OS X isn't Apple's downfall, its the fact their computers are so annoyingly expensive that most people won't buy them.
Ugh. The expensive computers aren't their downfall, they are their business model. Say it with me, folks: "Apple is a HARDWARE company." OS X is a value-add, maybe the biggest one in history, to sell more hardware. They don't make cheaper hardware because enough people will buy their expensive hardware to keep them profitable. Apple doesn't make discount computers for the same reason you can't buy a Cadillac subcompact: they are a premium hardware company. Making cheap computers will cut into their profit (why make $50/computer when you can make $300/computer?) and turn out crappier 'value' Macs, further diluting the brand. For the same reason, they don't offer OS X for other platforms. It's designed to sell their hardware. Selling it for PC eats into their hardware sales while upping the numbers of people who install OS X inexpertly or on wacky hardware and then decide it's unreliable.
Rate this -1 or +1, but make sure it says 'Obvious'.
Uhh, all breading/battering jokes aside, we don't breed tuna. We catch them wild. I assume that there are probably some tuna farms, but the vast majority of tuna are wild-caught and thus have not been shaped by the genetic engineering via selective breeding that has happened to cows, pigs, sheep, etc.
It might be that they mean "Designed by Apple in California" and not "Designed by Apple in Shanghai". I love California even less than most people, but the bottom line is, jobs (small "j") in California are jobs in the USA.
On the original topic, I paid a premium for my Mac, knowing that I could get similar specs for cheaper on a PC, for two reasons. I prefer OS X, and I enjoy the fact that the hardware and software, including a number of included, free applications, are pre-integrated for me and function as a cohesive whole. I'm pretty nerdy, I could set up an easy workflow for my tasks on a PC or other OS given enough time, but I don't want to spend the time. So I spent the money.
It's not that one is inherently better than the other, it's that they are different value propositions. Certainly they have different strengths and weaknesses, and I would have thought that this community, if not the general public, would understand this by now.
Can you post model names/numbers for those baby monitors? I'd love to be able to pick one that has channel-switching built in, rather than learning the hard way.
Hmm. I could probably round up half a dozen Korean-speakers who can run a disk-recovery application properly, given an hour or two. Ok, so, I live in a university town and I have an advantage, I'll admit it.
But I think that it's entirely possible that someone who has run a couple of small scams successfully could parlay that cash into buying several hundred hard drives. Finding name/SSN sets on one of these hard drives has plenty of value for identity thieves right here in the U. S. of A. It's not only the launch codes that have value, it's also all the other data.
Ok, so they ask if attacks are increasing, and 45% say they are, presumably meaning 55% said no. That's an increase? That sounds like a decrease.
51% say the technical sophistication is increasing? Well, as time goes on, technology gets more sophisticated. It seems like attacks would follow that trend too.
This doesn't sound like a real story, it sounds like someone coming up with an idea and trying to make the statistics sound right. Didn't Mark Twain say something about lies, d*mn lies and statistics?
So why don't we submit the austrailian government's web sites? And Amazon.com? And everything else that's useful? Once the internet starts to get too blocked, some MP's kid will throw a shit fit and daddy (or mommy) will sponsor a bill to make things a bit more sane.
Or just submit so many sites that they can't keep up.
The best part is that they really shouldn't be accepting submissions at all. I mean, any submission of sites with illegal content (depicting abuse of minors, etc.) implies that the user visited the site, which is illegal.
There is a difference, but you're cutting it very thin. Applications that a first-time user finds easy are often (not always, but usually) also easy for experienced users. If you can walk up to something and 'get it' right away, it's often an indication that the designer has really captured the user's mental model for the task. If you find something usable only after months of practice, that application is not usable for most values of the word usable.
the last 16 years of Clinton/Bush subpoenas and evidence gathering did little more than to undermine the power of the Presidency relative to the Congress
I think if anything, the last 16 years has done the opposite- the power of congress (the *only directly elected representatives* we have in Washington) has been greatly diminished compared to the the presidency.
The congress used to have exclusive rights to the declaration of war, yet neither of the last two wars (nor any since WWII) were 'declared' by the congress and indeed would have proceeded without their approval.
The congress used to have the 'power of the purse' yet when they declined to prop up the car companies the president did it anyway.
