It also occurred to me just now that Microsoft seems to be abandoning the "one OS to rule them all" approach and starting to concentrate on apps, which I think is a much better fit for the company moving forward.
If nothing else, this helps to "future proof" Microsoft technologies, as apps are easier to make work in radically different spaces than an OS is. (And with PC sales stagnant, having a presence in other spaces is doubly important.) Let Google and Apple continue to create the framework, and Microsoft can concentrate on selling apps.
And who knows? With pressure off the company to come up with radical "improvements" in the OS every couple years, maybe Windows will settle down and get more robust as time goes on, instead of more different.
OK, Microsoft finally realizes that they kinda suck at creating a mobile-specific OS, (WinCE, Windows Mobile, etc) and that full blast Windows isn't a good fit on a mobile device. This is good. But Microsoft still needs to be a player in this space, hence a mirror application rather than an OS. I can see where this would make sense to Microsoft strategists.
Thing is, with apps like Good (as much as I personally dislike it) that already give encapsulated access to Outlook, and are more well known and a lot more mature, I'm not sure how successful Microsoft is going to be in this space. But I guess one can't fault them for trying. I'm thinking this'll drag on for a few years and then get quietly canceled, but hey, my crystal ball has been wrong before.
It's common in the technical industry for a product to start out with a steep profit margin as large gains are made in functionality and performance. As the technology matures, the performance and functionality curves level out, with each new iteration having fewer compelling features. Manufacturers will try to keep this going with "changes for the sake of change" (Flat icons! no, 3d icons! No really, flat icons! No, animated icons!) but that typically only extends the phenomenon another couple of iterations. There will usually also be an attempt to increase sales by making consumables like batteries an integral part of the product, forcing an upgrade or inconvenient repair, but again, that only has so much effect.
Sales drop as features asymptotically approach some practical value, and the product becomes a commodity item. Smart phones have become commodity items. Computers became commodity items a few years ago.
16x9, commonly 1920X1024, may be fine for viewing widescreen videos but it's a poor geometry for getting actual work done. This has been true for as long as the geometry has been common, regardless of whether it's a laptop or a desktop. (I don't count tablets because there's not yet a good system for content creation through hand gestures.) At the default font, you often can't view a full page of text or a full web page, having to rock the page back and forth while you're working. This is ludicrous. The geometry is made for watching movies, and that's not the primary purpose of a PC. Or, arguably, a laptop, although I bet more people are primarily content consumers on laptops.
1920X1280 monitors are available, and I find them a lot more useful. You can see an entire page of text, or an entire web page if you don't have too much crap at the top of your browser. I don't know offhand if 1920X1280 laptops are available.
This has been true for a long time. Really, it's just now being noticed?
4K shook things up a little, as now even though the geometry is still sub-optimal for non-video work, at least there's enough real estate to get work done. I don't have a 4K tv -- I don't think it's that important. But I do have a 4K monitor on my primary workstation.
I absolutely agree. I'd also like to see something like "turn right in 1/2 mile / 45 seconds, and then turn left in 3 miles". I like to think two or three steps ahead to cover things like being in the correct lane for turns, and Google Maps does that part really badly. If you miss a turn because there were five lanes of traffic to cross and you only got 10 seconds of notice, the directions have failed.
That's a good observation. Wife tends to give directions based on landmarks, ambiguous direction like "go over to" and vague distances like "go down a bit" where I use street signs and compass points and distance in miles or blocks. (But that, I'm told is because I'm a Mansplainin' a$$h0le.) We often can't understand each other's directions. ("WEST. You know where WEST is! It's where THE SUN GOES DOWN. See, it's right there. Behind us, now.")
Landmarks are fine if there is enough detail to make it work. "Left after the train station" is fine. "Left where the church used to be" is not fine. I still remember this conversation, sitting in the driveway, all ready for a day of mindless wandering:
"So, where is this store?"
"It's by the freeway"
(This is the SF bay area...) "Which freeway?"
"The one that goes past the big building." [1]
"What big building?"
"The one on the way to the store."
