> I suspect the next step is location based taxes. For example parking a car within 500 feet of a church is free, yet anyone whom parks within 500 feet of an adult video stores will have their visit documented on a public web site and charged a $50 parking fee. Or anyone whom doesn't attend / park nearby a church every week will pay a higher tax "Y".
This is Oregon we're talking about. They're more likely to tax church parking.
That is not up to the OS manufacturer to decide. In my case, spending a lot of time rendering video and manipulating raw camera images, the cpu and memory footprint of all processes unnecessary to that task is critical. Even when I'm not doing that, there are times when the OS can't seem to get out of it's own way -- right click on an icon, wait wait wait for some process to get swapped into memory and finally the menu comes up.
Again, it comes down to what the PC is *for*. If you bought your PC to play with cool menu effects, your money might have been better spent with a lava lamp or a Tesla Plasma Ball.
Then... why is it that the first thing people turn off if they're having performance problems are the special effects? Did you read the other article in this thread about the implementation of Aero pixel shading vs Mac pixel shading, and how one works on legacy video cards and the other needs very high end cards to render at non-glacial speeds? (Leaving to the student to guess which is which.) Apple's latest operating system gives acceptable performance on 2001 hardware, demonstrating that it can actually be done.
I do have a leather chair at home. It has a height adjustment and that's it. It's fairly comfortable.
At work I have one of those newfangled chairs with four levers sticking out the bottom and a two buttons on each handrest (height and tilt) and a dial for lumbar and a dial for back position and a dial for armrest width. I've spent all day trying to figure out how to adjust it, and it still makes my back hurt. For instance, for as ergonomic as it purports to be, it won't adjust high enough to be comfortable. Even with it all the way up I fell like I'm sitting in a subcompact. I've had the company ergo specialist come by and adjust it and it still makes my back hurt. I'm thinking of bringing in my simple, one-adjustment chair from home.
No, you don't have to sit on a wooden stool, and you don't have to type TROFF into a command line. We've already discussed that. But at some point you reach a level where all the really useful features have already been implemented, and trying to make the next version cooler just uses up resources to no good purpose. I had to upgrade from ME to XP because ME clearly sucked. XP is good enough. Years later, XP is still good enough. Can't I just get some work done?
If your job is secure, an economic downturn is the time to look for deals. If you buy at maximum bubble, you're almost certainly paying too much.
For instance, I ride a Harley. (I actually ride mine, I don't just keep it under wraps in the garage and occasionally pose with it.) During the dot com bubble, Harleys were going for thousands over MSRP because there was a lot of new disposable income and it was considered by some to be a status symbol. When the dot coms detonated in 2001, there were suddenly a lot of nearly-new bikes on the market for thousands *less* than MSRP. If you were going to buy a bike, that would have been the time.
The same is pretty much true now. I'm told the local shops are crammed with 2008 models they can't move, and they aren't taking in any more on consignment. If you're in the market, why wait until prices go up?
I agree with you -- now is not the time to buy purchases you can't afford. Your first priority is to pay down debt and concentrate on the essentials. That said, we bought a widescreen TV in November. Why? Because our old one had crapped out and couldn't be fixed (we were victims of the Sony Grand Wega fiasco) and we lucked into a deal that got us a replacement at 1/4 retail (about 1/3 street) that would not be repeated. So we gritted our teeth, ate soup for a couple weeks, and paid cash. On the surface it may sound like mindless consumerism, but I saved more than $1K over what it would have cost me had I waited until the economy improved.
Look at it another way: Say the economy is going great guns, and you decide it's time to buy that Lexus. THEN the economy crashes. You're left with iffy job prospects AND a car you paid way to much for. That you can't sell.
We had an abnormal amount of snow in the two weeks before Christmas, and I've read that this winter has been generally harsher across the nation. Perhaps more people decided not to brave the crowds.
Another factor might be the general belt-tightening this season due to the economic downturn. For a given product, it's highly probable that Amazon has it cheaper than the local Best Buy, or has a refurbished or used unit for less. (But mind the shipping costs!)
