Microsoft used a stylus because the OS (and all the apps) demanded it: there are too many small controls to manipulate with fingers. The stylus included with every TabletPC was (literally) a pointer to the actual problem.
By the same token, the lack of a stylus on the iPad (and devices based on its design) points out the fact that they are (at best) less-than-optimal for most content-creation tasks. For example, although I really like Apple and iOS, a slate-format TabletPC is a far better tool for drawing than an iPad ever will be, because it has a precision, pressure-sensitive input device.
Explorer.exe is almost exactly analogous to Finder on a Mac: just an app that provides the familiar UI environment.
What's ironic is that this is pretty much doing Win98/IE4 in reverse. That was when Microsoft decided that not only did you have to load the standard UI at boot time, you had to load their web browser too, so they combined the browser and the UI into a single program. Unbundling the UI from the OS... hell, that's almost like rolling back to before Win95! First boot the OS, then (if you want) load the GUI.:)
While I can see plenty of good reasons for doing this, it's going to be very confusing to the users, who have no conception of the distinction between the OS and the UI. If you load Windows, and there's no Start button, no (My) Computer, no task bar, etc.... to most people that's not Windows. They don't care if the drivers and kernel and whatnot are all the same; it will be (for their perspective) an entirely different operating system.
That's something that's called "predatory pricing". There are laws against it in the United States... not that they ever get enforced.
Of course there's a huge gap between what HP did ("If we build it they will come") and sinking a fortune into predatory pricing to kill off competitors. HP's execs apparently didn't have a clue where they should have gone within that range.
"the ribbon approach offered benefits in line with our goals"
Apparently one of their goals is to keep me using Windows XP until the hardware it is running on can no longer be repaired.
The concept of the Pull-Down Menu was not broke.* It did not need to be "fixed".
*Actually Microsoft did break the Pull-Down Menu, by automatically removing things from it if you didn't use them often enough. In doing so they reduced the likelihood that you would remember seeing where a little-used feature was on the menu ("I think that was under Edit..."), or discover a "new" feature by seeing it listed there ("Hey, there's an option on the View menu to display full-screen!").
Yes, by all means, we should all change our millennia-old approach to time and dates, in order to make things easier for the developers of calendar software.
Because it's the worst idea I've heard suggested outside of a political campaign, at least since Michael Dell suggested shutting down Apple and giving the money back to the shareholders.
There is almost no benefit whatsoever to people who don't travel or participate in pointless teleconferences a lot. Why on earth would I care whether my clock is the same as someone's in Gdansk or Perth? Most of my communication with people these days is asynchronous, and almost none of it is based on it being scheduling by the clock, except for face-to-face meetings all in the same time zone.
Furthermore, without time zones, the date would have to change everywhere simultaneously. Fine if you live in Europe; it'll happen while you sleep. Too damn bad if you live in Hawaii; it's going to happen around noon-ish (or will they not be allowed to call it that anymore)?
A: "I'll see you on Tuesday." B: "Do you mean Tuesday afternoon tomorrow, or Tuesday morning the day after that?"
Y: "What's the date today?" Z: "Let me think... um, what time is it?
This would totally muck up most of our day-to-day usage of time and date as a reference point – undermining the whole concept of "today" – and solve a problem (it isn't "noon" everywhere at the same time) that's already been solved: with time zones.
You do realize that the people stuffing your inbox with porn are not actually in charge of The Porn Industry, right? What you're saying is the equivalent of saying that [insert local minority here] deserves what they get because they steal things, bring down property values, etc.
I agree with most of your reasons why this is A Bad Thing, but I believe you are mistaken about the legal issue of pornography vs. obscenity. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled (even in recent years) that pornography is protected speech. As long as it isn't obscene pornography, it still enjoys First Amendment protection, and any laws against mere "pornography" that are still on the books are not enforceable. Although putting a.xxx TLD on something would certainly prove to any reasonable person that it was "pornographic", it would not prove to the courts that it was "obscene". For that, you'd be back to the same fuzzy definition of obscenity (the Miller Test) that you'd be dealing with if the site's TLD were.com; those last three letters are a non-issue in making that determination.
Economics and cash flow. I agree with you in principle, but saving it all up and releasing it as one volume is pretty difficult when working in a medium that typically takes a person working full-time a year to produce about 100 pages of material. Unless you're Warner/DC or Disney/Marvel, the money just isn't there to pay a reasonable wage for the work as it's produced (with no income from sales of the monthlies), and if you are one of those companies, you don't want to invest that kind of time and money into something that might sell only a few thousand units when it's finally finished.
