Just to add to this, I think we also have to acknowledge that fascism just works. Frankly, a lot of the technology that Apple adds to OS X is hardly earth shattering, but they can make it work and get it adopted by a large audience with surprisingly few problems because they have total control. I'm no expert, but I have been using Linux for over a decade (Slackware 96 was my first distro and I even used a version of Debian with a Linux 1.x kernel), and I have witnessed many attempts to get new and interesting systems added to Linux. Democracy is slow. Look at all the effort it took to get Pulse working in a reasonable fashion. I'm no Pulse hater, I think it is an amazing piece of software, but the growing pains were agonizing. Even standardizing on X11 drivers infrastructure has been difficult (there were at least 2 versions of Ubuntu that contained major regressions in Intel graphics drivers). All of this leads to fragmentation and compatibility problems.
OS X is impressive because it suffers from this less. The total control wielded by Steve Jobs allows Apple to introduce new(ish) technologies in a timely manner. Yes, things like Grand Central or Time Machine may not be entirely unique, but they work and are available to a large audience.
I don't think that geeks give Steve Jobs a free pass. I think they just acknowledge that his way of doing things has been very successful in the grand scheme of things. OS X is an impressive piece of software that brings to the table many of the things that Linux folk have been talking about for years.
Ok, so we know why these 33 employees failed to prevent the meltdown, what about the thousands of other SEC employees? At least these guys have something to show for their time at the SEC.
No, but they do move to save on labor costs (including worker safety), environmental regulations, and consumer product regulations. Or maybe you're right, it's all about the taxes.
Just look at Office 2007. Word looks and behaves nothing like Outlook or OneNote. In Windows, the big players tend to have fairly good interfaces, but as soon as you move away from the over-$100 realm of Windows software, you're in amateur land and the interfaces quickly devolve into a case study in worst practices. I find that I much prefer using ported Gnome software in Windows than many native solutions. Yes, Photoshop is a fantastic program, but I'd take GIMP over ArcSoft abominations any day of the week. At least I don't have to pay for GIMP.
This article should really be titled "Why Users Drop Cheaper Programs for More Expensive Ones". At least the open source solutions generally resist the urge to insert ads into their software and use a bunch of proprietary widgets.
In Vista you can tag Microsoft Office documents, but that is all. The files I use most, PDFs, are not taggable. Nor are text files, or open office files, or anything else for that matter. You can search, but the interface isn't great.
Visiting multiple websites isn't that difficult. That is why we have bookmarks. They allow us to easily and quickly go to a page that we have visited previously. I know for instance that Battlestar Galactica is on Hulu but Lost is on abc.com. So, when I want to watch Lost I go to abc.com and when I want to watch BSG I go to hulu. This isn't a problem. If this becomes too burdensome for consumers then the media companies will simply fail as people will stop visiting them. Right now I get ALL of my television from hulu, with the exceptions of Lost (abc.com) and some PBS stuff (digital converter box). I get more than enough TV right now. If a new show comes around that wants my attention, it would do well to distribute itself through one of the channels I already frequent.
I agree that it is a bit stupid for a media company to wall itself off, especially in the near future when more and more people drop cable/satellite for Internet based television. Right now abc probably has no problem getting people to watch Lost on their website. This is not really a burden to consumers though. Besides, Hulu is actually reducing fragmentation. I mean, we could have a situation where you have to go to Nbc.com to see the Office and then over to scifi.com to watch BSG. Instead, I can watch both of those on Hulu. That seems like a win to me. Also, unlike with iTunes and cable, I don't have to pay to watch TV. The ads on hulu are the exact right length so that I don't mind watching them.
Hmm, my own experience has been different. I've owned two logitech mouse like devices, both of them have been great. The first was a logitech marbleman that I bought like 11 years ago. It finally kicked the bucket a few months ago. Now I have one of those bluetooth laser mice. It seems good so far.
I'm aware that it's more than a calendar and email client. I like it as a calendar. It's nice that it integrates with OneNote for instance. I just think it's too bad that it sucks as an email client, especially since Microsoft loves to integrate software with Outlook.
