They took an operating system usable on a NeXTStep with a 25MHz 68040 and made its file browser unresponsive on a machine with dual 2 GHz processors.
Okay, I get that you're arguing the quick-enough-for-iphone part, but this example happens to all OSes.
To be on-topic: Those no-good hacks at SUN made Solaris 10 on my Ultra10 run slower than Solaris 2.5 did on my Classic.
I tried some recent flashy Linux distro on a dual-core laptop a few months back, it was slower than when I had RedHat installed on my 225MHz Pentium back in 1997.
Vista on my 2-year-old cheapo laptop... do I even need to finish that sentence? (At least Win7 runs faster on it, dunno yet what I'll do when the beta expires this summer.)
The lack of "File" menus that need to be toggled visible... even when they are needed to get to your bookmarks in IE.
Huh? Right-click the IE icon on the taskbar. You get a list of your bookmarked favorites and your recent history as choices to open. Just wish Chrome supported it.
The only place I've ever had an issue is WMP. It can sometimes be very difficult to navigate through it without the menus.
True. That's part of the transient nature of the internet, though, and that's what really bothers me about sites like Facebook. You lose control of your content. They could just decide to stop hosting the website tomorrow, and you wouldn't be able to prevent it either. And someday, it will shut down, and everything that's been shared and said will be gone.
Which has nothing to do with Blockbuster, where shutting down their service doesn't result in the actual loss of anything, so I'll avoid going off on my rant again.:)
Facebook had a banner at the top of the homepage for at least several weeks giving people notice about the interface change. It even had a link to show you a preview of what it would look like.
During my senior year (1997), my high school created an Intro to C Programming class. Since I had pretty much mastered TI-BASIC during various boring math and english classes, and had been lazily self-teaching myself C at home for a year or two, it seemed like a good idea.
They gave the calculus teacher a dozen 8086s (to be honest, you don't really need anything more than DOS at 8MHz to compile and run Hello World) and had him take night classes at the local Vo-Tech. He set up the curriculum so that he was teaching us about a week behind what he was learning in his own class.
I spent most of the semester helping my classmates learn what he was trying to teach, and yes, sometimes correcting his mistakes directly. I was so bored by the time the final project rolled around, I had to do SOMETHING to make it challenging. So, I wrote my final program for my TI-85, by setting up a cross compiler under a PC emulator on my Amiga, and loading the executable using ZShell. Easily the most fun I've had for a school programming project.
The way I see it (yeah, IANAL) even if I only have a license to use the program on the disc according to certain restrictions, I bought the disc, case, manual, and maybe even a cardboard box from the store when I gave them my credit card. I can re-sell these physical items regardless of whether the license can legally be transferred or not.
Traditionally it has been basically impossible to prevent the "transfer" of the license after a resale either. Except now that we have programs with activation systems linked to the individual computer it is being installed on, like Spore. With all the current consoles supporting native internet access, I assume it's only time before more games do this just to ruin the second-hand console game market.
Maybe there is a pattern, though? NES->SNES was consumer momentum... PS1->PS2 the same... but notice the switches between vendors is from a no platform to a yes platform.
For someone who is used to the "way things are done" in any situation, introducing something new and different is always hard, and usually met with a lot of resistance. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who can sit down with Vista and "just get stuff done." I welcome MS making the desktop look more plesant to look at, simplifying the interface, and so on.
My mother-in-law has a Vista laptop. I don't think she's ever done anything that caused UAC to pop up. She checks email, uses Office, and that's about it. I want the darn OS to hold her hand every step of the way, because then *I* don't have to. Similarly, my kids have little difficulty navigating the task-oriented control panel layout. Yeah, when I'm first setting up my own computer, some of the customizations I do take a couple more clicks. But how often do I really need to go into, say, the virtual memory settings? And should the average user ever monkey around with it at all?
That said, I do think MS was a little too ambitious with Vista, and there are times when UAC is a burden even to average users. Win7 has been a lot better so far - less duplicate prompts to acknowledge something, and fewer times when it even comes up at all. This is definately the right direction to be moving in.
Not in front of my 7 system (at work where they still use W2k), so this is from memory.