I was a CS major at the same college as Rob Malda several years before him. I worked in the CIT dept there when he was a student, but I never met him (maybe I reset his password), so that's as close as I get to having an actual connection to early Slashdot. As you can see from my 6-digit UID I wasn't even an "early adopter". (Doing theater with Gillian Anderson in high school is my real I-knew-someone-famous claim.)
One of my CS profs (Herb, in case Rob reads this) commented my senior year that I was not as good a CS student as I could have been. I had to agree with that. I think it was mostly because I had too many other interests (college newspaper, radio, student government, fraternity). I'm smart, and I was good, but I didn't have the hacker drive that Rob obviously had. Which is why he created Slashdot, and I... didn't. I did some half-assed early stuff on the web in the mid-1990s, but didn't follow through with it.
Evidently we're both at "what do I want to do with myself now?" points in our lives. But damn, I wish had something like this to look back at. So some advice to the younger folks (which is most of you, it seems): do what Rob did. Not the same thing, of course. But do something. Make something. And do it now. So that when you're having your mid-life crisis, it won't be tinged with regret.
There's a similar pattern that plays out in the comics industry. Readers are reluctant to try a new series (meaning genuinely new series, not just another new title starring the X-Men or Batman) because they aren't sure whether it'll last long enough to tell the story the writer is setting out to tell. So they wait, perhaps for a collected edition of the first several monthlies into a paperback, which indicates that the publisher is committed to it. But because they're not buying the monthlies, the sales on them suck, so the publisher gets cold feet and the series gets cancelled. The readers don't trust the publishers and the publishers don't trust the readers, and the result is a lot of unfinished - or at least unnecessarily discontinued - stories.
And there's the predictable down-mod from someone upset that I don't want to watch him pretend to shoot at things.
It's about as entertaining as it would be for you to watch me write a story or draw a picture or ride my bike. Just because I'm having fun doesn't mean it's fun to watch.
At least 25%? You're being way too generous there. I don't think that percentage even know what select/cut/copy/paste are.
On a daily basis I deal with people – employees with college degrees, for whom I provide tech support – who don't know what to do when I ask them to "see if you can pull up a web site, like Google or Yahoo". Even if Internet Explorer is already open, they don't know how/where to type the address. (Of course a lot of them type the address into the search field instead of the URL field, but I'm talking about people who didn't even know how to do it the wrong way.) I even had one protest that she didn't know Google's address. When they come into our office, I see that most of them don't know that they can hit the Tab key ("where's that?" when I suggest it) to go from the Username field to the Password field, and instead stop typing and grab the mouse or stylus to select the next field. Some type the required capital letters in their passwords by hitting CapsLock then turning it off, rather than using the Shift key. Many of them are under 30, so they don't have the "we never had these in school" excuse.
Ctrl-key shortcuts are way beyond their computer literacy.
Well, it depends a bit on what entity ends up owning the PC division: whether it's sold to a foreign corporation or not. But really, does it make a difference where the corporate offices of the company are? Yes, it's nice that Apple has headquarters in Cupertino, Dell is in Round Rock, and HP is in Palo Alto, and that they provide good jobs and pay some taxes there, but they're all selling products that are made overseas.
What will they call the PC-hardware spin-off? I vote for "Compaq".
"Digital" could work too, though there are a lot of consumers who wouldn't get that it's a name with history behind it, and think that "Digital Computer" is just a redundant way of saying "digital computer" but with uppercase letters.
"So it's better for your personal situation to stay unemployed than to lower your salary requirements?"
I've lowered my salary requirements. Repeatedly. To the point that I again make roughly as much money as I did 20 years ago. Unfortunately that doesn't look so great when they ask you to fill out a form listing your employment/salary history. Being a 45-year-old who commands the same salary as as a 25-year-old just makes me look unqualified for anything better. Staying on unemployment while I could and (off the record) starting up a consultancy business in the meantime would've been a better strategy. Now that I'm (luckily) employed full time again... I don't have the time or flexibility to do that. And that 25-year-old's income doesn't leave much chance to save up and do it later.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft used a stylus because the OS (and all the apps) demanded it: there are too many small controls to manipulate with fingers. The stylus included with every TabletPC was (literally) a pointer to the actual problem.
By the same token, the lack of a stylus on the iPad (and devices based on its design) points out the fact that they are (at best) less-than-optimal for most content-creation tasks. For example, although I really like Apple and iOS, a slate-format TabletPC is a far better tool for drawing than an iPad ever will be, because it has a precision, pressure-sensitive input device.
Explorer.exe is almost exactly analogous to Finder on a Mac: just an app that provides the familiar UI environment.