No, it isn't it. The problem is that it is a really terrible mail client. It makes for an okay calendar. Really though, email is not its strong suit. Especially IMAP. Wow is it terrible at IMAP. I don't know the technical reasons behind it, but Thunderbird is way faster at displaying IMAP messages than Outlook. Also, Outlook has a really hard time keeping track of whether or not I have new email. The little icon in the systray gets confused so easily. I've actually stopped using it and have taken to just switching to Outlook periodically and pressing send/receive. Maybe it's because I'm on Vista64 and Microsoft doesn't really support that platform (for instance, the send to OneNote printer is not available on 64 bit systems and they have no intention of making it available. They'll fix it in the next version of office. Thanks Microsoft!) Anyway, Outlook would be great if you could specify a different email client to use.
I have 10.3.9, and after 10.5 came out I was still getting security updates. Yeah, I did't get to have dashboard or spotlight for free, but I wasn't left without critical updates.
think about how terrible it would be if the screen were touch sensitive. People would constantly be moving your cursor around and hitting buttons you don't want hit. This again brings up the question, 'why would you want a touchscreen?'
You also can't buy off the shelf software for the windows based netbooks as that software tends to come on optical storage media, which netbooks cannot read. I guess you could get a USB dvd drive, but how many people want to invest in that? With Linux you just install from your distro's repositories. Much easier. No extra hardware required.
I would except in Vista it takes a couple minutes to go into and out of hibernate. Booting is actually must faster. I think this is because I have 4 gigs of ram. My wife's laptop with only 2 gigs is much faster at hibernating. Linux used to be quite quick in the hibernation department, but I've been testing out Ubuntu Intrepid and hibernate stopped working correctly for me.
Yes. They really are that crippled, especially if you have Verizon. They actually go to the trouble of wiping out the software that was on the phone and putting in their own interface so they can charge for every single feature of the phone. For instance, my phone has GPS, but I can only use it by paying $10 to verizon for their GPS based driving directions service. All I want is to be able to get my GPS coordinates. Too bad.
I would also like to be able to sync my calendar and contact list (which I finally figured out how to do with the excellent BitPim). They provide no software to do this, but the sales rep told me that there was a service I could pay for that would do it. Thanks Verizon. My problem is that I want a phone that does cool stuff, I just don't want to pay a monthly fee for it. I would buy a smart phone if they didn't come with expensive data plans. I tried to do this recently and was told by a rep that there was no way to guarantee that software on the phone wasn't connecting to the internet and that some of the synchronization happened over the network. My gut feeling was that it was a lie designed to sell me a data plan, but I didn't want to test that. I just want a phone that is also a PDA, but not a blackberry. I don't need email in my pocket, but I would like a calendar that is easy to synchronize with my computer. When did smartphone become synonymous with email? So instead I got a cheaper phone with fewer features.
I can just imagine if computers were sold this way. Lets say you could buy computers from Comcast, but they were still made by Dell. Instead of Windows or Linux, they loaded some custom shit on there that hid every feature of the computer behind some monthly service. Hell, they'd probably charge you extra for the mouse and there would be no USB ports or DVD drive. To get music you'd have to buy and adapter to hook up an external drive or you'd have to pay $1.99 per song to Comcast. That right there is the US cell phone industry.
This is why we invade other countries. We're looking for good cell phones.
if you have bluetooth on your computer you can probably use bitpim to interface with the phone. I use it with my LG Env2 to sync my calendar and contact list with Outlook. Agreed though that Verizon is a ripoff with that "Music Management Kit". A Verizon rep actually looked me in the eyes and told me it was the only way to get music onto the phone because it had to be "converted" to work on a Verizon phone. I even asked, "what about this microSD slot?" He told me it still had to be converted from mp3 to work on the phone. Of course, I didn't buy the kit and went home and happily put a bunch of music on the phone with a microSD card; it played fine. It's one thing to be evasive, but to actually lie to the customer is just wrong.
Re:Good analysis. MOD PARENT UP.
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
My first reaction when I loaded up chrome was, "my God! my computer is speaking to me!" I had forgotten how annoying flash advertisements can be on the web. Seriously, does every site have automatically playing sound now? I had no idea how pervasive this shit was. I can't stand the web without flashblock.
The harddrives in old MacBooks were lubricated with Dolphin oil. It's one of those things that makes a Mac different from a PC. Shit, now I may as well buy a Dell.
Great, then Microsoft can introduce Windows Vista Ultimate Compatibility Edition. They could also have a different edition for each version of windows compatibility. XP edition, 3.11 edition, NT 4.0 edition. You don't think they're going to GIVE you a copy of Windows for Workgroups do you?
