I've got a soft spot in my heart for E, but it's a fond memory from my past and not in my present (or likely future). OS X encompasses a lot more than just the UI - more like KDE than E - including stuff like reasonably reliable cloud sync; a services architecture that's actually used (click on a date in an email to create a scheduled event in the calendar app of my choosing); Wi-Fi that always comes back up after hibernation; erm, hibernation itself; tight integration between desktop apps and their mobile counterparts; user-friendly backup and restore; tons of commercial apps; etc.
I've gotten several of those to work in Linux through lots of tinkering, but ain't nobody got time for that. Or at least I don't. None of those are hypothetically impossible in Linux but my impression is that the ecosystem doesn't have them today. I'd rather buy a nice desktop OS than invest the time required to make myself happy on another Linux desktop. Don't get me wrong: all that tinkering's been great for my career as I learned way more than I'd ever planned on deep OS internals! It's just that I'm ready to move on to other challenges than futzing around with my desktop config before I can get work done.
I can't agree with the bit about rendering pages properly. In my experience, Safari is outstanding at rendering content on small screens and I truly don't remember the last time I had trouble accessing a web page with it.
Yes, it's annoying that other browsers are basically wrappers around WebKit. I wish that were different. But being "stuck" with Safari isn't exactly a burden.
I used Linux/BSD desktops for about 14 years before I gave up and bought a Mac. People laugh about "Just Works", but damned if it isn't true most of the time. "But what about my pet obscure feature X?" I had a few of those that were hard to give up, but once I stopped trying to make my Mac act exactly like KDE or awesome WM and started using their workflows I found myself being way more productive than I ever had been on Linux.
I'm not an Apple fanboy: if Linux or Windows ever got sufficiently better than OS X that I could justify changing ecosystems, I'd totally be open to considering it. Realistically, though, based on the last 20 years of watching their respective user interface development, I don't think that's likely to happen.
I second this wholeheartedly. It also has a nice iOS app (and maybe Android too?), so I basically have Evernote except with terabytes of "free" storage and my data never gets stored anywhere outside my control. Link: Note Station
I bought a 9.7" iPad Pro a couple of months ago and I've barely used my personal laptop since. I don't take my work laptop to meetings anymore now that I can scribble out notes easily while I'm recording talks.
I can't play "big" games on it or edit code (at least not to the degree I need), but for almost everything else it's way more convenient than a full-size laptop.
They should allow users to register IPv6/48 or/56 or/64
...or skip all that fakeable bullshit and use your billing address on file. That sounds way easier, more accurate, and less voodooish than any other methods.
According to Google, about an eighth of all their traffic today is IPV6, the percentage is growing, and the rate is accelerating. If you were waiting for a clear sign from the heavens that it's time to finally start supporting IPv6 as at least equal to IPv4, then you can stop waiting. While almost all of those systems currently also have native IPv4, it's absolutely insane to ignore v6 traffic in 2016. Do it at your and your employer's own peril.
Oh, there're are definitely "those guys". I'd be surprised (perhaps not as much as I wish) if that accounted for a significant portion of the outcome, though.
I think that's certainly a possibility. I also tend to respect the 538 gang so I won't quickly dismiss their results (with the caveat that I still haven't RTFA). It just seems to me like there are plenty of unmalicious reasons for the stated outcomes that I'd prefer to see ruled out first before attributing the result to "gangs of sabotaging men".
I'm too lazy to read the article so I'll wildly speculate in grand Slashdot tradition. Did the authors investigate why that's happening? I could imagine at least a few non-nefarious causes:
Maybe men are more likely to vote against a show they dislike than women are, so as many women dislike "Blue Mountain State" as men dislike "Private Practice" but they don't bother downvoting it.
Maybe men are more likely to watch shows they dislike with their partners than women are (and this is certainly true in my house). I'll sit through shows I don't care for because I'm not all that picky and I'd rather spend time with her watching Grey's Anatomy than doing other stuff. The converse isn't true: she isn't likely to sit through COPS with me. I'm more likely to have an opinion and vote on her shows than she is mine because I've seen more of hers.