What's ironic is that this is pretty much doing Win98/IE4 in reverse. That was when Microsoft decided that not only did you have to load the standard UI at boot time, you had to load their web browser too, so they combined the browser and the UI into a single program. Unbundling the UI from the OS... hell, that's almost like rolling back to before Win95! First boot the OS, then (if you want) load the GUI. :)
While I can see plenty of good reasons for doing this, it's going to be very confusing to the users, who have no conception of the distinction between the OS and the UI. If you load Windows, and there's no Start button, no (My) Computer, no task bar, etc.... to most people that's not Windows. They don't care if the drivers and kernel and whatnot are all the same; it will be (for their perspective) an entirely different operating system.
So maybe it's time Microsoft changed the name?
That's something that's called "predatory pricing". There are laws against it in the United States... not that they ever get enforced.
Of course there's a huge gap between what HP did ("If we build it they will come") and sinking a fortune into predatory pricing to kill off competitors. HP's execs apparently didn't have a clue where they should have gone within that range.
"the ribbon approach offered benefits in line with our goals"
Apparently one of their goals is to keep me using Windows XP until the hardware it is running on can no longer be repaired.
The concept of the Pull-Down Menu was not broke.* It did not need to be "fixed".
*Actually Microsoft did break the Pull-Down Menu, by automatically removing things from it if you didn't use them often enough. In doing so they reduced the likelihood that you would remember seeing where a little-used feature was on the menu ("I think that was under Edit..."), or discover a "new" feature by seeing it listed there ("Hey, there's an option on the View menu to display full-screen!").
Rest assured, that with 7 billion people on the planet, there will always be someone who agrees with any given screwball idea. :)
Yes, by all means, we should all change our millennia-old approach to time and dates, in order to make things easier for the developers of calendar software.
"So why aren't we doing it?"
Because it's the worst idea I've heard suggested outside of a political campaign, at least since Michael Dell suggested shutting down Apple and giving the money back to the shareholders.
There is almost no benefit whatsoever to people who don't travel or participate in pointless teleconferences a lot. Why on earth would I care whether my clock is the same as someone's in Gdansk or Perth? Most of my communication with people these days is asynchronous, and almost none of it is based on it being scheduling by the clock, except for face-to-face meetings all in the same time zone.
Furthermore, without time zones, the date would have to change everywhere simultaneously. Fine if you live in Europe; it'll happen while you sleep. Too damn bad if you live in Hawaii; it's going to happen around noon-ish (or will they not be allowed to call it that anymore)?
A: "I'll see you on Tuesday."
B: "Do you mean Tuesday afternoon tomorrow, or Tuesday morning the day after that?"
Y: "What's the date today?"
Z: "Let me think... um, what time is it?
This would totally muck up most of our day-to-day usage of time and date as a reference point – undermining the whole concept of "today" – and solve a problem (it isn't "noon" everywhere at the same time) that's already been solved: with time zones.
You do realize that the people stuffing your inbox with porn are not actually in charge of The Porn Industry, right? What you're saying is the equivalent of saying that [insert local minority here] deserves what they get because they steal things, bring down property values, etc.
I agree with most of your reasons why this is A Bad Thing, but I believe you are mistaken about the legal issue of pornography vs. obscenity. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled (even in recent years) that pornography is protected speech. As long as it isn't obscene pornography, it still enjoys First Amendment protection, and any laws against mere "pornography" that are still on the books are not enforceable. Although putting a .xxx TLD on something would certainly prove to any reasonable person that it was "pornographic", it would not prove to the courts that it was "obscene". For that, you'd be back to the same fuzzy definition of obscenity (the Miller Test) that you'd be dealing with if the site's TLD were .com; those last three letters are a non-issue in making that determination.
Economics and cash flow. I agree with you in principle, but saving it all up and releasing it as one volume is pretty difficult when working in a medium that typically takes a person working full-time a year to produce about 100 pages of material. Unless you're Warner/DC or Disney/Marvel, the money just isn't there to pay a reasonable wage for the work as it's produced (with no income from sales of the monthlies), and if you are one of those companies, you don't want to invest that kind of time and money into something that might sell only a few thousand units when it's finally finished.
I was a CS major at the same college as Rob Malda several years before him. I worked in the CIT dept there when he was a student, but I never met him (maybe I reset his password), so that's as close as I get to having an actual connection to early Slashdot. As you can see from my 6-digit UID I wasn't even an "early adopter". (Doing theater with Gillian Anderson in high school is my real I-knew-someone-famous claim.)