For the large textbooks this is true, but I know from personal experience that rarely updated books aren't necessarily cheap. I had a course that used a textbook (this was in 2002 or so) that was printed in the late 80s. This was the latest edition of the book and it still cost over $80 "new" (It was out of print but there was still a backstock). I found a copy, after searching quite a bit, for like $70 used.
As much as I hated paying for text books I can see how it could be difficult to stay in business without releasing new editions. If you continued to print a book at $100, and it continued to be popular, and you didn't release new editions, just kept printing the same edition, eventually the market would get flooded with used copies, which would badly undercut your business. With all those cheap used copies, it might no longer be profitable to print the book (especially with royalties and ever increasing labor and materials costs, that don't have to be paid by resellers). You can hope to make up the lag in sales by printing other text books, but that is really no better than a new edition of the same text book. I guess at least new contributors get a chance at royalties.
Not that I think the publishers are saints. I do think text books should be more reasonable, but the only way that will happen is with some real competition. That means professors judging books on price and content, not just on which book arrived in the mail first. Part of the problem is that the people buying the books don't get to make the decisions. They just have to buy the damn thing if they want to take the class. They don't get to choose which physics book to buy (though that would be a fun exercise in capitalism, if you cheap out on the book you might not pass).
I had one "book" that cost $80 and wasn't even bound. It was just a shrink-wrapped stack of pages with holes punched in the pages so i could put it in a binder. I still have it because the bookstore wouldn't buy it back. Pretty good deal from the publisher's perspective. That three-ring binder looks great on my book shelf.
I've never had a problem with service from Amazon.com, but man do I hate their website. I can't think of more cluttered website than Amazon.com. I run a somewhat underpowered PowerBook, but it's more than capable of loading most pages in a timely manner. Not Amazon.com. They include so much useless information.
Damn, I can't get this critical update for Vista this month because I'm out of bandwidth. Or, I guess I don't get to play this game I just bought because I don't have the bandwidth left to download the first 12 patches to it that came out in between the time I left the store and when I got home. I would be less concerned about capping bandwidth if everybody didn't expect you to have an unlimited connection. Maybe that expectation would change in time (maybe flash would go away!).
Slashdot Mirror
Just to add to this, I think we also have to acknowledge that fascism just works. Frankly, a lot of the technology that Apple adds to OS X is hardly earth shattering, but they can make it work and get it adopted by a large audience with surprisingly few problems because they have total control. I'm no expert, but I have been using Linux for over a decade (Slackware 96 was my first distro and I even used a version of Debian with a Linux 1.x kernel), and I have witnessed many attempts to get new and interesting systems added to Linux. Democracy is slow. Look at all the effort it took to get Pulse working in a reasonable fashion. I'm no Pulse hater, I think it is an amazing piece of software, but the growing pains were agonizing. Even standardizing on X11 drivers infrastructure has been difficult (there were at least 2 versions of Ubuntu that contained major regressions in Intel graphics drivers). All of this leads to fragmentation and compatibility problems.
OS X is impressive because it suffers from this less. The total control wielded by Steve Jobs allows Apple to introduce new(ish) technologies in a timely manner. Yes, things like Grand Central or Time Machine may not be entirely unique, but they work and are available to a large audience.
I don't think that geeks give Steve Jobs a free pass. I think they just acknowledge that his way of doing things has been very successful in the grand scheme of things. OS X is an impressive piece of software that brings to the table many of the things that Linux folk have been talking about for years.
Ok, so we know why these 33 employees failed to prevent the meltdown, what about the thousands of other SEC employees? At least these guys have something to show for their time at the SEC.
No, but they do move to save on labor costs (including worker safety), environmental regulations, and consumer product regulations. Or maybe you're right, it's all about the taxes.
Just look at Office 2007. Word looks and behaves nothing like Outlook or OneNote. In Windows, the big players tend to have fairly good interfaces, but as soon as you move away from the over-$100 realm of Windows software, you're in amateur land and the interfaces quickly devolve into a case study in worst practices. I find that I much prefer using ported Gnome software in Windows than many native solutions. Yes, Photoshop is a fantastic program, but I'd take GIMP over ArcSoft abominations any day of the week. At least I don't have to pay for GIMP.
This article should really be titled "Why Users Drop Cheaper Programs for More Expensive Ones". At least the open source solutions generally resist the urge to insert ads into their software and use a bunch of proprietary widgets.
The parent post answers an important question: what sort of analogy do you make when the story is about cars?
