In my experience, Impress's biggest problem is that their stock templates are pretty amateurish. Given a good professional template, it can do everything that really is necessary for presestation software to do. Excessive use of the bells and whistles in my mind takes away from a presentation rather than adds anything. Having to endure presentations where a speaker pauses to allow his bullshit aimation to finish is mind numbing.
I disagree with most of what you say.:-)
First, personally I don't care about the templates; I don't use them anyway. Almost to a T, my presentations use graphics and text on a plain black background. Makes things simple, but it has a couple nice properties like the fact that the edges of the screen aren't typically visible.
Second is the utility of animations. I'll be the first to agree that they can be used pretty ridiculously. However, they can also be used very well. For instance, I often find myself trying to illustrate a process, and often showing how things go around can be done with animations. I'd say most of the time an appear/disappear effect suffices (and I will sometimes "animate" that with separate slides), but not always. I've seen a couple of presentations that make fairly heavy use of animations and were rather well done, because they add rather than distract.
Third, there are a lot of other problems with Impress. I don't remember most of the annoyances I had with it, but I can give an example which is what ended my last attempt to use it to make a diagram not for a presentation: terrible block arrows. I consider that to be a basic shape, use it a lot, and it is just broken in Impress. The width of the body is proportional to the width of the entire arrow, which means that (1) two arrows that are different sizes will have different widths and (2) an arrow with a different width and height will look retarded. Compare to PowerPoint. PowerPoint will use the same width of line throughout, which solves (2), and gives you handles via which you can adjust properties like the width of the line and size of the arrowhead, which solves (1). When I was working on that diagram, I spent a few minutes playing around trying to figure out if there was a way to get what I want, and gave up and rebooted into Windows. (I'm sure that the approach is achievable in Impress -- e.g. draw the outline with a tool -- the point is that even something I consider an incredibly basic task is a PITA.)
Also, get rid of ALL the duality. Like the separate task list for Metro apps only: get rid of it. Use a single task bar and task switcher; the desktop task bar seems just fine for that.
This is actually probably my single biggest complaint about the Win8 UI from a "why did you do this?" perspective (as opposed to "affects my use and is annoying").
I don't mind if that start screen would have a couple versions to it (or tabs, etc.) such as one for settings / a redesigned control panel.
It sort of has that now, when you're searching. (That's one of my complaints from a "does affect my use" perspective.:-))
I don't mind the start screen in itself, it would indeed be nice if it just showed as an overlay with a dimmed/blurred background, I guess similar to what Ubuntu Unity does when you make the dash open full-screen.
My main complaint about it is that I can't tell what organization, if any, it has. It seems like the main thing you get when you click the start "button" in the lower left corner is basically completely disorganized except what you've done. I find it almost unusable. There's a separate "all programs" view that you can get which is a lot better; I'd rather see that be what you get, or perhaps some hybrid. Right now it's just a mess of icons.
(I pretty much start all programs by typing a substring of the name, so it's not a huge deal, but still.)
How about "any time you open a PDF, it kicks you into a full-screen Metro app"? No, Microsoft, of course I didn't want to be able to look at "walk.pdf" and "chew_gum.pdf" at the same time, please go into your dain-bramaged fullscreen mode.
Yeah, the full screen PDF reader sucks. It was way better in Windows 7 when any time you opened a PDF it would say "wtf is this I don't know how to show you that!"
Though I do wish there was a way to just say "move all audio and video associations that are with your crap-ass metro players to WMP". (Installing a 3rd party player missed some, so I'm occasionally still surprised by the Metro player.)
The systems were loaded with an over abundance of RAM (6GB I recall) and needed every MB of it to run anywhere near as well as an XP machine with 2GB of RAM.
I ran Vista for some time with 2 GB of RAM. Ran fine.
Remember, Windows 8 isn't Windows as we know it on the desktop side of things, either.
