> Back then, the screen technology was not advanced enough to handle finger-touches and gestures. They had to us a stylus in order to get accurate "clicks".
Yep, true, but Palm was in that market even earlier, with a single touch, stylus-based OS that was actually useful. In fact, look at the original Palm Pilot, and you will see vague prehistoric design cues that I would argue were later used in iOS and Android. Fewer wipe gestures for reasons you stated, but the same page-o-icons idea, with no hint of "walking menus" to get to your application. (Moreover, the various aftermarket launchers that supported tabs are interestingly like the multiple pages of iOS and Android.) And this was in 1997!
And Microsoft went with a "Start" button. Because... well, who knows? Not because of ergonomics. Because it looked more like Winders, or because they could reuse GUI code (unlikely on early revisions) or because of a misunderstanding of customers' need to see the exact same interface on every platform, no matter how impractical.
Um, you need to look up "on-call". But, no, wait. I see the misunderstanding. I get *paid* to be on-call. Does that make more sense? Or is this some ninety nine percenter thing I don't understand?
> Try explaining to your boss why you almost never pick up when he calls, and then when he does call you, you hang up on him.
The very last call I (didn't) receive was from my boss, strategic update during a production outage. And I missed it. The next business day, I put in an order for a Blackberry Bold. My boss couldn't approve it fast enough. (He needs me to be connected.)
> If only they could've ditched the stylus-centric GUI design (ie itty bitty tiny controls and no gestures)
That's right on the money, (from an ergonomic standpoint, how did anyone ever think a "start" button an eighth of an inch wide was a good idea?? [1]) although I'm not sure it's a complete explanation. My Windows 6 phone would fail periodically with a popup something like "the audio driver has encountered an unexpected error and will now terminate". If you didn't catch it when it happened and reboot the phone, on the next call the phone wouldn't ring.
Let's savor that for a moment.
The phone wouldn't RING!!
The second or third time I failed to get a call while on-call, due to the audio driver malfunctioning, I had to dump the phone or risk losing my job.
As a result, I will never, ever, EVER have another Windows phone. In my line of work it's just too risky to have a phone that may at some random time decline to RING.
Ok, so I could be the only one to ever have that problem or problems like it, but if not, Windows 7 has a huge uphill battle to gain acceptance in the business market.
[1] From a code reuse standpoint, it makes perfect sense.
> Well, more to the point 720p non-interlaced vs. 480p interlaced was a substantial difference.
You mean 480i. 480p is progressive scan, non-interlaced by definition. Owning a newer progressive scan DVD and an earlier (but still high quality) non-progressive scan DVD player, the difference is glaring. Merely going to non-interlaced bought us at least as much as the increased resolution.
I did not. I said Microsoft is "trying" to force upgrades, and for the most part it isn't working. For a variety of reasons, Microsoft is no longer in a position to use their market saturation to force wholesale adoption of a new version of Windows. Not the least of which is that XP is Good Enough. We all switched to XP partly because ME was a crapfest. XP is not a crapfest, even now, and for the first time we can stop making a career out of screwing with the OS and actually get some work done. For most users, there's really no reason to upgrade. (I have one machine running Windows 7 64 bit, and that's because the app requires more than 4 GB memory. The rest, including laptops, are still running 32 bit XP.)
In fact, that's probably another reason why people are more reluctant to upgrade: They're doing more with their computers, have more invested in them, and the pain to upgrade is significantly more than back when you had to remember to save the game files and reload Wing Commander.
The point about Apple is less about Apple than it is about the difference between the panic to have the latest and greatest PC hardware and OS, and using PCs for their intended purpose, which is to run apps. I used the G4 until earlier this year, which is not bad for a product released before the turn of the century. It ran Adobe CS3 just fine. I was under no particular onus to switch to an Intel Mac, because what I had, worked.
And what I have now, works.
...and I absolutely disagree that the longer you delay the worse upgrades are. Had I upgraded every time Microsoft craps out another version, I'd have been running Vista for almost three years. (shudder) I wouldn't wish that on anyone. And when everyone was trying to figure out how to get their legacy peripherals to work on Windows 7, I continued to get work done. (The one machine upgraded to Windows 7 lost a scanner as there was no driver, that scanner was moved to -- say it with me -- a machine running XP.)
And so, I don't completely understand *your* point. Since when is a bunch of upgrades, some more painful than others, somehow better than a forklift replacement every 10-12 years? I think the fundamental misunderstanding is that we're approaching this from two different points: I see operating systems as a way to run applications that I need to run. You appear to see operating systems as an end in themselves.