The congress used to have not just the power to oversee, but the *responsibility* for oversight. Yet when they asked to see documents concerning various potential violations of the law, including items regarding the outing of Valerie Plame, CIA interrogation techniques, warrantless wiretapping etc. the President refused to acknowledge their subpoenas.
I for one want my directly elected representatives to be given their power back. I have some respect for Obama, and I hope that he will have the balls to put the power back where it belongs.
Or in/. terms: Obama- please be Galadriel, not Saruman. Thanks.
I figure all of Apple's customers thought differently once. That was when they decided not to go with Windows. Then they stopped.
As a software designer, I think Jobs and Co. are the tech equivalent of a movie director, author or musician who insists on their work being created without outside editing. 90% of them are crap, but there are shining examples of artistic visions being fully realized and truly great works resulting.
I think the unique thing about Jobs is not his "I'm right and everyone else is wrong" attitude, it's the fact that he IS right. Not that Macs are perfect, but that they are a fully realized vision that successfully meets the needs of a specific segment of the population.
If only there were Jobs-like companies to fill all the other niches...
This is absolutely correct. As a UI designer, any part of the user experience is something I share responsibility for. Response time and feedback are things that I deal with daily.
Voting machines are probably the most important general-use UIs in our society, and they *have to* be good. There are thousands of competent programmers and UI designers in this country, I just don't understand why a single company can't manage to produce a good voting machine. It's not that hard.
The game is interesting enough to be played instead of botted, for the majority of players. The problem is that a minority of players will bot no matter how engaging the gameplay is, because they can make money, are lazy, or are just miscreants. These are the electronic equivalent of people defacing public restrooms. And even a moderate number of these cheaters can negatively impact the gameplay of legitimate players.
I would hate to see WoW taken over by cheaters like DII was for a while. It really ruins the fun for people who like the game. Considering how much money is at stake here, I don't blame Blizzard for fighting tooth and nail to protect their game. Some of their methods might be a bit sketchy, but I understand their desire to fight.
I drive an SUV for one reason, and one reason only:
F = ma
I drive a 2 ton car. I live in the Midwest, where many other people do too. I am attempting to ensure (to a reasonable extent- I don't drive a semi) that I will either be bigger, or almost as big, as any car I will be in an accident with.
Is it a perfect plan? No. But it has worked so far.
I am a user interface design 'expert', and I can tell you the best solution is to hire an expert, if that's possible. This is a whole field of study- I studied it for 2 years, got my MS, hit the real world and then REALLY started to learn about it. I did include some titles below, but getting good at this requires a totally different kind of thinking than writing good code (which was my old job). That doesn't mean you aren't going to be able to do it, but it does mean that it's going to require you to think about things from a totally different point of view. Imagine an art major trying to write good, well-modularized code.
I have read a number of answers above- some are good, many have nuggets of truth or basic guidelines, some are downright awful, but the one truth is this- you are not your user. What is good or easy for you is not necessarily good or easy for your users. Ultimately, you will need to watch them use the interface to make it truly good. This doesn't require eyetracking equipment, video cameras, etc. Just ask them to use it and sit there and watch, silently. It will be the best thing you can do to learn about how your users use the app.
Here are the titles I promised: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, Scott D. Wood Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt
So this means Mario is making our generation more capable! We all learned pretty quickly that the only way to progress is to keep trying and look for successful strategies. If we carried this into our daily lives we should be well-prepared for success, according to the article.
Well, one huge advantage that is applicable to modern warfare is that this extends the ability of a destroyer or battleship to bombard inland cities/targets significantly. Right now, if it's 15 miles from shore, the Navy can't help you without launching a Tomahawk ($1million+) or an attack plane ($don't get me started).
With this, we could park a ship 2 miles off shore and hit buildings 200 miles inland- with no risk of losing pilots, and a much cheaper projectile. Plus- buildings don't move. So this would be ideal for all sorts of uses. Not every use, but enough to make it worth having.
Not to be over-argumentative, but typically I see the opposite problem- developers spending 80% of our budget hours to gracefully handle 8.01% chance cases, leaving not enough hours to do a really nice job with the two cases that are happening 99.9% of the time. I understand that all use cases need to be accounted for- this makes sense- but the some developers closing all the holes more important than doing an nice job with the important cases. There must be a balance.
Heh- I just almost signed this with my WoW handle, whoops.
I used to play games in the 486 days, and I would say if anything, it's much easier now. I bought a new $1700 PC in early 2003, and since then, I have not upgraded it and not had any problems getting any game to run, and be playable.