That's not nearly as true as the Android/Linux comment. From what I can tell, I can't just take an arbitrary Linux program and run it on an Android tablet. That's not true of Windows 8, which is in some sense little more than a UI change -- Windows 8 basically works basically identically to Windows 7 about 99% of the time if you don't use Metro apps; the main meaningful change is launching programs from the start menu/metro screen that changes.
Of course, things are much different with WinRT, where your "WinRT isn't Windows as we know it" applies again.
That is the biggest thing. I know less than a hand full of people that need MS Office. That is mostly Excel. One of them would have a hard time without word (she could do it, but it would be a bit painful), and none of them need PowerPoint.
I'm somewhat of an unusual case, but I'm almost the opposite. I almost never use a word processor and rarely use a spreadsheet, but I do sometimes use PowerPoint.
And the problem there is that Impress sucks donkey balls. I don't know of any presentation software that is even in the same ballpark except maybe Keynote -- and as I don't have a Mac, that's a non-starter.
Tie all those to a minor OS (instead of a dominant OS), and they won't be billion dollar businesses.
You definitely have a point.
But at the same time, suppose that it suddenly became more critical to support other platforms. It would be really interesting to see how well they did. For instance, you point out that the Mac version of MSO is behind the Windows one. But what happens if the higher-ups say "hey, this is now a priority!" as opposed to now, where I suspect it's more "hey you guys, work on this and we'll try to get some extra money." I suspect you could see that gap disappear.
I suspect you'd see at least quite a few people still interested in Office (PowerPoint at least is unrivaled except for Keynote which has limited platform issues), and I strongly suspect you'd see at least fairly strong interest in Visual Studio among devs who work on other platforms.
I think it's your middle group (e.g. IIS and Windows Server) that's in the most danger. But still, the good news there is that I'm not sure how much interaction there is between Windows and desktop systems on the decline and servers on the decline.
It seems to me like there'd be a lot of tossups here.
IMO the real problem with Apple's desktop hardware is they don't offer a mid-range tower, so you lose out on a lot of flexibility. They've only got the all-in-one iMac, the ultra-expensive Mac Pro, and the Mini which is basically just a laptop without a monitor.
Even if there was something like the Mac Pro that used consumer hardware (e.g. not Xeons!) but was a bit more expensive than what you'd pay from most other vendors or if you built it itself it would at least be worth a look. But at the moment for me, an Apple desktop is just out of the question.
The melting point matters to people who live in regions of the Earth where temperatures goes below 0C. I leave it as on excercise to the reader why +1C is hugely different compared to -1C when going out.
As someone who is very familiar with such weather, I don't think I agree. For instance, take perhaps the most important reason that freezing/not freezing makes a difference, at least IMO: you're driving, and want to know how much you have to worry about ice. If it was the case that, for instance, at +1C you knew you wouldn't have to deal with ice on the roads or something like that vs -1C you do, I would. But it's already so fuzzy already: hyper-local air temperatures, amount of sun, ground temperatures, etc. already mean that 0C doesn't actually tell you a ton. You have to be worried about ice potentially even several degrees warmer than freezing, and you may not have to deal with it (even if there's water) several degrees below. It makes the nice round number 0C way less useful.
On the other hand, L/100km is very useful for figuring what you need to arrive at a given destination. Driving somewhere that's 250 km away in a car that uses 10 L/100 km? You'll need 25 L of fuel for that. With gas in the US at roughly $1/L, you'll know it costs $25 to drive there. You release about 2.5 kg of CO2 per L, so the trip dumps about 60 some kg of CO2 in the gas powered car.
But what decision are you going to make based on that figure? Are you really going to choose whether to take a trip based on the gas cost? (I suppose you might want to figure drive cost vs air or something like that.)
Whereas "I estimate I have 3 gallons left in my tank, can I make it 90 miles" is something I compute many times each longish car trip.
Interestingly, I prefer cm/mm over inches and feet over meters; have no preference with gallons/qts vs. liters; prefer ml over fluid ounces, prefer grams over ounces but pounds over kg. How is THAT for confused.
