Here in the UK, BB has the teenage girl market totally sewn up - if you dont have BBM, the other girls wont speak to you! BB need to bring out a "Hello Kitty" model, a "Barbie" model, and a "My Little Pony" model (autographed by Justin Bleiber) and forget the business market.
The teen-girl market is a lock for RIM because they're both affordable and offer the best mobile for communications on the market. Additionally, BBM offers features such as received and read confirmations, which you won't find on other platforms -- no more wondering "did they get my message" or "did they read it".
Forget the business market? Well, right now RIM is the ONLY company that makes a phone useful for business! While the physical keyboard and optical trackpad make writing effortless, a huge bonus, the Blackberry platform simply handles PIM data far better than the competition. Your schedule and notifications are visible (and editable) right on the home screen!
For advanced users, everything important is a keystroke away. Open the calender, jump to next week, add an entry -- three keystrokes. On other platforms, fumble until you find the calendar app, scroll to next week, do who-knows-what to add an appointment, try to type some uncommon name in on that soft-keyboard...
Heaven forbid you forget a detail and need to go back to your email! With Blackberry, you have true multi-tasking -- something iOS and Android still haven't mastered -- jump back and forth between applications without worrying about losing your place. (It's a single keystroke, there and back again -- a nice UI trick to make you more productive). With the optical trackpad, copy and paste is quick and easy -- not a slow hit and miss finger-fumbling process like on a touchscreen only interface.
See, a business phone needs to give you the info you need as quickly as possible, let you enter the info you need as quickly as possible, and stay out of your way. Business users see their phone as a tool -- RIM knows this, and makes serious use quick and easy -- the less time they spend tinkering with their phone the better. Need your schedule? Just look down. No fumbling around looking for and launching apps. Want to make a change? It's one click away. Well, with RIM, most important things are just a keystroke away.
My wife, a huge android fan, just dumped her new Samsung for an antique Blackberry 8500. With her new job, she found that an old Blackberry was a better match for her needs than a new Android handset. She needed to manage a lot of contacts, a lot of messages, and a constantly changing schedule. Sounds like something a smartphone ought to handle well. As things stand today, no other "smartphone" manufacturer even comes close to what RIM has been doing for years.
RIM may be a third-place player in the smartphone game now that it's dominated by the consumer market -- but no other manufacture even come close to matching even their old models in terms of productivity. Even Google's CEO uses a Blackberry
Forget about business! You must be out of your mind!
If you want to do work on your phone, a stylus could be acceptable I guess.
That was the point, really. Then again, I thought doing work on the phone was the whole point of a smartphone?
For those of us that just want to use the phone generally, we don't want to whap out a stylus every time we need to add a contact or check our email.
I'll agree, though I think a physical keyboard is even better suited to the task.
I never looked at Blackberrys seriously. Any time I've had to deal with them or the desktop software for them they seemed very poorly designed.
Well, if you don't plan on using your phone for work, I can see how you'd get that impression. In actual use, they're incredibly well-designed. Things like email, contacts, scheduling, etc. are either immediately available or just a single keystroke away. The desktop software isn't really necessary, save for local backups and switching to a new device. Otherwise, BB Protect will handle most users backup needs. I very rarely use it, though I haven't noticed any problems with it so far. For music, you can use just about any music-manger you want -- treating the SD card like any inexpensive MP3 player
My wife, a huge android fan, recently traded in her new Samsung for an antique Blackberry 8500. She wanted the better battery life, and the improved productivity she's seen me get out of my phones. As her needs became more complex with her new job, she needed more productivity out of her phone. Sure, she can do all of the things she does now on her android, just not nearly as well. An overview of her schedule and all of her notifications are on the home screen, available at a glance. In two keystrokes she can check and delete or respond to a new message -- and far more quickly and accurately with the physical keyboard.
When her needs were less work-focused, however, she gained much more value out of her Android. It had better games, a nicer browser, and worked adequately enough for email, SMS, and facebook.
A phone like the Bold 9900 offers an interesting compromise, with a touchscreen on top, and keyboard & trackpad below. Touch when it makes sense, trackpad and keyboard for when it doesn't.
RIM does have a patent on a hybrid capacitive/resistive touchscreen, which I'd like to see on new phones. I would prefer to use a stylus when working with spreadsheets, for example, that the optical trackpad -- I already know that I can't manage the things with a capacitive touchscreen alone. It's just not well suited.
Of course, that's the point isn't it? The capacitive touchscreen isn't the end-all of the hand-held UI. It's good for a few things, but all-but-useless for other, common, tasks.
They did -- in that they made touch-screen devices even less usable.
Sure, you can slide your greasy fingers across them to make gross ape-like gestures and "click" gigantic targets, but you can't do anything that requires more precision than jamming your finger into your nose.
