Just a few years ago, customized news was supposed to be one of the much-hyped big-money profit opportunities of the Internet, and... I'm trying to recall the names of some of the companies pursuing it as a business model... Individual?
The theory was that busy executives with no time to read the whole Wall Street Journal and no interest in serendipitous discovery of significant news items would gladly pay to get the news filtered so that they only saw items in the preselected categories of interest.
Yep, Individual.com still exists and appears to be operating on a business model of free-as-in-beer.
Digital Equipment Corporation under Robert Palmer, Wang Laboratories under Richard Miller, Polaroid under William J. McCune, and of course Hewlett-Packard under Carly Fiona demonstrate clearly that it takes a business person to run a business.
Addle-headed technical people without marketing expertise are apt to introduce boneheaded products like the PDP-1, the Wang Word Processor, the Model 110 Pathfinder Camera, the HP-35 calculator, etc. etc. when none of these products were backed by solid evidence from focus groups showing that consumers had any need of them.
They also have a disturbing tendency to be perfectionists, and build products that are better, more reliable, and more durable than they actually need to be, adding cost and decreasing margins.
This is a little freaky. Jobs and Raskin, rivals for the title of father of the Macintosh, both get pancreatic cancer... which is rare to begin with... and usually a death sentence.
Raskin dies of it, Jobs lives...
I'm not sure exactly what it means, but it must mean something.
...then the code isn't important enough to optimize. Plain and simple.
Never try to optimize anything unless you have measured the speed of the code before optimizing and have measured it again after optimizing.
Optimized code is almost always harder to understand, contains more possible code paths, and more likely to contain bugs than the most straightforward code. It's only worth it if it's really faster...
And you simply cannot tell whether it's faster unless you actually time it. It's absolutely mindboggling how often a change you are certain will speed up the code has no effect, or a truly negligible effect, or slows it down.
This has always been true. In these days of heavily optimized compilers and complex CPUs that are doing branch prediction and God knows what all, it is truer than ever. You cannot tell whether code is fast just by glancing at it. Well, maybe there are processor gurus who can accurately visualize the exact flow of all the bits through the pipeline, but I'm certainly not one of them.
A corollary is that since the optimized code is almost always trickier, harder to understand, and often contains more logic paths than the most straightforward code, you shouldn't optimize unless you are committed to spending the time to write a careful unit-test fixture that exercises everything tricky you've done, and write good comments in the code.
Oh, gimme a break... "The W4200HD has a native pixel resolution of 1024x768, and as such, isn't a true HD device, since it doesn't have enough pixels to draws a 1280x720 (720p) HDTV image."
Look, I know lots of people will buy these things and be ecstatically happy with them, but can't we have just a little bit of truth-in-advertising? If it's not HDTV, don't call it HDTV.
A not-terribly-computer-savvy friend of mine is having problems with his AOL email.
So I suggested he sign up for Yahoo mail, because all the people I know who use it find it perfectly satisfactory.
He can't get signed up for Yahoo mail. I tried coaching him step by step over the phone. I can't be 100% certain of what's happening, but as I followed through the same steps on my own browser, he ran into troubles at exactly the point when Yahoo popped up a confirmation screen on my browser.
I'm about 95% sure he has popup blocking enabled and that's what's preventing him from signing up with Yahoo.
Of course, he doesn't know what a popup blocker is, or how to control it.
So, these days there are probably users who are suffering both from the new popups and from incompatibilities caused by the use of popup blockers.
The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb 'ought to be put under international control.' But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us namely: 'How difficult are these things to manufacture?...
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralized police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace.'
-- George Orwell, "You and the Atomic Bomb," October 19, 1945
What WOULD you call Google's approach?
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's not quite AI, yet Google comes closer to realizing the fantasy of Isaac Asimov's Multivac than anything else I've experienced before. It's very weird: the impression that Google gives is that it does NOT understand your question, yet it DOES manage to find the answers you want.
It's not quite user-interface, in the sense of elegant widgets or consistency or any of that stuff. Google's traditional search features could almost run on Lynx on a green screen. Maybe they can. Google Maps is visually spiffy by comparison to Mapquest, but it's nothing we haven't seen in standalone programs years ago.
It isn't really "search." Or at least, if it is, with every new thing they roll out, Google does an amazing job of expanding my notion of what "search" means. What does it mean to "search" on "250 pounds in kilograms?"