Ok, now we're in a hard loop. I really want to ask "is there someone else I can talk to?" but I know that wouldn't do any good.
[1] For a moment I thought I had that one, but turns out she *was not* talking about the Blimp hanger at Moffett.
I wonder if we'll eventually see "go down the road a piece, and turn left where the market used to be. Then go summat further and turn right where old man Smith's barn was before it burned down. Caint miss it."
Um, can you give me directions using landmarks that actually exist now?
You have a point, except you don't even need 10 foot TVs in the home. THX recommends a 40 degree viewing angle, which at 5 feet away from the wall is a TV in the 50 inch range. (Ours is a 55 inch Sony Bravia.) The problem with 10 foot TVs (I knew someone with a projection system that was at least that big) is that you can't get far enough away from them in a normal size room to view them properly, for the same reason that people usually don't choose the first three rows in a theater.
That's playing with words. "Content consumer" is a known term with a known definition. It involves experiencing content created by another with a minimum of interaction. Whether the content still exists after being experienced by the consumer is moot. How this fits in with DRM is an entirely different discussion. We were talking about social impact, not legal details. You have a nice, shiny ax there. But you're grinding it in the wrong building.
Tablets and smartphones tend to be content consumption devices. They *could* do more, but the necessary work in UI has not yet been done to make them reasonable content creation devices, except in the trivial "add ears and nose to my photo" social media gimmicks. (Side note - admittedly, this is my own axe.) Content creation tends to require the addition of the "k" and "m" of KVM. Which gives you devices that aren't really laptops and aren't really tablets and don't do either well. (And yes, there are other devices besides "k" and "m". I have a Bamboo tablet (a function the touch screen should be doing!) and a motorized mixer that's supported by Adobe Lightroom. But those functions could easily be done by gestures instead, if anyone ever put a reasonable system together.)
Part of this dichotomy is the pressure of the buying community. The market for a really well made, well integrated touch-only tool for doing professional level photo or video creation, for instance, doesn't exist. And yesssss I know someone once filmed a movie on an iphone and released it at Cannes. It's the exception that proves the rule -- like an elephant doing ballet, the remarkable thing is not how good her Arabesque is, but that she's doing it at all. Chances are not good that directors will replace their RED cameras with iphones on little stands anytime soon.
Tablets and smartphones have found their niche, in content CONSUMPTION (there's that word again) and there just isn't the market pressure to do much else with them. Sucks for me, as I'd really like to do my creation on a touch interface instead of spending hours scraping my rat.
Again, whether the "consumption" mindset leads to more draconian DRM is entirely besides the point. It is what it is.
I'm going to ignore the language for a minute and answer honestly. Yes, we do both have a problem. My own counselors keep asking the same question "Why haven't you extracted yourself from this situation?" The answers are complex and involve duty to my family taking precedence over my own happiness, and I know that's not a good reason.
Thumb drives? External hard drives? It doesn't have to be NAS. It doesn't take much technical expertise to plug something in and see a new drive icon appear. My mother-in-law can do that much.
Oh, and, the job market -- daughter has a jobs at a department store one day a week. They want to give her more hours, (she's apparently good at it) but she doesn't think she can handle it. In this particular case, it's not about not having other choices. I suspect this is true for others in her age group also -- they could do productive stuff, but the lure of the little screen is just too great.
Hey man, the job market is tough for the younger crowd. Some side income can be really helpful.....Are you SURE her interaction online is "passive"?
Yes. If she was making money off youtube, more power to her. She actually has the tools (I've seen to this) and the education (arts and communication school) to perhaps make a living off youtube. So far, she's chosen not to. (And in anticipation of the snide comments, I'm pretty sure she's not on xhamster either.)
People have become, by and large, content consumers
As opposed to people watching football? How man man-hours have you spent in your life watching TV?
That's not "opposed" at all. Watching football is exactly being a content consumer.
As to the man-hours I've spent watching TV, I confess growing up that TV was pretty much my life, all 3 channels of it. As an adult, TV has become a lot less important. I watch one movie a week, on Friday, with pizza and beer. I follow three 45 minute series, (sans commercials) on demand, and confidentially, I'm way behind at the moment. The rest of my off-time is spent reading, doing photography (my side business, content CREATION, not consumption) or working in the electronics lab upstairs. I've put some thought into this, and have made some effort to practice what I preach.