Pop in the system control panel, advanced settings, and go to performance. Click off of "let windows handle it" to "best performance". This turns off all the fancy window dressings and gives it a Win2k/Win98 appearance.
The other thing would probably be turning off UAC, which isn't too hard, but I don't know where it is off the top of my head.
I haven't looked in detail, but the stories going around say they've already been stripping out unnecessary services and making more of them start on-demand rather than at startup. That seems to be one of the things that makes 7 faster than Vista. On my 1GB laptop, at boot, Win7 uses less RAM than XP did. This morning, with AVG, Apache, MySQL, and a couple IE windows up, it was sitting at 600MB in-use. That's not quite as good as Win2k, but still far better than Vista, which would have needed to push half of that to swap already.
I've run Vista from beta 2 through the RCs. When the final version was released I got the free upgrade for the "Vista Capable" sub-$500 laptop I'd bought in November.
While Vista was in beta, it was dismal. There were major issues, and minor issues. Through the beta process, the quality improved - all the minor issues were resolved (things like the taskbar corrupting the desktop when it was moved to the top of the screen instead of the bottom). On the other hand, all the major issues - Aero performance, network performance, gaming performance, hyperactive UAC, and so on - didn't improve at all.
I know I bought a laptop that compromised a lot for the cost, but I still expected a brand new computer to at least be able to let me double-click a folder in explorer without stalling and spinning for tens of seconds. After suffering for a while, dealing with the issues so that I could stay up with the "cutting edge" and so I'd be familiar when friends asked me to help them with their own new computers, I ended up rolling back to XP.
I grabbed the 7 beta around midnight Friday, and put it on the same laptop (it's the only system my family won't kill me for messing with). While it isn't as fast as XP, it's really quite useable even with all the Aero features on. I haven't loaded up any games yet, still tinkering around with apps. The performance was the biggest problem for me, and with 7 it's a non-issue completely. The interface is more consistent (a lot of the standard tools and control panels in Vista were untouched from 2k/XP, more of them follow the new UI now). Desktop gadgets work like I expect them to. Lots of things are just "better."
Regarding hardware requirements... I think what's happened is that MS has learned from the "Vista Capable" fiasco and that even though 7 could run and perform on lighter hardware than Vista, they're keeping the higher standard so that you can actually expect such a "minimum" system to be used on a daily basis.
You'd be even more dismayed at WinMo if you'd seen versions prior to 6. I got a PPC6700 for free recently, and after being thoroughly unimpressed with WM5 flashed it to WM6. There was very little difference, and overall I found it hard to believe this is a product of 10 years of improvement over the WinCE 2.x OS that lived on my NEC MobilePro 700.
That little NEC clamshell handheld (also a used gift back in 2001) fit all my mobile needs at the time, much better than a Palm could, and would still be useful today had I not fried the poor thing many years ago. PocketIE was nearly worthless as a browser then, like IE Mobile today, but it was very useful for programming on my home linux box over a terminal with the dialup, for note taking, and general PIM stuff. Just using the calendar is a pain in WM5/6, and I would expect that to be a highly-refined core feature of a combo phone/PIM like this.
(Oh, and did I mention the wireless seems to hate most of the hotspots around here? Connects but won't ever pull an IP. I don't want to pay the absurd data rates, and there's no other network connectivity on this thing. I got wireless to work at home, but that's where I already have my other computers.)
Hey, it wasn't my fault! She got the computer from a friend, with all the software left over from when they were using it. They also got her set up with the AOL account, presumably because they'd also used AOL on it before.
Either picking up your hand to click them, or using both hands on the mouse.
My great-aunt got a computer back in 2000, some clunker 486 or something that was hopelessly out of date even then. She used to work as a switchboard operator at Ma Bell and then the regional Baby Bell, but since she retired before computers became common in the business world, she'd never used a PC before. Since I worked in tech support at the time, I was the logical choice in the family to call upon for help.
I walked her through how to use Windows 95, connect to AOL with a modem, send emails, and navigate the web, all over the phone.
The whole thing was frustrating beyond any tech support experience I ever had at work. Every time I said to use the left mouse button, she kept clicking the right, and vice versa. It would take her forever to follow simple directions to go from place to place on the screen.
