> Meanwhile, ever since Windows 7 came out, I've felt that Windows has better usability than the Linux desktops I've tried and massively better usability than the Mac I have to use at work.
So do I, and you're right. Windows 7 really is, finally, good enough to get work done on modern hardware. I think Microsoft's trouble is that they've existed for too long on the business model of selling massive numbers of a new version of Windows, as people stuck with using it strain to reach that golden fleece, the environment that maintains compatibility with Windows applications and doesn't crash incessantly. Windows' very lack of quality, and the number of users desperate to upgrade, was a major factor in their success. It wasn't hard to foresee the next step -- Microsoft produces a decent, stable version, and sales of their primary earner fall off. As besides the OS/office suite and a gaming box they really don't have a lot, this leads them in a bad position. They've tried to compensate by reinventing the OS with Windows 8. The question, the overriding question, is, why would regular users (not OS junkies) want to upgrade at all?
> if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
I was there for the seventies and eighties, and the sixties, too. I saw hip huggers fall in and out of style twice. And now we're going back to clothing styles from the fifties, which I stipulate is not a good trade.
But if I mention a date too far back, most slashdotters will go "what?" It's like history begins at September 28, 1987.
> And never significantly adopted, because, in the end, they were thought up as witticisms not as a prescriptive change of language.
Hmm. I don't think I ever talked with the people who actually thought up those terms, so I can't say one way or another whether the terms were intended as witticisms. It's possible they were. I had debated with people on usenet in the nineties, however, who (let's be generous) appear not to have gotten the memo. Or were carrying the joke wayyy to far.
> And if -- ghod forbid -- we discover a way to make the vacuum unstable, then we might learn how to make one really big boom. Just one, because it will consume the entire universe, but that one will be REALLY BIG.
It's not hot here. It was in the mid sixties and raining all through last month up until yesterday. We had hail in the beginning of June. Broadcast news says it might get into the eighties today but accuweather says no. It has been unusually cool for the last three years, with 2011 being the first on record with no over 90 degree days. But whenever I bring that up, I'm told that's "weather" and the blistering heat today in the east is "climate". Ok...
We got central air in the mid nineties, but haven't used it after the turn of the century. I'm not sure it even works anymore.
So... how does one beat the summer heat? I dunno, live somewhere where it doesn't get hot?
The old screen saver became a breeding ground for people gaming the system in the name of cranking up their work unit totals. Their scientific vision suffered. The pretty screen saver was replaced by a framework that has been adopted by dozens of other projects that didn't have the wherewithal to create such a process on their own.
In terms of the ever famous slashdot-brand car analogy; You won't buy another Ford until they bring back the Pinto.
I won't argue that the original screen saver was a Pinto. It was reliable for me, and the replacements weren't, for me. As always, your mileage may vary, and it's just not that important an issue to argue terminology.
So, it's more like, I had to get rid of the Pinto (if you will), and so I bought five new Ford Escalades and they all exploded. When I mention that, I'm told "have you driven a Ford lately?" to which I have to answer truthfully, no, I haven't. But I really have no inclination to do so. First impressions are important, and my time is not unlimited.
I think that's stretching a car analogy pretty much as far as one can.
Even when it wasn't BSOD-ing or hanging my computers, early BOINC seemed to have a very liberal definition of "unused cycles", and I often had to kill it to get real work done. (I'm not a gamer, but I do a lot of CPU and memory intensive things.) What seti@home lost when they switched to BOINC was user control of exactly when the program could use the computer. When it was a screen saver, I knew with certainty that seti@home would only run when the screen saver was active, which was, by definition, when I was not making interactive use of the computer. I know BOINC is supposed to make intelligent load balancing decisions and you are not supposed to notice it running, but actual results were not consistent with that. I brought this up in the seti newsgroup, and got a lot of various things to try, by people with much more time than I (evidently) but after wrestling with it for awhile, I set it aside, and haven't touched it since. Life is too short. Besides, the new seti screen saver was ugly.
