Apple's "mystic and excellent marketing" is clearly not enough to sell any old box. Really, you might want to look into why the iPhone is so popular. I'm sure Palm as we speak is adjusting the Treo line with the lessons learned from the iPhone.
Full disclosure: I'm a prior treo 600 owner. It has a much better keyboard than the iPhone, but for everything else I prefer Apple's little machine.
The iPhone was the first phone I haven't wanted to throw out the window immediately. A touch screen interface to a phone works much more intuitively than a pen or small trackball, and the multi-touch allows you to really maneuver around oversized data without too much hassle. The e-mail / phone / internet / ipod integration is simple and straightforward. And how phones had gotten by without Google maps prior to the iPhone is befuddling.
Really, what makes the iPhone good is how all of the steps of the process comes together. Tap the camera icon, get a screen with the camera feed and the camera button. If someone you don't know calls you, you can just click the arrow next to their call in the recents list and create a new contact. Further, click the blank spot where the photo should go, and pick from a screen full of photos. Comparatively, on my old LG you had to hit the guide button, click around on an old joystick to get to the camera function, choose target data storage and a couple of photo styles, take the picture, name it, etc etc etc.
Really, the iPhone was a break with the interfaces of old, with nearly all of the annoying or confusing components removed.
There are a lot of problems with the iPhone. A real keyboard would be nice, or at least a bluetooth keyboard connection. Copy / Paste is sadly missing, without an obvious way of integrating. And then, of course, there is the sad lack of GPS turn-by-turn.
Now that someone has created a sample platform, I suspect that other developers will extend and push the paradigm forward. I hope they do. There is a lot of development left to go, and I hope nobody simply ceeds the space to Apple.
We've never had a properly secured platform as a monolithic target. It will be interesting to see whether or not the iPhone can prove or disprove the old addage that the #1 platform will inherently be virus prone, or if that was just excusing poor programming.
From OSX onward, Mac OS upgrades have all basically been making genuine improvements to a solid platform. Apple hasn't bogged down the OS tremendously. With a little extra RAM, OSX 10.5 runs fine on my girlfriend's 6-year-old laptop. It's essentially the OSX that shipped with her laptop, but with some nice backup features, easier search, and some good usability upgrades.
With Vista, Microsoft went for the big re-engineer to get some nifty features in, then cut all the nifty features to hit a ship date. What you had, then, was a less-compatible operating system with more problems, and no compelling reasons left to switch. Such great features like resolution-agnostic interfacing resizing were cut, but the new requirement for a full-time 3D graphics card to render the interface remained. It does the same thing as before, but the system requirements changed significantly. Similarly, lots of aspects of networking changed, to the point where getting Linux and OSX to interact with legacy XP boxes is a lot easier than getting Vista to.
You probably wouldn't want an older version of OSX any more than you would want an older version of your graphics card driver. The new ones are refined and improved versions of the previous ones at about the same power. The same couldn't be said for Windows ME or Vista.
1. File system is still a sewer. This includes showing unnecessary files, being unable to re-organize programs, the slowness of search, fragility of ailases and links, drive naming conventions, etc. 2. Lots of aspects of networking and wireless networking are unnecessarily complex and useless. 3. At least 4 separate locations where startup items can be stored / triggered. 4. Still terrible search after all these years. 5. Can't add folder shortcuts to the standard save-as dialog box. 6. Still can't shutdown cleanly. For that matter, why should shutdown take 4 or 5 minutes? 7. Still architedted for weird driver conflicts if you happen to switch wireless card manufacturers frequently. 8. Uninstall is terribly designed *and* terribly implemented. 9. The registry must go. 10. How many control panels does one computer need? Why are administrative tools not under control panels? 11. Really need standardized, easier way to manage startup applications.
Honestly, the most acceptable way to run Vista is to immediately turn off all of the useless glitz and make it look like Windows 2000. The actual functional improvements remain, but the OS runs much more quickly.
To be quite frank, if you have an application that does something greatly detrimental like zapregistry without user confirmation is going to get you into trouble, plain and simple.