In Vista you can tag Microsoft Office documents, but that is all. The files I use most, PDFs, are not taggable. Nor are text files, or open office files, or anything else for that matter. You can search, but the interface isn't great.
Visiting multiple websites isn't that difficult. That is why we have bookmarks. They allow us to easily and quickly go to a page that we have visited previously. I know for instance that Battlestar Galactica is on Hulu but Lost is on abc.com. So, when I want to watch Lost I go to abc.com and when I want to watch BSG I go to hulu. This isn't a problem. If this becomes too burdensome for consumers then the media companies will simply fail as people will stop visiting them. Right now I get ALL of my television from hulu, with the exceptions of Lost (abc.com) and some PBS stuff (digital converter box). I get more than enough TV right now. If a new show comes around that wants my attention, it would do well to distribute itself through one of the channels I already frequent.
I agree that it is a bit stupid for a media company to wall itself off, especially in the near future when more and more people drop cable/satellite for Internet based television. Right now abc probably has no problem getting people to watch Lost on their website. This is not really a burden to consumers though. Besides, Hulu is actually reducing fragmentation. I mean, we could have a situation where you have to go to Nbc.com to see the Office and then over to scifi.com to watch BSG. Instead, I can watch both of those on Hulu. That seems like a win to me. Also, unlike with iTunes and cable, I don't have to pay to watch TV. The ads on hulu are the exact right length so that I don't mind watching them.
...I haven't touched Pocket IE in a very long time.
Neither has Microsoft.
Hmm, my own experience has been different. I've owned two logitech mouse like devices, both of them have been great. The first was a logitech marbleman that I bought like 11 years ago. It finally kicked the bucket a few months ago. Now I have one of those bluetooth laser mice. It seems good so far.
I'm aware that it's more than a calendar and email client. I like it as a calendar. It's nice that it integrates with OneNote for instance. I just think it's too bad that it sucks as an email client, especially since Microsoft loves to integrate software with Outlook.
No, it isn't it. The problem is that it is a really terrible mail client. It makes for an okay calendar. Really though, email is not its strong suit. Especially IMAP. Wow is it terrible at IMAP. I don't know the technical reasons behind it, but Thunderbird is way faster at displaying IMAP messages than Outlook. Also, Outlook has a really hard time keeping track of whether or not I have new email. The little icon in the systray gets confused so easily. I've actually stopped using it and have taken to just switching to Outlook periodically and pressing send/receive. Maybe it's because I'm on Vista64 and Microsoft doesn't really support that platform (for instance, the send to OneNote printer is not available on 64 bit systems and they have no intention of making it available. They'll fix it in the next version of office. Thanks Microsoft!)
Anyway, Outlook would be great if you could specify a different email client to use.
I have 10.3.9, and after 10.5 came out I was still getting security updates. Yeah, I did't get to have dashboard or spotlight for free, but I wasn't left without critical updates.
think about how terrible it would be if the screen were touch sensitive. People would constantly be moving your cursor around and hitting buttons you don't want hit. This again brings up the question, 'why would you want a touchscreen?'
You also can't buy off the shelf software for the windows based netbooks as that software tends to come on optical storage media, which netbooks cannot read. I guess you could get a USB dvd drive, but how many people want to invest in that? With Linux you just install from your distro's repositories. Much easier. No extra hardware required.
I would except in Vista it takes a couple minutes to go into and out of hibernate. Booting is actually must faster. I think this is because I have 4 gigs of ram. My wife's laptop with only 2 gigs is much faster at hibernating. Linux used to be quite quick in the hibernation department, but I've been testing out Ubuntu Intrepid and hibernate stopped working correctly for me.
Yes. They really are that crippled, especially if you have Verizon. They actually go to the trouble of wiping out the software that was on the phone and putting in their own interface so they can charge for every single feature of the phone. For instance, my phone has GPS, but I can only use it by paying $10 to verizon for their GPS based driving directions service. All I want is to be able to get my GPS coordinates. Too bad.
I would also like to be able to sync my calendar and contact list (which I finally figured out how to do with the excellent BitPim). They provide no software to do this, but the sales rep told me that there was a service I could pay for that would do it. Thanks Verizon. My problem is that I want a phone that does cool stuff, I just don't want to pay a monthly fee for it. I would buy a smart phone if they didn't come with expensive data plans. I tried to do this recently and was told by a rep that there was no way to guarantee that software on the phone wasn't connecting to the internet and that some of the synchronization happened over the network. My gut feeling was that it was a lie designed to sell me a data plan, but I didn't want to test that. I just want a phone that is also a PDA, but not a blackberry. I don't need email in my pocket, but I would like a calendar that is easy to synchronize with my computer. When did smartphone become synonymous with email? So instead I got a cheaper phone with fewer features.