Common tasks like selecting text and re-positioning the text-cursor (easy with a stylus) are extraordinarily frustrating on the wretchedly imprecise mess that is the capacitive touch-screen.
Thankfully, some companies offer an optical trackpad to make those sorts of tasks less-painful. Still, for many applications, you still can't beat a stylus.
If you want to blame Apple for this particular usability and productivity killing trend, be my guest.
As for nobody innovating in the smartphone arena before Apple, you're out of your mind. RIM offered new ideas year after year both before and after the iPhone. (The iPhone is still WAY behind RIM in terms of productivity. They don't even come close if you look at things like notifications -- which RIM has nearly perfected.)
That's just one company. There were MANY other innovators from Nokia to Motorola who offered new and interesting concepts.
The iPhone was a total joke when it first came out. I have no idea how a "smartphone" without MMS, extremely short battery-life, and lacking other basic features common to the cheapest dumb-phone sold at all. iOS 5 promises to bring notifications up to RIM c. 2003 standards. That's right, they STILL haven't caught up to RIM. That's pretty sad.
As for innovation, it's well known that Apple is far from the first with a touchscreen phone, nor even one with a capacitive touchscreen. And the wall-of-icons UI is hardly innovative. It's ridiculous that anyone could come to such an absurd conclusion.
Sure, they shook the industry -- but in the process, they set it back several years. We're just now starting to see manufactures break away from the touch-screen only horror show and offer REAL smart phones that actually enhance productivity -- and they're achieving that by copying a real industry innovator: RIM.
when I was in high school in the 90's they still had math books from the 70's
I didn't realize that highschool-level mathematics changed so dramatically since the 1970's
They had computer programming books that featured code in the BASIC language.
And this was somehow insufficient to teach computer programming principles?
We had Tandy computers with 8086 processors. And this was high school in the 90's.
Er, a lot happened in the 1990's. This should have been more than adequate in the early 90's.
And these kids who are getting iPads at 5 years old are the ones who will grow up and say kids from my neighborhood are having the world handed to them and don't deserve a chance to go to college.
This just doesn't make any sense. How did you come to such an absurd conclusion?
Sorry, I don't see where MS has copied Apple here. Metro is dramatically different from iOS.
Apple, it seems, is the one who's stopped innovating. iOS wasn't terribly innovative to begin with, and STILL stuffers from some particularly horrid UI problems (notifications stand out here).
Other mobile UI's have long since surpassed iOS it terms of usability. webOS was well ahead of iOS before HP killed it, as is WP7. I don't know that iOS ever matched BBOS in terms of productivity. With QNX improving on the best parts webOS, Apple looks to be way behind the rest of the industry in the UI department.
If you can accuse anyone of copying Apple, it would be Android. Though this isn't true in every case, it's only slightly ahead of iOS on phones, though not significantly so. On tablets Android is coming into it's own, though it's not really pushing any boundaries like other mobile OS's.
Apple can't live on the myth that they're the "best" and "easiest to use" forever. If they want to stay relevant, they need to start innovating again.
Microsoft can't innovate in the UI -- they either copy or fail.
Don't be ridiculous. It's just like the idiots who say "RIM isn't innovating" -- they're just parroting nonsense.
Just a few examples, look at the UI improvements in DOS over CP/M, or Windows 95 over 3.1 Hell, the start menu was such a popular concept you couldn't find a linux distro without a start menu clone!
Even the Metro interface, love it or hate it, is certainly not a clone. It's undoubtedly something new -- which is more than anyone can say for the iOS wall-of-icons UI. Just because you personally don't find it attractive doesn't make it any less innovative.
An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. It's like you're not even trying.
Well, maybe not those specific applications (because they haven't been ported, possibly dosbox) but you can run whatever you want on a Blackberry without "jailbreaking" or "rooting" as Apple and Android users are forced to do.
Drop the file on an SD card, download it through the browser, or even write a program directly on the hand-set. The choice is yours.
It even multi-tasks properly, with exceptional battery life.
In 5 years, most mobile phones will use touchscreens. Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Obvious? Hell, I thought that in 5 years it would be obvious to everyone how awful the touchscreen-only interface actually is.
Seriously, it's absolute misery. The few benefits it offers are FAR outweighed by the drawbacks -- everything from typing (swipe? get real) to something as simple as re-positioning the text-cursor. Maybe with a hybrid resistive/capacitive screen (so you could use a stylus) it may be less horrid, but it'll still be a nightmare to type, as it is now.
There's a reason we're seeing so many new phones with physical keyboards, you know. The Droid Pro is almost usable, but it is in desperate need of an optical trackpad if you plan to use it for more than basic text-entry.