4K? Yeah, I know about it. My opinion: Not just "no", but "hell no". As I've said in other articles, at some point, as the eyeball remains the same and display equipment improves, we hit the point of diminishing returns, and I think for video entertainment that's about 720P. 1080P is overdoing it. 4K is just an excuse to sell nerds a new TV and yet another copy of The Phantom Menace (no doubt with additional cute graphics and squeaky CGI creatures).
Um, good point about price, but are we allowed to not like how 3D *looks*? I've been a video geek for almost 30 years, and I still see 3D as a gimmick that detracts from video clarity.
Caveat; I've been a video geek since the early eighties.
There is no contradiction.
NTSC was not good enough. It was interlaced, had poor resolution, and was the wrong aspect ratio. "Letterboxing" the content, of which I was a big fan at the time, (because seeing the entire frame was more important) admittedly reduced the (vertical) resolution even further. Some say part of the problem was also the analog nature of the signal (as opposed to HDTV being digital) and there is some truth to that, but I personally think the term "digital" is way overused. [1]
HDTV was non-interlaced [2], had resolution that was good enough (take note, we'll come back to that later) and was closer to the aspect ratio used in theaters. (In that 1.85:1 would have a tiny bit of zoom or letterboxing, and 2.39:1 would still be acceptable.)
Now, VHS was a horrible medium, that didn't even come close to the resolution of the better TVs of the time. (Can you imagine today watching content in 170 horizontal line resolution?) Laserdisc (of which I was a consumer) came closer. DVD represented a huge, easily visible increase in quality over VHS. (Moreover, a well-crafted DVD on a good player was visibly better than even the best Criterion laserdisc on a good player, without all the disadvantages of laserdisc.)
So if you go strictly nerd-like by the numbers only, the resolution of vhs (170 lines) is about the same fraction of NTSC (525 lines) as DVD (480P) is of HDTV (1080P). So DVD must be just horrible on HDTVs, right? In real life it's not that simple, for a few reasons:
(1) As we do not change out our eyeballs with every upgrade, at some point, the video quality is good enough. The difference between VHS and a well crafted 480P DVD is striking. Even your grandparents notice it. But the difference between 480P and Blu-ray? Shrug. The difference in detail can be noticeable, but it's just not striking. For most people, 480P is good enough. 720P is an embarrassment of riches. 1080P is overkill. [3] (Note I didn't include any interlaced modes. I hope interlace goes away and never ever comes back.)
(2) The reason I keep saying "well crafted" is that it's an important issue in and of itself. I was an early adopter of Blu-ray as a backup medium, but since I had one in my media center I could also use it to play Blu-ray discs on the TV (Sony 48 inch Bravia). What I found was that there is a considerable overlap between the best DVDs and the worst Blu-rays. As one would expect, as it takes more than a medium to craft a brilliant video. Buying a title on Blu-ray is not, in and of itself, a guarantee that you're getting better video quality.
(3) Screen size is important. In less than 50 inches, the difference between DVD and Blu-ray is insignificant. Up to 60 inches it becomes noticeable, and at 100 inches or larger (projection) Blu-ray is required, as DVD just doesn't hack it at that screen size. Now, it used to be that the bigger screen you had the better, right? People were putting 60 inch sets in rooms way too small, and forcing themselves to sit way too close to get a good viewing experience, but hey, it's BIG. And big is BETTER. However, I've read lately that there is some reversal in this trend, and now 32 inches is considered a good size because it's GREEN. And green is BETTER. Shrug. The point is, unless you have a viewing room big enough and a screen big enough and every single component in the video stream is good enough, you're wasting your money. Sorry, it's true. We can make ourselves believe we're having a better experience, but really we're not, except in our imaginations.
And so, for most people in most situations with most equipment, Blu-ray just doesn't buy you enough to warrant paying more. Once it's dead even and Blu-ray players are $39 and there's a huge pile of discs in the cut-out bin (and by that I don't mean "Ernest saves Christmas") I might consider it when the current DVD player fails and can't be fixed. But it's ju
Just goes to show, there are single-position people on all sides of an argument. The converse (that everyone who doesn't like M$ would do the same thing) is not necessarily true -- I personally detest Microsoft, but am happy to say that the original post was obviously relevant.
And I'm actually somewhat interested in downloading the product when it's available. It'd give me a use for the joystick, gathering dust under the desk.