Heh, I'm similar except with a different list: inches over cm and feet over meters; liters over gallons/qts/fl oz; indifferent about pounds vs kg; prefer Fahrenheit over Celsius.
redneck detected. mpg isn't clear about efficiency
But who cares? How often do you really compare about the efficiency? About the only time I would was if I was contemplating buying a new car and trying to figure out if it would be worth it. And how often do you do that, vs when driving around figuring out how far you can go on the current tank? Because for me it's a ratio of about 1 time to 100...
No, zero Celsius is "too damn cold", zero Fahrenheit is HOLY SHIT HOW CAN A HUMAN BEING LIVE HERE.
I'm biased because of my location (Wisconsin), but part of the reason that I like that quote is because it matches my own temperature opinions so closely. By my scale, down to about 10F it's really easy to dress appropriately and be reasonably comfortable, and single digits Fahrenheit is where I really start wishing it was warmer. On the other end of the spectrum, I can deal reasonably well up to mid-80s, and 90 is where I really start wishing it was cooler. And ~60 is about perfect.:-)
Really though, places that regularly see 100 F, I have the same reaction to your reaction to 0 F. I really don't understand how someone would voluntarily live in Texas or Arizona or whatever. (And if you say "it's a dry heat" I hope to god someone mods you down as literally flamebait.:-))
Yeah. 25, 30, 35, 45, 55, 65, and 70 are all extremely common in my experience. 15 and 20 are common for fairly special cases (e.g. school zones or shopping mall access roads), you occasionally see 40 or 50, and other parts of the country have interstate speed limits that are 75 or even 85.
We have a weird situation here in the UK. All fuel is sold by the litre - but no one knows what litres per 100km means or how the cost of a litre of gas will affect them. We all refer to MPG and we know that a gallon is about 4.5x the cost of a litre (yes, our gallons have more litres than yours).
So I tend to be pretty ambivalent about metric vs imperial. I would vaguely prefer if everything switched to metric, but I also don't think that it would make much of a difference at all in day-to-day life. Cooking is about the one time I care about the imperial system. (How many tsp are in a tbsp again?)
But I would posit that one reason that L/100km may not have taken off is because that's a stupid way to measure fuel efficiency.
The times I'd care about my fuel efficiency are (1) when I'm choosing whether to buy a new car and what to get and (2) when I'm on the road and want to know whether I have enough fuel to get me to some future waypoint of interest (e.g. "can I get past the Mobil stations on the Indiana turnpike that are run by a bunch of greedy opportunist bastards and across the border to Ohio where prices drop substantially, or should I fill up now?"). Volume-per-distance is the better way to measure efficiency for the first purpose, as if one car's L/100km measure is twice another's then it'll make me pay twice as much for gas.
But for the second purpose you really want distance-per-volume, so you can look at your gas gauge, estimate how many gallons are left, then multiply. Easy peasy. With volume-per-distance it becomes much more awkward. And #2 happens way more than #1. How often do you buy a new car?
It's 200K to Seattle? We'll, we're averaging 100 kph so we'll be there in a couple of hours.
Actually I think driving is one place where miles actually has a tiny advantage.
Suppose you're going 60 mph. That's a mile each minute, which is really easy to work with. Destination 13 miles away? That's 13 minutes. But if you're going 100 km/h and your destination is 20 km away, now you have to do more actual math: divide 100 [km/h] by 20 [km] to get 5 [1/h], then divide 60 [min/hr] by 5 [1/h] to get 12 [min].
It's not hard, but really nothing in this unit conversion stuff is.
Even at 70 or 75 mph, the 1 mile/minute rule can be adjusted a bit. 13 miles away? Well, that's a bit less than 13 minutes. You do still have to do some calculations to get a more accurate answer, but a rough estimate can be arrived at nearly immediately. And even 60 mph is reasonably common -- many non-interstate highways have a 55mph speed limit, as do most interstates in urban areas. Also even on the interstates, if are going 70 mph but stop for an average of 5 minutes each hour, you get a lot closer to 1 mi/min. (That comes out to 64.1 mph on average.)