A few days later, she complained about the mouse getting tangled up in the cord all the time, which led to the diagnosis of mousis reversis. (She went on to become one of the most prolific email forwarders I've ever seen. Talk about payback...)
It was quite a lesson in end-user expectations. My poor 80-something year old aunt had none of the pre-conceived notions that even most non-tech-saavy people have. She had no concept of how the movement of the mouse was supposed to translate to movement of the cursor. She didn't know it was designed so you could click the buttons without picking your hand up. She just thought it looked most like a "mouse" when the cord was towards her.
Fortunately for those still in tech support, folks like her are even harder to find today. However, it's also unfortunate - it's more likely the rest of us will continue to create user interfaces that fit our pre-conceived ideas of "how things should work" instead of finding even more intuitive ways to interact with technology.
each progressive lane in the driver's-side direction should be moving faster than the preceding lane at all times.
I suppose this depends on your jurisdiction, because where I grew up and learned to drive, the basic protocol of highways with more than two lanes each direction was that the center lane was the "slow" lane, lanes to the left for passing, and lanes to the right for local/merging traffic. That's what drivers ed teaches, that's what the state drivers' handbooks teach, that's what the defensive driving courses teach.
That was Oklahoma. You'd probably be ticketed for driving that way in Texas, though; it's a law that you must drive in the right-most lane except when actively passing slower traffic. (I've been pulled over for driving in the left lane through a little town with no traffic in either direction for miles around.)
I like to actually have the buttons there - but taking a page from IE and placing the menu items into two buttons, and integrating the tabs into the titlebar means they can be there and also out-of-the-way.
Also, it drives me nuts how FF makes the whole page pop down when you mouse up to the hidden navbar when it's in F11 mode.
I've been giving Chrome a try myself, but my wife and my kids all still use FF or IE. I like that it takes up less screen realestate for tabs and so forth, and the history-homepage thingy is useful to me.
I'd be happier with Chrome if it weren't for it's habit of getting hung up on Flash sites and bringing the whole OS to a screeching halt - sites that work fine in Firefox.
Yeah, we should stand up and be proud and bold like we used to be. Let's stard by abolishing the FDA and CDC and disbanding every state medical and nursing board. We'll have so much freedom we won't know what to do with ourselves!
Your argument might have made sense, oh, about 100 years ago. But we've had government regulated healthcare in this country of ours for quite some time already. Most current proposals are either a federal safety-net for those who don't have access to insurance, or basic universal insurance that can be supplemented with private insurance options. Yeah, I can see arguing these might affect your taxes, but not the rest of your so-called freedoms on that list.
The first live video I streamed was one of the presidential debates in 1996 from CNN, using RealVideo over a 33.6 dialup on a 33MHz SGI - just for the novelty value, since my parents were watching it on the TV in the other room.
I thought Real took a bad turn with G1 or whatever it was called, and for years I kept finding and installing the old "classic" realplayer when I set up new systems. I couldn't stand the gaudy interface, the required registration, the nagging "message center" popups on my taskbar, the "guide" that wanted to stream advertisements whenever I started the player, and so on. Of course, these days, that's just par for the course - a dozen apps know my email address, everything in the world wants to blink popups at me when I boot up (Live Mesh is starting! You have new email! Your printer is low on ink!), and who could possibly want a media player that didn't have funky gadgets and non-standard window dressings?
Re:Controls Correction
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
(I think it might have been something about proximity to tab/shift/ctrl as well, but I'm not sure.)
Even before then, there were two-player games in the '80s that could be played one keyboard, and you'd try to put the controls as far apart as possible so your hands aren't hitting each other as you try to play. So one player would have WASD, and the second could use IJKL or the arrow keys.
Slashdot Mirror
They took an operating system usable on a NeXTStep with a 25MHz 68040 and made its file browser unresponsive on a machine with dual 2 GHz processors.
Okay, I get that you're arguing the quick-enough-for-iphone part, but this example happens to all OSes.
To be on-topic: Those no-good hacks at SUN made Solaris 10 on my Ultra10 run slower than Solaris 2.5 did on my Classic.
