Seagate offers five year warranties, and companies have in fact recognized that people want even better reliability. Wait a few years and you'll be able to replace your smallest drives with flash.
I never said more is better. I said more is better for people who need more.
You're a luddite because your complaint is senseless: 1. As long as someone needs the space and is willing to pay for it, increasing space is good regardless of whether the majority needs it. 2. Companies are working very hard on your needs as well, so you aren't being neglected.
In addition, you're also ignorant, because consumers are already buying HDTV video cameras. As long as people keep breeding, there will be massive amounts of new footage - and yes, for completely normal people.
"Making users delighted is all about doing what they expect. The technophiles are clearly in control at Nokia. I hope Apple puts them out of business, because Nokia will have earned it."
I'm not so sure about that; real technophiles would appreciate a good UI. It seems more like the engineers are in charge of the hardware, but the software is controlled by the marketing department - why else would it ship with a completely unusable mp3 player if not to look good in a checklist? The hardware is more than capable of running anything they could reasonably throw at it.
As for the slowness, it's not as bad anymore. They've upgraded the processors. But yeah, I can't understand why the basic tasks seem like complete bloatware either. It's ok if Oggplay takes a while to load, but how hard would it be to keep the basic phone functions in memory all the time? 10 kB maybe, with a good programmer?
No, I love my N73 too, but there are several problems. I'm sure someone somewhere is going to post about how all they want to do is make a call, but that's actually implemented fairly well, although not perfectly. People who want to use the hardware to its full potential are the ones who will suffer! Here are some real issues I've found, and they amaze me:
Simple yes/no-toggles are implemented with dropdown menus. Unforgivable in a mobile device. One press should change the setting, not open a menu. To add insult to injury, the active option is the one that's selected when the menu opens.
The music player is retarded:
Instead of listing your songs, it wastes the whole screen on empty space. You have to open a menu to get to a playlist.
Instead of mapping playing functions to keys, you have to select virtual buttons on the screen.
It doesn't let you set it to a specific folder, so if any game uses mp3 sound effects, they will be added to your playlist. That would work on a dedicated mp3 player, yeah, but not on a goddamn general purpose computing device. Jesus Christ, morons!
The photo/video viewer does the same thing. Want to hide porn or just some boring diagrams you copied onto the memory card? Nope, can't do it, they'll all show up when you're trying to show someone the cool photos you got.
Not a single application including the main UI tries to use the keys that are available. The interface designers seem to be completely in love with menus and virtual buttons you have to select on the screen. What happened, did they fire everyone who worked on Series 40? I want my quick to access alarm clock back.
The calendar is obviously NOT designed to minimize button presses.
The clock has lost its timer and countdown timer for no reason at all.
The phone will display a picture of the person who is calling, but it'll be a 10x10 thumbnail at the bottom of the screen. WTF??
I could go on and on with this crap, but in summary: The hardware is great, but I'm looking to replace every single official application that came with the phone. Oggplay already takes care of my music, and it's brilliant. I hope the application UI designers are out of a job by the time S60v4 comes out.
Although I must say the web browser really shines, to be fair.
"Why do companies keep on locking themselves into one device when it would be much easier to support a large number of devices."
Yeah, that was my first reaction too; this is a horrible development. The future could offer wonderful potential for ubiquitous connectivity, but policies like these will only ensure that actually interfacing with devices in practice will be harder than ever. We'd be better off with RS-232, frankly.
"There's no telling how many OTHER bugs are still there, waiting to totally crash your system and force you to reinstall. We can make guesses (200? 500? 1000?) but nobody really knows."
"*I've said it before and I'll say it again, can we please come up with a better sobriquet than "Net Neutrality"?! How the hell am I supposed to get my family and friends interested in "neutrality"?"
Hopefully by appealing to reasoning and your conversational skills. We don't want any more PATRIOT and SAVETHECHILDREN style votes, even if they benefit us.
"I can support the seperation of church and state. But that isn't what is going on here. People aren't being encouraged to seperate the two, they are being encouraged to abandon religion all together."
I disagree. Church and state are separate in the US, but it's completely obvious that religion has an insane overall effect on politicians and hence politics. In Finland, we have an official state religion, but it has virtually no power to influence anyone.
I feel that the latter is much more important, and as such fighting religious influence directly is no bad idea.
"So in other words, the problems MS needs to solve have already been solved, MS is just pig-headed and wants to roll their own solution instead of using one that's been tempered over the last 20 years. I'm not sure that's a good thing."
