Sort of agree, although I wouldn't have put it quite that way. The reason they call anything "Windows 7" is that it *has* to be called Windows, as Windows is Microsoft's core competency [1] and pretty much the only mindshare they have left. (They couldn't very well call it "xbox phone". Or maybe they could...)
My understanding with Windows 8 is that it'll be called Windows 8 everywhere, desktop, laptop, slate, and phone. So a tablet will run "Windows 8" and the phone will also run "Windows 8". And due to the policy of code reuse, [2] under the covers it might actually be the same DLLs on every platform. From a corporate standpoint, this meets the managerial line item of "windows everywhere". It'd go bad for them if 8 turned out to be another Vista.
But going along with the subject line, I'd answer to Jobs, were he available, "Putting an "e" in front of everything got old in the nineties. Putting an "i" in front of everything is getting old now." As we're speaking of names, you understand.
[1] I heard that! No laughter back there.
[2] Ah, that brings back memories. "The application has encountered a problem and needs to close" popups... on my PHONE. That was precious.
This is exactly the type of press release that you get from movie producers after a very expensive dud. The idea is to direct attention from the crappiness of the product and to, well, anything else. The genre is dead. They didn't cast leads with enough star power. Improper marketing. Just anything other than the hard fact that they produced a product that nobody wanted. (Extra points for accusing the consumer of not being sophisticated enough to "get it".)
Charlie appears to think that following the lead of the absolute most popular smartphone on the planet (locking down the hardware and limiting what freedom the carriers had with the product) is what caused his product to place in the rear of the pack.
...ok, he might have a point, but perhaps not the point he thinks. Microsoft tends to think they can enter into any market with a mindshare advantage because they're selling something called Windows. It makes sense that they could talk themselves into a frame of mind where they're competing on equal footing with the iPhone and can demand the same concessions from manufacturers and service providers.
The problem with this picture is that (a) Microsoft was last to market with a viable touch screen smartphone, and (b) previous versions of Windows Mobile sucked so violently that it harmed the brand. And so, Windows Phone 7 had a double uphill battle -- trying to enter a market long crowded with reasonably decent products, and trying to shed the bad taste in consumer's mouths from the debacle that was Windows Mobile 6. And 5. That they also pissed off their vendors probably didn't help, but it was not the whole of the problem.
And by the way, Kindel, Windows Phone 7 is *not* "superior", unless you mean, to Windows Mobile 6, and I don't think you do. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
(I have to say, you're more polite that I would have been.)
Hear that Charlie? It was the IMPLEMENTATION that sucked, not your relationship with the carriers. The hilarious thing is not meeting enterprise standards, which was pretty much Microsoft's only market for phones in the past, due to the perception (incorrect, as it turns out,) that there would be an IT advantage to having Windows on portable devices.
From Kindel's blog: "Remember that end users just do what they are told (by advertising and RSPs). "
Yeah? Really? Screw you, Charlie, and all the devices you flogged. Go on, TELL me to buy a Windows phone. Go on. I'm listening. What? Louder. Ok, I hear you. I understand the instruction. The answer is NO.
There is some truth to that, but it's also the case that we don't really know if Microsoft has actually learned a lesson or whether the current Windows Mobile is a fluke. Moreover, there's how the phone behaves in the store, and how it behaves when you start digging into it, and here again Microsoft has a reputation to overcome.
And, there's still enough indication that Management believes "they'll buy it 'cause it's Windows and LIKE it" (from the article: "end users just do what they are told") type of hubris that we tend to be very cautious consumers. Due to, you know, buying it in the past, and *not* liking it.
And finally, it's too late. Microsoft was last to market with a phone that had a reasonably touch-friendly interface.
That was unnecessary. Funny, but unnecessary. I don't begrudge Microsoft's attempt to sell phones. I just would never ever consider owning another one (having struggled with and finally rejected [1] my company-issued Winders phone).
Speaking as the dad of a kid homeschooled through 8th grade, (now in her final year of art school and doing fine) I can't see where this will make a great deal of difference. You still need direct, engaged involvement from a knowledgeable adult (which is one of the reasons we pulled her out of school initially -- "direct" "engaged" "knowledgeable" pick two...) and a mere e-reader isn't going to make much difference. It's a nice fantasy to think that you can hand a kid a device and they'll get a quality education on their own while you catch up on Jersey Shore, but it really doesn't work like that.
TFA's example of involvement (teaching a kid to read with a newspaper and sharpie) is a good one (I've used it) but doesn't adapt that well to an e-reader. (You ruin more screens that way...) What *has* helped is a laptop with one of the better text readers installed. Daughter could highlight the text and hear the word read to her.
