They can even verbosly copy the various Google APIs, APIs are not copyrightable after all. Google fought that out with Oracle.
This isn't necessarily true. There was a Slashdot article just a few days ago about this; it looks like Oracle is appealing that decision and it could very well be overturned. Of course, such an idiotic court decision will probably cause total havoc int he computing sector, but still....
I tried a couple of Windows Phones a while back. I wasn't too impressed, mainly because the UI is just so butt-ugly. They were pretty responsive, though; I'll give them that. But I wouldn't ever buy one because of two things: 1) it's from Microsoft, as you noted about no one wanting to buy a MS product, and after all the bad experiences I've had with their other software I have zero confidence this would be any different once I start getting to know it a lot better, and 2) I have to assume that a MS mobile device isn't going to be too different from an Apple iOS device, since they're obviously trying to ape Apple as much as possible these days, and this means that the device will be a complete PITA when you try to do something in a way different than the One True Holy Way the designers intended. I already had that experience with my wife's earlier iPod and iPhone; I couldn't do anything with those stupid devices without using their horrible iTunes software. By contrast, our Android phones are much easier to deal with, for instance when I want to copy a bunch of music files to them; all I have to do is connect a USB cable and run rsync since the SD card shows up as a regular FAT filesystem.
But about your point regarding Canonical doing nothing right for the past 5 years, can you point to any other big or well-known (on Slashdot) company that's done things right for the past 5 years? I can't think of very many. Off the top of my head, Intel and Amazon have done pretty well as far as not screwing up horribly; Intel's new CPUs are extremely power-efficient, and Amazon continues to do better in the online retail segment. Everyone else is generally screwing up left and right: Microsoft->Windows 8 Metro, Windows RT tablet writeoff Google->screwed up UI in Gmail, developed bad reputation for privacy, relentless pushing of Google+ Canonical->Unity, Mir, "open source Tea Party" comment Dell->new laptop designs cheaper and uglier than before, big financial problems, 15k layoff HP->I can't remember the last time their stuff didn't suck Lenovo->Thinkpads getting cheaper and crappier
Textual interaction with programs is the default, which is perfectly normal to a programmer, but completely opaque to the uninitiated.
No it isn't; your post sounds like you just stepped out of 1997 at the very latest. My wife uses Linux every day, and has absolutely no clue how to use the command line. Thanks to KDE, she doesn't have to; for web browsing, working with office documents, basic file management, and other basic computer uses, it serves her purposes perfectly, without all the annoyances and headaches that come with Windows.
If being able to (god help you) fine tune your init scripts doesn't strike a deep chord of joy in your heart, then Linux may not be for you.
This is total crap. You don't have to be able to mess with init scripts (which are going away soon anyway with systemd), or anything else of the sort, to be a regular Linux user. Lots of corporate and government office workers use Linux every day and don't mess with any kind of system administration tasks. That stuff is all available, and isn't going anywhere (provided you have root access, not something you'd get on a normal office machine, but which you would retain on your home system), but it isn't necessary at all with a modern distro.
ALSA is part of the kernel. PulseAudio is a userspace layer that works with ALSA drivers (in the kernel) to route and control sound from sound-producing processes to hardware devices. For almost everyone these days, it works just fine.
It mostly works because we Americans also value that paper, and readily exchange goods and services for them. If the Chinese and Arabs decide that paper is valueless, it's only because we Americans have also (and initially) decided it's valueless, which means our economy has collapsed. If our economy has collapsed to the point where we have no real currency and have gone back to bartering or trading gold or whatever, we'll have much worse problems than not getting Chinese electronics or Arabian oil.
Go blame the assholes that deregulated an industry that almost immediately started creating a gigantic economic bubble and then begged for help when it popped.