Yeah, and why the fuck is that Torvalds guy messing with his own kernel when we have Minix and BSD?
"(Personally, I find the Finnish OP's comments somewhat strange too: In Australia, we manage to have public and private bushland, with the government neither owning all the bush, but nor does private ownership of some of it cause great stress to the public. If I want to enjoy the bush, I'll go to a national park somewhere, it'd never occur to me to go our randomly and start trekking through private property.)"
Heh, over here people would laugh you out of the room if you suggested that they'd have to go to some special place to be allowed into a forest.
That doesn't mean we don't have natural parks, though, but they're mostly for especially beautiful or biologically valuable areas.
But you can defend your resources, and you do "possess" the forest. This law doesn't mean that people are allowed to litter, or in fact do anything that leaves a trace. It'll be perfectly fine.
No, people don't own roads. The analogy is, however, valid for a different reason: The government protects the roads by owning them, and protects the forests by placing restrictions on ownership.
But the purpose is the same: it makes sure everyone can use the roads, and that everyone can use the forests. The latter measure is just less drastic.
The people in the forest cost you nothing, regardless of who owns the land, so you're not "catering" to them. As for mushrooms, if you own enough land to not have it be part of your back yard, there will be plenty for everyone.
That law is there to prevent people from getting territorial about their forests. If they did, it would end everybody's chances of enjoying the country's natural beauty overnight.
Think of it this way: would the government allow anyone to buy a stretch of road in the middle of a city and put up a "private property" sign?
"Like why in the world does the bullet render as a modification of a line instead of a deletable item? And if you want to deleted it you have to press undo (ctrl-z). This makes no sense. Word guesses that since you had a bullet on the previous line that you want bullets on the rest of the document. I can tell you right now that 99% of the time that assumption is false."
Word is very annoying, but this is correct behavior. If we compare it to HTML, you don't write an unordered list by putting dashes in front of lines, you use the ul and li tags. Then, you can specify how they are rendered by using CSS, not by editing them directly, like you wanted to do.
The behavior of the enter key is also logical. If the cursor is in a paragraph, it jumps to a new paragraph. If the cursor is in a list, it jumps to a new item. If this is bad for you 99% of the time, you must not be writing very long lists.
But since we're bashing MS, I'd like to also highlight MSN Messenger. It will perform regex substitutions on your messages without telling you, which is downright dangerous and should be considered malevolent. If you, for example, want to send someone your internal IP, it will helpfully change it to your external IP, causing confusion for users who know what they're doing.
Messenger servers will also drop any message that contains pics.php in the assumption that they're spam. Getting around this is impossible, forcing me to obscure links to my web gallery when I send them to certain people.
Actually, in several countries you couldn't even do that. In Finland, wherever you erect a house is considered completely private property, but if you own forest beyond your back yard, you can't prevent people from using it.
They can't, of course, start cutting down trees or breaking things, but you're not allowed to prevent them from doing reasonable things such as traversing it or picking berries/mushrooms.
This makes perfect sense, as the only other alternative would be for the government to own all forests, to prevent crazy landowners from destroying everyone else's enjoyment. Imagine if you had to pick berries with a GPS locator and a map of all local land borders.
In practice, it means you can't start posting stupid signs telling people what they're allowed to do. Just like that website couldn't...
"It's a shame that they're doing comedy again. In the Pirkinning suffered from one clear drawback: Finns can't do parody. We suck at it - sorry."
What? SW:ItP was funnier than any Mel Brooks movie I've ever seen.
The difference is that Brooks needs to make sure everyone gets the jokes, whereas the SW team was free to base them on references maybe 0,5 % of the population will recognize. If you don't get them, of course you're not going to like it.
Does anyone else think it's scary that a site that's offering an MPEG video links to it using a Windows Media icon and says "Best viewed with Windows Media Player"? I'm sure Microsoft is grateful for their efforts.
Also, "Warning! This is a big file." (2.9 MB) Wtf...
"As far as why networks won't allow cross hardware? Well crap that would mean storing a huge collection of firmware programs that are all different platforms. Hell I know we have BREW and J2ME and all that good abstraction stuff, but core features don't use that stuff. The demands on the already overworked three India guys that program all the functions in Verizon phones would kill them. It would be just a nightmare to try and support every single stinking phone. Hardware vendors aren't really making phones to be eaiser for the developer, I know hard to believe."