Well said. Touchscreens are practically useless outside of clicking over-sized buttons and gross ape-like gestures.
For precision work, like re-positioning the text-cursor or clicking small targets, you really need something like an optical trackpad. With a touchscreen-only interface, such a simple and common task is extremely frustrating. (No, zooming in isn't an option. That completely defeats the purpose of having a larger screen.)
As for typing, no matter how awesome you think swipe is, it still can't compare to a physical keyboard either in precision or speed. Anything beyond sending a text or updating your facebook status and it's a huge chore.
The new Blackberry Bold 9900 is the best of both worlds, offering a touchscreen, full keyboard, and can't-live-without optical trackpad. Other smartphone manufactures would do well to copy this design. It's fantastic for productivity.
Re:Is there an error in first time the date is use
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Happy Programmer Day!
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Er, it seems that being a shill by definition requires more than merely exhibiting similar behaviors. In fact, shills purposefully mimic the behavior of legitimate customers/clients. From behavior alone, you can not determine if someone is or is not a shill in this context.
Further, looking at shills in a different sense, behavior is still not an indicator as a shill must act the way they do out of self-interest. That is, the motivation for the praise or defense they offer is what makes a person a shill -- not merely the act of speaking.
In short, someone isn't a Microsoft shill by definition just because they're at a keynote and offering a positive description of the demo.
This doesn't seem to support the 'skip every other version' idea that you're suggesting.
We could also add 3.1 to the good list, leaving more than twice as many good versions than bad!
We could even put ME on the good list, as it didn't suck for most users. The lack of useful command line tools (SFC, etc.) is what made it suck for techs -- otherwise, it was just a mediocre 98se upgrade. It was more stable than 98, and it had better USB support. It wasn't as bad as people think.
Vista? Yeah, it sucked. Though once I added an extra gb of ram and the installed the latest service pack, my wife's vista laptop went from being a near-useless pile-of-garbage, ignored for her netbook, to her main computer.
On Windows 8, we won't really know if it's good or bad until we can use it. The point, of course, is that there isn't a need to skip every other version. That pattern just doesn't seem to exist.
People play video games to simulate situations they couldn't or wouldn't otherwise experience, whether they are fantasy, or an aspect of reality they either can't or don't want to experience for real.
Well said. This is *exactly* why I love Tetris so much.
I would argue that you're not a bigot, just someone who parrots out the narrow spectrum of 'current event' opinions he is exposed to.
And what about my post lead you to that conclusion? Just like the user who accused me of being intolerant, it seems you're more interested in dismissing what I've said than addressing it.
As your comparing tablets to netbooks, I thought I'd chime in on this point:
* Polishing touches such as smart covers. Seriously, to anyone who hasn't used an iPad, smart covers may seem like "total meh", but it's actually a genius-level polishing touch: stuff automatically turns on when you take it out, and stuff automatically turns off when you put it away. You don't have to hit a power button.
I can't think of a netbook that you can't easily configure to automatically suspend when the lid is closed (some are even configured this way by default.)
As you've brought up the iPad specifically, not tablets in general, I think it's reasonable to point out here, that the use of magnets in a cover to change the state of the system is something that RIM has been doing with their smart phones at least since the 7290 (2005, iirc, possibly also with earlier models, but I don't have anything older lying around to check).
The point, of course, is that this feature isn't limited to tablets in general or the iPad specifically. Nor is it a feature absent on netbooks. In short, it doesn't support your argument.
He wasn't blaming Android, he was blaming Richard for using a stock Android setup.
This is a matter of interpretation. I don't see the blame being placed on Richard here, only an acknowledgement that the stock android setup is wretched; which seems to place the blame squarely on Android.
We also interpret this differently "I was telling him that he could, with very little effort, make it closer to what he would like"
Keep in mind that Richard was NOT planning to upgrade until next year. He was, for all practical purposes, stuck with a phone he didn't like.
From that perspective, it seems to me that ScrewMaster was both agreeing with Richard the the UI was horrid and offering him useful advice on how it can be made better (from Richards perspective) or more like iOS. The intent, from what I can see, was to allow Richard to enjoy a more iOS-like experience until he could upgrade early next year.
Now, I have absolutely no doubt that ScrewMaster was hoping that Richard would find this feature compelling enough to adopt Android as his platform of choice. Though, from my perspective, this doesn't seem to be primary intent of his post.
Sure, if you see the world through Android-colored glasses, that's how it would look to you.
If my personal preferences make a difference to you, I don't care for Android. Oddly enough, for many of the same reasons that I don't care for iOS. I don't find either platform to be better suited to my needs than my Blackberry.
In other words, Richard just needs to put in a little more effort, and Android allows that while Apple, somehow, does not, which is strange given that Richard seems to prefer iOS, so it's hard to see how Android could allow him to make the phone closer to iOS, but Apple cannot.