Moreover... if you don't homeschool your kid, you may not understand this... A lot of homeschooled kids are home because of various afflictions that the school doesn't handle well. In my daughter's case, it's severe dyslexia, which the local district chooses not to recognize as an affliction. (The school independently diagnosed her as ADD and prescribed Ritalin, completely ignoring the thick report I had sent them from a summer of testing and diagnosis from professionals.) A kid with special needs may not be in a position to do a lot of reading. I did all her reading for her in the early days, and continued to read to her even after she got the computer to talk to her. (Parenthetically, her early reliance on computers as a tool has resulted in a high amount of technical ability in that area. She now wears a T-shirt at school that says "no, I won't fix your computer".)
In her senior year of high school, daughter still reads at a 3rd grade level, and that is probably the best she'll ever do. You can see where she wouldn't look forward to a Nook for Christmas. Nor would it do that much good for her. Mind you, she copes with devices -- she has special dispensation to carry her cell phone in class, use it for audio and video recordings and to photograph the whiteboard. (I'm thinking about writing a paper about it.) She uses her laptop in the resource room to do homework (it has all her tools on it) and has gotten very adept at sharing content between her phone, laptop, desktop at home, and members of her team for group assignments. The recent breakthroughs in affordable (or even free) text-to-voice and voice-to-text has helped considerably. But I don't see a place in her life for an e-reader.
Now, when she was homeschooled, we belonged to a homeschool co-op, (non-denominational and non-political, because regular people sometimes need to homeschool too) and got our materials through them. (Supplemented by Amazon.) I suppose some of those documents could have been delivered via e-reader, but you couldn't scribble on them. We did use the computer for research, but lessons were still in physical lesson books, for a number of reasons.
So, yeah, although there are a few good examples in TFA, the general message that e-readers will make schools redundant sounds like one of those "year of the linux desktop" and "apple branded televisions" threads. Wishful thinking at best.
It's small for a TV but large for a monitor. You have to consider the marketplace. a 32" tv is the perfect size for a lonely fanboi in a studio apartment.
Agreed. It's in the same class as "the year of Linux on the desktop". Or the second coming. Or the end of the Mayan calendar.
I think what makes it news is that it captures the imagination, divided roughly into two groups:
The first group imagines a thin, trendy monitor for a substantial markup over other brands that do more, non-standard connectors, content from a sheltered garden to "preserve the user experience", and carefully timed miniscule improvements where users will be expected to dump their old TV and buy a new one on a yearly basis.
The second group expects pretty much the same, but they will consider it the greatest thing since Oxygen and will start camping at the Apple store three days in advance.
Um, gotta disagree. Microsoft is still the big evil corp that everyone loves to hate. It's not like Microsoft started giving away puppies with Windows phones last year. What Apple is proving is that there's room for more than one entity in that category.
...and then there were the incidents where the gatekeepers, the very people we're supposed to trust, were deliberately wrong, and it took crowsourcing to bring out the truth. That's the problem with gatekeepers. They get to decide what's news. In the instances where they're actually working to bring out the truth, it looks like a good idea. Less so when the gatekeepers are participating a hoax.
Parenthetically, I'm a little surprised that this didn't solve itself, and I suspect it would have eventually. There are those of us who deal with stock photos daily, recognize them, and can follow them to their source. That a news story is a hoax is news, in and of itself, and in lots of cases the reveal travels faster than the original hoax.
I've already answered these points in another thread, but let's summarize.
On point 1 iphone batteries made of unicorn horns and fairy dust, I call bullshit. Same ingredients, and in many cases same overseas manufacturer. The real reason they don't make it replaceable is that the Apple paradigm is to replace the device when they decide to come out with an incrementally better one. Making the device user serviceable in any way detracts from that paradigm.
On point 2, requirements change, or are not fully understood when the device was purchased. Or to put it simply, you could just take out the mini-SD card and put in one with more capacity. Except you can't, and I can. And -- bonus -- I don't have to pay the premium that Apple charges for the same damned memory.
On point 3, replacing a perfectly good device once a year is hugely wasteful. I only replace my phone when it breaks and can not be fixed. My last phone lasted three years and my current Droid X is going strong at 18 months. I find it an incredible conceit to fall for that kind of disposable paradigm and struggle to understand the fanboiism that spawns it. The earth is more polluted every day. How can you stand yourself? You're just giving more money to a company that has more disposable income than many countries.
Actually, you SHOULD ignore those kind of emails. Let the lowest-bidder incompetent outsourcing firm cause a production outage and make sure that all fingers point at them. This will get management's attention and ensure that proper change controls are put in place. Otherwise they're content to just let you work at all hours fixing the mistakes of the cheap labor.
Their perception is that all proper change controls are in place. The outsourcing company has weekly change control meetings, wherein the individual changes are presented. The problem is, the people who attend the meetings have no conception of how the machines and resources are interconnected, and so, for instance, they know our customer web farm has to stay up during regular working hours, but they'll take down the database feeding it, or the NAS feeding the database, or the router connecting them.