As a variant of the last one, maybe women generally feel that they have less spare time around the house to watch TV. In households where routine chores are "women's work", the male resident might put in more screen hours than the female who has laundry and cooking and only has time to watch the shows she really cares about. (Note: I am not saying laundry and cooking are women's responsibility, just that lots of households divide work that way, and I think probably enough to sway the numbers.)
Yes, I'm sure there are dumbasses who routinely vote down female-centric shows (as defined by the study) just to be jerks. I'd stake money that there are plenty of women who would go down the list of male-centric shows and vote them down, too: "Batman? Dumb. The Shield? Dumb. Star Trek? Dumb." But are there enough to make a difference, or is it more likely the effect of different TV viewing and/or Internet poll taking habits between the sexes?
I hope they sue Microsofts' asses off for restraint of trade and tortious interference with business relationships.
I, too, learned some big words this week. I didn't feel compelled to strut them about incorrectly in public, though.
Back in the real world Microsoft isn't required to do business with anyone they don't want to, barring a short list of explicitly banned reasons for doing so. They certainly aren't a duopoly as they still have less than 5% of the search market.
Are you also against Google dropping ads from payday loans? Or was it from comments on that story that you learned words like "tortious interference", and now you're trotting them out over here to sound clever and contrarian?
You could hypothetically make an email app that looked and acted like an IM app. I'd personally give it a shot! But email isn't set up for things like read receipts (admit it: it's nice to know your wife actually saw, then read, your message) or status indicators ("Joe's offline right now", or even "Joe's typing a response"). It's not designed as a realtime protocol, even if message deliver tends to be very quick.
Again, I'd totally try out an IM client that used SMTP transport, but I'm skeptical that it could act as nicely as a purpose-built IM client.
IMHO we can't blame these companies as they are operating to maximize shareholder value within the current set of rules (laws, regulations).
The fuck we can't. You don't have to implement a greedy algorithm to solve every problem. Apple and Google have been raking in money by throwing huge compensation and benefits at top talent. They could have record profits for a single quarter by cutting all engineer salaries to minimum wage, but the following quarter would be a shitshow and they know it. That's the kind of thing Carly Fiorina did to HP and she damn near ruined it.
There's something called enlightened self-interest that boils down to "be good to your employees, vendors, and customers and they'll be good to you". Good CEOs recognize that and use it to make their shareholders rich. Shitty boards of directors hire shitty CEOs to optimize for next week's net margins, then seem shocked, shocked! when it all comes crashing down around them.
We can and should blame these companies for "maximizing shareholder value" at the expense of long-term viability.
It is wasteful to get rid of old stuff just because new stuff is better.
It is wasteful to keep using old stuff. Most of the biggest computing advances in the last few years have been in work per watt. Today's CPUs aren't dramatically faster than one from just a few years ago, but thanks to huge markets in mobile computing they're far more power efficient.
All the systems discussed in the story and in these comments are the equivalent of driving a lawnmower to work. Sure, you can, but it's going to be way slower and enormously worse for the environment than upgrading to a modern fuel-efficient car.
I bet there's a funny story in there, but... what's a prime? Why'd the competitor announce everyone could keep their jobs? Why'd the new prime have zero acceptance?
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a soft spot in my heart for E, but it's a fond memory from my past and not in my present (or likely future). OS X encompasses a lot more than just the UI - more like KDE than E - including stuff like reasonably reliable cloud sync; a services architecture that's actually used (click on a date in an email to create a scheduled event in the calendar app of my choosing); Wi-Fi that always comes back up after hibernation; erm, hibernation itself; tight integration between desktop apps and their mobile counterparts; user-friendly backup and restore; tons of commercial apps; etc.