HDTV was a reasonable improvement on NTSC and PAL. 3D really isn't. Compare to: DVD was a huge improvement over VHS. Blu-ray isn't enough of an improvement over DVD to be interesting.
> My next Android handset will be chosen on the basis of Cyanogen support first and formost.
...and for geeks like us, that's fine. (I'm with you on that!) But for those of my daughter's girlfriends in high school who haven't drunk the iPhone kool-aid, and don't happen to be geeks, just about the only solution they have when they get burned is to not buy next time from the vendor who burned them. Parenthetically, this is one of the ways the free market is supposed to work.
And... I'll let you in on a little secret... I like Android; I and all of my family members carry an Android phone (none of them Samsung) [1]. But if it turns out that there isn't any single vendor that puts out a viable, quality product running Android, then the OS deserves to be dumped on the crap heap of broken geek dreams next to all the other operating systems that were really cool at the time but failed from some stupid vendor decision. It's not up to *me*, or to *anyone*, to prop up an OS in the face of vendors grimly determined to screw up the product.
Fortunately, there are a few good phones out there, still. Daughter dumped her Galaxy for a Bionic and couldn't be happier. Wife has a Rhyme and, well, is ok with it. And I'm getting good use out of my Droid X. Now if Motorola and HTC piss us off, we'll look at different vendors when it's time to switch. That's the way the marketplace works. You don't just look at the vendor's latest offering, sigh, and say "oh, I didn't really want a USB port. The vendor knows so much better than I what I really want".
> if we need to recable a government system, and we go and do the work, the company which owns the datacenter contract still gets paid as if they did the work. But we have to do it, because they always screw it up.
It's not just governments that trap themselves into this kind of contract.
Sorry, I had to chuckle at that. Rule 34: "openly pro-Linux" sounds like an invitation to group sex. Or would, were we talking about any other group than computer nerds...
> You would think so. But it also seems that bonch has shit like this typed up, just waiting to copy and paste into any Android article that shows up on slashdot. A pretty good collection of pre-made posts that he modifies just a little to accommodate the article, apparently.
...the Slashdot equivalent of email forwards... The sad thing is, he probably doesn't even get paid for it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Back then, the screen technology was not advanced enough to handle finger-touches and gestures. They had to us a stylus in order to get accurate "clicks".
Yep, true, but Palm was in that market even earlier, with a single touch, stylus-based OS that was actually useful. In fact, look at the original Palm Pilot, and you will see vague prehistoric design cues that I would argue were later used in iOS and Android. Fewer wipe gestures for reasons you stated, but the same page-o-icons idea, with no hint of "walking menus" to get to your application. (Moreover, the various aftermarket launchers that supported tabs are interestingly like the multiple pages of iOS and Android.) And this was in 1997!
And Microsoft went with a "Start" button. Because... well, who knows? Not because of ergonomics. Because it looked more like Winders, or because they could reuse GUI code (unlikely on early revisions) or because of a misunderstanding of customers' need to see the exact same interface on every platform, no matter how impractical.
That works for me as definition number two.
Um, you need to look up "on-call". But, no, wait. I see the misunderstanding. I get *paid* to be on-call. Does that make more sense? Or is this some ninety nine percenter thing I don't understand?
> Try explaining to your boss why you almost never pick up when he calls, and then when he does call you, you hang up on him.
The very last call I (didn't) receive was from my boss, strategic update during a production outage. And I missed it. The next business day, I put in an order for a Blackberry Bold. My boss couldn't approve it fast enough. (He needs me to be connected.)
> If only they could've ditched the stylus-centric GUI design (ie itty bitty tiny controls and no gestures)
That's right on the money, (from an ergonomic standpoint, how did anyone ever think a "start" button an eighth of an inch wide was a good idea?? [1]) although I'm not sure it's a complete explanation. My Windows 6 phone would fail periodically with a popup something like "the audio driver has encountered an unexpected error and will now terminate". If you didn't catch it when it happened and reboot the phone, on the next call the phone wouldn't ring.
Let's savor that for a moment.
The phone wouldn't RING!!
The second or third time I failed to get a call while on-call, due to the audio driver malfunctioning, I had to dump the phone or risk losing my job.
As a result, I will never, ever, EVER have another Windows phone. In my line of work it's just too risky to have a phone that may at some random time decline to RING.
Ok, so I could be the only one to ever have that problem or problems like it, but if not, Windows 7 has a huge uphill battle to gain acceptance in the business market.