For most people, successful quick autocomplete is fine. It just shouldn't be an issue.
You're kidding, right? With Fileplanet, high-speed internet access, downloadable demos on Xbox live and PSN, we're living in a world of unprescedented access to demos. This version of Prince of Persia will probably have a demo out about a month after the game, downloadable for your console or PC at your convienience over a fat pipe.
BTW, Doom was paid shareware, not a demo. You bought some of it (that 5 dollar retail floppy), and if you liked it you bought the rest. The mainstream game developers of the time weren't exactly doing the same thing. When was the last time you saw a demo of one of the King's Quest games available on the counter at Fry's?
Don't forget that there may be an aspect of CYA involved. If they knew that PoP sales were unlikely to live up to the pre-launch hype for some reason or another, they've just bought themselves a handy excuse.
Sadly, the majority of good games fail to set the market on fire. That's just how it works. So statistically this experiment is likely to end in an unsatisfactory state for all involved.
I'm probably going to buy the PC version of this game in order to support the experiment. But hopefully this doesn't just become an unfairly leveraged reason to force the more consumer-unfriendly forms of DRM down our throats.
The restrictions on GPS lead me to believe their supplier was willing to give apple a good deal on condition that they don't cannibalize core sales through competition. I suspect other components are similarly encumbered, including deals with AT&T on available network products.
In other words, I doubt that Apple could truly "open" the platform any more than they could remove all DRM from iTunes songs. Contracts would simply put a stop to that.
Where does MS go from here? Oh, I don't know... Consoles, handheld music players, cell phones, car control systems, Internet search...
Oh wait, they're falling in all of those (consoles excepted) because they waited for someone else to forge the path, then were unable to buy the leader out as easily as they have been able to in desktop software.
Microsoft isn't suffering from success, they're suffering from a profound lack of vision.
BASIC was created to be a highly accessible introduction to programming concepts, and it remains such to this day. Just because it isn't a tool that they will be programming with until the end of their days doesn't mean it isn't a valid option.
Also, BASIC gets a bad rap due to people who never left it. How these people survived is beyond me, but it is not the language's fault any more than it is the house's fault when the 30 year old child refuses to move out of his parents' house.
Might I suggest that we begin teaching students Javascript or Flash in High School? It's not harder than calculus, it's a lot more useful, and all of the good programmers I've met started on their own by High School at the latest. Might I suggest an HTML -> Client-side scripting -> PHP series?
Besides, there are definitely wide swaths of knowledge that professors take for granted in new students. My first programming course in college lost more than 70% of the students. The professor was trying to teach good fundamental Object Oriented Programming, and the students were struggling with parsing proper usage of control loops and variable allocations.
Quite frankly, finding the "best paradigm for a first programming course" seems like a thinly-veiled way of asking which genre of programming language will dominate the students' ways of thinking for the next few years. Why limit the first programming course to one paradigm? Why would the first course be so important, as they really should have functional knowledge of three or four languages by the time they exit the first year?
Arguably, one can get the authentic WoW experience in about 1% of the time it requires to actually play. The player who has spent that amount of time intrinsically understands the game the same way that the person who simply got bored and grinded for 40 hours a week.
Being a cowboy requires skill. Being a level 70 mage simply requires time.
Except that they're warehoused in the US. And shipping fees around Europe are astronomical (borders and unions everywhere). And VAT is added to the base cost of an item in Europe, whereas in the US our sales tax is added after the cost of the item. Heck, with Spain's 20% duties and 16% VAT, you can quickly reach that 40% threshold.
If you've ever tried to get an Italian suit in the US, you'll see that cross-global commerce is expensive. You think those 40 dollar pants sell for 40 dollars in Thailand? Every transition adds quite a bit of cost. Try buying genuinely Parisian clothing in New York City sometime and then come crying about how Europeans are being ripped off left and right. That's just the nature of having something sold in the US shipped to Europe.
For the second time in about 30 years we have a descent phone first. It won't happen again for a while, I'm sure.
I think they're complainting that Youtube (owned by Google) is very popular with their users. Which, when you think about it, is a strange thing to complain about.