I've gotten several of those to work in Linux through lots of tinkering, but ain't nobody got time for that. Or at least I don't. None of those are hypothetically impossible in Linux but my impression is that the ecosystem doesn't have them today. I'd rather buy a nice desktop OS than invest the time required to make myself happy on another Linux desktop. Don't get me wrong: all that tinkering's been great for my career as I learned way more than I'd ever planned on deep OS internals! It's just that I'm ready to move on to other challenges than futzing around with my desktop config before I can get work done.
I can't agree with the bit about rendering pages properly. In my experience, Safari is outstanding at rendering content on small screens and I truly don't remember the last time I had trouble accessing a web page with it.
Yes, it's annoying that other browsers are basically wrappers around WebKit. I wish that were different. But being "stuck" with Safari isn't exactly a burden.
At this time, I prefer the OS X UI to any other desktop UI I've used.
I used Linux/BSD desktops for about 14 years before I gave up and bought a Mac. People laugh about "Just Works", but damned if it isn't true most of the time. "But what about my pet obscure feature X?" I had a few of those that were hard to give up, but once I stopped trying to make my Mac act exactly like KDE or awesome WM and started using their workflows I found myself being way more productive than I ever had been on Linux.
I'm not an Apple fanboy: if Linux or Windows ever got sufficiently better than OS X that I could justify changing ecosystems, I'd totally be open to considering it. Realistically, though, based on the last 20 years of watching their respective user interface development, I don't think that's likely to happen.
There's the business phone, the productivity phone, but everyone's buying the social networking phone.
Why distinguish? I've made a good living with my iPhone as my business and productivity phone, and my social networking phone for the commute home.
Yes, but my iPhone reclaims that space when I'm not sending email.
I second this wholeheartedly. It also has a nice iOS app (and maybe Android too?), so I basically have Evernote except with terabytes of "free" storage and my data never gets stored anywhere outside my control. Link: Note Station
I bought a 9.7" iPad Pro a couple of months ago and I've barely used my personal laptop since. I don't take my work laptop to meetings anymore now that I can scribble out notes easily while I'm recording talks.
I can't play "big" games on it or edit code (at least not to the degree I need), but for almost everything else it's way more convenient than a full-size laptop.
Really, a VPN connection can only be established by you?
Steps for connecting my VPN:
Alternatively, connect to a Wi-Fi network that isn't my house, office, or cell phone. That also triggers it.
"You just have to put an ELB in front of everything, then you're golden." "Those are free, right, like an IPv6 address would be?" "Well, um..."
Yeah, OK. So everyone else is moving on but AWS is addicted to v4 for reasons that elude me.
They should allow users to register IPv6 /48 or /56 or /64
...or skip all that fakeable bullshit and use your billing address on file. That sounds way easier, more accurate, and less voodooish than any other methods.
I'm curious if this will utterly destroy IPv6's reputation among Internet users at large.
Check this graph again in a month and you should have your answer.
According to Google, about an eighth of all their traffic today is IPV6, the percentage is growing, and the rate is accelerating. If you were waiting for a clear sign from the heavens that it's time to finally start supporting IPv6 as at least equal to IPv4, then you can stop waiting. While almost all of those systems currently also have native IPv4, it's absolutely insane to ignore v6 traffic in 2016. Do it at your and your employer's own peril.
I'd be willing to bet that those are separate teams.
Yep, nothing like ignoring half of humanity to simplify things. Yep.
Oh, there're are definitely "those guys". I'd be surprised (perhaps not as much as I wish) if that accounted for a significant portion of the outcome, though.
I think that's certainly a possibility. I also tend to respect the 538 gang so I won't quickly dismiss their results (with the caveat that I still haven't RTFA). It just seems to me like there are plenty of unmalicious reasons for the stated outcomes that I'd prefer to see ruled out first before attributing the result to "gangs of sabotaging men".