I tried some recent flashy Linux distro on a dual-core laptop a few months back, it was slower than when I had RedHat installed on my 225MHz Pentium back in 1997.
Vista on my 2-year-old cheapo laptop... do I even need to finish that sentence? (At least Win7 runs faster on it, dunno yet what I'll do when the beta expires this summer.)
I CAN HAZ PONIE TOO?
The lack of "File" menus that need to be toggled visible... even when they are needed to get to your bookmarks in IE.
Huh? Right-click the IE icon on the taskbar. You get a list of your bookmarked favorites and your recent history as choices to open. Just wish Chrome supported it.
The only place I've ever had an issue is WMP. It can sometimes be very difficult to navigate through it without the menus.
True. That's part of the transient nature of the internet, though, and that's what really bothers me about sites like Facebook. You lose control of your content. They could just decide to stop hosting the website tomorrow, and you wouldn't be able to prevent it either. And someday, it will shut down, and everything that's been shared and said will be gone.
Which has nothing to do with Blockbuster, where shutting down their service doesn't result in the actual loss of anything, so I'll avoid going off on my rant again. :)
Facebook had a banner at the top of the homepage for at least several weeks giving people notice about the interface change. It even had a link to show you a preview of what it would look like.
Yeah, it was a separate class. I took calculus from him too, and I probably spent about half of it paying attention. :)
(The rest was discreetly programming in TI-BASIC on my calculator. I wrote a blackjack game that year which I'm rather proud of.)
During my senior year (1997), my high school created an Intro to C Programming class. Since I had pretty much mastered TI-BASIC during various boring math and english classes, and had been lazily self-teaching myself C at home for a year or two, it seemed like a good idea.
They gave the calculus teacher a dozen 8086s (to be honest, you don't really need anything more than DOS at 8MHz to compile and run Hello World) and had him take night classes at the local Vo-Tech. He set up the curriculum so that he was teaching us about a week behind what he was learning in his own class.
I spent most of the semester helping my classmates learn what he was trying to teach, and yes, sometimes correcting his mistakes directly. I was so bored by the time the final project rolled around, I had to do SOMETHING to make it challenging. So, I wrote my final program for my TI-85, by setting up a cross compiler under a PC emulator on my Amiga, and loading the executable using ZShell. Easily the most fun I've had for a school programming project.
The way I see it (yeah, IANAL) even if I only have a license to use the program on the disc according to certain restrictions, I bought the disc, case, manual, and maybe even a cardboard box from the store when I gave them my credit card. I can re-sell these physical items regardless of whether the license can legally be transferred or not.
Traditionally it has been basically impossible to prevent the "transfer" of the license after a resale either. Except now that we have programs with activation systems linked to the individual computer it is being installed on, like Spore. With all the current consoles supporting native internet access, I assume it's only time before more games do this just to ruin the second-hand console game market.
Maybe there is a pattern, though? NES->SNES was consumer momentum... PS1->PS2 the same... but notice the switches between vendors is from a no platform to a yes platform.
Just a thought.
For someone who is used to the "way things are done" in any situation, introducing something new and different is always hard, and usually met with a lot of resistance. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who can sit down with Vista and "just get stuff done." I welcome MS making the desktop look more plesant to look at, simplifying the interface, and so on.
My mother-in-law has a Vista laptop. I don't think she's ever done anything that caused UAC to pop up. She checks email, uses Office, and that's about it. I want the darn OS to hold her hand every step of the way, because then *I* don't have to. Similarly, my kids have little difficulty navigating the task-oriented control panel layout. Yeah, when I'm first setting up my own computer, some of the customizations I do take a couple more clicks. But how often do I really need to go into, say, the virtual memory settings? And should the average user ever monkey around with it at all?
That said, I do think MS was a little too ambitious with Vista, and there are times when UAC is a burden even to average users. Win7 has been a lot better so far - less duplicate prompts to acknowledge something, and fewer times when it even comes up at all. This is definately the right direction to be moving in.
Not in front of my 7 system (at work where they still use W2k), so this is from memory.