And finally, perhaps we've reached some sort of critial mass, where a significant number of shoppers have switched permanently to online shopping (as opposed to the fad it was during boom.dot.bust).
This statistic makes me hopeful, because it shows that perhaps people haven't stopped spending, they're just doing it more wisely.
In some ways, the OSX interface is a little too cute. I could do without apps on the task bar jumping up and down for attention.
But for the most part, even though the desktop is doing a lot of things, there is an understated look to the interface that doesn't interfere with what you're trying to do. The desktop isn't saying "ME ME ME!" (except perhaps for those jumping icons)
Most importantly, we're running OSX 10.5 on a low end G4 with only a gig and a half of memory and a video card two generations behind the one in my PC, and even with all those shading and animation effects, there appears to be little impact on the overall performance of the machine.
For me at least, OSX loses a point for a few cases of unnecessary cuteness, but more than compensates by providing a satisfying experience on low-end hardware, without me having to search for ways to turn off the special effects.
That said, we're not a "mac family" for other reasons. Our single Mac is a used box on which we run Garage Band, Photoshop and iTunes. But to overuse the car analogy elsewhere in this thread, Vista reminds me of a Honda Civic in full Riceboi regalia, including garish vinyl decals and fake racing components which look and sound cool but actually degrade performance, and the Mac has always felt more like a low-end Lexus -- not something to turn heads at the stoplight, but thoughtfully designed, well crafted and reliable. Parenthetically, I put up with the interface on the ipod touch because all that unnecessary cuteness doesn't appear to interfere with the performance of the device.
But this isn't a Mac vs Windows thread. The point is, there's a difference between thoughtfully designed desktop features that improve the workflow, and garish, resource-ravenous eye candy that exist to push the sale more than to make the user more productive. And when you have to upgrade perfectly good hardware just to use the new desktop, it's time to take a hard look at what problem you're actually trying to solve. Are you upgrading just because it's a New Thing, or do you really think animated icons and 3d window stacks will increase your work output more than performance impact will decrease it?
I like that. But going with that analogy, it would be OEM only unless you Know Someone. Since it will be offered for sale, it seems to me more like a service pack that we're expected to pay an additional $339.99 for. Wow, to the marketeers it must seem like printing money.
> The software plus services approach of the next office wave with the webapp versions of word, etc isn't a big enough paradigm shift for you?
Gee, that takes me back. I remember back in the nineties when ASP meant Application Service Provider. I haven't thought about SaaS in probably a decade.
Hmm? Oh, just reminiscing. To answer your question, no.
I currently have nine machines powered up at home, two Linux servers (with scsi raid) one G4 Mac (for daughter's homework) one Ubuntu desktop (mine), one Linspire laptop (daughter's) two XP laptops, one XP workstation, and the curse of my existence, a Windows Media Center. I use Windows where and when I have to, because I don't believe in rejecting an application just because I don't happen to like the OS under which it runs. But I don't have to like it. And Microsoft can have my XP install disks when they pry them from my cold, dead hands.
My company offers the 3G iphone as a company phone. I turned it down. The interface is ultra-slick, but the phone won't reliably make calls. But that is another story, covered elsewhere.
Thaaaaat's what this thread needed -- a car analogy.
Really? I paint the walls of my house to avoid wear and tear on the wood beneath. I wash my car (or, actually, the car wash machine washes it) to avoid wear and tear on the paint which is there to protect the metal beneath. Metallic unpainted cars are impractical because the the metal doesn't stand up to the elements. Except if it's stainless steel, and then you have a DeLorean, which was considered very stylish in it's day, despite (or because of?) it's uncomplicated, unadorned appearance.
Look at higher end cars -- the kind businesspeople drive -- what do you see? Clean, uncomplicated lines in subdued colors. What do car-geeks and ricebois drive? Garish, brightly colored, highly customized cars with lots of decals and impractical gadgets.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not convinced that the non-geek experience is about eye candy.