And this is considered *our* fault, because we didn't train them properly. We've argued until we're gasping for breath that we *do* train them, but as soon as they get a little training they qualify for a better paying job elsewhere. And those diagrams we drew? The visios showing the data flow and the individual components and what needs to be up for a certain resource to be working? What the hell happened to those?
"What is this diagrams you are talking about?"
So what it amounts to is that every single system change is a training opportunity, because the person doing it most probably has only been with the company a week or so and all previous documentation and tribal knowledge has somehow just disappeared.
I get your point, that we are protecting upper management from their own foolishness. But, I *like* being employed, especially in this economy, even though the job itself kinda sucks.
>...and I only upgrade at a maximum of once per year....
Once per year? Ye gods, the computer I'm typing this on was purchased at the turn of the century, replacing components as they failed. I replaced my phone when it failed 18 months ago and will keep this one until it fails and can't be repaired, despite there being a new model out this year with a dual core proc and better display. In fall 2010 I replaced the stock 8 gig SD card in my Droid X with a 16 gig card and may at some point put a 32 gig card in. If you did that... but you can't, can you? You have to replace the whole device. Besides, in fall 2010 you didn't even own the phone you have now, you owned the previous version, didn't you?
I also bought a higher capacity battery and separate charger, so I can swap batteries in the morning and keep one on the charger, and I have a battery I can use when the original finally goes stale. If you... Oh sorry, you can't do that either, can you?
iPad... god that's funny. My work issued me an ipad2. I played with it for a couple weeks, and gave it back. It's a toy. To do serious work you still need a laptop. As soon as that is no longer true, I'll consider a slate, and it probably won't be an ipad, for several reasons, not the least of which is I don't buy into this yearly forklift upgrade paradigm.
Look, it's not an upgrade if you replace your device. It's an upgrade if you put in more memory or a higher capacity battery. Replacing your device is replacing your device. Once per year? What kind of a fanboi would you have to be to replace a perfectly good device once a year? According to apple's own sales figures, over 73 million iphones have been sold. If everyone upgraded them once a year (some do more often, I have personal experience with this) the e-waste must be staggering.
So, you give away or resell your old model. And you really think Android users would not do that? And you really think it makes that much of a difference?
I take back, what I said, you don't have a log in your eye, you have an entire tree.
> One word "E-Waste". We have too much e-waste from disposable electronics that become useless within a few months and Android is one of the worst culprits for this.
There is actually some truth to this. There are inevitably going to be a lot of crap Android slates released, and I for one will not be buying a slate just because it has a green logo. I've already seen less technically sophisticated friends buying knock-offs and being disappointed in them, and you're right, it does lead to electronic waste, almost more than not having a replaceable battery, requiring you buy a new device to upgrade memory, and enticing you to replace your device whenever some tiny incremental improvement comes out. Cough.
> My opposition to the expansion of Android goes beyond being a user of Apple products at home.
"How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? "
Don't get me wrong, I like Android, carry a Droid X, and am in the market for an Android slate to replace my Winders laptop. But come on! Firstly, "the year of the" anything articles are so full of carp they could breathe underwater. (That's cute, isn't it? I give xkcd permission to use it.) Secondly, "the year of some version of Linux" has been predicted for decades and, you know, it's kinda like predicting the coming of Christ. Maybe it'll happen some day, but don't keep your bags packed.
But thirdly and most importantly, there is room in the marketplace for more than one OS. [1] Android and, iOS for instance, can coexist in the same marketplace just fine, thanks. Decisions will be made on capabilities, apps, features, and which logo is etched into the trendy metal backplate. Users have a choice, and choice is good.
[1] With the possible exception of Windows Phone 7.
Most of our IT is outsourced, which means most communication from IT (like, "we are pleased to be going to be patching these servers right now") occurs at whatever the daylight hours are in Burhanpur, which is not when it's daylight here. And so you have to monitor email essentially 24 hours a day to be able to catch stuff like this and call overseas to halt another unscheduled Production downtime. Yes, it's a huge pain in the butt (welcome to outsourcing), however, simply ignoring the messages (by turning off email) would result in all sorts of hilarious cock-ups. I'm surprised Volkswagen manages to make such a policy work.
> MS already provides some remote device management in Exchange, why would they need to buy RIM? Why not just expand what Exchange is capable of doing and make it exclusive to Windows Phone 7?
Well, because, then nobody would use the features. You really *really* think that Corporate America will just hand in their Blackberries (or their iPhones, or any non-Windows phone), pocket a Windows Phone 7 device, and be happy?
Let me see if I can explain this. The features of BES are valuable, and may be crucial in certain applications. But if BES goes away (as it did in my company) life manages to go on without Windows. A few years back, corporate IT offered several Windows Mobile phones and maybe one Blackberry model for the execs who demanded it. Now it's the other way around -- corporate offers one (1) Windows Mobile phone and a whole slew of BB, iOS and Android devices.