I stopped participating (and donating) when they switched to BOINC after having some bad experiences on a few machines. Every once in awhile I get a plea from Seti to return, and each time I respond "bring back the original screen saver and I'd love to".
Ok, I agree with his premise, but if he was executive producer of all Batman movies since 1989, what the hell happened with Batman and Robin (1997)? It took a lot of courage to make another Batman film after that piece of shite.
Gotcha, that makes sense. But why then would you buy Windows 7 assuming 8 is going to be the same price when it comes out? I would agree that it might not be a big enough improvement to justify paying a significant amount of money, but its at least better than nothing.
Because 7 is a known quantity. I have it running on a couple machines, and after the compatibility issues were ironed out (for instance, I had to retire a scanner that had no Windows 7 driver, and the XP driver did not work), it became an environment that I could easily reproduce and add to our workflow. Windows 8 would require starting over in that process, and there is quite literally no reason to do that. There is nothing in Metro that I need.
What about tablets? I own a Windows 7 tablet, it sucks. It's shelfware at this time. Since I'd have to upgrade it to something to make it useful, I might as well install Android, a mature OS from people who understand that a touch interface does not mean having cabalistic gestures intended to ape the operations of a three button mouse. I *might* be able to install Windows 8 (not sure at this time if the hardware is studly enough) but why? Shall I drop a couple bills just on the off chance that Microsoft has suddenly seen the light and created an OS that really works on a touch-only interface?
Given Microsoft's past record with every other release being problematic, I'm inclined to skip 8 completely, and instead look at 9 about the time the first service pack comes out. And if 9 turns out to be shite and I'm forced off 7, 8 will be there for consideration. Or maybe the applications we use will have been ported to Android, OSX, or IOS in that time.
In summery, only bleeding-edge fans and OS-philiacs jump on a new OS the moment it's released. People with non-PC-industry work to do, do not. If they value their jobs. Most especially if their current environment is good enough. (I understand wanting to upgrade from Vista to 7, but 7 really is good enough.)
Incidentally, if Microsoft really wanted early acceptance of Metro, they'd back-port it to 7 and include it in an update, giving people the option of switching from Aero. (which is, incidentally, a real resource hog -- the first thing I do is turn off all the special effects -- parenthetically, who's great idea was it to make the OS a video game??) But apparently they think that Metro will drive Windows 8 sales. I personally don't see it, but fine.
...and to someone who likes to be on the bleeding edge, or who is specifically involved in some way with operating systems, that might make sense. But this loses sight of the fact that personal computers are *for* something, or should be. They're not an end in themselves, except to systems or (sometimes) application programmers. Others, me for instance, need them to get work done that is unrelated to OS architecture. In that case, there are generally two overriding considerations: (1) Maturity. Has the environment been out long enough to be reasonable reliable? (2) "good enough". Is the current environment good enough for the task at hand? To the people who are trying to get real work done, the time to upgrade is when either 1 or 2 or both are substantially false.
No plans to upgrade to Windows 8 anyway. But this does remind me that I need to buy a few copies of 7 while it's still available. And then, wait until something good comes out.
That's good, but I don't think it's fair to blame the poor quality of Facebook's app entirely on HTML5. For example, the app will occasionally chew through hundreds of megs of space, crash randomly, or even navigate to the wrong page when you click a link. Pretty glaring bugs that even the greenest QA testers would have noticed.
At some point you have to blame management for not spending the time for proper testing and bug fixes. It *should* be a fairly straightforward app no matter how it was written.
And (this is the point, really) not just on IOS! Blaming the problems on html 5 and changing to old crufty Objective C sounds like a rationalization. An excuse used by executives to board members who don't know any better.
Slashdot Mirror
> Meanwhile, ever since Windows 7 came out, I've felt that Windows has better usability than the Linux desktops I've tried and massively better usability than the Mac I have to use at work.