I can just imagine if computers were sold this way. Lets say you could buy computers from Comcast, but they were still made by Dell. Instead of Windows or Linux, they loaded some custom shit on there that hid every feature of the computer behind some monthly service. Hell, they'd probably charge you extra for the mouse and there would be no USB ports or DVD drive. To get music you'd have to buy and adapter to hook up an external drive or you'd have to pay $1.99 per song to Comcast. That right there is the US cell phone industry.
This is why we invade other countries. We're looking for good cell phones.
if you have bluetooth on your computer you can probably use bitpim to interface with the phone. I use it with my LG Env2 to sync my calendar and contact list with Outlook. Agreed though that Verizon is a ripoff with that "Music Management Kit". A Verizon rep actually looked me in the eyes and told me it was the only way to get music onto the phone because it had to be "converted" to work on a Verizon phone. I even asked, "what about this microSD slot?" He told me it still had to be converted from mp3 to work on the phone. Of course, I didn't buy the kit and went home and happily put a bunch of music on the phone with a microSD card; it played fine. It's one thing to be evasive, but to actually lie to the customer is just wrong.
My first reaction when I loaded up chrome was, "my God! my computer is speaking to me!" I had forgotten how annoying flash advertisements can be on the web. Seriously, does every site have automatically playing sound now? I had no idea how pervasive this shit was. I can't stand the web without flashblock.
The harddrives in old MacBooks were lubricated with Dolphin oil. It's one of those things that makes a Mac different from a PC. Shit, now I may as well buy a Dell.
Great, then Microsoft can introduce Windows Vista Ultimate Compatibility Edition. They could also have a different edition for each version of windows compatibility. XP edition, 3.11 edition, NT 4.0 edition. You don't think they're going to GIVE you a copy of Windows for Workgroups do you?
For the large textbooks this is true, but I know from personal experience that rarely updated books aren't necessarily cheap. I had a course that used a textbook (this was in 2002 or so) that was printed in the late 80s. This was the latest edition of the book and it still cost over $80 "new" (It was out of print but there was still a backstock). I found a copy, after searching quite a bit, for like $70 used. As much as I hated paying for text books I can see how it could be difficult to stay in business without releasing new editions. If you continued to print a book at $100, and it continued to be popular, and you didn't release new editions, just kept printing the same edition, eventually the market would get flooded with used copies, which would badly undercut your business. With all those cheap used copies, it might no longer be profitable to print the book (especially with royalties and ever increasing labor and materials costs, that don't have to be paid by resellers). You can hope to make up the lag in sales by printing other text books, but that is really no better than a new edition of the same text book. I guess at least new contributors get a chance at royalties.
Not that I think the publishers are saints. I do think text books should be more reasonable, but the only way that will happen is with some real competition. That means professors judging books on price and content, not just on which book arrived in the mail first. Part of the problem is that the people buying the books don't get to make the decisions. They just have to buy the damn thing if they want to take the class. They don't get to choose which physics book to buy (though that would be a fun exercise in capitalism, if you cheap out on the book you might not pass).
I had one "book" that cost $80 and wasn't even bound. It was just a shrink-wrapped stack of pages with holes punched in the pages so i could put it in a binder. I still have it because the bookstore wouldn't buy it back. Pretty good deal from the publisher's perspective. That three-ring binder looks great on my book shelf.
I've never had a problem with service from Amazon.com, but man do I hate their website. I can't think of more cluttered website than Amazon.com. I run a somewhat underpowered PowerBook, but it's more than capable of loading most pages in a timely manner. Not Amazon.com. They include so much useless information.
So, Comcast is a big burly guy who runs up to you and pushes you off a treadmill? "Get off the machine!" Actually, yeah, I think that fits.
Damn, I can't get this critical update for Vista this month because I'm out of bandwidth. Or, I guess I don't get to play this game I just bought because I don't have the bandwidth left to download the first 12 patches to it that came out in between the time I left the store and when I got home. I would be less concerned about capping bandwidth if everybody didn't expect you to have an unlimited connection. Maybe that expectation would change in time (maybe flash would go away!).