Wife turns on the TV first thing in the morning and just lets it drone. She's the football fanatic in the family -- I couldn't tell you who was in the last superbowl with a gun to my head. She has her own room with a barcolounger and her own TV and Roku. It's far enough away from my office to not be distracting.
Interestingly, both wife and daughter have clinical depression. The question in the back of my head is, are they spending every waking hour watching a screen (big or small) because they're depressed, or are they depressed because they don't create anything of their own? Things, memories, experiences. Side note: Maybe that's why so many young people appear emotionally underdeveloped these days. I think the popular word is "snowflake".
"...than facebook or whatever..." I'm told facebook is now passe, "only old people use it", and even instagram has lost appeal. Snapchat is still acceptable, but it's going by the wayside also.
I have a twenty-something daughter who spends every free moment in her room with Instagram and Youtube. I am very much looking forward to the day when her smartphone loses its appeal and she eventually looks up and realizes that there is a "real reality" beyond her window.
As an aside, I think the real reason kids are bored is that the great majority of all this phone and internet connectivity is designed to be passively experienced. People have become, by and large, content consumers with no real desire to have experiences of their own. Maybe it shows my age, but that seems really boring to me.
Wait, that's potentially huge. It seems to me that DRM on everything, including my own content, means I could severely limit the rights of *anything* I originate, including metadata.
This won't just be "an issue" for Facebook, it'd destroy it. And probably Google. And any business that makes a significant part of their gross from data mining.
That might actually be fun to watch. (Just before the lights go out...)
Slashdot Mirror
It also occurred to me just now that Microsoft seems to be abandoning the "one OS to rule them all" approach and starting to concentrate on apps, which I think is a much better fit for the company moving forward.
If nothing else, this helps to "future proof" Microsoft technologies, as apps are easier to make work in radically different spaces than an OS is. (And with PC sales stagnant, having a presence in other spaces is doubly important.) Let Google and Apple continue to create the framework, and Microsoft can concentrate on selling apps.
And who knows? With pressure off the company to come up with radical "improvements" in the OS every couple years, maybe Windows will settle down and get more robust as time goes on, instead of more different.
OK, Microsoft finally realizes that they kinda suck at creating a mobile-specific OS, (WinCE, Windows Mobile, etc) and that full blast Windows isn't a good fit on a mobile device. This is good. But Microsoft still needs to be a player in this space, hence a mirror application rather than an OS. I can see where this would make sense to Microsoft strategists.
Thing is, with apps like Good (as much as I personally dislike it) that already give encapsulated access to Outlook, and are more well known and a lot more mature, I'm not sure how successful Microsoft is going to be in this space. But I guess one can't fault them for trying. I'm thinking this'll drag on for a few years and then get quietly canceled, but hey, my crystal ball has been wrong before.
Cable TV is a dying business. It makes sense to use a stranglehold on internet access to shore it up.
It's common in the technical industry for a product to start out with a steep profit margin as large gains are made in functionality and performance. As the technology matures, the performance and functionality curves level out, with each new iteration having fewer compelling features. Manufacturers will try to keep this going with "changes for the sake of change" (Flat icons! no, 3d icons! No really, flat icons! No, animated icons!) but that typically only extends the phenomenon another couple of iterations. There will usually also be an attempt to increase sales by making consumables like batteries an integral part of the product, forcing an upgrade or inconvenient repair, but again, that only has so much effect.
Sales drop as features asymptotically approach some practical value, and the product becomes a commodity item. Smart phones have become commodity items. Computers became commodity items a few years ago.
I'd be astonished if someone hadn't wondered if pig brains could pilot a missile.
All that would be gone if our survival were at stake. Multiple projects would run in parallel with nearly unlimited budgets.
One would hope.