This doesn't make much sense to me. The feature ScrewMaster was promoting here was the ability to radically change the UI. It's true (as far as I know) that Android allows this while iOS does not. Obviously the closest thing to iOS is iOS -- I don't think that was the point. Other than promoting his preferred platform via this feature, it IS something someone coming from iOS may not know about.
Again, it's important to keep in mind that Richard is stuck with his Android phone until next year. The option to make his phone work better for him seems like useful advice. That he may not have known about the ability to radically change the UI is perfectly reasonable. We can't expect everyone to know about every feature or capability of their mobile operating system.
People have different tastes. You guys really need to learn to accept that.
I think ScrewMaster made it clear that he understands that people have different tastes. Again, he offered a way for Richard to make his phone conform more to his preferences (more like iOS). Handy, as poor Richard is stuck with a phone that he doesn't like until next year, and may hate using it over the next few months much less if he made the UI more iOS like. He is planning, after all, to switch back to iOS next year.
If you were capable of accepting that someone would actually prefer iOS to Android, you might be able to understand that telling people they should just stick with the thing they don't prefer is rather absurd.
Again, Richard is stuck with Android until next year when he upgrades. ScrewMaster acknowledged Richard's preference for iOS and suggested a way to make his experience more iOS like in the mean time. I don't think that's unreasonable. I think it's rather useful advice, even if it was unsolicited. After all, unsolicited advice (both good and bad) is ridiculously common on Slashdot.
The fact that ScrewMaster took the opportunity to additionally extol the virtues he sees in his preferred platform isn't really relevant, from what I can see. I see fans of all platforms do this all the time. You're a well
Er, I don't follow. They came up with the term, after all. Is it bigoted or intolerant to identify the group by the name they gave themselves?
Even if that were true, why would someone's bigotry or intolerance affect the veracity of their claims regarding a completely unrelated subject?
Does being racist make an engineer less capable of assessing a bridge? Does being a religious fundamentalist make a chef less capable of preparing a meal?
It would appear that you haven't thought this through at all.
While your solution will likely solve the immediate problem of raccoons living living in the chimney, it may lead to an even greater problem: angry, flaming, raccoons running loose in the house, setting the furniture ablaze.
Government must first take wealth away from others attempting to create wealth, thereby decreasing their ability to do so and benefit others, pay for the administrative/governmental costs, then use a portion of what remains to hire and pay wages. It's the broken-window fallacy.
It's a tea-bagger! Neat, I didn't think anyone capable of both reading and writing actually bought into this nonsense.
Here's a clue: High taxes on corporate profits increase jobs and, by consequence, wealth. You can easily see this if you learn a bit of history.
This is the basic idea, since you seem to need a LOT of help here: When profits are heavily taxed, companies have a greater incentive to reinvest profits in building new factories, hiring more people, investing in R&D, etc. to reduce their tax burden. Lower taxes, and you lose that incentive. Fewer new jobs are created, fewer factories are built, and R&D is slashed to make the next quarter look a little better to investors.
As to grading, meaningful feedback is one of the keys to learning - the score doesn't matter, but showing what you did wrong so that you can correct it in the future is key to learning.
We used to call that "formative assessment". Unfortunately, the ridiculous point system we've come up with does not reward the students for learning, only the accumulation of points. They could give two-shits about WHY they got a question wrong, it's just n points that they can't get back.
Kids know that mindlessly filling out the daily homework worksheet and while failing the mid-term and final and the student can still "earn" them a passing grade. If that's not enough, lazy teachers offer "extra credit" projects (read: glue shit to poster board) to help little Johnny lazy "boost" his grade -- and keep equally lazy, entitled, self-righteous parents off their back.
We need to drop grades and 'points' (an abomination) and move to a competent / not yet competent system where students demonstrate competence for all of the courses core concepts. This would reward advanced students, who could work their way to an early graduation, while keeping the future-fast-food-workers from stumbling their way through, further devaluing the HS diploma, all the while holding the better students back.
You can bet little Susie do-nothing would care a lot more about WHY she got a question wrong -- she'll need to know if she wants to pass!
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the UK, BB has the teenage girl market totally sewn up - if you dont have BBM, the other girls wont speak to you! BB need to bring out a "Hello Kitty" model, a "Barbie" model, and a "My Little Pony" model (autographed by Justin Bleiber) and forget the business market.
The teen-girl market is a lock for RIM because they're both affordable and offer the best mobile for communications on the market. Additionally, BBM offers features such as received and read confirmations, which you won't find on other platforms -- no more wondering "did they get my message" or "did they read it".