Something that Google seems to share with Apple is some sort of courtesy or kindness or service orientation to the end-user. It just works. And unlike Microsoft or Apple, Google's services seem to come with fewer strings attached.
One of the things that delights me about Google is a certain kind of freshness I haven't seen elsewhere as often as I'd like. They have the characteristic you used to see in innovative software that when you describe the latest Google feature, it doesn't sound all that new, yet when you use it you get that feeling that something unexpected has been revealed.
Loaded with Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg?
on
The Sub-$100 Laptop?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
(I remember how intriguing it was when Steve Jobs premiered the NeXT with the American Heritage dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare as standard equipment...)
The article says "With increasing power requirements the amps on the 12V rail have constantly increased, and if this had continued unchecked a PSU failure could potentially result in a fatal accident. With the new design this risk has been greatly reduced and we should see a transition to dual or even quad 12V rails on all high-rated PC power supplies this year."
What on earth is this supposed to mean? If your power supply fails only half the contents of your computer will fry?
On a car, an insurance company would call this a "total loss" and I can't quite imagine repairing a computer half of whose components had been burned out.
"Programmers at Work," Susan Lammers, Microsoft Press, 1986, ISBN 0-914845-71-3, happens to be a darn good book even if it does have a chapter about Gates. It has a number of pages of printout (pp. 70, 348-352) of a listing by GATES/ALLEN/DAVIDOFF of the original 8080 BASIC interpreter, and a page in Gates' handwriting, p. 353, "Storage layout for BASIC."
It all looks perfectly workmanlike to me. I haven't gone over it with a fine-toothed comb judging how good it is compared to, uh, the code I was writing in 1978, but I think Bill Gates knows how to program.
It also has some magazine article he wrote in 1975 about tricky coding to squeeze algorithms into as few memory locations as possible.
The book also has code and handwritten material by Andy Hertzfeld, Gary Kildall, Butler Lampson, Jonathan Sachs, and, yes, Charles Simonyi (with address labels named PRPLC, PRPLC1, ERRPRP, PRPLC2, PRPLC3, and variables named PNCTP, PRPLLC, PRPLCN, BPESCC. Crystal clear.)
Yeah... I shouldn't knock it for being a self-acknowledged beginner's level. And, yes, I need to take a look at the Hanaan Rosenthal book the reviewer mentions.
Yet another chatty beginner's guide?
on
Beginning AppleScript
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...I already have Ethan Wilde's "AppleScript for the Internet" and Matt Neuberg's "AppleScript: The Definitive Guide" (an O'Reilly, with a Boston Terrier on the cover). And a couple of Apple PDFs.
What we really need is a fully grown-up guide that is truly definitive, with proper descriptions of the never-quite-explained object model behind AppleScript that is rigorous and complete--and that includes the functionality provided in Apple-supplied AppleScript extensions and in the Finder.
I want something at an Inside Macintosh level, or a Harbison and Steele level; not a Danny Goodman level or even a man-page level.
Neuberg's book is the best I've seen so far. He makes the right promise, but doesn't quite deliver. It is all too obvious that he is charting his personal voyage of discovery.
I know I should not comment on Goldstein's book without at least having browsed through it in a bookstore, but it sounds as if it is just one of another AppleScript books that will be full of magic snippets I can use, never quite understanding why they work, or why they fail... exactly what all the quoting rules are... and so forth.
I know there was a big fuss about these possibilities a couple of years ago--IIRC there were assertions that Al Qaeda was using it--and I thought some researchers had done a careful study and found no evidence for it whatsoever.
Is steganography in multimedia images really being used, or is it just a paranoid fantasy?
(Yes, I know--if it has never been detected, thatproves that it works....)
Futures, futures, futures. The Hubble is here and it works.
What will we do if the JWST has teething pains? Decide we can't send up a mission to fix it, either?
I thought the whole rationale for putting human in space rather than robots was their great adaptability... that is to say, their ability to fix things.
Old Omar Khayyam said it:
Some for the glories of this world and some Sigh for the Prophets Paradise to come. Ah, take the Cash and let the Credit go, Nor heed the Rumbling of a Distant Drum.
Remember that old word "perfected?" PDAs were perfected years ago. They do everything they need to do. They do it fairly well. Almost everyone that needs one has it already, they are durable, and nobody desperately needs any spiffy new features that it doesn't already have.
This just in: sales of pencils, shoelaces, and clothespins are not growing, either.