Bank of America allows you to pay online via systems that accept it, and mail checks to those who don't. Strangely enough, most of the people I pay bills to here in Massachusetts accept digital billpay through whatever system they use. But even paper checks are automatic and free.
BofA is a bunch of greedy bastards, yet they found a way to make it worthwile and simple. It's slowly filtering over to America.
It's like Cellphones: Companies don't feel like they can change one territory in the US at a time... they have to go all or nothing. So we get systems 10 years after the rest of the world has piecemeal brought themselves into it. Otherwise nationwide rollouts are untennable.
What about a simple way for Internet connected devices to broadcast to the local network "Oh Poop, I'm on fire." Your router hears the ping, and routes a message to your e-mail and SMS.
It would be nice to hear about catastrophic failures.
why do we have more tld's anyway? Comcast will need both comcast.com and comcast.tel anyway. And the end user experience is the same between "company.tel" and "companytel" with an implied.com.
Or another way of looking at it: The tools we have to define good health cannot be used to rule out the possibility of a stroke at any moment.
My uncle died of an aneurysm in his skull one night. He was in his late 20's and quite healthy. They still don't know why it formed.
It may be comforting to say things like "things like strokes do not happen overnight." It lets us sleep better. However, they do actually happen over night, and genuinely healthy people die all the time. By being healthy you reduce your chances of impending death, but you don't eliminate them.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing. What makes it popular is the apple mystic and excellent marketing...
If that was enough, we'd all be watching Apple TV's while jotting notes into our Newtons. Heck, Apple was one of the first Digital Camera manufacturers and had a video game console.
Apple's "mystic and excellent marketing" is clearly not enough to sell any old box. Really, you might want to look into why the iPhone is so popular. I'm sure Palm as we speak is adjusting the Treo line with the lessons learned from the iPhone.
Full disclosure: I'm a prior treo 600 owner. It has a much better keyboard than the iPhone, but for everything else I prefer Apple's little machine.
The iPhone was the first phone I haven't wanted to throw out the window immediately. A touch screen interface to a phone works much more intuitively than a pen or small trackball, and the multi-touch allows you to really maneuver around oversized data without too much hassle. The e-mail / phone / internet / ipod integration is simple and straightforward. And how phones had gotten by without Google maps prior to the iPhone is befuddling.
Really, what makes the iPhone good is how all of the steps of the process comes together. Tap the camera icon, get a screen with the camera feed and the camera button. If someone you don't know calls you, you can just click the arrow next to their call in the recents list and create a new contact. Further, click the blank spot where the photo should go, and pick from a screen full of photos. Comparatively, on my old LG you had to hit the guide button, click around on an old joystick to get to the camera function, choose target data storage and a couple of photo styles, take the picture, name it, etc etc etc.
Really, the iPhone was a break with the interfaces of old, with nearly all of the annoying or confusing components removed.
There are a lot of problems with the iPhone. A real keyboard would be nice, or at least a bluetooth keyboard connection. Copy / Paste is sadly missing, without an obvious way of integrating. And then, of course, there is the sad lack of GPS turn-by-turn.
Now that someone has created a sample platform, I suspect that other developers will extend and push the paradigm forward. I hope they do. There is a lot of development left to go, and I hope nobody simply ceeds the space to Apple.
We've never had a properly secured platform as a monolithic target. It will be interesting to see whether or not the iPhone can prove or disprove the old addage that the #1 platform will inherently be virus prone, or if that was just excusing poor programming.
From OSX onward, Mac OS upgrades have all basically been making genuine improvements to a solid platform. Apple hasn't bogged down the OS tremendously. With a little extra RAM, OSX 10.5 runs fine on my girlfriend's 6-year-old laptop. It's essentially the OSX that shipped with her laptop, but with some nice backup features, easier search, and some good usability upgrades.