Pop in the system control panel, advanced settings, and go to performance. Click off of "let windows handle it" to "best performance". This turns off all the fancy window dressings and gives it a Win2k/Win98 appearance.
The other thing would probably be turning off UAC, which isn't too hard, but I don't know where it is off the top of my head.
I haven't looked in detail, but the stories going around say they've already been stripping out unnecessary services and making more of them start on-demand rather than at startup. That seems to be one of the things that makes 7 faster than Vista. On my 1GB laptop, at boot, Win7 uses less RAM than XP did. This morning, with AVG, Apache, MySQL, and a couple IE windows up, it was sitting at 600MB in-use. That's not quite as good as Win2k, but still far better than Vista, which would have needed to push half of that to swap already.
I've run Vista from beta 2 through the RCs. When the final version was released I got the free upgrade for the "Vista Capable" sub-$500 laptop I'd bought in November.
While Vista was in beta, it was dismal. There were major issues, and minor issues. Through the beta process, the quality improved - all the minor issues were resolved (things like the taskbar corrupting the desktop when it was moved to the top of the screen instead of the bottom). On the other hand, all the major issues - Aero performance, network performance, gaming performance, hyperactive UAC, and so on - didn't improve at all.
I know I bought a laptop that compromised a lot for the cost, but I still expected a brand new computer to at least be able to let me double-click a folder in explorer without stalling and spinning for tens of seconds. After suffering for a while, dealing with the issues so that I could stay up with the "cutting edge" and so I'd be familiar when friends asked me to help them with their own new computers, I ended up rolling back to XP.
I grabbed the 7 beta around midnight Friday, and put it on the same laptop (it's the only system my family won't kill me for messing with). While it isn't as fast as XP, it's really quite useable even with all the Aero features on. I haven't loaded up any games yet, still tinkering around with apps. The performance was the biggest problem for me, and with 7 it's a non-issue completely. The interface is more consistent (a lot of the standard tools and control panels in Vista were untouched from 2k/XP, more of them follow the new UI now). Desktop gadgets work like I expect them to. Lots of things are just "better."
Regarding hardware requirements... I think what's happened is that MS has learned from the "Vista Capable" fiasco and that even though 7 could run and perform on lighter hardware than Vista, they're keeping the higher standard so that you can actually expect such a "minimum" system to be used on a daily basis.
You'd be even more dismayed at WinMo if you'd seen versions prior to 6. I got a PPC6700 for free recently, and after being thoroughly unimpressed with WM5 flashed it to WM6. There was very little difference, and overall I found it hard to believe this is a product of 10 years of improvement over the WinCE 2.x OS that lived on my NEC MobilePro 700.
That little NEC clamshell handheld (also a used gift back in 2001) fit all my mobile needs at the time, much better than a Palm could, and would still be useful today had I not fried the poor thing many years ago. PocketIE was nearly worthless as a browser then, like IE Mobile today, but it was very useful for programming on my home linux box over a terminal with the dialup, for note taking, and general PIM stuff. Just using the calendar is a pain in WM5/6, and I would expect that to be a highly-refined core feature of a combo phone/PIM like this.
(Oh, and did I mention the wireless seems to hate most of the hotspots around here? Connects but won't ever pull an IP. I don't want to pay the absurd data rates, and there's no other network connectivity on this thing. I got wireless to work at home, but that's where I already have my other computers.)
Hey, it wasn't my fault! She got the computer from a friend, with all the software left over from when they were using it. They also got her set up with the AOL account, presumably because they'd also used AOL on it before.
Either picking up your hand to click them, or using both hands on the mouse.
My great-aunt got a computer back in 2000, some clunker 486 or something that was hopelessly out of date even then. She used to work as a switchboard operator at Ma Bell and then the regional Baby Bell, but since she retired before computers became common in the business world, she'd never used a PC before. Since I worked in tech support at the time, I was the logical choice in the family to call upon for help.
I walked her through how to use Windows 95, connect to AOL with a modem, send emails, and navigate the web, all over the phone.
The whole thing was frustrating beyond any tech support experience I ever had at work. Every time I said to use the left mouse button, she kept clicking the right, and vice versa. It would take her forever to follow simple directions to go from place to place on the screen.