Yes, but what have Obama or the Democrats in Congress done about that problem? The Dems were in control of Congress in 2006-8 as I recall, and they didn't do squat about that problem, and instead gave a giant no-strings bailout to the banksters. Did they try to reinstitute the Glass-Steagal Act which Clinton helped overturn? Not at all. No, this isn't Obama's fault alone, obviously, but it's not like the Dems have done anything helpful. (And of course, it's not like the Republicans have done anything helpful either, but on the internet usually the Dems are somehow portrayed as wonderful legislators whose only fault is not being able to handle Republican "obstructionism", when the reality is that the Dems are no better.)
DIN holes suck; they were always much too small. In today's age of digital audio and MP3 players, you need a display that shows you what you're listening to, when you have something that can select between dozens or hundreds of albums. The DIN size is just too small for this, after you add in the controls (volume, track change, etc.).
What you really need is double-DIN.
If you want to talk about obsolete shit in cars, take a look at any brand-new car, and you'll probably see a CD player. WTF? I haven't played a CD in many, many years. Luckily, these same cars usually (but not always) also have a USB port to plug a USB thumbdrive into, so you can play MP3s. But here, you have the problem I described above; with a tiny screen, it's really hard to select a particular album/song off this thumbdrive.
You have it backwards. Touchscreens are cheaper than buttons. It's a lot cheaper to just slap a touchscreen in there and do all the controls in software than to design and manufacture custom buttons and control panels for those buttons.
Re:A matrix of 8 x 8 rectangular buttons...
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A New Car UI
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· Score: 1
I don't get it. What's the problem with a matrix of 64 backlit buttons in a complex aircraft? A lot of modern aircraft avionics systems have a display that's surrounded by similar buttons.
Re:Death to UIX experts.
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A New Car UI
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· Score: 1
No, it's worse with the UIX "experts". At least when engineers design interfaces, you get something that's perfectly functional, though perhaps a little arcane or obtuse, and maybe not so pretty. With practice, the engineers' interface will work well, and reliably. The UIX "expert's" interface will be pretty, but completely non-functional and impractical. You won't get much control or feedback or information, and the thing will fail in catastrophic ways at the worst times (for instance, try using this dipshit's multitouch UI in a car when it's -10 outside and you're wearing gloves).
Re:Not to state the obvious...
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A New Car UI
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· Score: 1
Yuk. I hate chalkboards. Much too noisy.
Back in the 90s when I went to college, we had this amazing invention in the newer classrooms, which I still see a lot in corporate conference rooms. It's called a "white board", or more accurately, a "dry erase board". It has all the advantages of the chalkboard, without the squeaky noise and dust. Just watch out for idiots using indelible Sharpies on it.
Or worse, heated seats. Leather is really just a luxury (cloth doesn't crack after years of use, and today's synthetic leathers are really good), but heated seats are really helpful if you live in a northern climate. But some cars tie the cold-weather package to the automatic transmission for some idiotic reason.
And it's not just that the automatic is "wasteful" (actually today's automatics get about the same fuel economy as manuals, at least according to EPA figures, sometimes slightly better). As the previous poster said, the automatic usually adds about $1500 to the car's price. What if you really want the heated seats, but the extra $1500 for the auto trans blows the car out of your budget?
Re:Here's the problem, vehicle designers
on
A New Car UI
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· Score: 1
Touchscreens in cars have their uses, just not for commonly-used functions. For changing rarely-changed configuration settings, they're really helpful because you can put a lot of configuration setting in there in software, instead of needing special plastic buttons for every single thing. These settings would be things you'd only change rarely, while you're parked.
For things like adjusting HVAC or radio stations, they're utterly stupid.
For Star Trek TNG, the touch-screens used miniature forcefields to give them tactile feedback, just like they used forcefields in the holodeck to make things realistic. Obviously, this technology does not exist today.
Yes there is. Cars aren't like houses. If nothing else, I need to be able to change the fan speed any time I want. This isn't a problem in houses because houses have ducts in unobtrusive places in each room, and don't usually have to deal with large temperature extremes. In cars, the vents are blowing directly in your face, and when it's 120F or -40 outside, you really do want cold/hot air blowing right at you, but you might want to change the velocity at times.