OK, I am giving a bit of a strawman. 75mph is 120km/h, which is very nicely 2 km/min, so there you'd just divide the destination distance by 2. At 70mph, you'd divide by 2 then add in a fudge factor, just like I subtract a fudge factor.)
This is made possible of course by the coincidence that 60 mph happens to be in the ballpark of highway speeds and there are 60 minutes in an hour, not because of any actual unit conversions or anything.
(Actually know I wonder what you'd get if you took the average speed limit of the entire interstate system weighted by traffic amount.)
I did see an awesome comment here on/. on an earlier story on the topic. It was something like:
"Fahrenheit is a wonderfully human temperature scale: 0 degrees is too damn cold, and 100 degrees is too damn hot."
I actually pretty much agree with this; Fahrenheit much more nicely covers the range of temperatures that a lot of places experience than does Celsius. The much-vaunted pegging of the Celcius scale at the melting and boiling points of water doesn't really matter one iota in day-to-day life; when I want to make pasta, I don't put a thermometer in the pot of water and say "yup, it's at 100 degC now, must be boiling; I just wait until it's bubbly."
Distributing software to end users isn't a core purpose of Google Code; the download functionality (which could be, and often was, used for that purpose) wasn't, as I understand it, provided for that purpose, but provided mostly as an alternative to using source control tools to get source code bundles.
It's possible that's what they were thinking (and maybe even said) but it sure doesn't come out from the design of the site, which I've always thought has been well-geared toward the end users. There's a consistent landing page with consistent links to the downloads, documentation, and news groups. Of the "hey, stick your OSS projects here!" sites, Google Code has been the one that I most like to use as an end user.
Amusingly, the biggest counterpoint was that if you want to offer downloads you should probably use google code which is much more user (rather than programmer) friendly.
That's pretty much my view too.
The way I looked at things was that Google Code and SourceForge are a lot more centered around what an end user would want to see (either someone who has no idea about version control and coding, or for a library or something like that even a programmer but who just wants to grab a library to use) while GitHub is a lot more centered around what developers who are actually working on a project want to see.
I mean, just think about what the landing page is: on Google Code you get a page with a description of the project and clear, standardized links to the downloads and documentation, and you have to follow a couple (still standardized) links before you're at the code. On GitHub, pretty much the most prominent thing you see when you go to a project page is the directory listing; it even appears above whatever README is present (if any).
Dropping support for a quick and easy download from the former is a lot more baffling of a move than dropping it from the latter.
Oh, I know. Let me try to recap my argument, because I suspect we're not actually disagreeing all that much.:-)
The conversation started with Holi saying "Find a console that isn't locked down that people actually want then come back with your whining" and you responding with "PC", and then the discussion changed to DRM on the PC.
My argument is that DRM is still a significant factor on the PC. Sure, the situation is better than it is on consoles both because there are some DRM-free games and because you can even do that in the first place if you want, but few people in my experience are willing to actually forgo games with DRM. And in some sense I would say that's DRM is rather closer to the rule than the exception, and I suspect this post by you was more focusing on the exceptions.
It's pretty much just that focus that I objected to rather than the fact that PCs are a better ecosystem.
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I disagree with most of what you say. :-)
First, personally I don't care about the templates; I don't use them anyway. Almost to a T, my presentations use graphics and text on a plain black background. Makes things simple, but it has a couple nice properties like the fact that the edges of the screen aren't typically visible.
Second is the utility of animations. I'll be the first to agree that they can be used pretty ridiculously. However, they can also be used very well. For instance, I often find myself trying to illustrate a process, and often showing how things go around can be done with animations. I'd say most of the time an appear/disappear effect suffices (and I will sometimes "animate" that with separate slides), but not always. I've seen a couple of presentations that make fairly heavy use of animations and were rather well done, because they add rather than distract.
