I'm hardly talking about GCC. The typical app, especially on Windows, is using several levels of libraries upon libraries, and that just keeps getting worse with every year, and not necessarily more productive for the developer. I wonder how big a "Hello, World" GUI app build with the default settings with the latest Visual Studio is. Megabytes?
Now, of course I realize the great power in abstraction and the fact that every developer can't and shouldn't reinvent the wheel, but at some point (and IMO, it happened years ago) we achieve diminishing returns where the cost of using the elephantine application frameworks and what-have-you, with their own set of bugs, quirks, documentation problems, etc, exceeds the cost programming on the bare metal (metaphorically, in the case Win32). At least when you venture beyond the extremely narrow problem domain solved by the framework.
However, I think your problem is that you expect a faster CPU to somehow make you more productive when using a word processor.
It _shouldn't_ mean that it still takes 30 to 60 seconds to load the app, but there it is. Try starting Microsoft Wurd. Use a calendar to time it. Yeah, I know it can preload itself at boot, but it still requires more computing power than probably existed in the entire world 30 years ago just to start in a reasonable amount of time.
I don't care what Word can do (which is nothing much until you become an advanced expert in its user hostile interface), the fact that it can't even start quickly is absurd, but here we are. A significant piece (albeit small) of functionality that has not improved in 20 years.
You have a good point, but the operating system has _nothing_ to do with this. You could have done this task using Windows NT 4.0.
There are ways in which we can better utilize the incredible hardware that can be had for a few hundred dollars, but these are largely things that are not done by 95% of computer users, nor are they things that the operating system facilitates. Vista has certain improvements built into it, at least in theory. In practice, it offers literally nothing new or improved over Windows XP. In fact, Windows XP offered little new over Windows 2000, although in my experience Explorer is substantially more stable. Obviously hardware support is a big piece of what the OS provides, but you could run Windows 2000 in 64MB of memory, and its performance was reasonable as long as you didn't use more than 1 or 2 apps at once. 256MB was really needed to make 2000 work well. XP probably wouldn't boot in 64M and you really needed 512MB to make it good. Now Vista is unusably slow with 512MB, although it comes on machines sold with that much RAM, which itself should be criminal since XP would work fine with that much RAM.
The fact of the matter is, the parent post is right: Our OS's don't really give us anything new, but demand exponentially more, although I think Linux is substantially less bad at this than Windows. Windows in particular hasn't had significant usability improvements in over a decade, IMO. When it comes to apps, Microsoft Word, which in my opinion is the worst piece of non-obscure software that doesn't deliberately do damage ever written takes as long or longer to start up in 2007 than it did in 1991. With the relatively rare exceptions of processing-heavy tasks like OCR, or my personal interest, ray-tracing, all of our incredible hardware advances have been soaked up by increasingly sloppy and inefficient programming. Software development is probably less advanced now than it was 10 years ago, because the hardware available doesn't require the efficiency, and the performance of our software is essentially the same despite our machines being something like 100 times as powerful.
In fact, I run Linux and since I do use certain pieces of Windows software, keep a Windows 2000 VM handy. Why would I want XP, or (shudder) Vista when 2000 gives me everything I need?
You sure are asking a lot of the MSM. After all, subtracting 75 points from the IQ of the average reporter or editor puts his or her IQ in the negatives. As is often the case, the/. crowd, along with the MSM takes every opportunity to exercise one of the few acceptable kinds of bigotry among the so-called "enlightened".
I think it's fair to say that XP was an improvement over 2000, at least after a service pack or two, and you turned that stomach-churning default UI skin off. I can't see that happening with Vista though. For all the claims of the new "network stack" I've found network performance to be significantly inferior to XP, which itself isn't as good as Linux.
My kids' machine runs Windows 2000. I'd upgrade to XP but the XP installer blue screens when booting. Yes, blue screens. So I'm stuck with 2000. 2000 was pretty decent, but memory fades with time, and I'd forgotten that Explorer used to be a lot more buggy than it is now, and it's hardly solid even after 12 years. Heck, it took me about an hour to find tons of bugs in Explorer in Vista. Explorer sucked in 1995 and it sucks in 2007. Konqueror improves more in one release than Explorer has in 12 years. Dolphin looks pretty decent too.
I don't run Windows, except for a couple games and apps, and it's great. On the other hand, it doesn't affect Microsoft one bit. I still paid the Microsoft tax on my laptop.
I know, I know, I could find a company that sells me a machine without Windows pre-installed. But you know what? All the ones I could find were much _more_ expensive than the HP lappy I ended up with, on which I run Ubuntu with Windows 2000 in a VM.