Despite my warnings, my wife bought a $30 battery-powered PDA with no PC connectivity about five years ago. She loved it. It did everything she needed. Then she failed to change the batteries in time and lost everything. She hasn't used one since. When a high-quality PDA with a reasonable way to sync to a PC drops to about $30, she'll probably by another one.
Me, I'm happy with my black-and-white--correction, dark-green-snot-on-light-green-snot--Palm. Why would I buy anything more? It's not as if my friends' addresses will be all that much more legible in color.
(Plus, I haven't checked all the latest models--why would I?--but it utterly baffles me why anyone would prefer a model with a rechargeable battery that needs daily charging--a battery that will deteriorate and require difficult and expensive replacement in about three years--over a model that runs six months on a set of cheap AAA's I can pick up in any supermarket checkout line).
Seriously. There's something odd about this. I'm not a great Microsoft fan, but a lot of their software is reasonably usable. (Excel, for example). I like Apple's hardware, but lots of other companies make quality, thoughtfully designed PC's, laptops, and so forth.
Digital cameras are a good example of a whole product category that have to cram globs of electronics and boatloads of figures into a tiny package, and for the most part they do it quite successfully and gracefully. It's NOT usual to hear people say "I couldn't get my digital camera to work at all" or "it froze up on me in the middle of photographing the kids' birthday party."
The big knock on non-iPod players, echoed in many reviews of would-be "iPod killers," is that people just can't get them to work. The article says that Robert Scoble "said he's heard from several executives who dutifully bought Microsoft-powered players, tried them, failed to get them working, and returned them in favor of an iPod. He went through the same experience..."
I won't trivialize UI design by saying "it's not rocket science," but what exactly is wrong with all of Apple's competitors? It's not as if Apple didn't have DRM.
Are all the competitive products SO weighed down by all sorts of hidden evil goals and agendas that there's little time and effort that can be spared on serving the consumer?
Every computer company and technology progresses. They all introduce new products at six month intervals or thereabouts. There is no exactly right time.
This is a case where the marketplace actually sort of does operate, and is reflected in the street prices of the gear you buy. If you wait for the hot new product and buy it immediately, you'll find that you will likely a) pay full list price, b) experience unpredictable but significant and annoying shipping delays--including changes in promised ship dates, and c) suffer from various teething pains in the first run of the product.
Those teething pains can vary from serious (high failure rates and product recalls) to cosmetic (Apple Cube "cracks") to trivial but still annoying (on a G5 Tower purchased immediately when first available, when the CD ejects it sounds cheap and clunky and you have the feeling that the door-opening mechanism may fail--although it hasn't yet. They made some kind of improvement and later models are much smoother and confidence-inspiring... that sort of thing...)
Meanwhile, in the runup to the new product introduction everyone is trying to clear out old inventory, and you can get a fire-sale price and all sorts of deals with "free" extra RAM and bundled printers and so forth.
When you buy in is a personal matter, but the actual price you pay and the deal you get tend to reflect the marketplace judgement of the current value of the gear.
If you're waiting, that means you don't have enough money to just buy a new computer every year or so. Personally, I get at least four years out every computer. Four years from now, your computer is going to be four years old. Depending on how clever you are about jumping in just after the leap in technology, it may feel like it is effectively three-and-a-half years old or four-and-a-half years old. It doesn't really matter.
Besides, over the last ten years an amazing thing has happened: performance has been levelling off AND hardware has started catching up to software. These days, you can spend a thousand bucks and get "enough." Whatever enough means. I use a 1.8 GHz G5 at work. My home machine is a 400 MHz G4. Is there a difference in speed? Sure. Is my home machine "fast enough?" Yes.
For a very good discussion of the foolishness of letterbox fanatics, this article on Martin Hart's "American Wide-Screen Museum" website.
For years, DVD reviewers have been fussing about the artistic importance of maintaining the original aspect ratio. For years, studios have known that some video fans will go apeshit if the aspect ratio of the DVD is different from the original, but apparently don't know or care about whether the original frame information and composition was truly preserved or not. So studios just have been happily chopping the picture to the right shape.
This is just an extreme case.
Apparently letterbox fans don't complain; just so long as they see big black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, they are happy.
The fact that it apparently went on for years, without the DVD community noticing or blowing the whistle, just goes to expose the fallacy of the belief that a) cinematographers compose their frames with exquisite care, and b) sophisticated viewers can easily tell the difference between a presentation that reflects the cinematographers' finesse and one that does not.