Android (despite its many flaws) has a task manager that's easy to get to from the app menu, which can easily be used to kill wayward processes. This isn't normally needed because they go into the background, and after a certain time (less than an hour I'm sure, probably 10 minutes or less but I'm not sure exactly) are shut down automatically.
Windows Phone is not a viable alternative, it's a complete joke (esp. when you consider MS's history as far as software quality, UI design, etc.).
I don't know if Canonical's offering will be any good or not, but just because consumers are wisely avoiding Windows Phone doesn't mean that iOS and Android are really all that great, it just means Windows Phone sucks so bad that no one wants it more than the other two.
I'm not impressed with Canonical's Unity UI, however the UI you want on a phone is totally different than what works well on a desktop or laptop PC, so I'd be willing to check out their phone offering, but I am skeptical.
Don't forget the cost to replace equipment. When a virus is detected, then all equipment that virus may have affected has to be quarantine, removed, and destroyed. That includes computers, monitors, even keyboards and mice. It all has to be put in the crusher and totally destroyed, in order to deal properly with the virus.
If you're thinking this is a ridiculous waste of money, then you haven't been around the US government.
Lead is most certainly non-magnetic (same with copper), yet according to the first X-Men movie, Magneto has no trouble controlling lead bullets.
In the second movie, he stopped the X-Men's airplane from crashing. Airplanes aren't made from steel, they're made usually from aluminum, another totally non-magnetic substance.
Apparently, in the X-Men universe, ALL metals are magnetic.
Europe has much more government than America, and far more regulation, yet healthcare there costs a fraction as much, even when they're using medical devices manufactured in America.
An artificial hip joint, made in America, costs around $15000 at an American hospital, even though it only cost a few hundred dollars to make (in America).
That exact same joint, flown to Belgium and installed at a hospital in Belgium, costs less than USD$1000.
Are you going to try to tell me that Belgium doesn't have state regulations?
Slashdot Mirror
If it weren't by MS, and it weren't so butt-ugly, it'd probably be a smash hit.
They can even verbosly copy the various Google APIs, APIs are not copyrightable after all. Google fought that out with Oracle.
This isn't necessarily true. There was a Slashdot article just a few days ago about this; it looks like Oracle is appealing that decision and it could very well be overturned. Of course, such an idiotic court decision will probably cause total havoc int he computing sector, but still....
I tried a couple of Windows Phones a while back. I wasn't too impressed, mainly because the UI is just so butt-ugly. They were pretty responsive, though; I'll give them that. But I wouldn't ever buy one because of two things: 1) it's from Microsoft, as you noted about no one wanting to buy a MS product, and after all the bad experiences I've had with their other software I have zero confidence this would be any different once I start getting to know it a lot better, and 2) I have to assume that a MS mobile device isn't going to be too different from an Apple iOS device, since they're obviously trying to ape Apple as much as possible these days, and this means that the device will be a complete PITA when you try to do something in a way different than the One True Holy Way the designers intended. I already had that experience with my wife's earlier iPod and iPhone; I couldn't do anything with those stupid devices without using their horrible iTunes software. By contrast, our Android phones are much easier to deal with, for instance when I want to copy a bunch of music files to them; all I have to do is connect a USB cable and run rsync since the SD card shows up as a regular FAT filesystem.
But about your point regarding Canonical doing nothing right for the past 5 years, can you point to any other big or well-known (on Slashdot) company that's done things right for the past 5 years? I can't think of very many. Off the top of my head, Intel and Amazon have done pretty well as far as not screwing up horribly; Intel's new CPUs are extremely power-efficient, and Amazon continues to do better in the online retail segment. Everyone else is generally screwing up left and right:
Microsoft->Windows 8 Metro, Windows RT tablet writeoff
Google->screwed up UI in Gmail, developed bad reputation for privacy, relentless pushing of Google+
Canonical->Unity, Mir, "open source Tea Party" comment
Dell->new laptop designs cheaper and uglier than before, big financial problems, 15k layoff
HP->I can't remember the last time their stuff didn't suck
Lenovo->Thinkpads getting cheaper and crappier
Textual interaction with programs is the default, which is perfectly normal to a programmer, but completely opaque to the uninitiated.