Third, there are a lot of other problems with Impress. I don't remember most of the annoyances I had with it, but I can give an example which is what ended my last attempt to use it to make a diagram not for a presentation: terrible block arrows. I consider that to be a basic shape, use it a lot, and it is just broken in Impress. The width of the body is proportional to the width of the entire arrow, which means that (1) two arrows that are different sizes will have different widths and (2) an arrow with a different width and height will look retarded. Compare to PowerPoint. PowerPoint will use the same width of line throughout, which solves (2), and gives you handles via which you can adjust properties like the width of the line and size of the arrowhead, which solves (1). When I was working on that diagram, I spent a few minutes playing around trying to figure out if there was a way to get what I want, and gave up and rebooted into Windows. (I'm sure that the approach is achievable in Impress -- e.g. draw the outline with a tool -- the point is that even something I consider an incredibly basic task is a PITA.)
This is actually probably my single biggest complaint about the Win8 UI from a "why did you do this?" perspective (as opposed to "affects my use and is annoying").
It sort of has that now, when you're searching. (That's one of my complaints from a "does affect my use" perspective. :-))
My main complaint about it is that I can't tell what organization, if any, it has. It seems like the main thing you get when you click the start "button" in the lower left corner is basically completely disorganized except what you've done. I find it almost unusable. There's a separate "all programs" view that you can get which is a lot better; I'd rather see that be what you get, or perhaps some hybrid. Right now it's just a mess of icons.
(I pretty much start all programs by typing a substring of the name, so it's not a huge deal, but still.)
How about "any time you open a PDF, it kicks you into a full-screen Metro app"? No, Microsoft, of course I didn't want to be able to look at "walk.pdf" and "chew_gum.pdf" at the same time, please go into your dain-bramaged fullscreen mode.
Yeah, the full screen PDF reader sucks. It was way better in Windows 7 when any time you opened a PDF it would say "wtf is this I don't know how to show you that!"
Though I do wish there was a way to just say "move all audio and video associations that are with your crap-ass metro players to WMP". (Installing a 3rd party player missed some, so I'm occasionally still surprised by the Metro player.)
Also, the minimum requirements were 512 MB (home basic) or 1 GB (everything else). Windows 7 requires 1 GB.
I ran Vista for some time with 2 GB of RAM. Ran fine.
That's not nearly as true as the Android/Linux comment. From what I can tell, I can't just take an arbitrary Linux program and run it on an Android tablet. That's not true of Windows 8, which is in some sense little more than a UI change -- Windows 8 basically works basically identically to Windows 7 about 99% of the time if you don't use Metro apps; the main meaningful change is launching programs from the start menu/metro screen that changes.
Of course, things are much different with WinRT, where your "WinRT isn't Windows as we know it" applies again.
Just out of curiosity, how's Eclipse's C++ support these days. Last I tried it was pretty sucky, but that was a few years ago.
I'm somewhat of an unusual case, but I'm almost the opposite. I almost never use a word processor and rarely use a spreadsheet, but I do sometimes use PowerPoint.
And the problem there is that Impress sucks donkey balls. I don't know of any presentation software that is even in the same ballpark except maybe Keynote -- and as I don't have a Mac, that's a non-starter.
You definitely have a point.
But at the same time, suppose that it suddenly became more critical to support other platforms. It would be really interesting to see how well they did. For instance, you point out that the Mac version of MSO is behind the Windows one. But what happens if the higher-ups say "hey, this is now a priority!" as opposed to now, where I suspect it's more "hey you guys, work on this and we'll try to get some extra money." I suspect you could see that gap disappear.
I suspect you'd see at least quite a few people still interested in Office (PowerPoint at least is unrivaled except for Keynote which has limited platform issues), and I strongly suspect you'd see at least fairly strong interest in Visual Studio among devs who work on other platforms.
I think it's your middle group (e.g. IIS and Windows Server) that's in the most danger. But still, the good news there is that I'm not sure how much interaction there is between Windows and desktop systems on the decline and servers on the decline.
It seems to me like there'd be a lot of tossups here.
IMO the real problem with Apple's desktop hardware is they don't offer a mid-range tower, so you lose out on a lot of flexibility. They've only got the all-in-one iMac, the ultra-expensive Mac Pro, and the Mini which is basically just a laptop without a monitor.
