Their benchmarks hardly show a conclusive improvement for Windows 7. Vista mostly beats it in DX10, and XP still beats it about half the other benchmarks. It *does* manage to beat Vista in DX9... hardly exciting, but something.
Their mid-range also seems a bit ambitious - more like mid-range of new hardware for serious gamers, which means high-end for the rest of us.
The most interesting paragraph for me: "because Windows 7 felt more ready to go once the desktop loaded up. Both XP and Vista took at least an extra minute after the desktop loaded to be ready to run applications, while Windows 7 ran Firefox without stuttering or hesitation. " Now thats something worthwhile. The 2 seconds of "boot time" is irrelevant, being able to use the desktop immediately is a real improvement.
I have to agree... all the citation warnings are extremely tedious, especially when they are littered throughout the page. It's really only editors who are going to do anything about it, so at most they should be on the editing page, and a one-liner at the top otherwise.
True, there is massive bias. However, they are not going to find out about bugs (in most cases) from usage statistics, so the two things are separate. Bugzilla is the best/only way they have to collect bugs, and they are mostly ignoring the votes in there, so it seems likely they would ignore the user feedback as well (except where they are already interested in an issue).
Users have submitted thousands of bugs, and then voted on them. Yet those votes don't get acted on. Mozilla fixes bugs or adds features when "something else" tells them they should - often, what's cool for developers or what some big company wants.
Why would they pay attention to the statistics generated by this program when they don't pay attention to the much more focussed statistics already in Bugzilla?
How the heck are you going to find that "administrators need to update Firefox automatically" from daily usage statistics?
Sorry, but these stats will only be useful for certain small parts of the browser. Most of the browser goes into creating a platform - HTML, scripting, add-ins etc.
I agree (mostly). Most of the interesting interaction in a web browser happens according to the design of the *web site* not the browser. There really isn't a lot in the browser that can be changed - enter URL, back/forward, bookmarks.
It seems a bit like the shareware author who's written a text editor, and since the basic functions were completed years ago he's now adding file management, compiling support, image viewer...
Well actually, systems like the one on facebook do have a kind of "I don't know" which is the "give me another". At least it makes it possible to solve, if extremely annoying...
I feel like there are much more substantial problems for Linux to do much better; things that have nothing to do with development. I admit that Linux is basically functionally good enough, easy to install, and has reasonable apps, but...
And: 3) As you make it harder to solve for computers, you also make it harder to solve for humans.
Since current CAPTCHAs are getting quite difficult for humans to solve, the process has already reached it's limit. Facebooks captchas are difficult enough for me that I have to ask for a new one 5-10 times to get one I'm fairly sure of.
This one involving optical illusions is absurd, there will be large numbers of people who can never get it right.
Yes, you definitely can NOT control the state. All you can do is measure the unknown state, find out what it is; and the other end will see the same state when it measures. Which of course tells you nothing of use (no information).
Spamcop is a more scalable version of that, in that it doesn't rely on one organisation to decide what is spam. On the other hand, it relies on random unchecked strangers to decide instead, so it presumably loses some quality (not that much because they manage it and only the genuinely motivated go so far as getting a spamcop reporting account).
Yes it does now, but I think many people think it would be fine if WP *did* have some topics for which it is the primary source.
In my field, there is stuff that I (and others) know but which is certainly not written down anywhere in a coherent form. I am guessing there would be many similar fields.
Wait wait! I do have a use for Britannica - the company that is, not the product. They would make fine editors of Wikipedia for selected important articles! (Assuming of course, they got over their current elitist attitudes). OK, there is a use for Britannica as well - comparing it's articles against WP would probably provide some useful updates to the WP articles. Sorry, didn't have anything to say about monetising this process chaps.
Take a look however at the motors, and there are few changes from the motors available in the 1950s.
Er, maybe the basic design is similar, but motors are extraordinarily smaller (such as the 5mm wide specimens used in radio control kits nowadays) and there are new designs as well, such as stepper motors.