With Vista, Microsoft went for the big re-engineer to get some nifty features in, then cut all the nifty features to hit a ship date. What you had, then, was a less-compatible operating system with more problems, and no compelling reasons left to switch. Such great features like resolution-agnostic interfacing resizing were cut, but the new requirement for a full-time 3D graphics card to render the interface remained. It does the same thing as before, but the system requirements changed significantly. Similarly, lots of aspects of networking changed, to the point where getting Linux and OSX to interact with legacy XP boxes is a lot easier than getting Vista to.
You probably wouldn't want an older version of OSX any more than you would want an older version of your graphics card driver. The new ones are refined and improved versions of the previous ones at about the same power. The same couldn't be said for Windows ME or Vista.
Areas that XP still needs development:
1. File system is still a sewer. This includes showing unnecessary files, being unable to re-organize programs, the slowness of search, fragility of ailases and links, drive naming conventions, etc.
2. Lots of aspects of networking and wireless networking are unnecessarily complex and useless.
3. At least 4 separate locations where startup items can be stored / triggered.
4. Still terrible search after all these years.
5. Can't add folder shortcuts to the standard save-as dialog box.
6. Still can't shutdown cleanly. For that matter, why should shutdown take 4 or 5 minutes?
7. Still architedted for weird driver conflicts if you happen to switch wireless card manufacturers frequently.
8. Uninstall is terribly designed *and* terribly implemented.
9. The registry must go.
10. How many control panels does one computer need? Why are administrative tools not under control panels?
11. Really need standardized, easier way to manage startup applications.
Honestly, the most acceptable way to run Vista is to immediately turn off all of the useless glitz and make it look like Windows 2000. The actual functional improvements remain, but the OS runs much more quickly.
To be quite frank, if you have an application that does something greatly detrimental like zapregistry without user confirmation is going to get you into trouble, plain and simple.
For most people, successful quick autocomplete is fine. It just shouldn't be an issue.
You're kidding, right? With Fileplanet, high-speed internet access, downloadable demos on Xbox live and PSN, we're living in a world of unprescedented access to demos. This version of Prince of Persia will probably have a demo out about a month after the game, downloadable for your console or PC at your convienience over a fat pipe.
BTW, Doom was paid shareware, not a demo. You bought some of it (that 5 dollar retail floppy), and if you liked it you bought the rest. The mainstream game developers of the time weren't exactly doing the same thing. When was the last time you saw a demo of one of the King's Quest games available on the counter at Fry's?
Don't forget that there may be an aspect of CYA involved. If they knew that PoP sales were unlikely to live up to the pre-launch hype for some reason or another, they've just bought themselves a handy excuse.
Sadly, the majority of good games fail to set the market on fire. That's just how it works. So statistically this experiment is likely to end in an unsatisfactory state for all involved.
I'm probably going to buy the PC version of this game in order to support the experiment. But hopefully this doesn't just become an unfairly leveraged reason to force the more consumer-unfriendly forms of DRM down our throats.
The restrictions on GPS lead me to believe their supplier was willing to give apple a good deal on condition that they don't cannibalize core sales through competition. I suspect other components are similarly encumbered, including deals with AT&T on available network products.
In other words, I doubt that Apple could truly "open" the platform any more than they could remove all DRM from iTunes songs. Contracts would simply put a stop to that.
Where does MS go from here? Oh, I don't know... Consoles, handheld music players, cell phones, car control systems, Internet search...
Oh wait, they're falling in all of those (consoles excepted) because they waited for someone else to forge the path, then were unable to buy the leader out as easily as they have been able to in desktop software.
Microsoft isn't suffering from success, they're suffering from a profound lack of vision.
BASIC was created to be a highly accessible introduction to programming concepts, and it remains such to this day. Just because it isn't a tool that they will be programming with until the end of their days doesn't mean it isn't a valid option.
Also, BASIC gets a bad rap due to people who never left it. How these people survived is beyond me, but it is not the language's fault any more than it is the house's fault when the 30 year old child refuses to move out of his parents' house.
Might I suggest that we begin teaching students Javascript or Flash in High School? It's not harder than calculus, it's a lot more useful, and all of the good programmers I've met started on their own by High School at the latest. Might I suggest an HTML -> Client-side scripting -> PHP series?