Forget the business market? Well, right now RIM is the ONLY company that makes a phone useful for business! While the physical keyboard and optical trackpad make writing effortless, a huge bonus, the Blackberry platform simply handles PIM data far better than the competition. Your schedule and notifications are visible (and editable) right on the home screen!
For advanced users, everything important is a keystroke away. Open the calender, jump to next week, add an entry -- three keystrokes. On other platforms, fumble until you find the calendar app, scroll to next week, do who-knows-what to add an appointment, try to type some uncommon name in on that soft-keyboard...
Heaven forbid you forget a detail and need to go back to your email! With Blackberry, you have true multi-tasking -- something iOS and Android still haven't mastered -- jump back and forth between applications without worrying about losing your place. (It's a single keystroke, there and back again -- a nice UI trick to make you more productive). With the optical trackpad, copy and paste is quick and easy -- not a slow hit and miss finger-fumbling process like on a touchscreen only interface.
See, a business phone needs to give you the info you need as quickly as possible, let you enter the info you need as quickly as possible, and stay out of your way. Business users see their phone as a tool -- RIM knows this, and makes serious use quick and easy -- the less time they spend tinkering with their phone the better. Need your schedule? Just look down. No fumbling around looking for and launching apps. Want to make a change? It's one click away. Well, with RIM, most important things are just a keystroke away.
My wife, a huge android fan, just dumped her new Samsung for an antique Blackberry 8500. With her new job, she found that an old Blackberry was a better match for her needs than a new Android handset. She needed to manage a lot of contacts, a lot of messages, and a constantly changing schedule. Sounds like something a smartphone ought to handle well. As things stand today, no other "smartphone" manufacturer even comes close to what RIM has been doing for years.
RIM may be a third-place player in the smartphone game now that it's dominated by the consumer market -- but no other manufacture even come close to matching even their old models in terms of productivity. Even Google's CEO uses a Blackberry
Forget about business! You must be out of your mind!
If you want to do work on your phone, a stylus could be acceptable I guess.
That was the point, really. Then again, I thought doing work on the phone was the whole point of a smartphone?
For those of us that just want to use the phone generally, we don't want to whap out a stylus every time we need to add a contact or check our email.
I'll agree, though I think a physical keyboard is even better suited to the task.
I never looked at Blackberrys seriously. Any time I've had to deal with them or the desktop software for them they seemed very poorly designed.
Well, if you don't plan on using your phone for work, I can see how you'd get that impression. In actual use, they're incredibly well-designed. Things like email, contacts, scheduling, etc. are either immediately available or just a single keystroke away. The desktop software isn't really necessary, save for local backups and switching to a new device. Otherwise, BB Protect will handle most users backup needs. I very rarely use it, though I haven't noticed any problems with it so far. For music, you can use just about any music-manger you want -- treating the SD card like any inexpensive MP3 player
My wife, a huge android fan, recently traded in her new Samsung for an antique Blackberry 8500. She wanted the better battery life, and the improved productivity she's seen me get out of my phones. As her needs became more complex with her new job, she needed more productivity out of her phone. Sure, she can do all of the things she does now on her android, just not nearly as well. An overview of her schedule and all of her notifications are on the home screen, available at a glance. In two keystrokes she can check and delete or respond to a new message -- and far more quickly and accurately with the physical keyboard.
When her needs were less work-focused, however, she gained much more value out of her Android. It had better games, a nicer browser, and worked adequately enough for email, SMS, and facebook.
A phone like the Bold 9900 offers an interesting compromise, with a touchscreen on top, and keyboard & trackpad below. Touch when it makes sense, trackpad and keyboard for when it doesn't.
RIM does have a patent on a hybrid capacitive/resistive touchscreen, which I'd like to see on new phones. I would prefer to use a stylus when working with spreadsheets, for example, that the optical trackpad -- I already know that I can't manage the things with a capacitive touchscreen alone. It's just not well suited.
Of course, that's the point isn't it? The capacitive touchscreen isn't the end-all of the hand-held UI. It's good for a few things, but all-but-useless for other, common, tasks.
Capacitive touchscreens made a big difference too
They did -- in that they made touch-screen devices even less usable.
Sure, you can slide your greasy fingers across them to make gross ape-like gestures and "click" gigantic targets, but you can't do anything that requires more precision than jamming your finger into your nose.
Common tasks like selecting text and re-positioning the text-cursor (easy with a stylus) are extraordinarily frustrating on the wretchedly imprecise mess that is the capacitive touch-screen.
Thankfully, some companies offer an optical trackpad to make those sorts of tasks less-painful. Still, for many applications, you still can't beat a stylus.
If you want to blame Apple for this particular usability and productivity killing trend, be my guest.