No it isn't; your post sounds like you just stepped out of 1997 at the very latest. My wife uses Linux every day, and has absolutely no clue how to use the command line. Thanks to KDE, she doesn't have to; for web browsing, working with office documents, basic file management, and other basic computer uses, it serves her purposes perfectly, without all the annoyances and headaches that come with Windows.
If being able to (god help you) fine tune your init scripts doesn't strike a deep chord of joy in your heart, then Linux may not be for you.
This is total crap. You don't have to be able to mess with init scripts (which are going away soon anyway with systemd), or anything else of the sort, to be a regular Linux user. Lots of corporate and government office workers use Linux every day and don't mess with any kind of system administration tasks. That stuff is all available, and isn't going anywhere (provided you have root access, not something you'd get on a normal office machine, but which you would retain on your home system), but it isn't necessary at all with a modern distro.
ALSA is part of the kernel. PulseAudio is a userspace layer that works with ALSA drivers (in the kernel) to route and control sound from sound-producing processes to hardware devices. For almost everyone these days, it works just fine.
It mostly works because we Americans also value that paper, and readily exchange goods and services for them. If the Chinese and Arabs decide that paper is valueless, it's only because we Americans have also (and initially) decided it's valueless, which means our economy has collapsed. If our economy has collapsed to the point where we have no real currency and have gone back to bartering or trading gold or whatever, we'll have much worse problems than not getting Chinese electronics or Arabian oil.
Go blame the assholes that deregulated an industry that almost immediately started creating a gigantic economic bubble and then begged for help when it popped.
Yes, but what have Obama or the Democrats in Congress done about that problem? The Dems were in control of Congress in 2006-8 as I recall, and they didn't do squat about that problem, and instead gave a giant no-strings bailout to the banksters. Did they try to reinstitute the Glass-Steagal Act which Clinton helped overturn? Not at all. No, this isn't Obama's fault alone, obviously, but it's not like the Dems have done anything helpful. (And of course, it's not like the Republicans have done anything helpful either, but on the internet usually the Dems are somehow portrayed as wonderful legislators whose only fault is not being able to handle Republican "obstructionism", when the reality is that the Dems are no better.)
Well there was Dennis Kucinich. But he seems to have been run out of the Democratic party.
DIN holes suck; they were always much too small. In today's age of digital audio and MP3 players, you need a display that shows you what you're listening to, when you have something that can select between dozens or hundreds of albums. The DIN size is just too small for this, after you add in the controls (volume, track change, etc.).
What you really need is double-DIN.
If you want to talk about obsolete shit in cars, take a look at any brand-new car, and you'll probably see a CD player. WTF? I haven't played a CD in many, many years. Luckily, these same cars usually (but not always) also have a USB port to plug a USB thumbdrive into, so you can play MP3s. But here, you have the problem I described above; with a tiny screen, it's really hard to select a particular album/song off this thumbdrive.
You have it backwards. Touchscreens are cheaper than buttons. It's a lot cheaper to just slap a touchscreen in there and do all the controls in software than to design and manufacture custom buttons and control panels for those buttons.
I don't get it. What's the problem with a matrix of 64 backlit buttons in a complex aircraft? A lot of modern aircraft avionics systems have a display that's surrounded by similar buttons.
No, it's worse with the UIX "experts". At least when engineers design interfaces, you get something that's perfectly functional, though perhaps a little arcane or obtuse, and maybe not so pretty. With practice, the engineers' interface will work well, and reliably. The UIX "expert's" interface will be pretty, but completely non-functional and impractical. You won't get much control or feedback or information, and the thing will fail in catastrophic ways at the worst times (for instance, try using this dipshit's multitouch UI in a car when it's -10 outside and you're wearing gloves).
Yuk. I hate chalkboards. Much too noisy.