16x9, commonly 1920X1024, may be fine for viewing widescreen videos but it's a poor geometry for getting actual work done. This has been true for as long as the geometry has been common, regardless of whether it's a laptop or a desktop. (I don't count tablets because there's not yet a good system for content creation through hand gestures.) At the default font, you often can't view a full page of text or a full web page, having to rock the page back and forth while you're working. This is ludicrous. The geometry is made for watching movies, and that's not the primary purpose of a PC. Or, arguably, a laptop, although I bet more people are primarily content consumers on laptops.
1920X1280 monitors are available, and I find them a lot more useful. You can see an entire page of text, or an entire web page if you don't have too much crap at the top of your browser. I don't know offhand if 1920X1280 laptops are available.
This has been true for a long time. Really, it's just now being noticed?
4K shook things up a little, as now even though the geometry is still sub-optimal for non-video work, at least there's enough real estate to get work done. I don't have a 4K tv -- I don't think it's that important. But I do have a 4K monitor on my primary workstation.
I absolutely agree. I'd also like to see something like "turn right in 1/2 mile / 45 seconds, and then turn left in 3 miles". I like to think two or three steps ahead to cover things like being in the correct lane for turns, and Google Maps does that part really badly. If you miss a turn because there were five lanes of traffic to cross and you only got 10 seconds of notice, the directions have failed.
That's a good observation. Wife tends to give directions based on landmarks, ambiguous direction like "go over to" and vague distances like "go down a bit" where I use street signs and compass points and distance in miles or blocks. (But that, I'm told is because I'm a Mansplainin' a$$h0le.) We often can't understand each other's directions. ("WEST. You know where WEST is! It's where THE SUN GOES DOWN. See, it's right there. Behind us, now.")
Landmarks are fine if there is enough detail to make it work. "Left after the train station" is fine. "Left where the church used to be" is not fine. I still remember this conversation, sitting in the driveway, all ready for a day of mindless wandering:
"So, where is this store?"
"It's by the freeway"
(This is the SF bay area...) "Which freeway?"
"The one that goes past the big building." [1]
"What big building?"
"The one on the way to the store."
Ok, now we're in a hard loop. I really want to ask "is there someone else I can talk to?" but I know that wouldn't do any good.
[1] For a moment I thought I had that one, but turns out she *was not* talking about the Blimp hanger at Moffett.
For a slightly higher fee, it'll insist you really want to go through the drive-thru before it gives you the next direction.
It'll probably make the offer first, and won't tell you which way to turn until you buy something or touch a nearly invisible "no thanks" link.
I wonder if we'll eventually see "go down the road a piece, and turn left where the market used to be. Then go summat further and turn right where old man Smith's barn was before it burned down. Caint miss it."
Um, can you give me directions using landmarks that actually exist now?
You have a point, except you don't even need 10 foot TVs in the home. THX recommends a 40 degree viewing angle, which at 5 feet away from the wall is a TV in the 50 inch range. (Ours is a 55 inch Sony Bravia.) The problem with 10 foot TVs (I knew someone with a projection system that was at least that big) is that you can't get far enough away from them in a normal size room to view them properly, for the same reason that people usually don't choose the first three rows in a theater.
Caanes risks becoming irrelevant also.
That's playing with words. "Content consumer" is a known term with a known definition. It involves experiencing content created by another with a minimum of interaction. Whether the content still exists after being experienced by the consumer is moot. How this fits in with DRM is an entirely different discussion. We were talking about social impact, not legal details. You have a nice, shiny ax there. But you're grinding it in the wrong building.
Tablets and smartphones tend to be content consumption devices. They *could* do more, but the necessary work in UI has not yet been done to make them reasonable content creation devices, except in the trivial "add ears and nose to my photo" social media gimmicks. (Side note - admittedly, this is my own axe.) Content creation tends to require the addition of the "k" and "m" of KVM. Which gives you devices that aren't really laptops and aren't really tablets and don't do either well. (And yes, there are other devices besides "k" and "m". I have a Bamboo tablet (a function the touch screen should be doing!) and a motorized mixer that's supported by Adobe Lightroom. But those functions could easily be done by gestures instead, if anyone ever put a reasonable system together.)