You mean just how my ISP needs to carry FreeBSD kernels to make sure my computer supports TCP/IP? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. All "core" functions are written by the hardware vendors. The only things carriers do usually involve removing features to lock customers in.
"At at rate... Please people stop using your phone as a freaking MP3/WMA/whatever player. Cell phones have quickly become a jack of all trades but a master of jack crap. If you really want an MP3 player go get an iPod or hell be retro and get a CD-player. I carry my phone with me and my iPod shuffle, both small enough not to be a cumbersome duo."
If I wanted separate devices for all functions I desire, I'd be carrying an insane amount of stuff, including a laptop (ssh). Additionally, the phone may not be perfect at everything, but I can't take my EOS-350D everywhere I go, and a missed photo is worse than a grainy one.
More like the public fucks itself. This wouldn't even be an issue unless everyone in the US accepted the thought of phones as something the carrier provides.
Microsoft is indeed evil for asking, but this is as stupid as allowing your ISP to force you to use computers and software they provide, yet no one seems to be bothered enough to do something about it. You get what you deserve.
"I was just wondering, Slashdot. How does a bit of alcohol affect your personality?"
It just makes me feel uncomfortable. The feeling before it starts affecting my brain isn't that great, and if I accidentally drink enough to affect it, I feel like I want to escape into my computer until I can think at normal speed again. Somehow I manage to feel normal at the keyboard even when drunk.
As far as social situations go, it doesn't change anything. I always hate being close to groups of people I don't know, so places like bars are displeasing to me in general. Nightclubs are especially repulsive, because the music is so loud I can't have a real conversation even with people I know - I just end up wanting to go home to my beloved $ and forget about everyone else.
"Or maybe introverts tend to panic into inactivity while extroverts panic into (useless, dangerous) hyperactivity, while those that keep their heads act pretty similar, regardless of type?"
This is probably correct. Usually if I'm in an emergency* my brain will have formulated a recovery plan so quickly that I can react virtually instantaneously. In fact, it will usually feel like the rest of the world, including my body, slows down significantly. I attribute this to my introversion.
*Never been in any extreme emergency, though. Here I assume it refers to any situation that requires quick actions.
"Basically it's a story of a finnish army unit in second world war, and it's point is to tear down the myth of clean and heroic finnish soldier."
I haven't seen the movie, but the book does have its fair share of heroes despite not being idealized.
"About Star Wreck being the most popular: can you really compare a strictly finnish audience with a potentially global audience? Excluding Aki Kaurismäki's Man without past, this is one of the few finnish movies, that have ever got any international distribution."
Yes, you can, because:
a) Even if SW has an "unfair" advantage, that's still more people.
b) The fact that Tuntematon sotilas wasn't interesting for foreigners means that SW actually deserves to be more popular.
Slashdot Mirror
Seagate offers five year warranties, and companies have in fact recognized that people want even better reliability. Wait a few years and you'll be able to replace your smallest drives with flash.
I never said more is better. I said more is better for people who need more.
You're a luddite because your complaint is senseless:
1. As long as someone needs the space and is willing to pay for it, increasing space is good regardless of whether the majority needs it.
2. Companies are working very hard on your needs as well, so you aren't being neglected.
In addition, you're also ignorant, because consumers are already buying HDTV video cameras. As long as people keep breeding, there will be massive amounts of new footage - and yes, for completely normal people.
"Making users delighted is all about doing what they expect. The technophiles are clearly in control at Nokia. I hope Apple puts them out of business, because Nokia will have earned it."
I'm not so sure about that; real technophiles would appreciate a good UI. It seems more like the engineers are in charge of the hardware, but the software is controlled by the marketing department - why else would it ship with a completely unusable mp3 player if not to look good in a checklist? The hardware is more than capable of running anything they could reasonably throw at it.
As for the slowness, it's not as bad anymore. They've upgraded the processors. But yeah, I can't understand why the basic tasks seem like complete bloatware either. It's ok if Oggplay takes a while to load, but how hard would it be to keep the basic phone functions in memory all the time? 10 kB maybe, with a good programmer?
No, I love my N73 too, but there are several problems. I'm sure someone somewhere is going to post about how all they want to do is make a call, but that's actually implemented fairly well, although not perfectly. People who want to use the hardware to its full potential are the ones who will suffer! Here are some real issues I've found, and they amaze me:
I could go on and on with this crap, but in summary: The hardware is great, but I'm looking to replace every single official application that came with the phone. Oggplay already takes care of my music, and it's brilliant. I hope the application UI designers are out of a job by the time S60v4 comes out.