Microsoft stopped caring over a decade ago. Do you think they have any interest in what users want or need? It's all about lock-in, baby.
They don't care what's on your hardware as long as it's theirs. Actually I wish that were true, because XP is pretty decent, but they couldn't leave well enough alone and had to spend 5 years squatting on the toilet to excrete Vista, the first piece of software that doesn't even pretend to offer anything new to the customers, it's only selling points are what's good for Microsoft and their big media buddies. OK, I lied. It does offer a new feature for users: It's shiny.
I'm with you. I don't care if Real's latest player is the best piece of software since Nethack. For what they've done to me in the past, and what they made me put up with, including their crap not even working right when it came pre-installed on the laptop, I will never again use their software. And if that means I miss out on content, well, I'm willing to live with that, and let the people providing content in Real's format that they won't be getting my business.
I won't be happy until Real is gone forever.
Besides, who wants DRM'ed video, regardless of the format? Not me.
You think MS can legally weasel out of the GPL obligations? What are you, some astroturfer or something?
They legally weasel out of plenty of other things. The first step is to see if the courts rule against them, the second step (a part of the judicial system only open to super rich and super powerful companies) is to try to find a way to wriggle out of it even if you do lose. Witness the anti-trust case. Microsoft lost and the biggest penalty was the threat of another suit, which, as we've seen, hasn't had much effect either.
Perhaps, but toolbars are quite a bit older than 10 years.
Tabbed dialogs are worth something too, probably something medieval and grisly.
I spent several hours on Saturday helping a blind fellow become more familiar with Windows Explorer and a few other apps and tabbed dialogs are kinda hairy in that context. In fact, from a UI-design point of view, they are hairy, period. My buddy uses the JAWS system on Windows XP and he's quite proficient, but there are tons of shortcuts and minutiae that he is still learning. And, no, JAWS doesn't support Vista, which is good because I recommended he stay from Vista anyway.
I, for one, can't think of a single upside of "Software as Service"
That's because you are thinking "Business 1.0" where "you give me money and I give you value". That's so 20. This is the future where the rule is "You give me money to keep what you've already got." Get with the program. It's not about providing value for money, it's all about holding the proles hostage. It's all about maintaining revenue streams without all that tedious innovation, testing or even giving a damn. It's all about being owed money because you exist. Welcome to post-competition business.
Actually, it's "Think Slightly Differently From The Market Leader, But All In Lockstep With Each Other".
For all of Apples faux non-conformity, they are really not very different from companies like Microsoft, except perhaps the fact that they actually make stuff people want. At least Apple continues to earn its single-digit market-share. Microsoft hasn't earned anything in about a decade.
On the other hand, they can litigate and stomp all over users with the best of them.
It's a very good point, and one which I've always taken into account. On the other hand, I'm terrified of Hillary Clinton having the power of the local Dogcatcher, leave alone anything above and beyond what the President currently enjoys.
But do they bleed the company dry when the company is as rich and powerful as Microsoft? I don't recall seeing any significant changes on the part of Microsoft due to the many lawsuits that have been decided against them.
The problem is not when the unions represent the employees to the companies. That's what the unions were created for, and what they are supposed to be. The problem is that too much these days, the unions are representing the employees _against_ the companies (i.e. the airline workers' unions which seem to prefer destroying the company to compromise, or the teachers' unions, which are very effective at prevent the education reform we need to advance our schools beyond what was designed in the heydey of the Industrial Revolution, or in a lot of cases where the unions are simply in it for their own money and power to the detriment of everyone, where "right to work' laws become necessary for average folks to not be oppressed by the unions themselves.
Now, with the addition of cheap postal rental of DVDs and the Internet, broadcast TV has a hard time competing for the time I have for entertainment.
And yet they insist on doing everything they can to further antagonize me. Random schedules, reality shows, more advertising per hour, advertisements _during_ the programs... I cancelled my satellite subscription years ago and with Netflix and my own personal collection (including The Simpsons, MST3K and plenty of other nerdy shows), I don't miss network TV at all.
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I'm hardly talking about GCC. The typical app, especially on Windows, is using several levels of libraries upon libraries, and that just keeps getting worse with every year, and not necessarily more productive for the developer. I wonder how big a "Hello, World" GUI app build with the default settings with the latest Visual Studio is. Megabytes?