I think this article slightly exaggerates to make this seem more exciting...
Another random thought: this article assumes that a rotating motor is still needed, but why? If bacteria and other things move around by other means, maybe the only efficient methods of movement at small scales are NOT rotating?
Not necessarily. If they earn less profit than investors would get from other common investments (e.g. a bank) then it's still not sustainable unless the owners are prepared to lose money.
Which is why GUIs should NOT just use images for buttons. The modern trend of trying to have only a beautiful icon for each button, with no text at all, is a step backwards. A simple word or two is usually much less ambiguous. Ironically, picture-only buttons turn user interfaces back into an exercise in rote-learning, a little like a command line...
Well, the likelihood is that most of the Linux developers would refuse to listen if you told them the most important things to users. They are not really interested in that, in general; rather in solving their own problems.
This is why I personally have given up on Linux progressing beyond where it is now, a power user/technical niche; the people who are interested in developing it, are, by definition, NOT interested in doing the things it would take for the rest of us to use it.
Fundamentally, you cannot make the CLI more intuitive: it ALWAYS requires foreknowledge of what commands are available; even if it has help available, that requires you to search, learn the commands and parameters to the commands, and then remember them.
A GUI system (specifically a menu) is different in that it explicitly SHOWS you what options are currently available. Each possible "command" is shown on the screen (possibly grouped into useful areas).
Up to a point. Then they will have the problem Mozilla has: floods of unhelpful "bug" reports and no additional resources to fix bugs. Mozilla long ago reached the point where the people finding/reporting bugs exceeded the ability of the developers to fix them, to the point that thousands of reasonably significant bugs sit there unfixed for years.
I thought I wanted drag and drop. So I bought an iRiver. And it was occasionally useful to have a widely supported access method. But then I realised I was using iTunes anyway to buy music, and that actually synching a drive with only drive access is kind of tedious, and difficult to remember to do manually, and that I didn't really care about these details.
And finally I realised that buying a player because it had an occasionally useful drag-n-drop facility and ignoring all the other benefits of an iPod, like ease of use and integration to the music store, was a stupid idea.
LOL! You lie for a living and still justify it that the suckers who believe it can choose not to! Sorry sir, you're just a scammer like all the other low-lifes out there, who also typically justify themselves that the people who fall for it are too stupid and deserve to be ripped off.
Hm, having read Mathias Bauer's page, I also think I see a culture clash between German business (which is quite hierarchical) and FOSS community.
Mathias thinks everything has been done properly, and that he discussed it with the proper people.
But from the outside, it looks like some committee (mostly) inside Sun/StarDivision had a meeting and decided what they wanted, and then expected this critical discussion to be disseminated *by the appropriate hierachies* to everyone affected.
That's not really how F/OSS works however. Individual contributors need to be carefully kept in the loop, not held at arm's length and expected to get updates from their company hierarchy. Particularly problematic in this case, where Kohei started as an individual then joined Novell, so Sun assumed he was in the Novell hierarchy. Which is why Kohei got such a bad feeling.
I have experienced the same corporate disregard, when a project of mine was integrated into a commercial distribution without any discussion. Now it was mostly a good thing, but I felt annoyed, especially about the thought of having to do more work to support the company. The least thing a company can do is to PERSONALLY CONTACT the contributor and explain what is happening. Not rely on messages on a mailing list; not discuss it in a far-removed committee; not rely on company or other hierarchies to spread information. Simply send a personal email to e.g. Kohei saying "We really appreciate your work which is great because X, but we can't use it because Y. We would like you to stay involved. What can we do to work this out?"
One could say that Sun's attitude is OK for paid employees of Sun, but not for others.
Slashdot Mirror
Their benchmarks hardly show a conclusive improvement for Windows 7. Vista mostly beats it in DX10, and XP still beats it about half the other benchmarks. It *does* manage to beat Vista in DX9... hardly exciting, but something.