Although I must say the web browser really shines, to be fair.
"Why do companies keep on locking themselves into one device when it would be much easier to support a large number of devices."
Yeah, that was my first reaction too; this is a horrible development. The future could offer wonderful potential for ubiquitous connectivity, but policies like these will only ensure that actually interfacing with devices in practice will be harder than ever. We'd be better off with RS-232, frankly.
"There's no telling how many OTHER bugs are still there, waiting to totally crash your system and force you to reinstall. We can make guesses (200? 500? 1000?) but nobody really knows."
There are BUGS? In SOFTWARE??
"*I've said it before and I'll say it again, can we please come up with a better sobriquet than "Net Neutrality"?! How the hell am I supposed to get my family and friends interested in "neutrality"?"
Hopefully by appealing to reasoning and your conversational skills. We don't want any more PATRIOT and SAVETHECHILDREN style votes, even if they benefit us.
I can assemble a new computer in under an hour. My salary would have to be pretty damn high.
"I can support the seperation of church and state. But that isn't what is going on here. People aren't being encouraged to seperate the two, they are being encouraged to abandon religion all together."
I disagree. Church and state are separate in the US, but it's completely obvious that religion has an insane overall effect on politicians and hence politics. In Finland, we have an official state religion, but it has virtually no power to influence anyone.
I feel that the latter is much more important, and as such fighting religious influence directly is no bad idea.
"So in other words, the problems MS needs to solve have already been solved, MS is just pig-headed and wants to roll their own solution instead of using one that's been tempered over the last 20 years. I'm not sure that's a good thing."
Yeah, and why the fuck is that Torvalds guy messing with his own kernel when we have Minix and BSD?
"(Personally, I find the Finnish OP's comments somewhat strange too: In Australia, we manage to have public and private bushland, with the government neither owning all the bush, but nor does private ownership of some of it cause great stress to the public. If I want to enjoy the bush, I'll go to a national park somewhere, it'd never occur to me to go our randomly and start trekking through private property.)"
Heh, over here people would laugh you out of the room if you suggested that they'd have to go to some special place to be allowed into a forest.
That doesn't mean we don't have natural parks, though, but they're mostly for especially beautiful or biologically valuable areas.
But you can defend your resources, and you do "possess" the forest. This law doesn't mean that people are allowed to litter, or in fact do anything that leaves a trace. It'll be perfectly fine.
No, people don't own roads. The analogy is, however, valid for a different reason: The government protects the roads by owning them, and protects the forests by placing restrictions on ownership.
But the purpose is the same: it makes sure everyone can use the roads, and that everyone can use the forests. The latter measure is just less drastic.
The people in the forest cost you nothing, regardless of who owns the land, so you're not "catering" to them. As for mushrooms, if you own enough land to not have it be part of your back yard, there will be plenty for everyone.
That law is there to prevent people from getting territorial about their forests. If they did, it would end everybody's chances of enjoying the country's natural beauty overnight.
Think of it this way: would the government allow anyone to buy a stretch of road in the middle of a city and put up a "private property" sign?
Uh, the person eating it?
"Like why in the world does the bullet render as a modification of a line instead of a deletable item? And if you want to deleted it you have to press undo (ctrl-z). This makes no sense. Word guesses that since you had a bullet on the previous line that you want bullets on the rest of the document. I can tell you right now that 99% of the time that assumption is false."
Word is very annoying, but this is correct behavior. If we compare it to HTML, you don't write an unordered list by putting dashes in front of lines, you use the ul and li tags. Then, you can specify how they are rendered by using CSS, not by editing them directly, like you wanted to do.
The behavior of the enter key is also logical. If the cursor is in a paragraph, it jumps to a new paragraph. If the cursor is in a list, it jumps to a new item. If this is bad for you 99% of the time, you must not be writing very long lists.
But since we're bashing MS, I'd like to also highlight MSN Messenger. It will perform regex substitutions on your messages without telling you, which is downright dangerous and should be considered malevolent. If you, for example, want to send someone your internal IP, it will helpfully change it to your external IP, causing confusion for users who know what they're doing.
Messenger servers will also drop any message that contains pics.php in the assumption that they're spam. Getting around this is impossible, forcing me to obscure links to my web gallery when I send them to certain people.
Actually, in several countries you couldn't even do that. In Finland, wherever you erect a house is considered completely private property, but if you own forest beyond your back yard, you can't prevent people from using it.