Now, of course I realize the great power in abstraction and the fact that every developer can't and shouldn't reinvent the wheel, but at some point (and IMO, it happened years ago) we achieve diminishing returns where the cost of using the elephantine application frameworks and what-have-you, with their own set of bugs, quirks, documentation problems, etc, exceeds the cost programming on the bare metal (metaphorically, in the case Win32). At least when you venture beyond the extremely narrow problem domain solved by the framework.
That bugs me too, but what bugs me even more is the live music is often played at a different tempo, usually faster, than the studio recording.
However, I think your problem is that you expect a faster CPU to somehow make you more productive when using a word processor.
It _shouldn't_ mean that it still takes 30 to 60 seconds to load the app, but there it is. Try starting Microsoft Wurd. Use a calendar to time it.
Yeah, I know it can preload itself at boot, but it still requires more computing power than probably existed in the entire world 30 years ago just to start in a reasonable amount of time.
I don't care what Word can do (which is nothing much until you become an advanced expert in its user hostile interface), the fact that it can't even start quickly is absurd, but here we are. A significant piece (albeit small) of functionality that has not improved in 20 years.
You have a good point, but the operating system has _nothing_ to do with this. You could have done this task using Windows NT 4.0.
There are ways in which we can better utilize the incredible hardware that can be had for a few hundred dollars, but these are largely things that are not done by 95% of computer users, nor are they things that the operating system facilitates. Vista has certain improvements built into it, at least in theory. In practice, it offers literally nothing new or improved over Windows XP. In fact, Windows XP offered little new over Windows 2000, although in my experience Explorer is substantially more stable. Obviously hardware support is a big piece of what the OS provides, but you could run Windows 2000 in 64MB of memory, and its performance was reasonable as long as you didn't use more than 1 or 2 apps at once. 256MB was really needed to make 2000 work well. XP probably wouldn't boot in 64M and you really needed 512MB to make it good. Now Vista is unusably slow with 512MB, although it comes on machines sold with that much RAM, which itself should be criminal since XP would work fine with that much RAM.
The fact of the matter is, the parent post is right: Our OS's don't really give us anything new, but demand exponentially more, although I think Linux is substantially less bad at this than Windows. Windows in particular hasn't had significant usability improvements in over a decade, IMO. When it comes to apps, Microsoft Word, which in my opinion is the worst piece of non-obscure software that doesn't deliberately do damage ever written takes as long or longer to start up in 2007 than it did in 1991. With the relatively rare exceptions of processing-heavy tasks like OCR, or my personal interest, ray-tracing, all of our incredible hardware advances have been soaked up by increasingly sloppy and inefficient programming. Software development is probably less advanced now than it was 10 years ago, because the hardware available doesn't require the efficiency, and the performance of our software is essentially the same despite our machines being something like 100 times as powerful.
In fact, I run Linux and since I do use certain pieces of Windows software, keep a Windows 2000 VM handy. Why would I want XP, or (shudder) Vista when 2000 gives me everything I need?
Actually, they let him put in the yeast, but stopped him before he could add the sugar.
You sure are asking a lot of the MSM. After all, subtracting 75 points from the IQ of the average reporter or editor puts his or her IQ in the negatives. As is often the case, the /. crowd, along with the MSM takes every opportunity to exercise one of the few acceptable kinds of bigotry among the so-called "enlightened".
I ran this through Babelfish, but it just shrugged.
So Windows is like the Federal Government... it only survives by destroying the productivity of others.
I think it's fair to say that XP was an improvement over 2000, at least after a service pack or two, and you turned that stomach-churning default UI skin off. I can't see that happening with Vista though. For all the claims of the new "network stack" I've found network performance to be significantly inferior to XP, which itself isn't as good as Linux.
My kids' machine runs Windows 2000. I'd upgrade to XP but the XP installer blue screens when booting. Yes, blue screens. So I'm stuck with 2000. 2000 was pretty decent, but memory fades with time, and I'd forgotten that Explorer used to be a lot more buggy than it is now, and it's hardly solid even after 12 years. Heck, it took me about an hour to find tons of bugs in Explorer in Vista. Explorer sucked in 1995 and it sucks in 2007. Konqueror improves more in one release than Explorer has in 12 years. Dolphin looks pretty decent too.
BTW, I run Ubuntu on all my machines.
I don't run Windows, except for a couple games and apps, and it's great. On the other hand, it doesn't affect Microsoft one bit. I still paid the Microsoft tax on my laptop.
I know, I know, I could find a company that sells me a machine without Windows pre-installed. But you know what? All the ones I could find were much _more_ expensive than the HP lappy I ended up with, on which I run Ubuntu with Windows 2000 in a VM.
Microsoft stopped caring over a decade ago. Do you think they have any interest in what users want or need? It's all about lock-in, baby.