Big deal... I mean, to paraphrase Dave Barry, did they convene a focus group to find out what number comes after 4?
What I want to know is, in these days when a CPU chip puts out more heat than a vacuum tube used to... how are they going to prevent it from toasting ones' manhood, in the case of male customers?
Is there a way to make an extremely thin, flat, rectangular Dewar flask?
Will the thing be packed full of chemical gel that is an insulator with a big latent heat of fusion, and you'll pop in in the freezer to chill the gel whenever the battery is charging?
Will there be a Peltier cooler on the bottom face, and a backpack for a big lead-acid cell to power it?
1) De gustibus, no disputandum est. 2) YMMV. 3) I didn't say it was good I said that Apple did it earlier than PCs. And, yes, I know that many workstations, including the Alto, had done it much earlier.
Actually, the legibility and pleasingness of black text on a white screen varies A LOT depending not only on the individual observer but the SPECIFIC display, room lighting, etc. For example, in the days when screens were dim, curved, and didn't have AR coatings, I personally found white backgrounds preferable because it minimized the distracting effect of reflections.
The original Mac screen, for whatever reason, appeared crisp and legible. Black-on-white, on typical stock monitors with lower video bandwidth, did not look nearly as good.
Many, many human factors people have argued for years that book pages should be a grey-green color rather than white, and in the fifties there was a vogue for it; elementary-school children used yellowish or greenish writing paper, and a magazine called Children's Digest was printed on it.
Since white paper is actually more expensive to produce than grey-green-snot-colored paper, I think the continued dominance for white paper suggests that the supposed legibility advantages are negligible.
Personally, I find the texture of RGB dots to be far, far more irritating than any differences between black-on-white, green-on-white, or European-ergonomic-amber on white. I really miss the smooth clarify of black-and-white monochrome screens. Not enough to use one, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Just a few years ago, customized news was supposed to be one of the much-hyped big-money profit opportunities of the Internet, and... I'm trying to recall the names of some of the companies pursuing it as a business model... Individual?
The theory was that busy executives with no time to read the whole Wall Street Journal and no interest in serendipitous discovery of significant news items would gladly pay to get the news filtered so that they only saw items in the preselected categories of interest.
Yep, Individual.com still exists and appears to be operating on a business model of free-as-in-beer.
May the potlatch continue!
...wasn't a well-planned, thoroughly implemented engineering architecture.
Or that the Titanic didn't have enough lifeboats.
How can we ever make progress with all these Monday-morning-quarterbacking naysayers?
Digital Equipment Corporation under Robert Palmer, Wang Laboratories under Richard Miller, Polaroid under William J. McCune, and of course Hewlett-Packard under Carly Fiona demonstrate clearly that it takes a business person to run a business.
Addle-headed technical people without marketing expertise are apt to introduce boneheaded products like the PDP-1, the Wang Word Processor, the Model 110 Pathfinder Camera, the HP-35 calculator, etc. etc. when none of these products were backed by solid evidence from focus groups showing that consumers had any need of them.
They also have a disturbing tendency to be perfectionists, and build products that are better, more reliable, and more durable than they actually need to be, adding cost and decreasing margins.
This is a little freaky. Jobs and Raskin, rivals for the title of father of the Macintosh, both get pancreatic cancer... which is rare to begin with... and usually a death sentence.
Raskin dies of it, Jobs lives...
I'm not sure exactly what it means, but it must mean something.
VERY interesting point. I have three mod points and I'd use one of them here if I hadn't contributed to the discussion.
...then the code isn't important enough to optimize. Plain and simple.
Never try to optimize anything unless you have measured the speed of the code before optimizing and have measured it again after optimizing.
Optimized code is almost always harder to understand, contains more possible code paths, and more likely to contain bugs than the most straightforward code. It's only worth it if it's really faster...
And you simply cannot tell whether it's faster unless you actually time it. It's absolutely mindboggling how often a change you are certain will speed up the code has no effect, or a truly negligible effect, or slows it down.
This has always been true. In these days of heavily optimized compilers and complex CPUs that are doing branch prediction and God knows what all, it is truer than ever. You cannot tell whether code is fast just by glancing at it. Well, maybe there are processor gurus who can accurately visualize the exact flow of all the bits through the pipeline, but I'm certainly not one of them.