They can't, of course, start cutting down trees or breaking things, but you're not allowed to prevent them from doing reasonable things such as traversing it or picking berries/mushrooms.
This makes perfect sense, as the only other alternative would be for the government to own all forests, to prevent crazy landowners from destroying everyone else's enjoyment. Imagine if you had to pick berries with a GPS locator and a map of all local land borders.
In practice, it means you can't start posting stupid signs telling people what they're allowed to do. Just like that website couldn't...
"It's a shame that they're doing comedy again. In the Pirkinning suffered from one clear drawback: Finns can't do parody. We suck at it - sorry."
What? SW:ItP was funnier than any Mel Brooks movie I've ever seen.
The difference is that Brooks needs to make sure everyone gets the jokes, whereas the SW team was free to base them on references maybe 0,5 % of the population will recognize. If you don't get them, of course you're not going to like it.
"like being able to save .DOC files to your USB stick"
Could we at least on slashdot use Free file formats in examples instead of promoting the MS Word "standard"? Please.
Does anyone else think it's scary that a site that's offering an MPEG video links to it using a Windows Media icon and says "Best viewed with Windows Media Player"? I'm sure Microsoft is grateful for their efforts.
Also, "Warning! This is a big file." (2.9 MB) Wtf...
"As far as why networks won't allow cross hardware? Well crap that would mean storing a huge collection of firmware programs that are all different platforms. Hell I know we have BREW and J2ME and all that good abstraction stuff, but core features don't use that stuff. The demands on the already overworked three India guys that program all the functions in Verizon phones would kill them. It would be just a nightmare to try and support every single stinking phone. Hardware vendors aren't really making phones to be eaiser for the developer, I know hard to believe."
You mean just how my ISP needs to carry FreeBSD kernels to make sure my computer supports TCP/IP? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. All "core" functions are written by the hardware vendors. The only things carriers do usually involve removing features to lock customers in.
"At at rate... Please people stop using your phone as a freaking MP3/WMA/whatever player. Cell phones have quickly become a jack of all trades but a master of jack crap. If you really want an MP3 player go get an iPod or hell be retro and get a CD-player. I carry my phone with me and my iPod shuffle, both small enough not to be a cumbersome duo."
If I wanted separate devices for all functions I desire, I'd be carrying an insane amount of stuff, including a laptop (ssh). Additionally, the phone may not be perfect at everything, but I can't take my EOS-350D everywhere I go, and a missed photo is worse than a grainy one.
"Yet again Micro$oft fucks the computing public."
More like the public fucks itself. This wouldn't even be an issue unless everyone in the US accepted the thought of phones as something the carrier provides.
Microsoft is indeed evil for asking, but this is as stupid as allowing your ISP to force you to use computers and software they provide, yet no one seems to be bothered enough to do something about it. You get what you deserve.
"I was just wondering, Slashdot. How does a bit of alcohol affect your personality?"
It just makes me feel uncomfortable. The feeling before it starts affecting my brain isn't that great, and if I accidentally drink enough to affect it, I feel like I want to escape into my computer until I can think at normal speed again. Somehow I manage to feel normal at the keyboard even when drunk.
As far as social situations go, it doesn't change anything. I always hate being close to groups of people I don't know, so places like bars are displeasing to me in general. Nightclubs are especially repulsive, because the music is so loud I can't have a real conversation even with people I know - I just end up wanting to go home to my beloved $ and forget about everyone else.
"Or maybe introverts tend to panic into inactivity while extroverts panic into (useless, dangerous) hyperactivity, while those that keep their heads act pretty similar, regardless of type?"
This is probably correct. Usually if I'm in an emergency* my brain will have formulated a recovery plan so quickly that I can react virtually instantaneously. In fact, it will usually feel like the rest of the world, including my body, slows down significantly. I attribute this to my introversion.
*Never been in any extreme emergency, though. Here I assume it refers to any situation that requires quick actions.
"Basically it's a story of a finnish army unit in second world war, and it's point is to tear down the myth of clean and heroic finnish soldier."
I haven't seen the movie, but the book does have its fair share of heroes despite not being idealized.
"About Star Wreck being the most popular: can you really compare a strictly finnish audience with a potentially global audience? Excluding Aki Kaurismäki's Man without past, this is one of the few finnish movies, that have ever got any international distribution."
Yes, you can, because:
a) Even if SW has an "unfair" advantage, that's still more people.
b) The fact that Tuntematon sotilas wasn't interesting for foreigners means that SW actually deserves to be more popular.