now?
What could possibly be the point? And Motif next? Seriously?
Both my wife and my sister have very nice laptops ca. 2009-2010. I used to do an ongoing and significant amount of Windows tech support for both of them.
Nothing in about 2 years. What they have in common: both have iPhones.
I don't live with my sister, so I don't know whether this is absolutely true in her case, but my wife hasn't even opened her laptop in months. I regularly see her using her iPhone for web browsing, Facebook, email, etc. (As in, for several hours a day.) And I have recently done iPhone-related tech support for both (sister: how to upgrade iOS 4 -> iOS 5 to install an app that she needed; wife: replace an iPhone battery that she basically wore out).
I do know that my sister is active on Facebook and she does communicate with me via email, so I'm making the assumption that she and my wife followed basically the same path: get an iPhone and never really use the computer again.
"and the alternatives (resistive touch, button-based navigation, etc.)"
should read:
"and the alternatives (resistive touch, button-based navigation, etc.) frankly sucked."
A lot of Slashdotters could really stand to read some Human Factors and HCI research before they spout off. Humans are not deterministically programmable. They don't have APIs. They do, othe other hand, have fingers and eyes and cultural assumptions.
Experience is ceretainly not subjective, it is a large area of empirical research and a professional specialization that pays big bucks and it does this for a reason--because good UI/UX design returns big profits because the consumers of any consmer electronics device are (drumroll) people.
See Also: Apple.
Capacative touch was *the* killer feature of the original iPhone. No other legitimately mass-market device of any kind from a major retailer or carrier had it when the iPhone was launched, and the alternatives (resistive touch, button-based navigation, etc.)
Capactivite touch basically makes possible the current generation of mobile devices and the practicability of their basic UI model.
Your dismissal isn't just uninformed but it in fact sounds just plain silly.
Perhaps for the same reason so many geeks think they know how to design and optimally configure an end-user appliance like a tablet from scratch?
(Written on an iPad.)
People say that you can't get "real work" done on an iPad but I'm an academic and use it as a primary tool for my research and writing. Here's what I use most:
Sente for iPad (academic reference, citation, and PDF database and annotating manager, syncs to the cloud and desktop database)
DevonThink to Go (the anything database, syncs to desktop database)
Textastic (Syntax-aware cloud-capable text editor similar in many ways to SublimeText)
Notability (Notepad/note archiving application)
There are a bunch of other apps that also get put through their paces from time to time—Pages, Numbers, Things, etc.
Thanks to Talkatone, my iPad is also my primary phone and text messenger.
I tried a Samsung Android tablet for a couple of weeks as I was getting ready to upgrade from a 16GB original iPad to a 64GB iPad 2. I hit up my friends and colleagues for input on replacement apps and academic productivity apps in general.
I couldn't get a single one of the apps above satisfactorily replaced in the Android ecosystem. So I returned the Samsung and got the iPad 2. It's not that Android itself sucks (though it is less smooth and polished) but that the apps really suck when it comes to getting real work done.
I routinely put in many-hours-long sessions of real daytime work on the iPad, basically whenever I don't need to do anything with SPSS or large datasets or final write-ups, because the iPad interface is so much more transparent and the iPad is so much more mobile than my laptop. But what I've seen so far doesn't suggest to me that Android could be used for the same serious work in the way that I use the iPad, and it's not about the intrinsic capability of the device (the hardware is nearly as good) but more about the general half-assedness of the Android ecosystem in general.
I want to work on my work, not work on getting my tablet to do what I want.
Their in-store service was always good, and you had a 50/50 chance of getting really good service on a support call.
I had been with them 10 years by the time I left and midway through (around year 5) I could call and get an upgrade 6-8 months early for having been a "longtime customer." Just had to ask and they'd do it.
In a way, by offering even better service (making iPhone unlocks available) they lost me—the moment they started doing unlocks, I paid the early termination fee for every line, unlocked all of the iPhones in house (which AT&T did without hassle) and went to T-Mobile's $30/month unlimited no-contract data plan with them, with Talkatone and Google Voice+Chat for making all in-house calls via WiFi.