Who amongst non-geeks really cares what the desktop looks like? Am I the only one who thinks that perhaps we've lost sight of what an operating system is for? I really don't expect my desktop to look and operate like Myst. I expect an OS to be a robust, secure, program loader and a robust, cohesive collection of resources that applications use. Yes, I know I used "robust" twice. It's important.
The desktop is a way to start and manipulate applications. It is not an end in itself. It shouldn't suck the life out of the machine for the sake of pretty graphics.
And this Linux desktop vs Windows desktop thing totally misses the point. Yes, I played with Ubuntu's cute rubber windows for awhile, and then I turned all those features the hell off. What a waste of resources.
I think it comes down to why one buys a computer in the first place. Is it to do actual work, or to play with the pretty jellyfish? I think that if pressed, most people who make their living on computers would admit that all the cuteness is at best a distraction.
I mean, from a technical standpoint, the design and implementation of cutting-edge desktop presentation is interesting, don't get me wrong. But on a day to day basis, would you really sacrifice the majority of your computer resources just for presentation? Amongst other things, that doesn't seem very Green to me.
And don't even start with "let's all go back to the command line". Office 2000 was a huge increase in efficiency over vi/troff and I'm never going to go back. But Office 2007 is just Office, only annoying. We've reached a point of diminishing returns. Until there's a significant Xerox-PARC-grade paradigm shift, we're just rearranging the furniture. And each remodel significantly increases clutter and expense.
Good point. That gets them through the first weekend (to use a film metaphor). And the lack of add-ons, if true, will help because it'll make the OS seem faster out of the box. There will be a lot of marketing and social engineering tweaks to make Windows 7 successful, which means, to me, that we need to wait for real-world reports before making a decision. There is more reason than ever to be cautious of Release Mania.
But hmm...
> 3) Not as much bloat is supposed to be bundled. If you want all the default MS software, you'll go to Windows Live to grab it. Bloat being: Media Player, the Movie Maker, Picture Gallery, etc. You'll get IE (cause you'll need something provided to go grab the stuff) and you'll get a pretty plain OS otherwise. I'm a huge fan of that.
As am I. This will help on new PC purchases, but not on upgrades, because presumably all that stuff already exists on the previous Vista install. It will be interesting to see what people's experiences are.
Yes, but, do you really think that's what's going to happen? Do you think Microsoft is going to do the right thing and rearchitect major parts of Vista for Windows 7? Even if they wanted to replace significant parts of the code base, they simply don't have the time.
I expect somewhat more than "lipstick on a pig", but I don't expect much more than what we got with XP SP1 -- lots of bug fixes and a few new features. Keep in mind that "hope" and "expect" are two very different things. Many of us would like to see Windows 7 be a significant re-write. But realistically, I can't see how that could happen.
Parenthetically, why are we all crouched over our keyboards on a Sunday morning?
I agree, but, well, lower requirements is a big one. I remember an article in/. that pontificated that "Vista runs fine on any processor 3 Ghz and above" which is a bar that none of my computers can reach. Some are limited by architecture to 2 Gbytes ram, another buzzkill. (And why should I buy bleeding edge hardware -- in this economy -- to run Vista when XP runs fine?) If Windows 7 (any version) can run on netbook-level hardware, it actually has a chance in hell of replacing some of my XP installations. [1]
And yet... and yet, when Vista was still in beta, we heard reports that it was faster than XP, and look how that turned out. So we really can't go by the beta, we have to wait for reports about the finished product. And then we find out if Microsoft really has made an effort to make the codebase more efficient, or if their real plan was to wait two more years for the hardware to catch up with Windows' gargantuan requirements.
Before someone brings it up, I'm aware that much of Vista's performance issue was the way DRM was implemented. But since DRM is part and parcel with the operating system, it counts. It's the total end to end performance that makes the user experience, so it's not legitimate to say "the new OS really is much faster than the previous release, all those pauses and long execution times you're seeing is because the OS has to check every bit to make sure you haven't stolen something".