A corollary is that since the optimized code is almost always trickier, harder to understand, and often contains more logic paths than the most straightforward code, you shouldn't optimize unless you are committed to spending the time to write a careful unit-test fixture that exercises everything tricky you've done, and write good comments in the code.
Oh, gimme a break... "The W4200HD has a native pixel resolution of 1024x768, and as such, isn't a true HD device, since it doesn't have enough pixels to draws a 1280x720 (720p) HDTV image."
Look, I know lots of people will buy these things and be ecstatically happy with them, but can't we have just a little bit of truth-in-advertising? If it's not HDTV, don't call it HDTV.
A not-terribly-computer-savvy friend of mine is having problems with his AOL email.
So I suggested he sign up for Yahoo mail, because all the people I know who use it find it perfectly satisfactory.
He can't get signed up for Yahoo mail. I tried coaching him step by step over the phone. I can't be 100% certain of what's happening, but as I followed through the same steps on my own browser, he ran into troubles at exactly the point when Yahoo popped up a confirmation screen on my browser.
I'm about 95% sure he has popup blocking enabled and that's what's preventing him from signing up with Yahoo.
Of course, he doesn't know what a popup blocker is, or how to control it.
So, these days there are probably users who are suffering both from the new popups and from incompatibilities caused by the use of popup blockers.
The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb 'ought to be put under international control.' But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us namely: 'How difficult are these things to manufacture?...
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralized police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace.'
-- George Orwell, "You and the Atomic Bomb," October 19, 1945
Actually, that web page was up to date... I skipped right over it.
It is "Course BE."
How could they depart from hallowed tradition? O tempora. O mores. O mens. O manes.
Of course, question that all of want to know is, what Roman numeral did they give to the new course?
I think the highest existing number is Course XXIV, Linguistics and Philosophy, so presumably Biological Engineering is Course XXV... or is it?
This web page,alas, is not up-to-date.
It's not quite AI, yet Google comes closer to realizing the fantasy of Isaac Asimov's Multivac than anything else I've experienced before. It's very weird: the impression that Google gives is that it does NOT understand your question, yet it DOES manage to find the answers you want.
It's not quite user-interface, in the sense of elegant widgets or consistency or any of that stuff. Google's traditional search features could almost run on Lynx on a green screen. Maybe they can. Google Maps is visually spiffy by comparison to Mapquest, but it's nothing we haven't seen in standalone programs years ago.
It isn't really "search." Or at least, if it is, with every new thing they roll out, Google does an amazing job of expanding my notion of what "search" means. What does it mean to "search" on "250 pounds in kilograms?"
Something that Google seems to share with Apple is some sort of courtesy or kindness or service orientation to the end-user. It just works. And unlike Microsoft or Apple, Google's services seem to come with fewer strings attached.
One of the things that delights me about Google is a certain kind of freshness I haven't seen elsewhere as often as I'd like. They have the characteristic you used to see in innovative software that when you describe the latest Google feature, it doesn't sound all that new, yet when you use it you get that feeling that something unexpected has been revealed.
Do I dare to hope it will come preloaded with Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and the full collection of Project GutenbergeBooks?
(I remember how intriguing it was when Steve Jobs premiered the NeXT with the American Heritage dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare as standard equipment...)
The article says "With increasing power requirements the amps on the 12V rail have constantly increased, and if this had continued unchecked a PSU failure could potentially result in a fatal accident. With the new design this risk has been greatly reduced and we should see a transition to dual or even quad 12V rails on all high-rated PC power supplies this year."
What on earth is this supposed to mean? If your power supply fails only half the contents of your computer will fry?
On a car, an insurance company would call this a "total loss" and I can't quite imagine repairing a computer half of whose components had been burned out.
"Programmers at Work," Susan Lammers, Microsoft Press, 1986, ISBN 0-914845-71-3, happens to be a darn good book even if it does have a chapter about Gates. It has a number of pages of printout (pp. 70, 348-352) of a listing by GATES/ALLEN/DAVIDOFF of the original 8080 BASIC interpreter, and a page in Gates' handwriting, p. 353, "Storage layout for BASIC."
It all looks perfectly workmanlike to me. I haven't gone over it with a fine-toothed comb judging how good it is compared to, uh, the code I was writing in 1978, but I think Bill Gates knows how to program.
It also has some magazine article he wrote in 1975 about tricky coding to squeeze algorithms into as few memory locations as possible.