So do I, and you're right. Windows 7 really is, finally, good enough to get work done on modern hardware. I think Microsoft's trouble is that they've existed for too long on the business model of selling massive numbers of a new version of Windows, as people stuck with using it strain to reach that golden fleece, the environment that maintains compatibility with Windows applications and doesn't crash incessantly. Windows' very lack of quality, and the number of users desperate to upgrade, was a major factor in their success. It wasn't hard to foresee the next step -- Microsoft produces a decent, stable version, and sales of their primary earner fall off. As besides the OS/office suite and a gaming box they really don't have a lot, this leads them in a bad position. They've tried to compensate by reinventing the OS with Windows 8. The question, the overriding question, is, why would regular users (not OS junkies) want to upgrade at all?
....is "People Magazine" for well-off literate people.
Well-off, yes. Literate? I guess all things are relative.
> if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
Now, *that's* an internship I would turn down...
After opening with a false premise like "storied history of leadership", do you really want to read more?
Yeah, that was a good one. I also liked "...and the company has driven innovation for decades." That made me chuckle.
Innovation in IP leverage and marketing...
I was there for the seventies and eighties, and the sixties, too. I saw hip huggers fall in and out of style twice. And now we're going back to clothing styles from the fifties, which I stipulate is not a good trade.
But if I mention a date too far back, most slashdotters will go "what?" It's like history begins at September 28, 1987.
> And never significantly adopted, because, in the end, they were thought up as witticisms not as a prescriptive change of language.
Hmm. I don't think I ever talked with the people who actually thought up those terms, so I can't say one way or another whether the terms were intended as witticisms. It's possible they were. I had debated with people on usenet in the nineties, however, who (let's be generous) appear not to have gotten the memo. Or were carrying the joke wayyy to far.
"womyn" and "herstory" is so nineties.
> And if -- ghod forbid -- we discover a way to make the vacuum unstable, then we might learn how to make one really big boom. Just one, because it will consume the entire universe, but that one will be REALLY BIG.
Maybe it's already happened.
> Does your company do this?
No.
> What's the best way to survive this type of system?"
Work for a company that doesn't do this.
It's not hot here. It was in the mid sixties and raining all through last month up until yesterday. We had hail in the beginning of June. Broadcast news says it might get into the eighties today but accuweather says no. It has been unusually cool for the last three years, with 2011 being the first on record with no over 90 degree days. But whenever I bring that up, I'm told that's "weather" and the blistering heat today in the east is "climate". Ok...
We got central air in the mid nineties, but haven't used it after the turn of the century. I'm not sure it even works anymore.
So... how does one beat the summer heat? I dunno, live somewhere where it doesn't get hot?
The old screen saver became a breeding ground for people gaming the system in the name of cranking up their work unit totals. Their scientific vision suffered. The pretty screen saver was replaced by a framework that has been adopted by dozens of other projects that didn't have the wherewithal to create such a process on their own.
In terms of the ever famous slashdot-brand car analogy; You won't buy another Ford until they bring back the Pinto.
I won't argue that the original screen saver was a Pinto. It was reliable for me, and the replacements weren't, for me. As always, your mileage may vary, and it's just not that important an issue to argue terminology.
So, it's more like, I had to get rid of the Pinto (if you will), and so I bought five new Ford Escalades and they all exploded. When I mention that, I'm told "have you driven a Ford lately?" to which I have to answer truthfully, no, I haven't. But I really have no inclination to do so. First impressions are important, and my time is not unlimited.
I think that's stretching a car analogy pretty much as far as one can.
Even when it wasn't BSOD-ing or hanging my computers, early BOINC seemed to have a very liberal definition of "unused cycles", and I often had to kill it to get real work done. (I'm not a gamer, but I do a lot of CPU and memory intensive things.) What seti@home lost when they switched to BOINC was user control of exactly when the program could use the computer. When it was a screen saver, I knew with certainty that seti@home would only run when the screen saver was active, which was, by definition, when I was not making interactive use of the computer. I know BOINC is supposed to make intelligent load balancing decisions and you are not supposed to notice it running, but actual results were not consistent with that. I brought this up in the seti newsgroup, and got a lot of various things to try, by people with much more time than I (evidently) but after wrestling with it for awhile, I set it aside, and haven't touched it since. Life is too short. Besides, the new seti screen saver was ugly.