Their mid-range also seems a bit ambitious - more like mid-range of new hardware for serious gamers, which means high-end for the rest of us.
The most interesting paragraph for me:
"because Windows 7 felt more ready to go once the desktop loaded up. Both XP and Vista took at least an extra minute after the desktop loaded to be ready to run applications, while Windows 7 ran Firefox without stuttering or hesitation. "
Now thats something worthwhile. The 2 seconds of "boot time" is irrelevant, being able to use the desktop immediately is a real improvement.
I have to agree ... all the citation warnings are extremely tedious, especially when they are littered throughout the page.
It's really only editors who are going to do anything about it, so at most they should be on the editing page, and a one-liner at the top otherwise.
True, there is massive bias.
However, they are not going to find out about bugs (in most cases) from usage statistics, so the two things are separate. Bugzilla is the best/only way they have to collect bugs, and they are mostly ignoring the votes in there, so it seems likely they would ignore the user feedback as well (except where they are already interested in an issue).
Users have submitted thousands of bugs, and then voted on them.
Yet those votes don't get acted on. Mozilla fixes bugs or adds features when "something else" tells them they should - often, what's cool for developers or what some big company wants.
Why would they pay attention to the statistics generated by this program when they don't pay attention to the much more focussed statistics already in Bugzilla?
Or more sensibly, simply go and find real physical people, randomly selected, to come into their offices... you know... like real user tests...
How the heck are you going to find that "administrators need to update Firefox automatically" from daily usage statistics?
Sorry, but these stats will only be useful for certain small parts of the browser. Most of the browser goes into creating a platform - HTML, scripting, add-ins etc.
I agree (mostly). Most of the interesting interaction in a web browser happens according to the design of the *web site* not the browser. There really isn't a lot in the browser that can be changed - enter URL, back/forward, bookmarks.
It seems a bit like the shareware author who's written a text editor, and since the basic functions were completed years ago he's now adding file management, compiling support, image viewer...
Well actually, systems like the one on facebook do have a kind of "I don't know" which is the "give me another". At least it makes it possible to solve, if extremely annoying ...
I feel like there are much more substantial problems for Linux to do much better; things that have nothing to do with development. I admit that Linux is basically functionally good enough, easy to install, and has reasonable apps, but ...
What would it take to make Linux the #1 desktop?
http://reverse-entropy.livejournal.com/
And:
3) As you make it harder to solve for computers, you also make it harder to solve for humans.
Since current CAPTCHAs are getting quite difficult for humans to solve, the process has already reached it's limit. Facebooks captchas are difficult enough for me that I have to ask for a new one 5-10 times to get one I'm fairly sure of.
This one involving optical illusions is absurd, there will be large numbers of people who can never get it right.
Yes, you definitely can NOT control the state. All you can do is measure the unknown state, find out what it is; and the other end will see the same state when it measures. Which of course tells you nothing of use (no information).
Spamcop is a more scalable version of that, in that it doesn't rely on one organisation to decide what is spam. On the other hand, it relies on random unchecked strangers to decide instead, so it presumably loses some quality (not that much because they manage it and only the genuinely motivated go so far as getting a spamcop reporting account).
Yes it does now, but I think many people think it would be fine if WP *did* have some topics for which it is the primary source.
In my field, there is stuff that I (and others) know but which is certainly not written down anywhere in a coherent form. I am guessing there would be many similar fields.
Wait wait! I do have a use for Britannica - the company that is, not the product. They would make fine editors of Wikipedia for selected important articles!
(Assuming of course, they got over their current elitist attitudes).
OK, there is a use for Britannica as well - comparing it's articles against WP would probably provide some useful updates to the WP articles.
Sorry, didn't have anything to say about monetising this process chaps.
Did you mean: sales
You keep using that word "sells" - I do not think it means what you think it means
To put it in a shorter form, Windows is the standard and there's no place for something non-standard.