Assuming, of course, there is some new feature I absolutely have to have. I didn't see any in Vista. Yes, it had a snazzy new interface. But since I turned off XP's snazzy new interface and all the irritating special effects when I installed it, why would I base a buying decision on yet another snazzy new interface I have to turn off?
I don't see why this is surprising. This is just Windows Vista service pack 3 after all. Naturally the beta is going to be more stable than the initial Vista beta.
You can't be serious. This is Hollywood -- they're as likely to take whatever the current administration wants and do the exact opposite. They make politically charged movies that even moviegoers don't care to see. That the producers decided to soft-pedal the negative portrayal of some dead President because of the views of a current administration of the same political party seems extremely unlikely. At least, this year. After January, who knows.
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Has anyone asked what the cost will be to implement and maintain, vs the current gas tax?
> I suspect the next step is location based taxes. For example parking a car within 500 feet of a church is free, yet anyone whom parks within 500 feet of an adult video stores will have their visit documented on a public web site and charged a $50 parking fee. Or anyone whom doesn't attend / park nearby a church every week will pay a higher tax "Y".
This is Oregon we're talking about. They're more likely to tax church parking.
That is not up to the OS manufacturer to decide. In my case, spending a lot of time rendering video and manipulating raw camera images, the cpu and memory footprint of all processes unnecessary to that task is critical. Even when I'm not doing that, there are times when the OS can't seem to get out of it's own way -- right click on an icon, wait wait wait for some process to get swapped into memory and finally the menu comes up.
Again, it comes down to what the PC is *for*. If you bought your PC to play with cool menu effects, your money might have been better spent with a lava lamp or a Tesla Plasma Ball.
That's an interesting solution. How well would it work as a media center?
Then... why is it that the first thing people turn off if they're having performance problems are the special effects? Did you read the other article in this thread about the implementation of Aero pixel shading vs Mac pixel shading, and how one works on legacy video cards and the other needs very high end cards to render at non-glacial speeds? (Leaving to the student to guess which is which.) Apple's latest operating system gives acceptable performance on 2001 hardware, demonstrating that it can actually be done.
I do have a leather chair at home. It has a height adjustment and that's it. It's fairly comfortable.
At work I have one of those newfangled chairs with four levers sticking out the bottom and a two buttons on each handrest (height and tilt) and a dial for lumbar and a dial for back position and a dial for armrest width. I've spent all day trying to figure out how to adjust it, and it still makes my back hurt. For instance, for as ergonomic as it purports to be, it won't adjust high enough to be comfortable. Even with it all the way up I fell like I'm sitting in a subcompact. I've had the company ergo specialist come by and adjust it and it still makes my back hurt. I'm thinking of bringing in my simple, one-adjustment chair from home.
No, you don't have to sit on a wooden stool, and you don't have to type TROFF into a command line. We've already discussed that. But at some point you reach a level where all the really useful features have already been implemented, and trying to make the next version cooler just uses up resources to no good purpose. I had to upgrade from ME to XP because ME clearly sucked. XP is good enough. Years later, XP is still good enough. Can't I just get some work done?
If your job is secure, an economic downturn is the time to look for deals. If you buy at maximum bubble, you're almost certainly paying too much.
For instance, I ride a Harley. (I actually ride mine, I don't just keep it under wraps in the garage and occasionally pose with it.) During the dot com bubble, Harleys were going for thousands over MSRP because there was a lot of new disposable income and it was considered by some to be a status symbol. When the dot coms detonated in 2001, there were suddenly a lot of nearly-new bikes on the market for thousands *less* than MSRP. If you were going to buy a bike, that would have been the time.
The same is pretty much true now. I'm told the local shops are crammed with 2008 models they can't move, and they aren't taking in any more on consignment. If you're in the market, why wait until prices go up?