As for nobody innovating in the smartphone arena before Apple, you're out of your mind. RIM offered new ideas year after year both before and after the iPhone. (The iPhone is still WAY behind RIM in terms of productivity. They don't even come close if you look at things like notifications -- which RIM has nearly perfected.)
That's just one company. There were MANY other innovators from Nokia to Motorola who offered new and interesting concepts.
The iPhone was a total joke when it first came out. I have no idea how a "smartphone" without MMS, extremely short battery-life, and lacking other basic features common to the cheapest dumb-phone sold at all. iOS 5 promises to bring notifications up to RIM c. 2003 standards. That's right, they STILL haven't caught up to RIM. That's pretty sad.
As for innovation, it's well known that Apple is far from the first with a touchscreen phone, nor even one with a capacitive touchscreen. And the wall-of-icons UI is hardly innovative. It's ridiculous that anyone could come to such an absurd conclusion.
Sure, they shook the industry -- but in the process, they set it back several years. We're just now starting to see manufactures break away from the touch-screen only horror show and offer REAL smart phones that actually enhance productivity -- and they're achieving that by copying a real industry innovator: RIM.
when I was in high school in the 90's they still had math books from the 70's
I didn't realize that highschool-level mathematics changed so dramatically since the 1970's
They had computer programming books that featured code in the BASIC language.
And this was somehow insufficient to teach computer programming principles?
We had Tandy computers with 8086 processors. And this was high school in the 90's.
Er, a lot happened in the 1990's. This should have been more than adequate in the early 90's.
And these kids who are getting iPads at 5 years old are the ones who will grow up and say kids from my neighborhood are having the world handed to them and don't deserve a chance to go to college.
This just doesn't make any sense. How did you come to such an absurd conclusion?
in the line of copiers following Apple, as usual.
Sorry, I don't see where MS has copied Apple here. Metro is dramatically different from iOS.
Apple, it seems, is the one who's stopped innovating. iOS wasn't terribly innovative to begin with, and STILL stuffers from some particularly horrid UI problems (notifications stand out here).
Other mobile UI's have long since surpassed iOS it terms of usability. webOS was well ahead of iOS before HP killed it, as is WP7. I don't know that iOS ever matched BBOS in terms of productivity. With QNX improving on the best parts webOS, Apple looks to be way behind the rest of the industry in the UI department.
If you can accuse anyone of copying Apple, it would be Android. Though this isn't true in every case, it's only slightly ahead of iOS on phones, though not significantly so. On tablets Android is coming into it's own, though it's not really pushing any boundaries like other mobile OS's.
Apple can't live on the myth that they're the "best" and "easiest to use" forever. If they want to stay relevant, they need to start innovating again.
A fine estimate, though solving the actual problem is just as easy.
For half of the participants of this thread: Just divide 7 by 11, and multiply the result by 100.
Didn't everyone learn this in elementary school? Why is this even being discussed?
Microsoft can't innovate in the UI -- they either copy or fail.
Don't be ridiculous. It's just like the idiots who say "RIM isn't innovating" -- they're just parroting nonsense.
Just a few examples, look at the UI improvements in DOS over CP/M, or Windows 95 over 3.1 Hell, the start menu was such a popular concept you couldn't find a linux distro without a start menu clone!
Even the Metro interface, love it or hate it, is certainly not a clone. It's undoubtedly something new -- which is more than anyone can say for the iOS wall-of-icons UI. Just because you personally don't find it attractive doesn't make it any less innovative.
An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. It's like you're not even trying.
You're not a big reader are you? Let me quote my post:
not those specific applications
Metro is a pile of shite, the 'designers' are idiots who are simply trying to justify their positions, by ruining everybody's user experience.
So first it's MS just copying Apple, now it's a horrible design.
I wish you trolls would just make up your minds. Failing that, how about changing the mantra to something like "They copied Apples horrible design"?
Well, maybe not those specific applications (because they haven't been ported, possibly dosbox) but you can run whatever you want on a Blackberry without "jailbreaking" or "rooting" as Apple and Android users are forced to do.
Drop the file on an SD card, download it through the browser, or even write a program directly on the hand-set. The choice is yours.
It even multi-tasks properly, with exceptional battery life.
In 5 years, most mobile phones will use touchscreens. Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Obvious? Hell, I thought that in 5 years it would be obvious to everyone how awful the touchscreen-only interface actually is.
Seriously, it's absolute misery. The few benefits it offers are FAR outweighed by the drawbacks -- everything from typing (swipe? get real) to something as simple as re-positioning the text-cursor. Maybe with a hybrid resistive/capacitive screen (so you could use a stylus) it may be less horrid, but it'll still be a nightmare to type, as it is now.
There's a reason we're seeing so many new phones with physical keyboards, you know. The Droid Pro is almost usable, but it is in desperate need of an optical trackpad if you plan to use it for more than basic text-entry.