From TFA:
Take a look however at the motors, and there are few changes from the motors available in the 1950s.
Er, maybe the basic design is similar, but motors are extraordinarily smaller (such as the 5mm wide specimens used in radio control kits nowadays) and there are new designs as well, such as stepper motors.
I think this article slightly exaggerates to make this seem more exciting...
Another random thought: this article assumes that a rotating motor is still needed, but why? If bacteria and other things move around by other means, maybe the only efficient methods of movement at small scales are NOT rotating?
Not necessarily. If they earn less profit than investors would get from other common investments (e.g. a bank) then it's still not sustainable unless the owners are prepared to lose money.
Which is why GUIs should NOT just use images for buttons. The modern trend of trying to have only a beautiful icon for each button, with no text at all, is a step backwards. A simple word or two is usually much less ambiguous.
Ironically, picture-only buttons turn user interfaces back into an exercise in rote-learning, a little like a command line...
Well, the likelihood is that most of the Linux developers would refuse to listen if you told them the most important things to users. They are not really interested in that, in general; rather in solving their own problems.
This is why I personally have given up on Linux progressing beyond where it is now, a power user/technical niche; the people who are interested in developing it, are, by definition, NOT interested in doing the things it would take for the rest of us to use it.
Fundamentally, you cannot make the CLI more intuitive: it ALWAYS requires foreknowledge of what commands are available; even if it has help available, that requires you to search, learn the commands and parameters to the commands, and then remember them.
A GUI system (specifically a menu) is different in that it explicitly SHOWS you what options are currently available. Each possible "command" is shown on the screen (possibly grouped into useful areas).
Up to a point. Then they will have the problem Mozilla has: floods of unhelpful "bug" reports and no additional resources to fix bugs. Mozilla long ago reached the point where the people finding/reporting bugs exceeded the ability of the developers to fix them, to the point that thousands of reasonably significant bugs sit there unfixed for years.
I thought I wanted drag and drop. So I bought an iRiver. And it was occasionally useful to have a widely supported access method.
But then I realised I was using iTunes anyway to buy music, and that actually synching a drive with only drive access is kind of tedious, and difficult to remember to do manually, and that I didn't really care about these details.
And finally I realised that buying a player because it had an occasionally useful drag-n-drop facility and ignoring all the other benefits of an iPod, like ease of use and integration to the music store, was a stupid idea.
LOL! You lie for a living and still justify it that the suckers who believe it can choose not to!
Sorry sir, you're just a scammer like all the other low-lifes out there, who also typically justify themselves that the people who fall for it are too stupid and deserve to be ripped off.
Hm, having read Mathias Bauer's page, I also think I see a culture clash between German business (which is quite hierarchical) and FOSS community.
Mathias thinks everything has been done properly, and that he discussed it with the proper people.
But from the outside, it looks like some committee (mostly) inside Sun/StarDivision had a meeting and decided what they wanted, and then expected this critical discussion to be disseminated *by the appropriate hierachies* to everyone affected.
That's not really how F/OSS works however. Individual contributors need to be carefully kept in the loop, not held at arm's length and expected to get updates from their company hierarchy. Particularly problematic in this case, where Kohei started as an individual then joined Novell, so Sun assumed he was in the Novell hierarchy. Which is why Kohei got such a bad feeling.
I have experienced the same corporate disregard, when a project of mine was integrated into a commercial distribution without any discussion. Now it was mostly a good thing, but I felt annoyed, especially about the thought of having to do more work to support the company. The least thing a company can do is to PERSONALLY CONTACT the contributor and explain what is happening. Not rely on messages on a mailing list; not discuss it in a far-removed committee; not rely on company or other hierarchies to spread information. Simply send a personal email to e.g. Kohei saying "We really appreciate your work which is great because X, but we can't use it because Y. We would like you to stay involved. What can we do to work this out?"
One could say that Sun's attitude is OK for paid employees of Sun, but not for others.