I agree with you -- now is not the time to buy purchases you can't afford. Your first priority is to pay down debt and concentrate on the essentials. That said, we bought a widescreen TV in November. Why? Because our old one had crapped out and couldn't be fixed (we were victims of the Sony Grand Wega fiasco) and we lucked into a deal that got us a replacement at 1/4 retail (about 1/3 street) that would not be repeated. So we gritted our teeth, ate soup for a couple weeks, and paid cash. On the surface it may sound like mindless consumerism, but I saved more than $1K over what it would have cost me had I waited until the economy improved.
Look at it another way: Say the economy is going great guns, and you decide it's time to buy that Lexus. THEN the economy crashes. You're left with iffy job prospects AND a car you paid way to much for. That you can't sell.
We had an abnormal amount of snow in the two weeks before Christmas, and I've read that this winter has been generally harsher across the nation. Perhaps more people decided not to brave the crowds.
Another factor might be the general belt-tightening this season due to the economic downturn. For a given product, it's highly probable that Amazon has it cheaper than the local Best Buy, or has a refurbished or used unit for less. (But mind the shipping costs!)
And finally, perhaps we've reached some sort of critial mass, where a significant number of shoppers have switched permanently to online shopping (as opposed to the fad it was during boom.dot.bust).
This statistic makes me hopeful, because it shows that perhaps people haven't stopped spending, they're just doing it more wisely.
Yes, but, there is a difference between "sleek and pretty" and "busy and complicated". In fact, they're pretty much opposites.
Well, look on the bright side. Maybe when it's open source, someone will write a reasonable user interface.
In some ways, the OSX interface is a little too cute. I could do without apps on the task bar jumping up and down for attention.
But for the most part, even though the desktop is doing a lot of things, there is an understated look to the interface that doesn't interfere with what you're trying to do. The desktop isn't saying "ME ME ME!" (except perhaps for those jumping icons)
Most importantly, we're running OSX 10.5 on a low end G4 with only a gig and a half of memory and a video card two generations behind the one in my PC, and even with all those shading and animation effects, there appears to be little impact on the overall performance of the machine.
For me at least, OSX loses a point for a few cases of unnecessary cuteness, but more than compensates by providing a satisfying experience on low-end hardware, without me having to search for ways to turn off the special effects.
That said, we're not a "mac family" for other reasons. Our single Mac is a used box on which we run Garage Band, Photoshop and iTunes. But to overuse the car analogy elsewhere in this thread, Vista reminds me of a Honda Civic in full Riceboi regalia, including garish vinyl decals and fake racing components which look and sound cool but actually degrade performance, and the Mac has always felt more like a low-end Lexus -- not something to turn heads at the stoplight, but thoughtfully designed, well crafted and reliable. Parenthetically, I put up with the interface on the ipod touch because all that unnecessary cuteness doesn't appear to interfere with the performance of the device.
But this isn't a Mac vs Windows thread. The point is, there's a difference between thoughtfully designed desktop features that improve the workflow, and garish, resource-ravenous eye candy that exist to push the sale more than to make the user more productive. And when you have to upgrade perfectly good hardware just to use the new desktop, it's time to take a hard look at what problem you're actually trying to solve. Are you upgrading just because it's a New Thing, or do you really think animated icons and 3d window stacks will increase your work output more than performance impact will decrease it?
I like that. But going with that analogy, it would be OEM only unless you Know Someone. Since it will be offered for sale, it seems to me more like a service pack that we're expected to pay an additional $339.99 for. Wow, to the marketeers it must seem like printing money.
> The software plus services approach of the next office wave with the webapp versions of word, etc isn't a big enough paradigm shift for you?
Gee, that takes me back. I remember back in the nineties when ASP meant Application Service Provider. I haven't thought about SaaS in probably a decade.
Hmm? Oh, just reminiscing. To answer your question, no.
I currently have nine machines powered up at home, two Linux servers (with scsi raid) one G4 Mac (for daughter's homework) one Ubuntu desktop (mine), one Linspire laptop (daughter's) two XP laptops, one XP workstation, and the curse of my existence, a Windows Media Center. I use Windows where and when I have to, because I don't believe in rejecting an application just because I don't happen to like the OS under which it runs. But I don't have to like it. And Microsoft can have my XP install disks when they pry them from my cold, dead hands.