Well said. Touchscreens are practically useless outside of clicking over-sized buttons and gross ape-like gestures.
For precision work, like re-positioning the text-cursor or clicking small targets, you really need something like an optical trackpad. With a touchscreen-only interface, such a simple and common task is extremely frustrating. (No, zooming in isn't an option. That completely defeats the purpose of having a larger screen.)
As for typing, no matter how awesome you think swipe is, it still can't compare to a physical keyboard either in precision or speed. Anything beyond sending a text or updating your facebook status and it's a huge chore.
The new Blackberry Bold 9900 is the best of both worlds, offering a touchscreen, full keyboard, and can't-live-without optical trackpad. Other smartphone manufactures would do well to copy this design. It's fantastic for productivity.
my prime number sieve discards both numbers
Eratosthenes? Is that you?
Er, it seems that being a shill by definition requires more than merely exhibiting similar behaviors. In fact, shills purposefully mimic the behavior of legitimate customers/clients. From behavior alone, you can not determine if someone is or is not a shill in this context.
Further, looking at shills in a different sense, behavior is still not an indicator as a shill must act the way they do out of self-interest. That is, the motivation for the praise or defense they offer is what makes a person a shill -- not merely the act of speaking.
In short, someone isn't a Microsoft shill by definition just because they're at a keynote and offering a positive description of the demo.
I can now say 'I don't know, I don't use it anymore'.
Me too. I just shrug my shoulders and say it's not something I'm prepared to help them with. Life is too short.
Yeah, helping others is just a waste of time.
Looking at your list:
Good: 95, 98, XP, 7
Bad: ME, Vista
This doesn't seem to support the 'skip every other version' idea that you're suggesting.
We could also add 3.1 to the good list, leaving more than twice as many good versions than bad!
We could even put ME on the good list, as it didn't suck for most users. The lack of useful command line tools (SFC, etc.) is what made it suck for techs -- otherwise, it was just a mediocre 98se upgrade. It was more stable than 98, and it had better USB support. It wasn't as bad as people think.
Vista? Yeah, it sucked. Though once I added an extra gb of ram and the installed the latest service pack, my wife's vista laptop went from being a near-useless pile-of-garbage, ignored for her netbook, to her main computer.
On Windows 8, we won't really know if it's good or bad until we can use it. The point, of course, is that there isn't a need to skip every other version. That pattern just doesn't seem to exist.
People play video games to simulate situations they couldn't or wouldn't otherwise experience, whether they are fantasy, or an aspect of reality they either can't or don't want to experience for real.
Well said. This is *exactly* why I love Tetris so much.
The word is titbit. Tit.
Titbit is a variant of tidbit, not the other way around.
I would argue that you're not a bigot, just someone who parrots out the narrow spectrum of 'current event' opinions he is exposed to.
And what about my post lead you to that conclusion? Just like the user who accused me of being intolerant, it seems you're more interested in dismissing what I've said than addressing it.
Why is that?
As your comparing tablets to netbooks, I thought I'd chime in on this point:
* Polishing touches such as smart covers. Seriously, to anyone who hasn't used an iPad, smart covers may seem like "total meh", but it's actually a genius-level polishing touch: stuff automatically turns on when you take it out, and stuff automatically turns off when you put it away. You don't have to hit a power button.
I can't think of a netbook that you can't easily configure to automatically suspend when the lid is closed (some are even configured this way by default.)
As you've brought up the iPad specifically, not tablets in general, I think it's reasonable to point out here, that the use of magnets in a cover to change the state of the system is something that RIM has been doing with their smart phones at least since the 7290 (2005, iirc, possibly also with earlier models, but I don't have anything older lying around to check).
The point, of course, is that this feature isn't limited to tablets in general or the iPad specifically. Nor is it a feature absent on netbooks. In short, it doesn't support your argument.
He wasn't blaming Android, he was blaming Richard for using a stock Android setup.
This is a matter of interpretation. I don't see the blame being placed on Richard here, only an acknowledgement that the stock android setup is wretched; which seems to place the blame squarely on Android.
We also interpret this differently "I was telling him that he could, with very little effort, make it closer to what he would like"
Keep in mind that Richard was NOT planning to upgrade until next year. He was, for all practical purposes, stuck with a phone he didn't like.
From that perspective, it seems to me that ScrewMaster was both agreeing with Richard the the UI was horrid and offering him useful advice on how it can be made better (from Richards perspective) or more like iOS. The intent, from what I can see, was to allow Richard to enjoy a more iOS-like experience until he could upgrade early next year.
Now, I have absolutely no doubt that ScrewMaster was hoping that Richard would find this feature compelling enough to adopt Android as his platform of choice. Though, from my perspective, this doesn't seem to be primary intent of his post.