Only a very small number of people have any desire to own a Windows 7 phone. Go visit a consumer store -- they have a rack of iphones in different colors, two racks of Android devices, a couple of RIM devices, and one (1) Windows 7 phone over in the corner. I won't say "nobody wants it" because a few are being sold. But clearly very few people want it.
Therefore, tying new Exchange Enterprise capabilities exclusively to Windows Phone 7 will be the millstone that drags the new product down to disappear without a trace. We'll do without, before we have to carry one of those.
There are times when you can prop up a failing product by tying it to a good product. But if the failing product is at the top of the food chain, the product that actually has to be in people's pockets, then all the cool infrastructure in the world won't save it. Because the people who appreciate infrastructure are few, and the people who appreciate UI are many.
>>...which means that as a practical matter you'll be able to play music from the Metro interface but will always have to drop back into the KVM interface to get work done.
> The same goes for iPad and Android, except that you have to "drop back" to a different device in that case.
At the moment. Adobe has some ports coming out that promise to sever my last connection to the PC. And I'll let you in on a secret -- I don't own a tablet yet, of any kind. I own an Android phone because Microsoft makes crap phones and my company has lost the ability to keep BES up. (A tragedy, really, as I loved my blackberry.) My company issued me a tablet (iPad 2), I played with it for a couple weeks, and gave it back, because it wouldn't quite do everything I needed and I didn't want to carry two devices. The Android phone, a lot of reading, and occasional visits to the store let me track the state of technology and decide when it's really time to make the jump.
I'm not an iOS or Android fanboi. The interface is there, but the apps aren't, yet. Whereas, with Microsoft the apps are there but I truly believe there are powers within Microsoft that result in the interface never really materializing. (More on that later.)
My daughter jumped too early, got a Windows 7 "touch edition" slate because it'd run an app she needs that hadn't been ported to Android yet, and after three months it stays docked permanently and she hasn't pulled out the stylus in probably a month. What a waste.
> In fact, most people who're complaining about Win8 are complaining about that - that it's way too touch-centric, even on a desktop where it's not needed.
First I have a hard time believing that, as I think I read that you can configure it to come up in desktop, just as you can configure media center to not start on boot. Second, if true (Fred and Ethyl not having the smarts to figure out how to keep Metro from starting), does this really mean metro is a *good* interface, or just that it gets in the way? I suspect the latter.
> At this point I have to asked: have you actually used Win8 (leaked builds with Metro, or dev preview)? Or are you basing your conclusions on a few screenshots floating around?
I've had personal experience with Microsoft's other touch interfaces -- XP touch edition, Win7 touch edition, Mobile 5 6 and 7. Way too much experience in some cases. I really wanted a touch interface to work on a platform where most of our apps reside(d). My daughter is an artist, does computer related art, and as a result we were early adopters of many different touch and digitizing technologies. Pretty frustrating, for the most part. Windows just doesn't dig touch and does stylus very clumsily -- forcing the user to memorize non-ergonomic gestures that mimic the actions of a three button mouse. Microsoft never really "got" touch.
Windows 8 represents the easiest migration from the touch devices we have now, so I examined it very carefully. I read everything I could find, and attended demonstrations, watching videos of demos over and over to get a feel for what they were trying to do.
And my conclusion is that they're not serious. The required gestures, the limitations, having to dump Metro to do certain things... it's not fully cooked. And at the core, I don't think it will ever be, as the company's structure prevents it from developing something that isn't just a variation on something they already have. There are brilliant people working at Microsoft, but when a team creates a ground-breaking product that really *does* work, like Surface, the company will kill it if it can't be wrapped into Winders. And so, Surface, for instance, is relegated to TV prop status.
Let me summarize: The way the company is structured and managed, it is *impossible* for Microsoft to create a viable touch-only interface, because it's counter to the paradigm that is their root competency.
> Computers are just a commodity tool nowadays. Why should students learn or care how they work inside?
Because somebody has to.
> Do we require students to go through a paper factory before assigning them reading? Do they have to learn to harvest their own wood and craft their own pencils?
You're talking to the wrong person. My daughter goes to art school, and she's required to make a lot of her own materials and some of her tools, even though you can buy the stuff off the shelf. The idea is to understand where the materials come from and what they consist of, not just how to manipulate them.
So, I wouldn't necessarily expect someone to have to make their own writing implements in a writing course, which is just putting words together and isn't bound tightly to the implement, but I could see it for a calligraphy course or an art course. (Actually have seen that -- sharpening your own quills, for instance, and even mixing your own ink.)
Understanding what happens behind the curtain is advantageous in a number of ways, not all of which are obvious.
Fill the lab with Winders or fruit and students will tend to skid to a halt at a "power user" level of proficiency. Fill it with uninstalled white box PCs and Linux CDs, and they will learn many valuable things in the process of creating a usable network. Sure, they may never again need to do a lot of that stuff, but at least they will understand why it's necessary.