The book also has code and handwritten material by Andy Hertzfeld, Gary Kildall, Butler Lampson, Jonathan Sachs, and, yes, Charles Simonyi (with address labels named PRPLC, PRPLC1, ERRPRP, PRPLC2, PRPLC3, and variables named PNCTP, PRPLLC, PRPLCN, BPESCC. Crystal clear.)
Yeah... I shouldn't knock it for being a self-acknowledged beginner's level. And, yes, I need to take a look at the Hanaan Rosenthal book the reviewer mentions.
...I already have Ethan Wilde's "AppleScript for the Internet" and Matt Neuberg's "AppleScript: The Definitive Guide" (an O'Reilly, with a Boston Terrier on the cover). And a couple of Apple PDFs.
What we really need is a fully grown-up guide that is truly definitive, with proper descriptions of the never-quite-explained object model behind AppleScript that is rigorous and complete--and that includes the functionality provided in Apple-supplied AppleScript extensions and in the Finder.
I want something at an Inside Macintosh level, or a Harbison and Steele level; not a Danny Goodman level or even a man-page level.
Neuberg's book is the best I've seen so far. He makes the right promise, but doesn't quite deliver. It is all too obvious that he is charting his personal voyage of discovery.
I know I should not comment on Goldstein's book without at least having browsed through it in a bookstore, but it sounds as if it is just one of another AppleScript books that will be full of magic snippets I can use, never quite understanding why they work, or why they fail... exactly what all the quoting rules are... and so forth.
I know there was a big fuss about these possibilities a couple of years ago--IIRC there were assertions that Al Qaeda was using it--and I thought some researchers had done a careful study and found no evidence for it whatsoever.
Is steganography in multimedia images really being used, or is it just a paranoid fantasy?
(Yes, I know--if it has never been detected, thatproves that it works....)
Futures, futures, futures. The Hubble is here and it works.
What will we do if the JWST has teething pains? Decide we can't send up a mission to fix it, either?
I thought the whole rationale for putting human in space rather than robots was their great adaptability... that is to say, their ability to fix things.
Old Omar Khayyam said it:
Some for the glories of this world and some
Sigh for the Prophets Paradise to come.
Ah, take the Cash and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the Rumbling of a Distant Drum.
Remember that old word "perfected?" PDAs were perfected years ago. They do everything they need to do. They do it fairly well. Almost everyone that needs one has it already, they are durable, and nobody desperately needs any spiffy new features that it doesn't already have.
This just in: sales of pencils, shoelaces, and clothespins are not growing, either.
Despite my warnings, my wife bought a $30 battery-powered PDA with no PC connectivity about five years ago. She loved it. It did everything she needed. Then she failed to change the batteries in time and lost everything. She hasn't used one since. When a high-quality PDA with a reasonable way to sync to a PC drops to about $30, she'll probably by another one.
Me, I'm happy with my black-and-white--correction, dark-green-snot-on-light-green-snot--Palm. Why would I buy anything more? It's not as if my friends' addresses will be all that much more legible in color.
(Plus, I haven't checked all the latest models--why would I?--but it utterly baffles me why anyone would prefer a model with a rechargeable battery that needs daily charging--a battery that will deteriorate and require difficult and expensive replacement in about three years--over a model that runs six months on a set of cheap AAA's I can pick up in any supermarket checkout line).
Seriously. There's something odd about this. I'm not a great Microsoft fan, but a lot of their software is reasonably usable. (Excel, for example). I like Apple's hardware, but lots of other companies make quality, thoughtfully designed PC's, laptops, and so forth.
Digital cameras are a good example of a whole product category that have to cram globs of electronics and boatloads of figures into a tiny package, and for the most part they do it quite successfully and gracefully. It's NOT usual to hear people say "I couldn't get my digital camera to work at all" or "it froze up on me in the middle of photographing the kids' birthday party."
The big knock on non-iPod players, echoed in many reviews of would-be "iPod killers," is that people just can't get them to work. The article says that Robert Scoble "said he's heard from several executives who dutifully bought Microsoft-powered players, tried them, failed to get them working, and returned them in favor of an iPod. He went through the same experience..."
I won't trivialize UI design by saying "it's not rocket science," but what exactly is wrong with all of Apple's competitors? It's not as if Apple didn't have DRM.
Are all the competitive products SO weighed down by all sorts of hidden evil goals and agendas that there's little time and effort that can be spared on serving the consumer?