[1] From a code reuse standpoint, it makes perfect sense.
Get off my lawn.
> Well, more to the point 720p non-interlaced vs. 480p interlaced was a substantial difference.
You mean 480i. 480p is progressive scan, non-interlaced by definition. Owning a newer progressive scan DVD and an earlier (but still high quality) non-progressive scan DVD player, the difference is glaring. Merely going to non-interlaced bought us at least as much as the increased resolution.
Yeah, "better". At some point you're just playing with numbers.
But on reflection, I'm sorry to ruin your excitement about new consumer opportunities. Someone has to keep the economy going, I guess.
(I don't have any interest in football, thanks.)
> If you can't tell the difference between 480P and 1080 P, with disks made for thos formats, then you need to see a Doctor
At no point did I say I couldn't tell the difference. What I said was that the difference is not important.
> You said Microsoft "forces" upgrades
I did not. I said Microsoft is "trying" to force upgrades, and for the most part it isn't working. For a variety of reasons, Microsoft is no longer in a position to use their market saturation to force wholesale adoption of a new version of Windows. Not the least of which is that XP is Good Enough. We all switched to XP partly because ME was a crapfest. XP is not a crapfest, even now, and for the first time we can stop making a career out of screwing with the OS and actually get some work done. For most users, there's really no reason to upgrade. (I have one machine running Windows 7 64 bit, and that's because the app requires more than 4 GB memory. The rest, including laptops, are still running 32 bit XP.)
In fact, that's probably another reason why people are more reluctant to upgrade: They're doing more with their computers, have more invested in them, and the pain to upgrade is significantly more than back when you had to remember to save the game files and reload Wing Commander.
The point about Apple is less about Apple than it is about the difference between the panic to have the latest and greatest PC hardware and OS, and using PCs for their intended purpose, which is to run apps. I used the G4 until earlier this year, which is not bad for a product released before the turn of the century. It ran Adobe CS3 just fine. I was under no particular onus to switch to an Intel Mac, because what I had, worked.
And what I have now, works.
And so, I don't completely understand *your* point. Since when is a bunch of upgrades, some more painful than others, somehow better than a forklift replacement every 10-12 years? I think the fundamental misunderstanding is that we're approaching this from two different points: I see operating systems as a way to run applications that I need to run. You appear to see operating systems as an end in themselves.
4K? Yeah, I know about it. My opinion: Not just "no", but "hell no". As I've said in other articles, at some point, as the eyeball remains the same and display equipment improves, we hit the point of diminishing returns, and I think for video entertainment that's about 720P. 1080P is overdoing it. 4K is just an excuse to sell nerds a new TV and yet another copy of The Phantom Menace (no doubt with additional cute graphics and squeaky CGI creatures).
Um, good point about price, but are we allowed to not like how 3D *looks*? I've been a video geek for almost 30 years, and I still see 3D as a gimmick that detracts from video clarity.
Caveat; I've been a video geek since the early eighties.
There is no contradiction.
NTSC was not good enough. It was interlaced, had poor resolution, and was the wrong aspect ratio. "Letterboxing" the content, of which I was a big fan at the time, (because seeing the entire frame was more important) admittedly reduced the (vertical) resolution even further. Some say part of the problem was also the analog nature of the signal (as opposed to HDTV being digital) and there is some truth to that, but I personally think the term "digital" is way overused. [1]
HDTV was non-interlaced [2], had resolution that was good enough (take note, we'll come back to that later) and was closer to the aspect ratio used in theaters. (In that 1.85:1 would have a tiny bit of zoom or letterboxing, and 2.39:1 would still be acceptable.)
Now, VHS was a horrible medium, that didn't even come close to the resolution of the better TVs of the time. (Can you imagine today watching content in 170 horizontal line resolution?) Laserdisc (of which I was a consumer) came closer. DVD represented a huge, easily visible increase in quality over VHS. (Moreover, a well-crafted DVD on a good player was visibly better than even the best Criterion laserdisc on a good player, without all the disadvantages of laserdisc.)
So if you go strictly nerd-like by the numbers only, the resolution of vhs (170 lines) is about the same fraction of NTSC (525 lines) as DVD (480P) is of HDTV (1080P). So DVD must be just horrible on HDTVs, right? In real life it's not that simple, for a few reasons:
(1) As we do not change out our eyeballs with every upgrade, at some point, the video quality is good enough. The difference between VHS and a well crafted 480P DVD is striking. Even your grandparents notice it. But the difference between 480P and Blu-ray? Shrug. The difference in detail can be noticeable, but it's just not striking. For most people, 480P is good enough. 720P is an embarrassment of riches. 1080P is overkill. [3] (Note I didn't include any interlaced modes. I hope interlace goes away and never ever comes back.)