"You know that teacher we hated in the high school computer course? I just realized I learned something that year that prevented a corporate meltdown today."
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Sort of agree, although I wouldn't have put it quite that way. The reason they call anything "Windows 7" is that it *has* to be called Windows, as Windows is Microsoft's core competency [1] and pretty much the only mindshare they have left. (They couldn't very well call it "xbox phone". Or maybe they could...)
My understanding with Windows 8 is that it'll be called Windows 8 everywhere, desktop, laptop, slate, and phone. So a tablet will run "Windows 8" and the phone will also run "Windows 8". And due to the policy of code reuse, [2] under the covers it might actually be the same DLLs on every platform. From a corporate standpoint, this meets the managerial line item of "windows everywhere". It'd go bad for them if 8 turned out to be another Vista.
But going along with the subject line, I'd answer to Jobs, were he available, "Putting an "e" in front of everything got old in the nineties. Putting an "i" in front of everything is getting old now." As we're speaking of names, you understand.
[1] I heard that! No laughter back there.
[2] Ah, that brings back memories. "The application has encountered a problem and needs to close" popups... on my PHONE. That was precious.
Maybe this is some new digital version of tourette syndrome?
This is exactly the type of press release that you get from movie producers after a very expensive dud. The idea is to direct attention from the crappiness of the product and to, well, anything else. The genre is dead. They didn't cast leads with enough star power. Improper marketing. Just anything other than the hard fact that they produced a product that nobody wanted. (Extra points for accusing the consumer of not being sophisticated enough to "get it".)
Charlie appears to think that following the lead of the absolute most popular smartphone on the planet (locking down the hardware and limiting what freedom the carriers had with the product) is what caused his product to place in the rear of the pack.
The problem with this picture is that (a) Microsoft was last to market with a viable touch screen smartphone, and (b) previous versions of Windows Mobile sucked so violently that it harmed the brand. And so, Windows Phone 7 had a double uphill battle -- trying to enter a market long crowded with reasonably decent products, and trying to shed the bad taste in consumer's mouths from the debacle that was Windows Mobile 6. And 5. That they also pissed off their vendors probably didn't help, but it was not the whole of the problem.
And by the way, Kindel, Windows Phone 7 is *not* "superior", unless you mean, to Windows Mobile 6, and I don't think you do. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.
(I have to say, you're more polite that I would have been.)
Hear that Charlie? It was the IMPLEMENTATION that sucked, not your relationship with the carriers. The hilarious thing is not meeting enterprise standards, which was pretty much Microsoft's only market for phones in the past, due to the perception (incorrect, as it turns out,) that there would be an IT advantage to having Windows on portable devices.
From Kindel's blog: "Remember that end users just do what they are told (by advertising and RSPs). "
Yeah? Really? Screw you, Charlie, and all the devices you flogged. Go on, TELL me to buy a Windows phone. Go on. I'm listening. What? Louder. Ok, I hear you. I understand the instruction. The answer is NO.
Arrgh!
There is some truth to that, but it's also the case that we don't really know if Microsoft has actually learned a lesson or whether the current Windows Mobile is a fluke. Moreover, there's how the phone behaves in the store, and how it behaves when you start digging into it, and here again Microsoft has a reputation to overcome.
And, there's still enough indication that Management believes "they'll buy it 'cause it's Windows and LIKE it" (from the article: "end users just do what they are told") type of hubris that we tend to be very cautious consumers. Due to, you know, buying it in the past, and *not* liking it.
And finally, it's too late. Microsoft was last to market with a phone that had a reasonably touch-friendly interface.
That was unnecessary. Funny, but unnecessary. I don't begrudge Microsoft's attempt to sell phones. I just would never ever consider owning another one (having struggled with and finally rejected [1] my company-issued Winders phone).
[1] "flung" would be a better term, I guess.
Speaking as the dad of a kid homeschooled through 8th grade, (now in her final year of art school and doing fine) I can't see where this will make a great deal of difference. You still need direct, engaged involvement from a knowledgeable adult (which is one of the reasons we pulled her out of school initially -- "direct" "engaged" "knowledgeable" pick two...) and a mere e-reader isn't going to make much difference. It's a nice fantasy to think that you can hand a kid a device and they'll get a quality education on their own while you catch up on Jersey Shore, but it really doesn't work like that.
TFA's example of involvement (teaching a kid to read with a newspaper and sharpie) is a good one (I've used it) but doesn't adapt that well to an e-reader. (You ruin more screens that way...) What *has* helped is a laptop with one of the better text readers installed. Daughter could highlight the text and hear the word read to her.