Every computer company and technology progresses. They all introduce new products at six month intervals or thereabouts. There is no exactly right time.
This is a case where the marketplace actually sort of does operate, and is reflected in the street prices of the gear you buy. If you wait for the hot new product and buy it immediately, you'll find that you will likely a) pay full list price, b) experience unpredictable but significant and annoying shipping delays--including changes in promised ship dates, and c) suffer from various teething pains in the first run of the product.
Those teething pains can vary from serious (high failure rates and product recalls) to cosmetic (Apple Cube "cracks") to trivial but still annoying (on a G5 Tower purchased immediately when first available, when the CD ejects it sounds cheap and clunky and you have the feeling that the door-opening mechanism may fail--although it hasn't yet. They made some kind of improvement and later models are much smoother and confidence-inspiring... that sort of thing...)
Meanwhile, in the runup to the new product introduction everyone is trying to clear out old inventory, and you can get a fire-sale price and all sorts of deals with "free" extra RAM and bundled printers and so forth.
When you buy in is a personal matter, but the actual price you pay and the deal you get tend to reflect the marketplace judgement of the current value of the gear.
If you're waiting, that means you don't have enough money to just buy a new computer every year or so. Personally, I get at least four years out every computer. Four years from now, your computer is going to be four years old. Depending on how clever you are about jumping in just after the leap in technology, it may feel like it is effectively three-and-a-half years old or four-and-a-half years old. It doesn't really matter.
Besides, over the last ten years an amazing thing has happened: performance has been levelling off AND hardware has started catching up to software. These days, you can spend a thousand bucks and get "enough." Whatever enough means. I use a 1.8 GHz G5 at work. My home machine is a 400 MHz G4. Is there a difference in speed? Sure. Is my home machine "fast enough?" Yes.
For a very good discussion of the foolishness of letterbox fanatics, this article on Martin Hart's "American Wide-Screen Museum" website.
For years, DVD reviewers have been fussing about the artistic importance of maintaining the original aspect ratio. For years, studios have known that some video fans will go apeshit if the aspect ratio of the DVD is different from the original, but apparently don't know or care about whether the original frame information and composition was truly preserved or not. So studios just have been happily chopping the picture to the right shape.
This is just an extreme case.
Apparently letterbox fans don't complain; just so long as they see big black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, they are happy.
The fact that it apparently went on for years, without the DVD community noticing or blowing the whistle, just goes to expose the fallacy of the belief that a) cinematographers compose their frames with exquisite care, and b) sophisticated viewers can easily tell the difference between a presentation that reflects the cinematographers' finesse and one that does not.
Big deal... I mean, to paraphrase Dave Barry, did they convene a focus group to find out what number comes after 4?
What I want to know is, in these days when a CPU chip puts out more heat than a vacuum tube used to... how are they going to prevent it from toasting ones' manhood, in the case of male customers?
Is there a way to make an extremely thin, flat, rectangular Dewar flask?
Will the thing be packed full of chemical gel that is an insulator with a big latent heat of fusion, and you'll pop in in the freezer to chill the gel whenever the battery is charging?
Will there be a Peltier cooler on the bottom face, and a backpack for a big lead-acid cell to power it?
1) De gustibus, no disputandum est. 2) YMMV. 3) I didn't say it was good I said that Apple did it earlier than PCs. And, yes, I know that many workstations, including the Alto, had done it much earlier.
Actually, the legibility and pleasingness of black text on a white screen varies A LOT depending not only on the individual observer but the SPECIFIC display, room lighting, etc. For example, in the days when screens were dim, curved, and didn't have AR coatings, I personally found white backgrounds preferable because it minimized the distracting effect of reflections.
The original Mac screen, for whatever reason, appeared crisp and legible. Black-on-white, on typical stock monitors with lower video bandwidth, did not look nearly as good.
Many, many human factors people have argued for years that book pages should be a grey-green color rather than white, and in the fifties there was a vogue for it; elementary-school children used yellowish or greenish writing paper, and a magazine called Children's Digest was printed on it.
Since white paper is actually more expensive to produce than grey-green-snot-colored paper, I think the continued dominance for white paper suggests that the supposed legibility advantages are negligible.
Personally, I find the texture of RGB dots to be far, far more irritating than any differences between black-on-white, green-on-white, or European-ergonomic-amber on white. I really miss the smooth clarify of black-and-white monochrome screens. Not enough to use one, however.