In college, I had a 486. I regularly bought games that I could never get to run on my computer. I would say that my failure rate was nearly 50%, on a Dell, which was then still an up-and-coming manufacturer.
I think you make some valid points about PC components being much more expensive, but I have found that PC games these days are both more reliable, and more forgiving of less than cutting edge hardware. Sure, you may have to turn the video settings down a bit, but you can still get reasonable frame rates, and many of them will even manage video settings themselves.
You sure as hell can drub it out of students, though, and the US schools are getting good at that.
I would argue along with several other posters that you can nurture creativity during the educational process. It just doesn't happen often. At this point, I will resist the temptation to rant about the crappiness of our (politician-mandated) schooling philosophy here in the States.
Well put. My Grandma is a nurse- she's competent, capable, and I love her dearly. But she is not ready to deal with dependency issues- well, maybe with patients, but certainly not with her computer. For that matter, my friends in nursing aren't either; they're more comfortable with computers than Grandma, but they spend their time studying how to make people well, not how to compile a kernel. They just need to know email, IM, and the web, and that's all they're interested in (generally).
I think that your answer is a classic example of what we in the usability business call the 'mirror persona'. You are answering this post thinking of your own capabilities, not the capabilities of the users we're hoping to attract. Packages are a great way to handle things for engineers, for linux enthusiasts, etc. Not Grandma.
What we need to be thinking about, if we're trying to get linux on average peoples' desktops, is those average people, for whom the 'dumb' OSX system is perfect. It does just get the files ontot your machine, where thay immediately work correctly with no configuration. The effectiveness of this approach is why we have Plug-N-Play, why we have the term zero configuration, and why Microsoft's new slogan is 'It Just Works.'
Assuming the goal is for linux to gain marketshare against Windows, we need to make it 'Just Work' too.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X isn't Apple's downfall, its the fact their computers are so annoyingly expensive that most people won't buy them.
Ugh. The expensive computers aren't their downfall, they are their business model. Say it with me, folks: "Apple is a HARDWARE company." OS X is a value-add, maybe the biggest one in history, to sell more hardware. They don't make cheaper hardware because enough people will buy their expensive hardware to keep them profitable. Apple doesn't make discount computers for the same reason you can't buy a Cadillac subcompact: they are a premium hardware company. Making cheap computers will cut into their profit (why make $50/computer when you can make $300/computer?) and turn out crappier 'value' Macs, further diluting the brand. For the same reason, they don't offer OS X for other platforms. It's designed to sell their hardware. Selling it for PC eats into their hardware sales while upping the numbers of people who install OS X inexpertly or on wacky hardware and then decide it's unreliable.
Rate this -1 or +1, but make sure it says 'Obvious'.
Uhh, all breading/battering jokes aside, we don't breed tuna. We catch them wild. I assume that there are probably some tuna farms, but the vast majority of tuna are wild-caught and thus have not been shaped by the genetic engineering via selective breeding that has happened to cows, pigs, sheep, etc.
-SB
The opposite would be a wholesale store, like Costco or Sam's Club, or a warehouse with a storefront that sells only to businesses in that industry.
I loved your joke, but.... Facts were missing, and I was compelled to fill them in.
It might be that they mean "Designed by Apple in California" and not "Designed by Apple in Shanghai". I love California even less than most people, but the bottom line is, jobs (small "j") in California are jobs in the USA.
On the original topic, I paid a premium for my Mac, knowing that I could get similar specs for cheaper on a PC, for two reasons. I prefer OS X, and I enjoy the fact that the hardware and software, including a number of included, free applications, are pre-integrated for me and function as a cohesive whole. I'm pretty nerdy, I could set up an easy workflow for my tasks on a PC or other OS given enough time, but I don't want to spend the time. So I spent the money.
It's not that one is inherently better than the other, it's that they are different value propositions. Certainly they have different strengths and weaknesses, and I would have thought that this community, if not the general public, would understand this by now.
Can you post model names/numbers for those baby monitors? I'd love to be able to pick one that has channel-switching built in, rather than learning the hard way.
Hmm. I could probably round up half a dozen Korean-speakers who can run a disk-recovery application properly, given an hour or two. Ok, so, I live in a university town and I have an advantage, I'll admit it.