Sure, if you see the world through Android-colored glasses, that's how it would look to you.
If my personal preferences make a difference to you, I don't care for Android. Oddly enough, for many of the same reasons that I don't care for iOS. I don't find either platform to be better suited to my needs than my Blackberry.
In other words, Richard just needs to put in a little more effort, and Android allows that while Apple, somehow, does not, which is strange given that Richard seems to prefer iOS, so it's hard to see how Android could allow him to make the phone closer to iOS, but Apple cannot.
This doesn't make much sense to me. The feature ScrewMaster was promoting here was the ability to radically change the UI. It's true (as far as I know) that Android allows this while iOS does not. Obviously the closest thing to iOS is iOS -- I don't think that was the point. Other than promoting his preferred platform via this feature, it IS something someone coming from iOS may not know about.
Again, it's important to keep in mind that Richard is stuck with his Android phone until next year. The option to make his phone work better for him seems like useful advice. That he may not have known about the ability to radically change the UI is perfectly reasonable. We can't expect everyone to know about every feature or capability of their mobile operating system.
People have different tastes. You guys really need to learn to accept that.
I think ScrewMaster made it clear that he understands that people have different tastes. Again, he offered a way for Richard to make his phone conform more to his preferences (more like iOS). Handy, as poor Richard is stuck with a phone that he doesn't like until next year, and may hate using it over the next few months much less if he made the UI more iOS like. He is planning, after all, to switch back to iOS next year.
If you were capable of accepting that someone would actually prefer iOS to Android, you might be able to understand that telling people they should just stick with the thing they don't prefer is rather absurd.
Again, Richard is stuck with Android until next year when he upgrades. ScrewMaster acknowledged Richard's preference for iOS and suggested a way to make his experience more iOS like in the mean time. I don't think that's unreasonable. I think it's rather useful advice, even if it was unsolicited. After all, unsolicited advice (both good and bad) is ridiculously common on Slashdot.
The fact that ScrewMaster took the opportunity to additionally extol the virtues he sees in his preferred platform isn't really relevant, from what I can see. I see fans of all platforms do this all the time. You're a well
Er, I don't follow. They came up with the term, after all. Is it bigoted or intolerant to identify the group by the name they gave themselves?
Even if that were true, why would someone's bigotry or intolerance affect the veracity of their claims regarding a completely unrelated subject?
Does being racist make an engineer less capable of assessing a bridge? Does being a religious fundamentalist make a chef less capable of preparing a meal?
It would appear that you haven't thought this through at all.
While your solution will likely solve the immediate problem of raccoons living living in the chimney, it may lead to an even greater problem: angry, flaming, raccoons running loose in the house, setting the furniture ablaze.
Government must first take wealth away from others attempting to create wealth, thereby decreasing their ability to do so and benefit others, pay for the administrative/governmental costs, then use a portion of what remains to hire and pay wages. It's the broken-window fallacy.
It's a tea-bagger! Neat, I didn't think anyone capable of both reading and writing actually bought into this nonsense.
Here's a clue: High taxes on corporate profits increase jobs and, by consequence, wealth. You can easily see this if you learn a bit of history.
This is the basic idea, since you seem to need a LOT of help here: When profits are heavily taxed, companies have a greater incentive to reinvest profits in building new factories, hiring more people, investing in R&D, etc. to reduce their tax burden. Lower taxes, and you lose that incentive. Fewer new jobs are created, fewer factories are built, and R&D is slashed to make the next quarter look a little better to investors.
Take a look for yourself: Top Marginal Tax Rates 1916-2010
Note the lead up to the great depression, America's greatest period of prosperity, and the recent recession.
As to grading, meaningful feedback is one of the keys to learning - the score doesn't matter, but showing what you did wrong so that you can correct it in the future is key to learning.
We used to call that "formative assessment". Unfortunately, the ridiculous point system we've come up with does not reward the students for learning, only the accumulation of points. They could give two-shits about WHY they got a question wrong, it's just n points that they can't get back.
Kids know that mindlessly filling out the daily homework worksheet and while failing the mid-term and final and the student can still "earn" them a passing grade. If that's not enough, lazy teachers offer "extra credit" projects (read: glue shit to poster board) to help little Johnny lazy "boost" his grade -- and keep equally lazy, entitled, self-righteous parents off their back.
We need to drop grades and 'points' (an abomination) and move to a competent / not yet competent system where students demonstrate competence for all of the courses core concepts. This would reward advanced students, who could work their way to an early graduation, while keeping the future-fast-food-workers from stumbling their way through, further devaluing the HS diploma, all the while holding the better students back.
You can bet little Susie do-nothing would care a lot more about WHY she got a question wrong -- she'll need to know if she wants to pass!