A few days later, she complained about the mouse getting tangled up in the cord all the time, which led to the diagnosis of mousis reversis. (She went on to become one of the most prolific email forwarders I've ever seen. Talk about payback...)
It was quite a lesson in end-user expectations. My poor 80-something year old aunt had none of the pre-conceived notions that even most non-tech-saavy people have. She had no concept of how the movement of the mouse was supposed to translate to movement of the cursor. She didn't know it was designed so you could click the buttons without picking your hand up. She just thought it looked most like a "mouse" when the cord was towards her.
Fortunately for those still in tech support, folks like her are even harder to find today. However, it's also unfortunate - it's more likely the rest of us will continue to create user interfaces that fit our pre-conceived ideas of "how things should work" instead of finding even more intuitive ways to interact with technology.
Maybe you could get a Nigerian scammer to record it for you, like this guy did for HHGTTG.
-Jupo
each progressive lane in the driver's-side direction should be moving faster than the preceding lane at all times.
I suppose this depends on your jurisdiction, because where I grew up and learned to drive, the basic protocol of highways with more than two lanes each direction was that the center lane was the "slow" lane, lanes to the left for passing, and lanes to the right for local/merging traffic. That's what drivers ed teaches, that's what the state drivers' handbooks teach, that's what the defensive driving courses teach.
That was Oklahoma. You'd probably be ticketed for driving that way in Texas, though; it's a law that you must drive in the right-most lane except when actively passing slower traffic. (I've been pulled over for driving in the left lane through a little town with no traffic in either direction for miles around.)
One of my CPR instructors taught us to use the beat of "another one bites the dust".
Just don't touch the 10.1.x.x range, that's what I use at my house, and I don't want to share. ;)
Nah, you have two, but can get by with one. Just let us buy the other, and if you really do need it in the future, you can always buy another one.
(That sounded funnier in my head.)
I like to actually have the buttons there - but taking a page from IE and placing the menu items into two buttons, and integrating the tabs into the titlebar means they can be there and also out-of-the-way.
Also, it drives me nuts how FF makes the whole page pop down when you mouse up to the hidden navbar when it's in F11 mode.
I've been giving Chrome a try myself, but my wife and my kids all still use FF or IE. I like that it takes up less screen realestate for tabs and so forth, and the history-homepage thingy is useful to me.
I'd be happier with Chrome if it weren't for it's habit of getting hung up on Flash sites and bringing the whole OS to a screeching halt - sites that work fine in Firefox.
Yeah, we should stand up and be proud and bold like we used to be. Let's stard by abolishing the FDA and CDC and disbanding every state medical and nursing board. We'll have so much freedom we won't know what to do with ourselves!
Your argument might have made sense, oh, about 100 years ago. But we've had government regulated healthcare in this country of ours for quite some time already. Most current proposals are either a federal safety-net for those who don't have access to insurance, or basic universal insurance that can be supplemented with private insurance options. Yeah, I can see arguing these might affect your taxes, but not the rest of your so-called freedoms on that list.
The first live video I streamed was one of the presidential debates in 1996 from CNN, using RealVideo over a 33.6 dialup on a 33MHz SGI - just for the novelty value, since my parents were watching it on the TV in the other room.
I thought Real took a bad turn with G1 or whatever it was called, and for years I kept finding and installing the old "classic" realplayer when I set up new systems. I couldn't stand the gaudy interface, the required registration, the nagging "message center" popups on my taskbar, the "guide" that wanted to stream advertisements whenever I started the player, and so on. Of course, these days, that's just par for the course - a dozen apps know my email address, everything in the world wants to blink popups at me when I boot up (Live Mesh is starting! You have new email! Your printer is low on ink!), and who could possibly want a media player that didn't have funky gadgets and non-standard window dressings?
(I think it might have been something about proximity to tab/shift/ctrl as well, but I'm not sure.)
Even before then, there were two-player games in the '80s that could be played one keyboard, and you'd try to put the controls as far apart as possible so your hands aren't hitting each other as you try to play. So one player would have WASD, and the second could use IJKL or the arrow keys.