Part of this dichotomy is the pressure of the buying community. The market for a really well made, well integrated touch-only tool for doing professional level photo or video creation, for instance, doesn't exist. And yesssss I know someone once filmed a movie on an iphone and released it at Cannes. It's the exception that proves the rule -- like an elephant doing ballet, the remarkable thing is not how good her Arabesque is, but that she's doing it at all. Chances are not good that directors will replace their RED cameras with iphones on little stands anytime soon.
Tablets and smartphones have found their niche, in content CONSUMPTION (there's that word again) and there just isn't the market pressure to do much else with them. Sucks for me, as I'd really like to do my creation on a touch interface instead of spending hours scraping my rat.
Again, whether the "consumption" mindset leads to more draconian DRM is entirely besides the point. It is what it is.
I'm going to ignore the language for a minute and answer honestly. Yes, we do both have a problem. My own counselors keep asking the same question "Why haven't you extracted yourself from this situation?" The answers are complex and involve duty to my family taking precedence over my own happiness, and I know that's not a good reason.
Thumb drives? External hard drives? It doesn't have to be NAS. It doesn't take much technical expertise to plug something in and see a new drive icon appear. My mother-in-law can do that much.
Oh, and, the job market -- daughter has a jobs at a department store one day a week. They want to give her more hours, (she's apparently good at it) but she doesn't think she can handle it. In this particular case, it's not about not having other choices. I suspect this is true for others in her age group also -- they could do productive stuff, but the lure of the little screen is just too great.
Hey man, the job market is tough for the younger crowd. Some side income can be really helpful. ....Are you SURE her interaction online is "passive"?
Yes. If she was making money off youtube, more power to her. She actually has the tools (I've seen to this) and the education (arts and communication school) to perhaps make a living off youtube. So far, she's chosen not to. (And in anticipation of the snide comments, I'm pretty sure she's not on xhamster either.)
People have become, by and large, content consumers
As opposed to people watching football? How man man-hours have you spent in your life watching TV?
That's not "opposed" at all. Watching football is exactly being a content consumer.
As to the man-hours I've spent watching TV, I confess growing up that TV was pretty much my life, all 3 channels of it. As an adult, TV has become a lot less important. I watch one movie a week, on Friday, with pizza and beer. I follow three 45 minute series, (sans commercials) on demand, and confidentially, I'm way behind at the moment. The rest of my off-time is spent reading, doing photography (my side business, content CREATION, not consumption) or working in the electronics lab upstairs. I've put some thought into this, and have made some effort to practice what I preach.
Wife turns on the TV first thing in the morning and just lets it drone. She's the football fanatic in the family -- I couldn't tell you who was in the last superbowl with a gun to my head. She has her own room with a barcolounger and her own TV and Roku. It's far enough away from my office to not be distracting.
Interestingly, both wife and daughter have clinical depression. The question in the back of my head is, are they spending every waking hour watching a screen (big or small) because they're depressed, or are they depressed because they don't create anything of their own? Things, memories, experiences. Side note: Maybe that's why so many young people appear emotionally underdeveloped these days. I think the popular word is "snowflake".
"...than facebook or whatever..." I'm told facebook is now passe, "only old people use it", and even instagram has lost appeal. Snapchat is still acceptable, but it's going by the wayside also.
Your point still stands, though.
There, FIFY.
I have a twenty-something daughter who spends every free moment in her room with Instagram and Youtube. I am very much looking forward to the day when her smartphone loses its appeal and she eventually looks up and realizes that there is a "real reality" beyond her window.
As an aside, I think the real reason kids are bored is that the great majority of all this phone and internet connectivity is designed to be passively experienced. People have become, by and large, content consumers with no real desire to have experiences of their own. Maybe it shows my age, but that seems really boring to me.
Wait, that's potentially huge. It seems to me that DRM on everything, including my own content, means I could severely limit the rights of *anything* I originate, including metadata.
This won't just be "an issue" for Facebook, it'd destroy it. And probably Google. And any business that makes a significant part of their gross from data mining.
That might actually be fun to watch. (Just before the lights go out...)