Moreover... if you don't homeschool your kid, you may not understand this... A lot of homeschooled kids are home because of various afflictions that the school doesn't handle well. In my daughter's case, it's severe dyslexia, which the local district chooses not to recognize as an affliction. (The school independently diagnosed her as ADD and prescribed Ritalin, completely ignoring the thick report I had sent them from a summer of testing and diagnosis from professionals.) A kid with special needs may not be in a position to do a lot of reading. I did all her reading for her in the early days, and continued to read to her even after she got the computer to talk to her. (Parenthetically, her early reliance on computers as a tool has resulted in a high amount of technical ability in that area. She now wears a T-shirt at school that says "no, I won't fix your computer".)
In her senior year of high school, daughter still reads at a 3rd grade level, and that is probably the best she'll ever do. You can see where she wouldn't look forward to a Nook for Christmas. Nor would it do that much good for her. Mind you, she copes with devices -- she has special dispensation to carry her cell phone in class, use it for audio and video recordings and to photograph the whiteboard. (I'm thinking about writing a paper about it.) She uses her laptop in the resource room to do homework (it has all her tools on it) and has gotten very adept at sharing content between her phone, laptop, desktop at home, and members of her team for group assignments. The recent breakthroughs in affordable (or even free) text-to-voice and voice-to-text has helped considerably. But I don't see a place in her life for an e-reader.
Now, when she was homeschooled, we belonged to a homeschool co-op, (non-denominational and non-political, because regular people sometimes need to homeschool too) and got our materials through them. (Supplemented by Amazon.) I suppose some of those documents could have been delivered via e-reader, but you couldn't scribble on them. We did use the computer for research, but lessons were still in physical lesson books, for a number of reasons.
So, yeah, although there are a few good examples in TFA, the general message that e-readers will make schools redundant sounds like one of those "year of the linux desktop" and "apple branded televisions" threads. Wishful thinking at best.
Bingo.
It's small for a TV but large for a monitor. You have to consider the marketplace. a 32" tv is the perfect size for a lonely fanboi in a studio apartment.
Agreed. It's in the same class as "the year of Linux on the desktop". Or the second coming. Or the end of the Mayan calendar.
I think what makes it news is that it captures the imagination, divided roughly into two groups:
The first group imagines a thin, trendy monitor for a substantial markup over other brands that do more, non-standard connectors, content from a sheltered garden to "preserve the user experience", and carefully timed miniscule improvements where users will be expected to dump their old TV and buy a new one on a yearly basis.
The second group expects pretty much the same, but they will consider it the greatest thing since Oxygen and will start camping at the Apple store three days in advance.
Um, gotta disagree. Microsoft is still the big evil corp that everyone loves to hate. It's not like Microsoft started giving away puppies with Windows phones last year. What Apple is proving is that there's room for more than one entity in that category.
It's not April yet. Why is this even an article?
Parenthetically, I'm a little surprised that this didn't solve itself, and I suspect it would have eventually. There are those of us who deal with stock photos daily, recognize them, and can follow them to their source. That a news story is a hoax is news, in and of itself, and in lots of cases the reveal travels faster than the original hoax.
I've already answered these points in another thread, but let's summarize.
On point 1 iphone batteries made of unicorn horns and fairy dust, I call bullshit. Same ingredients, and in many cases same overseas manufacturer. The real reason they don't make it replaceable is that the Apple paradigm is to replace the device when they decide to come out with an incrementally better one. Making the device user serviceable in any way detracts from that paradigm.
On point 2, requirements change, or are not fully understood when the device was purchased. Or to put it simply, you could just take out the mini-SD card and put in one with more capacity. Except you can't, and I can. And -- bonus -- I don't have to pay the premium that Apple charges for the same damned memory.
On point 3, replacing a perfectly good device once a year is hugely wasteful. I only replace my phone when it breaks and can not be fixed. My last phone lasted three years and my current Droid X is going strong at 18 months. I find it an incredible conceit to fall for that kind of disposable paradigm and struggle to understand the fanboiism that spawns it. The earth is more polluted every day. How can you stand yourself? You're just giving more money to a company that has more disposable income than many countries.
Actually, you SHOULD ignore those kind of emails. Let the lowest-bidder incompetent outsourcing firm cause a production outage and make sure that all fingers point at them. This will get management's attention and ensure that proper change controls are put in place. Otherwise they're content to just let you work at all hours fixing the mistakes of the cheap labor.
Their perception is that all proper change controls are in place. The outsourcing company has weekly change control meetings, wherein the individual changes are presented. The problem is, the people who attend the meetings have no conception of how the machines and resources are interconnected, and so, for instance, they know our customer web farm has to stay up during regular working hours, but they'll take down the database feeding it, or the NAS feeding the database, or the router connecting them.
And this is considered *our* fault, because we didn't train them properly. We've argued until we're gasping for breath that we *do* train them, but as soon as they get a little training they qualify for a better paying job elsewhere. And those diagrams we drew? The visios showing the data flow and the individual components and what needs to be up for a certain resource to be working? What the hell happened to those?
"What is this diagrams you are talking about?"