Besides, there are definitely wide swaths of knowledge that professors take for granted in new students. My first programming course in college lost more than 70% of the students. The professor was trying to teach good fundamental Object Oriented Programming, and the students were struggling with parsing proper usage of control loops and variable allocations.
Quite frankly, finding the "best paradigm for a first programming course" seems like a thinly-veiled way of asking which genre of programming language will dominate the students' ways of thinking for the next few years. Why limit the first programming course to one paradigm? Why would the first course be so important, as they really should have functional knowledge of three or four languages by the time they exit the first year?
Arguably, one can get the authentic WoW experience in about 1% of the time it requires to actually play. The player who has spent that amount of time intrinsically understands the game the same way that the person who simply got bored and grinded for 40 hours a week.
Being a cowboy requires skill. Being a level 70 mage simply requires time.
GSM makes sense, but GPS? If you don't have street signs to navigate to a riot site with, where the hell are you rioting?
"Frank just texted to say there is a big riot out in the middle of the sahara."
"Where is it?"
"Umm, West a bit. Damned lack of GPS!"
Now substitute the word "Rave," "Party," or "Political Gathering" and this actually makes a little bit of sense.
Except that they're warehoused in the US. And shipping fees around Europe are astronomical (borders and unions everywhere). And VAT is added to the base cost of an item in Europe, whereas in the US our sales tax is added after the cost of the item. Heck, with Spain's 20% duties and 16% VAT, you can quickly reach that 40% threshold.
If you've ever tried to get an Italian suit in the US, you'll see that cross-global commerce is expensive. You think those 40 dollar pants sell for 40 dollars in Thailand? Every transition adds quite a bit of cost. Try buying genuinely Parisian clothing in New York City sometime and then come crying about how Europeans are being ripped off left and right. That's just the nature of having something sold in the US shipped to Europe.
For the second time in about 30 years we have a descent phone first. It won't happen again for a while, I'm sure.
I think they're complainting that Youtube (owned by Google) is very popular with their users. Which, when you think about it, is a strange thing to complain about.
Yes, but which of those two would be the first to throw a few dollars at Google for a front-page endorsement to their competitor's users?
Bank of America allows you to pay online via systems that accept it, and mail checks to those who don't. Strangely enough, most of the people I pay bills to here in Massachusetts accept digital billpay through whatever system they use. But even paper checks are automatic and free.
BofA is a bunch of greedy bastards, yet they found a way to make it worthwile and simple. It's slowly filtering over to America.
It's like Cellphones: Companies don't feel like they can change one territory in the US at a time... they have to go all or nothing. So we get systems 10 years after the rest of the world has piecemeal brought themselves into it. Otherwise nationwide rollouts are untennable.
I don't think it is fair to judge a game by commercials. In GTA, every race indulges in power fantasy violence and hedonism in roughly equal parts.
What about a simple way for Internet connected devices to broadcast to the local network "Oh Poop, I'm on fire." Your router hears the ping, and routes a message to your e-mail and SMS.
It would be nice to hear about catastrophic failures.
why do we have more tld's anyway? Comcast will need both comcast.com and comcast.tel anyway. And the end user experience is the same between "company.tel" and "companytel" with an implied.com.
Why do we still allow this to happen?
Engagement Test Results:
85% - Half Life 2
90.1% - Gears of War 2
90.2% - Halo 3
9% - Yet Another Pokemon
95% - Yet Another Mario
30% - Spore
45% - Spore Demo
85% - Spore for the iPhone
69% - Creepy Touch Game
6.9% - Atari Games:
Participant - Midway Games
Or another way of looking at it: The tools we have to define good health cannot be used to rule out the possibility of a stroke at any moment.
My uncle died of an aneurysm in his skull one night. He was in his late 20's and quite healthy. They still don't know why it formed.
It may be comforting to say things like "things like strokes do not happen overnight." It lets us sleep better. However, they do actually happen over night, and genuinely healthy people die all the time. By being healthy you reduce your chances of impending death, but you don't eliminate them.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that there are more Mac users than racists.
Why do you think they're only available in white?
(I kid, I kid)