They don't care what's on your hardware as long as it's theirs. Actually I wish that were true, because XP is pretty decent, but they couldn't leave well enough alone and had to spend 5 years squatting on the toilet to excrete Vista, the first piece of software that doesn't even pretend to offer anything new to the customers, it's only selling points are what's good for Microsoft and their big media buddies. OK, I lied. It does offer a new feature for users: It's shiny.
I'm with you. I don't care if Real's latest player is the best piece of software since Nethack. For what they've done to me in the past, and what they made me put up with, including their crap not even working right when it came pre-installed on the laptop, I will never again use their software. And if that means I miss out on content, well, I'm willing to live with that, and let the people providing content in Real's format that they won't be getting my business.
I won't be happy until Real is gone forever.
Besides, who wants DRM'ed video, regardless of the format? Not me.
It's usually not a problem until she forgets herself and says, "Thanks, Mom!"
You think MS can legally weasel out of the GPL obligations? What are you, some astroturfer or something?
They legally weasel out of plenty of other things. The first step is to see if the courts rule against them, the second step (a part of the judicial system only open to super rich and super powerful companies) is to try to find a way to wriggle out of it even if you do lose. Witness the anti-trust case. Microsoft lost and the biggest penalty was the threat of another suit, which, as we've seen, hasn't had much effect either.
Perhaps, but toolbars are quite a bit older than 10 years.
Tabbed dialogs are worth something too, probably something medieval and grisly.
I spent several hours on Saturday helping a blind fellow become more familiar with Windows Explorer and a few other apps and tabbed dialogs are kinda hairy in that context. In fact, from a UI-design point of view, they are hairy, period. My buddy uses the JAWS system on Windows XP and he's quite proficient, but there are tons of shortcuts and minutiae that he is still learning. And, no, JAWS doesn't support Vista, which is good because I recommended he stay from Vista anyway.
Just... don't... mention... Flash...
I, for one, can't think of a single upside of "Software as Service"
That's because you are thinking "Business 1.0" where "you give me money and I give you value". That's so 20. This is the future where the rule is "You give me money to keep what you've already got." Get with the program. It's not about providing value for money, it's all about holding the proles hostage. It's all about maintaining revenue streams without all that tedious innovation, testing or even giving a damn. It's all about being owed money because you exist. Welcome to post-competition business.
Actually, it's "Think Slightly Differently From The Market Leader, But All In Lockstep With Each Other".
For all of Apples faux non-conformity, they are really not very different from companies like Microsoft, except perhaps the fact that they actually make stuff people want. At least Apple continues to earn its single-digit market-share. Microsoft hasn't earned anything in about a decade.
On the other hand, they can litigate and stomp all over users with the best of them.
Maybe when voter turnout gets to be less than 20% they will start to notice.
Turnout doesn't matter to the winner.
It's a very good point, and one which I've always taken into account. On the other hand, I'm terrified of Hillary Clinton having the power of the local Dogcatcher, leave alone anything above and beyond what the President currently enjoys.
But do they bleed the company dry when the company is as rich and powerful as Microsoft? I don't recall seeing any significant changes on the part of Microsoft due to the many lawsuits that have been decided against them.
The liberal press is generally very biased against Israel, which if it were a position taken by conservatives, would be considered anti-Semitic.
The problem is not when the unions represent the employees to the companies. That's what the unions were created for, and what they are supposed to be. The problem is that too much these days, the unions are representing the employees _against_ the companies (i.e. the airline workers' unions which seem to prefer destroying the company to compromise, or the teachers' unions, which are very effective at prevent the education reform we need to advance our schools beyond what was designed in the heydey of the Industrial Revolution, or in a lot of cases where the unions are simply in it for their own money and power to the detriment of everyone, where "right to work' laws become necessary for average folks to not be oppressed by the unions themselves.
Now, with the addition of cheap postal rental of DVDs and the Internet, broadcast TV has a hard time competing for the time I have for entertainment.
And yet they insist on doing everything they can to further antagonize me. Random schedules, reality shows, more advertising per hour, advertisements _during_ the programs... I cancelled my satellite subscription years ago and with Netflix and my own personal collection (including The Simpsons, MST3K and plenty of other nerdy shows), I don't miss network TV at all.
I remember when MTV showed mostly music videos that didn't suck. IMO that ended around 1991.
Does anyone remember when TV simple to use, and most of the shows were better?
My goodness, the media industry has turned watching TV into something about as fun as dealing with Microsoft software.
There's nothing that can't be turned into a total nightmare by adding technology.