Back in the 90s when I went to college, we had this amazing invention in the newer classrooms, which I still see a lot in corporate conference rooms. It's called a "white board", or more accurately, a "dry erase board". It has all the advantages of the chalkboard, without the squeaky noise and dust. Just watch out for idiots using indelible Sharpies on it.
There is no logical reason that volume is two fingers, but fan control is four, which means you will be looking at it to see what it's doing.
And what if someone is missing a finger on their right hand?
This multitouch interface is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of for car UIs.
Or worse, heated seats. Leather is really just a luxury (cloth doesn't crack after years of use, and today's synthetic leathers are really good), but heated seats are really helpful if you live in a northern climate. But some cars tie the cold-weather package to the automatic transmission for some idiotic reason.
And it's not just that the automatic is "wasteful" (actually today's automatics get about the same fuel economy as manuals, at least according to EPA figures, sometimes slightly better). As the previous poster said, the automatic usually adds about $1500 to the car's price. What if you really want the heated seats, but the extra $1500 for the auto trans blows the car out of your budget?
Touchscreens in cars have their uses, just not for commonly-used functions. For changing rarely-changed configuration settings, they're really helpful because you can put a lot of configuration setting in there in software, instead of needing special plastic buttons for every single thing. These settings would be things you'd only change rarely, while you're parked.
For things like adjusting HVAC or radio stations, they're utterly stupid.
For Star Trek TNG, the touch-screens used miniature forcefields to give them tactile feedback, just like they used forcefields in the holodeck to make things realistic. Obviously, this technology does not exist today.
Yes there is. Cars aren't like houses. If nothing else, I need to be able to change the fan speed any time I want. This isn't a problem in houses because houses have ducts in unobtrusive places in each room, and don't usually have to deal with large temperature extremes. In cars, the vents are blowing directly in your face, and when it's 120F or -40 outside, you really do want cold/hot air blowing right at you, but you might want to change the velocity at times.
Stupid typical warmongering American. Fuck off and die with your shitty healthcare.
Android (despite its many flaws) has a task manager that's easy to get to from the app menu, which can easily be used to kill wayward processes. This isn't normally needed because they go into the background, and after a certain time (less than an hour I'm sure, probably 10 minutes or less but I'm not sure exactly) are shut down automatically.
Windows Phone is not a viable alternative, it's a complete joke (esp. when you consider MS's history as far as software quality, UI design, etc.).
I don't know if Canonical's offering will be any good or not, but just because consumers are wisely avoiding Windows Phone doesn't mean that iOS and Android are really all that great, it just means Windows Phone sucks so bad that no one wants it more than the other two.
I'm not impressed with Canonical's Unity UI, however the UI you want on a phone is totally different than what works well on a desktop or laptop PC, so I'd be willing to check out their phone offering, but I am skeptical.
Belgium has more regulation than America. Things cost much, much less. Hence, regulation is a GOOD thing.
Are you really that fucking stupid?
Don't forget the cost to replace equipment. When a virus is detected, then all equipment that virus may have affected has to be quarantine, removed, and destroyed. That includes computers, monitors, even keyboards and mice. It all has to be put in the crusher and totally destroyed, in order to deal properly with the virus.
If you're thinking this is a ridiculous waste of money, then you haven't been around the US government.
You don't know that adamantium is magnetic.
Lead is most certainly non-magnetic (same with copper), yet according to the first X-Men movie, Magneto has no trouble controlling lead bullets.
In the second movie, he stopped the X-Men's airplane from crashing. Airplanes aren't made from steel, they're made usually from aluminum, another totally non-magnetic substance.
Apparently, in the X-Men universe, ALL metals are magnetic.
Europe has much more government than America, and far more regulation, yet healthcare there costs a fraction as much, even when they're using medical devices manufactured in America.
Explain that one.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
An artificial hip joint, made in America, costs around $15000 at an American hospital, even though it only cost a few hundred dollars to make (in America).
That exact same joint, flown to Belgium and installed at a hospital in Belgium, costs less than USD$1000.
Are you going to try to tell me that Belgium doesn't have state regulations?