One of my CS profs (Herb, in case Rob reads this) commented my senior year that I was not as good a CS student as I could have been. I had to agree with that. I think it was mostly because I had too many other interests (college newspaper, radio, student government, fraternity). I'm smart, and I was good, but I didn't have the hacker drive that Rob obviously had. Which is why he created Slashdot, and I... didn't. I did some half-assed early stuff on the web in the mid-1990s, but didn't follow through with it.
Evidently we're both at "what do I want to do with myself now?" points in our lives. But damn, I wish had something like this to look back at. So some advice to the younger folks (which is most of you, it seems): do what Rob did. Not the same thing, of course. But do something. Make something. And do it now. So that when you're having your mid-life crisis, it won't be tinged with regret.
There's a similar pattern that plays out in the comics industry. Readers are reluctant to try a new series (meaning genuinely new series, not just another new title starring the X-Men or Batman) because they aren't sure whether it'll last long enough to tell the story the writer is setting out to tell. So they wait, perhaps for a collected edition of the first several monthlies into a paperback, which indicates that the publisher is committed to it. But because they're not buying the monthlies, the sales on them suck, so the publisher gets cold feet and the series gets cancelled. The readers don't trust the publishers and the publishers don't trust the readers, and the result is a lot of unfinished - or at least unnecessarily discontinued - stories.
The only people this is good for are the folks who swept into Best Buy and bought up a bunch of $99 Touchpads to sell for $250 on eBay.
And there's the predictable down-mod from someone upset that I don't want to watch him pretend to shoot at things.
It's about as entertaining as it would be for you to watch me write a story or draw a picture or ride my bike. Just because I'm having fun doesn't mean it's fun to watch.
I'm not a video gamer - I just don't find many of them entertaining - but I understand why other people enjoy playing them.
I'm not a sports fan - ibid. - but I kinda understand why people enjoy watching them.
What I have never understood is why anyone would want to watch someone else play a video game. That's just one step beyond my comprehension.
Do you want to be the one to tell a bunch of soldiers that they have to go without air-conditioning for two months?
They are (relatively) cold. They are also (relatively) close.
40 lightyears! I hereby dub these "ninja stars", for their ability to sneak up on us like this.
At least 25%? You're being way too generous there. I don't think that percentage even know what select/cut/copy/paste are.
On a daily basis I deal with people – employees with college degrees, for whom I provide tech support – who don't know what to do when I ask them to "see if you can pull up a web site, like Google or Yahoo". Even if Internet Explorer is already open, they don't know how/where to type the address. (Of course a lot of them type the address into the search field instead of the URL field, but I'm talking about people who didn't even know how to do it the wrong way.) I even had one protest that she didn't know Google's address. When they come into our office, I see that most of them don't know that they can hit the Tab key ("where's that?" when I suggest it) to go from the Username field to the Password field, and instead stop typing and grab the mouse or stylus to select the next field. Some type the required capital letters in their passwords by hitting CapsLock then turning it off, rather than using the Shift key. Many of them are under 30, so they don't have the "we never had these in school" excuse.
Ctrl-key shortcuts are way beyond their computer literacy.
Well, it depends a bit on what entity ends up owning the PC division: whether it's sold to a foreign corporation or not. But really, does it make a difference where the corporate offices of the company are? Yes, it's nice that Apple has headquarters in Cupertino, Dell is in Round Rock, and HP is in Palo Alto, and that they provide good jobs and pay some taxes there, but they're all selling products that are made overseas.
They should spin off the printer hardware business, and just be a printer ink business: it's where the money is.
What will they call the PC-hardware spin-off? I vote for "Compaq".
"Digital" could work too, though there are a lot of consumers who wouldn't get that it's a name with history behind it, and think that "Digital Computer" is just a redundant way of saying "digital computer" but with uppercase letters.
He just might have to kill off the rest of the flight crew to pull it off. Kind of like you-know-who did you-know-when?
"So it's better for your personal situation to stay unemployed than to lower your salary requirements?"
I've lowered my salary requirements. Repeatedly. To the point that I again make roughly as much money as I did 20 years ago. Unfortunately that doesn't look so great when they ask you to fill out a form listing your employment/salary history. Being a 45-year-old who commands the same salary as as a 25-year-old just makes me look unqualified for anything better. Staying on unemployment while I could and (off the record) starting up a consultancy business in the meantime would've been a better strategy. Now that I'm (luckily) employed full time again... I don't have the time or flexibility to do that. And that 25-year-old's income doesn't leave much chance to save up and do it later.
"happiness is only important to people who value happiness."
OK, so we can limit this to the sane people on the planet.
"And yes, money does, in fact, buy happiness."
The quantity of counterexamples proving this wrong boggles the mind.