But I think that it's entirely possible that someone who has run a couple of small scams successfully could parlay that cash into buying several hundred hard drives. Finding name/SSN sets on one of these hard drives has plenty of value for identity thieves right here in the U. S. of A. It's not only the launch codes that have value, it's also all the other data.
Ok, so they ask if attacks are increasing, and 45% say they are, presumably meaning 55% said no. That's an increase? That sounds like a decrease.
51% say the technical sophistication is increasing? Well, as time goes on, technology gets more sophisticated. It seems like attacks would follow that trend too.
This doesn't sound like a real story, it sounds like someone coming up with an idea and trying to make the statistics sound right. Didn't Mark Twain say something about lies, d*mn lies and statistics?
So why don't we submit the austrailian government's web sites? And Amazon.com? And everything else that's useful? Once the internet starts to get too blocked, some MP's kid will throw a shit fit and daddy (or mommy) will sponsor a bill to make things a bit more sane.
Or just submit so many sites that they can't keep up.
The best part is that they really shouldn't be accepting submissions at all. I mean, any submission of sites with illegal content (depicting abuse of minors, etc.) implies that the user visited the site, which is illegal.
There is a difference, but you're cutting it very thin. Applications that a first-time user finds easy are often (not always, but usually) also easy for experienced users. If you can walk up to something and 'get it' right away, it's often an indication that the designer has really captured the user's mental model for the task. If you find something usable only after months of practice, that application is not usable for most values of the word usable.
the last 16 years of Clinton/Bush subpoenas and evidence gathering did little more than to undermine the power of the Presidency relative to the Congress
I think if anything, the last 16 years has done the opposite- the power of congress (the *only directly elected representatives* we have in Washington) has been greatly diminished compared to the the presidency.
The congress used to have exclusive rights to the declaration of war, yet neither of the last two wars (nor any since WWII) were 'declared' by the congress and indeed would have proceeded without their approval.
The congress used to have the 'power of the purse' yet when they declined to prop up the car companies the president did it anyway.
The congress used to have not just the power to oversee, but the *responsibility* for oversight. Yet when they asked to see documents concerning various potential violations of the law, including items regarding the outing of Valerie Plame, CIA interrogation techniques, warrantless wiretapping etc. the President refused to acknowledge their subpoenas.
I for one want my directly elected representatives to be given their power back. I have some respect for Obama, and I hope that he will have the balls to put the power back where it belongs.
Or in /. terms: Obama- please be Galadriel, not Saruman. Thanks.
I figure all of Apple's customers thought differently once. That was when they decided not to go with Windows. Then they stopped.
As a software designer, I think Jobs and Co. are the tech equivalent of a movie director, author or musician who insists on their work being created without outside editing. 90% of them are crap, but there are shining examples of artistic visions being fully realized and truly great works resulting.
I think the unique thing about Jobs is not his "I'm right and everyone else is wrong" attitude, it's the fact that he IS right. Not that Macs are perfect, but that they are a fully realized vision that successfully meets the needs of a specific segment of the population.
If only there were Jobs-like companies to fill all the other niches...
How is response time/feedback not a UI issue?
This is absolutely correct. As a UI designer, any part of the user experience is something I share responsibility for. Response time and feedback are things that I deal with daily.
Voting machines are probably the most important general-use UIs in our society, and they *have to* be good. There are thousands of competent programmers and UI designers in this country, I just don't understand why a single company can't manage to produce a good voting machine. It's not that hard.
The game is interesting enough to be played instead of botted, for the majority of players. The problem is that a minority of players will bot no matter how engaging the gameplay is, because they can make money, are lazy, or are just miscreants. These are the electronic equivalent of people defacing public restrooms. And even a moderate number of these cheaters can negatively impact the gameplay of legitimate players.
I would hate to see WoW taken over by cheaters like DII was for a while. It really ruins the fun for people who like the game. Considering how much money is at stake here, I don't blame Blizzard for fighting tooth and nail to protect their game. Some of their methods might be a bit sketchy, but I understand their desire to fight.
-Sandbenders
I drive an SUV for one reason, and one reason only:
F = ma
I drive a 2 ton car. I live in the Midwest, where many other people do too. I am attempting to ensure (to a reasonable extent- I don't drive a semi) that I will either be bigger, or almost as big, as any car I will be in an accident with.
Is it a perfect plan? No. But it has worked so far.