So what it amounts to is that every single system change is a training opportunity, because the person doing it most probably has only been with the company a week or so and all previous documentation and tribal knowledge has somehow just disappeared.
I get your point, that we are protecting upper management from their own foolishness. But, I *like* being employed, especially in this economy, even though the job itself kinda sucks.
> ...and I only upgrade at a maximum of once per year....
Once per year? Ye gods, the computer I'm typing this on was purchased at the turn of the century, replacing components as they failed. I replaced my phone when it failed 18 months ago and will keep this one until it fails and can't be repaired, despite there being a new model out this year with a dual core proc and better display. In fall 2010 I replaced the stock 8 gig SD card in my Droid X with a 16 gig card and may at some point put a 32 gig card in. If you did that... but you can't, can you? You have to replace the whole device. Besides, in fall 2010 you didn't even own the phone you have now, you owned the previous version, didn't you?
I also bought a higher capacity battery and separate charger, so I can swap batteries in the morning and keep one on the charger, and I have a battery I can use when the original finally goes stale. If you... Oh sorry, you can't do that either, can you?
iPad... god that's funny. My work issued me an ipad2. I played with it for a couple weeks, and gave it back. It's a toy. To do serious work you still need a laptop. As soon as that is no longer true, I'll consider a slate, and it probably won't be an ipad, for several reasons, not the least of which is I don't buy into this yearly forklift upgrade paradigm.
Look, it's not an upgrade if you replace your device. It's an upgrade if you put in more memory or a higher capacity battery. Replacing your device is replacing your device. Once per year? What kind of a fanboi would you have to be to replace a perfectly good device once a year? According to apple's own sales figures, over 73 million iphones have been sold. If everyone upgraded them once a year (some do more often, I have personal experience with this) the e-waste must be staggering.
And, of course, it is staggering.
So, you give away or resell your old model. And you really think Android users would not do that? And you really think it makes that much of a difference?
I take back, what I said, you don't have a log in your eye, you have an entire tree.
> One word "E-Waste". We have too much e-waste from disposable electronics that become useless within a few months and Android is one of the worst culprits for this.
There is actually some truth to this. There are inevitably going to be a lot of crap Android slates released, and I for one will not be buying a slate just because it has a green logo. I've already seen less technically sophisticated friends buying knock-offs and being disappointed in them, and you're right, it does lead to electronic waste, almost more than not having a replaceable battery, requiring you buy a new device to upgrade memory, and enticing you to replace your device whenever some tiny incremental improvement comes out. Cough.
> My opposition to the expansion of Android goes beyond being a user of Apple products at home.
"How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? "
Just sayin'
Don't get me wrong, I like Android, carry a Droid X, and am in the market for an Android slate to replace my Winders laptop. But come on! Firstly, "the year of the" anything articles are so full of carp they could breathe underwater. (That's cute, isn't it? I give xkcd permission to use it.) Secondly, "the year of some version of Linux" has been predicted for decades and, you know, it's kinda like predicting the coming of Christ. Maybe it'll happen some day, but don't keep your bags packed.
But thirdly and most importantly, there is room in the marketplace for more than one OS. [1] Android and, iOS for instance, can coexist in the same marketplace just fine, thanks. Decisions will be made on capabilities, apps, features, and which logo is etched into the trendy metal backplate. Users have a choice, and choice is good.
[1] With the possible exception of Windows Phone 7.
Most of our IT is outsourced, which means most communication from IT (like, "we are pleased to be going to be patching these servers right now") occurs at whatever the daylight hours are in Burhanpur, which is not when it's daylight here. And so you have to monitor email essentially 24 hours a day to be able to catch stuff like this and call overseas to halt another unscheduled Production downtime. Yes, it's a huge pain in the butt (welcome to outsourcing), however, simply ignoring the messages (by turning off email) would result in all sorts of hilarious cock-ups. I'm surprised Volkswagen manages to make such a policy work.
> MS already provides some remote device management in Exchange, why would they need to buy RIM? Why not just expand what Exchange is capable of doing and make it exclusive to Windows Phone 7?
Well, because, then nobody would use the features. You really *really* think that Corporate America will just hand in their Blackberries (or their iPhones, or any non-Windows phone), pocket a Windows Phone 7 device, and be happy?
Let me see if I can explain this. The features of BES are valuable, and may be crucial in certain applications. But if BES goes away (as it did in my company) life manages to go on without Windows. A few years back, corporate IT offered several Windows Mobile phones and maybe one Blackberry model for the execs who demanded it. Now it's the other way around -- corporate offers one (1) Windows Mobile phone and a whole slew of BB, iOS and Android devices.
Only a very small number of people have any desire to own a Windows 7 phone. Go visit a consumer store -- they have a rack of iphones in different colors, two racks of Android devices, a couple of RIM devices, and one (1) Windows 7 phone over in the corner. I won't say "nobody wants it" because a few are being sold. But clearly very few people want it.