I stopped participating (and donating) when they switched to BOINC after having some bad experiences on a few machines. Every once in awhile I get a plea from Seti to return, and each time I respond "bring back the original screen saver and I'd love to".
Ok, I agree with his premise, but if he was executive producer of all Batman movies since 1989, what the hell happened with Batman and Robin (1997)? It took a lot of courage to make another Batman film after that piece of shite.
Gotcha, that makes sense. But why then would you buy Windows 7 assuming 8 is going to be the same price when it comes out? I would agree that it might not be a big enough improvement to justify paying a significant amount of money, but its at least better than nothing.
Because 7 is a known quantity. I have it running on a couple machines, and after the compatibility issues were ironed out (for instance, I had to retire a scanner that had no Windows 7 driver, and the XP driver did not work), it became an environment that I could easily reproduce and add to our workflow. Windows 8 would require starting over in that process, and there is quite literally no reason to do that. There is nothing in Metro that I need.
What about tablets? I own a Windows 7 tablet, it sucks. It's shelfware at this time. Since I'd have to upgrade it to something to make it useful, I might as well install Android, a mature OS from people who understand that a touch interface does not mean having cabalistic gestures intended to ape the operations of a three button mouse. I *might* be able to install Windows 8 (not sure at this time if the hardware is studly enough) but why? Shall I drop a couple bills just on the off chance that Microsoft has suddenly seen the light and created an OS that really works on a touch-only interface?
Given Microsoft's past record with every other release being problematic, I'm inclined to skip 8 completely, and instead look at 9 about the time the first service pack comes out. And if 9 turns out to be shite and I'm forced off 7, 8 will be there for consideration. Or maybe the applications we use will have been ported to Android, OSX, or IOS in that time.
In summery, only bleeding-edge fans and OS-philiacs jump on a new OS the moment it's released. People with non-PC-industry work to do, do not. If they value their jobs. Most especially if their current environment is good enough. (I understand wanting to upgrade from Vista to 7, but 7 really is good enough.)
Incidentally, if Microsoft really wanted early acceptance of Metro, they'd back-port it to 7 and include it in an update, giving people the option of switching from Aero. (which is, incidentally, a real resource hog -- the first thing I do is turn off all the special effects -- parenthetically, who's great idea was it to make the OS a video game??) But apparently they think that Metro will drive Windows 8 sales. I personally don't see it, but fine.
Not a matter of hate. Not at all. It's a matter of being unnecessary. Why pay a couple bills for maybe a few minor improvements?
No plans to upgrade to Windows 8 anyway. But this does remind me that I need to buy a few copies of 7 while it's still available. And then, wait until something good comes out.
I'd buy that.
> Jobs did the right thing and yes he hated flash and wanted a more open web ecosystem.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Agreed. Absolutely agreed. And getting better tools is extremely important. The problem is, in the meantime a lot of web content isn't going to work.
This is just Facebook trying to blame their shoddy implementation on someone else.
None of the bugs and issues reported by users are HTML5 caused problems.
(You are absolutely correct. I was being ironic.)
That's good, but I don't think it's fair to blame the poor quality of Facebook's app entirely on HTML5. For example, the app will occasionally chew through hundreds of megs of space, crash randomly, or even navigate to the wrong page when you click a link. Pretty glaring bugs that even the greenest QA testers would have noticed.
At some point you have to blame management for not spending the time for proper testing and bug fixes. It *should* be a fairly straightforward app no matter how it was written.
And (this is the point, really) not just on IOS! Blaming the problems on html 5 and changing to old crufty Objective C sounds like a rationalization. An excuse used by executives to board members who don't know any better.
But... isn't html 5 the latest and coolest thing, and Objective-C some really old thing that Apple inherited from medieval times?
And and... hang on... wasn't the coolness of html 5 the excuse for Apple not supporting some old and crufty thing called Flash?
And while we're on the subject, get off my lawn!