We'll save a goodly amount, we have unlocked iPhones for less than the retail cost, and we now are not bound by any contract.
But I have to say that when people ask about going to a carrier, I still recommend AT&T if they want a subsidized phone. They were reasonable enough that I stayed for a decade. (Trivia: Before that in the late '90s we were using Verizon and it was a disaster, customer service and billing wise, bad enough that even now I wouldn't consider them.)
is "substantive freedom," i.e. freedom that actually makes you, the individual, feel more free in your life, given your preferences.
The lack of substantive freedom, which is commonly sacrificed for a kind of de novo freedom, is a thread that runs through all of society right now. With free software you're free to do a lot of things in theory, but in practice (i.e. in your daily life) your range of actual choices/opportunities is actually much smaller with free software than with "un-free" software.
The same thing is happening in our political and economic life. So many are desperate to protect freedoms they never plan to use or will never practically have the opportunity to use, and are willing, in order to protect them, to sacrifice the practical everyday choices and opportunities that they would gain with (say) more regulation, changes in the tax code, increases in public health or safety, etc.
Idealism can be the greatest tyrant of them all when it causes individuals to limit their choices to almost nil in order to preserve theoretical freedoms that they will likely (statistics tell us) never be in a position to use.
Only the choice increasingly, for the list of things that end users expect computers to do in 2012, isn't just about games.
The choice is not "free software or paid software"
The choice is "paid software or no software"
Linux is a reasonable OS (though the GNOME and KDE foibles in recent years have put a very large dent in its reasonableness), but the fact is that for an end user most of the things that one might want to do with a computer can't be done on Linux without much more expense (assuming that labor time has value and that this is equivalent to expense).
Where is the Creative Suite equivalent for the college arts students?
Where is the Garage Sale equivalent for online sellers?
Where is the DevonThink equivalent for information library managers?
Where is the Scrivener equivalent for writers?
Nowhere. And don't give me GIMP, Firefox, PostgreSQL, and OpenOffice as "replacements." Ask the college arts students, online sellers, information library managers, and writers whether they're equivalent. They're not and the claims that they are exemplify the disconnect between open source developers and end users that has existed since the beginning.
So far, in 19 years of Linux, that solution is not forthcoming. Which means that it is no solution at all.
Given the choice between a solution and no solution, most sane people would prefer the former.
The fact is, outside of TeX, various hunks of server software, and a bunch of development environments, there really isn't much stellar software available for Linux at all. OpenOffice and Firefox and GIMP are about all that there is. And of those, only GIMP is even really passable (and just barely, at that) as world-class software.
It's not 1993 any more. While the Linux world has continued to develop piss-all for end users, most of us that have to do real work have found that there's an entire universe of fabulous software out there now for almost any particular task. No, it's not the "one wrench for all nuts" kind of tool that, say, BASH scripting is, but in fact the extra focus, polish, and thoughtfulness in UI design make the non-coding/non-IT work that the rest of us have to do go that much more smoothly and efficiently.
And that's why people are leaving Linux on the desktop—because "no solution yet" keeps coming up against the "several solutions to choose from on non-Linux platform X" for task (or entertainment need) Y.
The reason people are leaving GNOME and Linux in droves is because they already have learned to use it—only to find that revision N+1 makes all of the learning they already did useless.
Linux and the open source community re-invent every wheel over and over again, each time with a completely new man page (or info page, or GNOME help page, or KDE help page—Q.E.D.).
They are moving to platforms where they can learn it once and move on to the things they wanted a computer for in the first place, rather than spending a large chunk of their life essentially stuck in the ever-changing Linux user manual (which must be collected from multiple sources, all of which also change on a regular and ongoing basis).
were very easy to port and run on Mac OS.
This would not have been true of Windows, and it was less and less true of Linux, ironically.
Meanwhile, you spout off about Apple lacking at the high end above, then contradict yourself by saying that the today's desktops are the high end below. Either Apple can't do real UNIX because it doesn't to high-end computing today, or desktops are the equivalent of your archetypal high-end UNIX systems from the '80s.
You can't have it both ways. (Or rather, I'm perfectly willing to let you, but it looks foolish.)