Therefore, tying new Exchange Enterprise capabilities exclusively to Windows Phone 7 will be the millstone that drags the new product down to disappear without a trace. We'll do without, before we have to carry one of those.
There are times when you can prop up a failing product by tying it to a good product. But if the failing product is at the top of the food chain, the product that actually has to be in people's pockets, then all the cool infrastructure in the world won't save it. Because the people who appreciate infrastructure are few, and the people who appreciate UI are many.
>> ...which means that as a practical matter you'll be able to play music from the Metro interface but will always have to drop back into the KVM interface to get work done.
> The same goes for iPad and Android, except that you have to "drop back" to a different device in that case.
At the moment. Adobe has some ports coming out that promise to sever my last connection to the PC. And I'll let you in on a secret -- I don't own a tablet yet, of any kind. I own an Android phone because Microsoft makes crap phones and my company has lost the ability to keep BES up. (A tragedy, really, as I loved my blackberry.) My company issued me a tablet (iPad 2), I played with it for a couple weeks, and gave it back, because it wouldn't quite do everything I needed and I didn't want to carry two devices. The Android phone, a lot of reading, and occasional visits to the store let me track the state of technology and decide when it's really time to make the jump.
I'm not an iOS or Android fanboi. The interface is there, but the apps aren't, yet. Whereas, with Microsoft the apps are there but I truly believe there are powers within Microsoft that result in the interface never really materializing. (More on that later.)
My daughter jumped too early, got a Windows 7 "touch edition" slate because it'd run an app she needs that hadn't been ported to Android yet, and after three months it stays docked permanently and she hasn't pulled out the stylus in probably a month. What a waste.
> In fact, most people who're complaining about Win8 are complaining about that - that it's way too touch-centric, even on a desktop where it's not needed.
First I have a hard time believing that, as I think I read that you can configure it to come up in desktop, just as you can configure media center to not start on boot. Second, if true (Fred and Ethyl not having the smarts to figure out how to keep Metro from starting), does this really mean metro is a *good* interface, or just that it gets in the way? I suspect the latter.
> At this point I have to asked: have you actually used Win8 (leaked builds with Metro, or dev preview)? Or are you basing your conclusions on a few screenshots floating around?
I've had personal experience with Microsoft's other touch interfaces -- XP touch edition, Win7 touch edition, Mobile 5 6 and 7. Way too much experience in some cases. I really wanted a touch interface to work on a platform where most of our apps reside(d). My daughter is an artist, does computer related art, and as a result we were early adopters of many different touch and digitizing technologies. Pretty frustrating, for the most part. Windows just doesn't dig touch and does stylus very clumsily -- forcing the user to memorize non-ergonomic gestures that mimic the actions of a three button mouse. Microsoft never really "got" touch.
Windows 8 represents the easiest migration from the touch devices we have now, so I examined it very carefully. I read everything I could find, and attended demonstrations, watching videos of demos over and over to get a feel for what they were trying to do.
And my conclusion is that they're not serious. The required gestures, the limitations, having to dump Metro to do certain things ... it's not fully cooked. And at the core, I don't think it will ever be, as the company's structure prevents it from developing something that isn't just a variation on something they already have. There are brilliant people working at Microsoft, but when a team creates a ground-breaking product that really *does* work, like Surface, the company will kill it if it can't be wrapped into Winders. And so, Surface, for instance, is relegated to TV prop status.
Let me summarize: The way the company is structured and managed, it is *impossible* for Microsoft to create a viable touch-only interface, because it's counter to the paradigm that is their root competency.
In the mean time, the other vendors are well
> just a select few who plan on going into
> Computers are just a commodity tool nowadays. Why should students learn or care how they work inside?
Because somebody has to.
> Do we require students to go through a paper factory before assigning them reading? Do they have to learn to harvest their own wood and craft their own pencils?
You're talking to the wrong person. My daughter goes to art school, and she's required to make a lot of her own materials and some of her tools, even though you can buy the stuff off the shelf. The idea is to understand where the materials come from and what they consist of, not just how to manipulate them.
So, I wouldn't necessarily expect someone to have to make their own writing implements in a writing course, which is just putting words together and isn't bound tightly to the implement, but I could see it for a calligraphy course or an art course. (Actually have seen that -- sharpening your own quills, for instance, and even mixing your own ink.)
Understanding what happens behind the curtain is advantageous in a number of ways, not all of which are obvious.
Fill the lab with Winders or fruit and students will tend to skid to a halt at a "power user" level of proficiency. Fill it with uninstalled white box PCs and Linux CDs, and they will learn many valuable things in the process of creating a usable network. Sure, they may never again need to do a lot of that stuff, but at least they will understand why it's necessary.
"You know that teacher we hated in the high school computer course? I just realized I learned something that year that prevented a corporate meltdown today."