Even if there was something like the Mac Pro that used consumer hardware (e.g. not Xeons!) but was a bit more expensive than what you'd pay from most other vendors or if you built it itself it would at least be worth a look. But at the moment for me, an Apple desktop is just out of the question.
Which is easier to do in your head? At least for me, multiplying is much more likely to be easy to both estimate and arrive at an actual answer.
(Remember, unit conversions are never hard; this whole story is about frequent but small annoyances.)
Texas, and at some point soon, Nevada. Also apparently there's 80 in at least Utah.
As someone who is very familiar with such weather, I don't think I agree. For instance, take perhaps the most important reason that freezing/not freezing makes a difference, at least IMO: you're driving, and want to know how much you have to worry about ice. If it was the case that, for instance, at +1C you knew you wouldn't have to deal with ice on the roads or something like that vs -1C you do, I would. But it's already so fuzzy already: hyper-local air temperatures, amount of sun, ground temperatures, etc. already mean that 0C doesn't actually tell you a ton. You have to be worried about ice potentially even several degrees warmer than freezing, and you may not have to deal with it (even if there's water) several degrees below. It makes the nice round number 0C way less useful.
But what decision are you going to make based on that figure? Are you really going to choose whether to take a trip based on the gas cost? (I suppose you might want to figure drive cost vs air or something like that.)
Whereas "I estimate I have 3 gallons left in my tank, can I make it 90 miles" is something I compute many times each longish car trip.
Heh, I'm similar except with a different list: inches over cm and feet over meters; liters over gallons/qts/fl oz; indifferent about pounds vs kg; prefer Fahrenheit over Celsius.
But who cares? How often do you really compare about the efficiency? About the only time I would was if I was contemplating buying a new car and trying to figure out if it would be worth it. And how often do you do that, vs when driving around figuring out how far you can go on the current tank? Because for me it's a ratio of about 1 time to 100...
Don't worry, so is Slashcode.
I'm biased because of my location (Wisconsin), but part of the reason that I like that quote is because it matches my own temperature opinions so closely. By my scale, down to about 10F it's really easy to dress appropriately and be reasonably comfortable, and single digits Fahrenheit is where I really start wishing it was warmer. On the other end of the spectrum, I can deal reasonably well up to mid-80s, and 90 is where I really start wishing it was cooler. And ~60 is about perfect. :-)
Really though, places that regularly see 100 F, I have the same reaction to your reaction to 0 F. I really don't understand how someone would voluntarily live in Texas or Arizona or whatever. (And if you say "it's a dry heat" I hope to god someone mods you down as literally flamebait. :-))
Are there many different speed limits in US?
Yeah. 25, 30, 35, 45, 55, 65, and 70 are all extremely common in my experience. 15 and 20 are common for fairly special cases (e.g. school zones or shopping mall access roads), you occasionally see 40 or 50, and other parts of the country have interstate speed limits that are 75 or even 85.
So I tend to be pretty ambivalent about metric vs imperial. I would vaguely prefer if everything switched to metric, but I also don't think that it would make much of a difference at all in day-to-day life. Cooking is about the one time I care about the imperial system. (How many tsp are in a tbsp again?)
But I would posit that one reason that L/100km may not have taken off is because that's a stupid way to measure fuel efficiency.
The times I'd care about my fuel efficiency are (1) when I'm choosing whether to buy a new car and what to get and (2) when I'm on the road and want to know whether I have enough fuel to get me to some future waypoint of interest (e.g. "can I get past the Mobil stations on the Indiana turnpike that are run by a bunch of greedy opportunist bastards and across the border to Ohio where prices drop substantially, or should I fill up now?"). Volume-per-distance is the better way to measure efficiency for the first purpose, as if one car's L/100km measure is twice another's then it'll make me pay twice as much for gas.
But for the second purpose you really want distance-per-volume, so you can look at your gas gauge, estimate how many gallons are left, then multiply. Easy peasy. With volume-per-distance it becomes much more awkward. And #2 happens way more than #1. How often do you buy a new car?