(2) The reason I keep saying "well crafted" is that it's an important issue in and of itself. I was an early adopter of Blu-ray as a backup medium, but since I had one in my media center I could also use it to play Blu-ray discs on the TV (Sony 48 inch Bravia). What I found was that there is a considerable overlap between the best DVDs and the worst Blu-rays. As one would expect, as it takes more than a medium to craft a brilliant video. Buying a title on Blu-ray is not, in and of itself, a guarantee that you're getting better video quality.
(3) Screen size is important. In less than 50 inches, the difference between DVD and Blu-ray is insignificant. Up to 60 inches it becomes noticeable, and at 100 inches or larger (projection) Blu-ray is required, as DVD just doesn't hack it at that screen size. Now, it used to be that the bigger screen you had the better, right? People were putting 60 inch sets in rooms way too small, and forcing themselves to sit way too close to get a good viewing experience, but hey, it's BIG. And big is BETTER. However, I've read lately that there is some reversal in this trend, and now 32 inches is considered a good size because it's GREEN. And green is BETTER. Shrug. The point is, unless you have a viewing room big enough and a screen big enough and every single component in the video stream is good enough, you're wasting your money. Sorry, it's true. We can make ourselves believe we're having a better experience, but really we're not, except in our imaginations.
And so, for most people in most situations with most equipment, Blu-ray just doesn't buy you enough to warrant paying more. Once it's dead even and Blu-ray players are $39 and there's a huge pile of discs in the cut-out bin (and by that I don't mean "Ernest saves Christmas") I might consider it when the current DVD player fails and can't be fixed. But it's ju
No.
Just goes to show, there are single-position people on all sides of an argument. The converse (that everyone who doesn't like M$ would do the same thing) is not necessarily true -- I personally detest Microsoft, but am happy to say that the original post was obviously relevant.
And I'm actually somewhat interested in downloading the product when it's available. It'd give me a use for the joystick, gathering dust under the desk.
There may have been shills in the past, but I have to agree, that one was on topic.
HDTV was a reasonable improvement on NTSC and PAL. 3D really isn't. Compare to: DVD was a huge improvement over VHS. Blu-ray isn't enough of an improvement over DVD to be interesting.
> My next Android handset will be chosen on the basis of Cyanogen support first and formost.
And... I'll let you in on a little secret... I like Android; I and all of my family members carry an Android phone (none of them Samsung) [1]. But if it turns out that there isn't any single vendor that puts out a viable, quality product running Android, then the OS deserves to be dumped on the crap heap of broken geek dreams next to all the other operating systems that were really cool at the time but failed from some stupid vendor decision. It's not up to *me*, or to *anyone*, to prop up an OS in the face of vendors grimly determined to screw up the product.
Fortunately, there are a few good phones out there, still. Daughter dumped her Galaxy for a Bionic and couldn't be happier. Wife has a Rhyme and, well, is ok with it. And I'm getting good use out of my Droid X. Now if Motorola and HTC piss us off, we'll look at different vendors when it's time to switch. That's the way the marketplace works. You don't just look at the vendor's latest offering, sigh, and say "oh, I didn't really want a USB port. The vendor knows so much better than I what I really want".
It's a phone. A tool. Not a religion.
[1] I still miss my Blackberry.
Sad that it's necessary.
I feel your pain.
> if we need to recable a government system, and we go and do the work, the company which owns the datacenter contract still gets paid as if they did the work. But we have to do it, because they always screw it up.
It's not just governments that trap themselves into this kind of contract.
I'm curious about the latest technology of what I'm working on. I'm not working on operating systems.
It's like a mechanic getting so wrapped up in his tools that he forgets the engine he's working on.
And some mechanics do.
Sorry, I had to chuckle at that. Rule 34: "openly pro-Linux" sounds like an invitation to group sex. Or would, were we talking about any other group than computer nerds...
> Yes, what an open-minded, neutral place Slashdot would be if not for 4-8 MS shills.
It would definitely be less entertaining.
> You would think so. But it also seems that bonch has shit like this typed up, just waiting to copy and paste into any Android article that shows up on slashdot. A pretty good collection of pre-made posts that he modifies just a little to accommodate the article, apparently.