I'm too lazy to read the article so I'll wildly speculate in grand Slashdot tradition. Did the authors investigate why that's happening? I could imagine at least a few non-nefarious causes:
Maybe men are more likely to vote against a show they dislike than women are, so as many women dislike "Blue Mountain State" as men dislike "Private Practice" but they don't bother downvoting it.
Maybe men are more likely to watch shows they dislike with their partners than women are (and this is certainly true in my house). I'll sit through shows I don't care for because I'm not all that picky and I'd rather spend time with her watching Grey's Anatomy than doing other stuff. The converse isn't true: she isn't likely to sit through COPS with me. I'm more likely to have an opinion and vote on her shows than she is mine because I've seen more of hers.
As a variant of the last one, maybe women generally feel that they have less spare time around the house to watch TV. In households where routine chores are "women's work", the male resident might put in more screen hours than the female who has laundry and cooking and only has time to watch the shows she really cares about. (Note: I am not saying laundry and cooking are women's responsibility, just that lots of households divide work that way, and I think probably enough to sway the numbers.)
Yes, I'm sure there are dumbasses who routinely vote down female-centric shows (as defined by the study) just to be jerks. I'd stake money that there are plenty of women who would go down the list of male-centric shows and vote them down, too: "Batman? Dumb. The Shield? Dumb. Star Trek? Dumb." But are there enough to make a difference, or is it more likely the effect of different TV viewing and/or Internet poll taking habits between the sexes?
I hope they sue Microsofts' asses off for restraint of trade and tortious interference with business relationships.
I, too, learned some big words this week. I didn't feel compelled to strut them about incorrectly in public, though.
Back in the real world Microsoft isn't required to do business with anyone they don't want to, barring a short list of explicitly banned reasons for doing so. They certainly aren't a duopoly as they still have less than 5% of the search market.
Are you also against Google dropping ads from payday loans? Or was it from comments on that story that you learned words like "tortious interference", and now you're trotting them out over here to sound clever and contrarian?
That's nice, but we were discussing email.
You could hypothetically make an email app that looked and acted like an IM app. I'd personally give it a shot! But email isn't set up for things like read receipts (admit it: it's nice to know your wife actually saw, then read, your message) or status indicators ("Joe's offline right now", or even "Joe's typing a response"). It's not designed as a realtime protocol, even if message deliver tends to be very quick.
Again, I'd totally try out an IM client that used SMTP transport, but I'm skeptical that it could act as nicely as a purpose-built IM client.
IMHO we can't blame these companies as they are operating to maximize shareholder value within the current set of rules (laws, regulations).
The fuck we can't. You don't have to implement a greedy algorithm to solve every problem. Apple and Google have been raking in money by throwing huge compensation and benefits at top talent. They could have record profits for a single quarter by cutting all engineer salaries to minimum wage, but the following quarter would be a shitshow and they know it. That's the kind of thing Carly Fiorina did to HP and she damn near ruined it.
There's something called enlightened self-interest that boils down to "be good to your employees, vendors, and customers and they'll be good to you". Good CEOs recognize that and use it to make their shareholders rich. Shitty boards of directors hire shitty CEOs to optimize for next week's net margins, then seem shocked, shocked! when it all comes crashing down around them.
We can and should blame these companies for "maximizing shareholder value" at the expense of long-term viability.
I did a shitty job of training?
I'd do a great job of training. My 4 year syllabus starts with "This Is A Mouse", and no, it cannot be rushed.
It is wasteful to get rid of old stuff just because new stuff is better.
It is wasteful to keep using old stuff. Most of the biggest computing advances in the last few years have been in work per watt. Today's CPUs aren't dramatically faster than one from just a few years ago, but thanks to huge markets in mobile computing they're far more power efficient.
All the systems discussed in the story and in these comments are the equivalent of driving a lawnmower to work. Sure, you can, but it's going to be way slower and enormously worse for the environment than upgrading to a modern fuel-efficient car.
I bet there's a funny story in there, but... what's a prime? Why'd the competitor announce everyone could keep their jobs? Why'd the new prime have zero acceptance?