Actually I think driving is one place where miles actually has a tiny advantage.
Suppose you're going 60 mph. That's a mile each minute, which is really easy to work with. Destination 13 miles away? That's 13 minutes. But if you're going 100 km/h and your destination is 20 km away, now you have to do more actual math: divide 100 [km/h] by 20 [km] to get 5 [1/h], then divide 60 [min/hr] by 5 [1/h] to get 12 [min].
It's not hard, but really nothing in this unit conversion stuff is.
Even at 70 or 75 mph, the 1 mile/minute rule can be adjusted a bit. 13 miles away? Well, that's a bit less than 13 minutes. You do still have to do some calculations to get a more accurate answer, but a rough estimate can be arrived at nearly immediately. And even 60 mph is reasonably common -- many non-interstate highways have a 55mph speed limit, as do most interstates in urban areas. Also even on the interstates, if are going 70 mph but stop for an average of 5 minutes each hour, you get a lot closer to 1 mi/min. (That comes out to 64.1 mph on average.)
OK, I am giving a bit of a strawman. 75mph is 120km/h, which is very nicely 2 km/min, so there you'd just divide the destination distance by 2. At 70mph, you'd divide by 2 then add in a fudge factor, just like I subtract a fudge factor.)
This is made possible of course by the coincidence that 60 mph happens to be in the ballpark of highway speeds and there are 60 minutes in an hour, not because of any actual unit conversions or anything.
(Actually know I wonder what you'd get if you took the average speed limit of the entire interstate system weighted by traffic amount.)
I did see an awesome comment here on /. on an earlier story on the topic. It was something like:
"Fahrenheit is a wonderfully human temperature scale: 0 degrees is too damn cold, and 100 degrees is too damn hot."
I actually pretty much agree with this; Fahrenheit much more nicely covers the range of temperatures that a lot of places experience than does Celsius. The much-vaunted pegging of the Celcius scale at the melting and boiling points of water doesn't really matter one iota in day-to-day life; when I want to make pasta, I don't put a thermometer in the pot of water and say "yup, it's at 100 degC now, must be boiling; I just wait until it's bubbly."
It's possible that's what they were thinking (and maybe even said) but it sure doesn't come out from the design of the site, which I've always thought has been well-geared toward the end users. There's a consistent landing page with consistent links to the downloads, documentation, and news groups. Of the "hey, stick your OSS projects here!" sites, Google Code has been the one that I most like to use as an end user.
Amusingly, the biggest counterpoint was that if you want to offer downloads you should probably use google code which is much more user (rather than programmer) friendly.
That's pretty much my view too.
The way I looked at things was that Google Code and SourceForge are a lot more centered around what an end user would want to see (either someone who has no idea about version control and coding, or for a library or something like that even a programmer but who just wants to grab a library to use) while GitHub is a lot more centered around what developers who are actually working on a project want to see.
I mean, just think about what the landing page is: on Google Code you get a page with a description of the project and clear, standardized links to the downloads and documentation, and you have to follow a couple (still standardized) links before you're at the code. On GitHub, pretty much the most prominent thing you see when you go to a project page is the directory listing; it even appears above whatever README is present (if any).
Dropping support for a quick and easy download from the former is a lot more baffling of a move than dropping it from the latter.
Oh, I know. Let me try to recap my argument, because I suspect we're not actually disagreeing all that much. :-)
The conversation started with Holi saying "Find a console that isn't locked down that people actually want then come back with your whining" and you responding with "PC", and then the discussion changed to DRM on the PC.
My argument is that DRM is still a significant factor on the PC. Sure, the situation is better than it is on consoles both because there are some DRM-free games and because you can even do that in the first place if you want, but few people in my experience are willing to actually forgo games with DRM. And in some sense I would say that's DRM is rather closer to the rule than the exception, and I suspect this post by you was more focusing on the exceptions.
It's pretty much just that focus that I objected to rather than the fact that PCs are a better ecosystem.