-Sandbenders
Please note: hippie chicks believe in 'free love.' Geeks, girls included, believe in getting their homework done.
I'm just saying- what would you rather be surrounded by?
-SB
I am a user interface design 'expert', and I can tell you the best solution is to hire an expert, if that's possible. This is a whole field of study- I studied it for 2 years, got my MS, hit the real world and then REALLY started to learn about it. I did include some titles below, but getting good at this requires a totally different kind of thinking than writing good code (which was my old job). That doesn't mean you aren't going to be able to do it, but it does mean that it's going to require you to think about things from a totally different point of view. Imagine an art major trying to write good, well-modularized code.
I have read a number of answers above- some are good, many have nuggets of truth or basic guidelines, some are downright awful, but the one truth is this- you are not your user. What is good or easy for you is not necessarily good or easy for your users. Ultimately, you will need to watch them use the interface to make it truly good. This doesn't require eyetracking equipment, video cameras, etc. Just ask them to use it and sit there and watch, silently. It will be the best thing you can do to learn about how your users use the app.
Here are the titles I promised:
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell
Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work by Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, Scott D. Wood
Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs by Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt
-Sandbenders
So this means Mario is making our generation more capable! We all learned pretty quickly that the only way to progress is to keep trying and look for successful strategies. If we carried this into our daily lives we should be well-prepared for success, according to the article.
Firefox is the killer email client.
Well, one huge advantage that is applicable to modern warfare is that this extends the ability of a destroyer or battleship to bombard inland cities/targets significantly. Right now, if it's 15 miles from shore, the Navy can't help you without launching a Tomahawk ($1million+) or an attack plane ($don't get me started).
With this, we could park a ship 2 miles off shore and hit buildings 200 miles inland- with no risk of losing pilots, and a much cheaper projectile. Plus- buildings don't move. So this would be ideal for all sorts of uses. Not every use, but enough to make it worth having.
We call those people "anal composers seeking to wring every cent they can out of poor classical musicians."
Not to be over-argumentative, but typically I see the opposite problem- developers spending 80% of our budget hours to gracefully handle 8 .01% chance cases, leaving not enough hours to do a really nice job with the two cases that are happening 99.9% of the time. I understand that all use cases need to be accounted for- this makes sense- but the some developers closing all the holes more important than doing an nice job with the important cases. There must be a balance.
Heh- I just almost signed this with my WoW handle, whoops.
I used to play games in the 486 days, and I would say if anything, it's much easier now. I bought a new $1700 PC in early 2003, and since then, I have not upgraded it and not had any problems getting any game to run, and be playable.
In college, I had a 486. I regularly bought games that I could never get to run on my computer. I would say that my failure rate was nearly 50%, on a Dell, which was then still an up-and-coming manufacturer.
I think you make some valid points about PC components being much more expensive, but I have found that PC games these days are both more reliable, and more forgiving of less than cutting edge hardware. Sure, you may have to turn the video settings down a bit, but you can still get reasonable frame rates, and many of them will even manage video settings themselves.
but you cannot teach creativity
You sure as hell can drub it out of students, though, and the US schools are getting good at that.
I would argue along with several other posters that you can nurture creativity during the educational process. It just doesn't happen often. At this point, I will resist the temptation to rant about the crappiness of our (politician-mandated) schooling philosophy here in the States.
Well put. My Grandma is a nurse- she's competent, capable, and I love her dearly. But she is not ready to deal with dependency issues- well, maybe with patients, but certainly not with her computer. For that matter, my friends in nursing aren't either; they're more comfortable with computers than Grandma, but they spend their time studying how to make people well, not how to compile a kernel. They just need to know email, IM, and the web, and that's all they're interested in (generally).
I think that your answer is a classic example of what we in the usability business call the 'mirror persona'. You are answering this post thinking of your own capabilities, not the capabilities of the users we're hoping to attract. Packages are a great way to handle things for engineers, for linux enthusiasts, etc. Not Grandma.
What we need to be thinking about, if we're trying to get linux on average peoples' desktops, is those average people, for whom the 'dumb' OSX system is perfect. It does just get the files ontot your machine, where thay immediately work correctly with no configuration. The effectiveness of this approach is why we have Plug-N-Play, why we have the term zero configuration, and why Microsoft's new slogan is 'It Just Works.'
Assuming the goal is for linux to gain marketshare against Windows, we need to make it 'Just Work' too.