My company offers the 3G iphone as a company phone. I turned it down. The interface is ultra-slick, but the phone won't reliably make calls. But that is another story, covered elsewhere.
If it's not useless, it's not eye-candy.
Thaaaaat's what this thread needed -- a car analogy.
Really? I paint the walls of my house to avoid wear and tear on the wood beneath. I wash my car (or, actually, the car wash machine washes it) to avoid wear and tear on the paint which is there to protect the metal beneath. Metallic unpainted cars are impractical because the the metal doesn't stand up to the elements. Except if it's stainless steel, and then you have a DeLorean, which was considered very stylish in it's day, despite (or because of?) it's uncomplicated, unadorned appearance.
Look at higher end cars -- the kind businesspeople drive -- what do you see? Clean, uncomplicated lines in subdued colors. What do car-geeks and ricebois drive? Garish, brightly colored, highly customized cars with lots of decals and impractical gadgets.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not convinced that the non-geek experience is about eye candy.
There's two "o"s in "too". :-)
> And can I rant for a second?
Certainly. May I?
Who amongst non-geeks really cares what the desktop looks like? Am I the only one who thinks that perhaps we've lost sight of what an operating system is for? I really don't expect my desktop to look and operate like Myst. I expect an OS to be a robust, secure, program loader and a robust, cohesive collection of resources that applications use. Yes, I know I used "robust" twice. It's important.
The desktop is a way to start and manipulate applications. It is not an end in itself. It shouldn't suck the life out of the machine for the sake of pretty graphics.
And this Linux desktop vs Windows desktop thing totally misses the point. Yes, I played with Ubuntu's cute rubber windows for awhile, and then I turned all those features the hell off. What a waste of resources.
I think it comes down to why one buys a computer in the first place. Is it to do actual work, or to play with the pretty jellyfish? I think that if pressed, most people who make their living on computers would admit that all the cuteness is at best a distraction.
I mean, from a technical standpoint, the design and implementation of cutting-edge desktop presentation is interesting, don't get me wrong. But on a day to day basis, would you really sacrifice the majority of your computer resources just for presentation? Amongst other things, that doesn't seem very Green to me.
And don't even start with "let's all go back to the command line". Office 2000 was a huge increase in efficiency over vi/troff and I'm never going to go back. But Office 2007 is just Office, only annoying. We've reached a point of diminishing returns. Until there's a significant Xerox-PARC-grade paradigm shift, we're just rearranging the furniture. And each remodel significantly increases clutter and expense.
> Although you are right that part of Windows7 success is [...]
Woah, partner -- it's way too early to be calling Windows 7 a success.
> 1) It won't be named Vista.
Good point. That gets them through the first weekend (to use a film metaphor). And the lack of add-ons, if true, will help because it'll make the OS seem faster out of the box. There will be a lot of marketing and social engineering tweaks to make Windows 7 successful, which means, to me, that we need to wait for real-world reports before making a decision. There is more reason than ever to be cautious of Release Mania.
But hmm...
> 3) Not as much bloat is supposed to be bundled. If you want all the default MS software, you'll go to Windows Live to grab it. Bloat being: Media Player, the Movie Maker, Picture Gallery, etc. You'll get IE (cause you'll need something provided to go grab the stuff) and you'll get a pretty plain OS otherwise. I'm a huge fan of that.
As am I. This will help on new PC purchases, but not on upgrades, because presumably all that stuff already exists on the previous Vista install. It will be interesting to see what people's experiences are.
Yes, but, do you really think that's what's going to happen? Do you think Microsoft is going to do the right thing and rearchitect major parts of Vista for Windows 7? Even if they wanted to replace significant parts of the code base, they simply don't have the time.
I expect somewhat more than "lipstick on a pig", but I don't expect much more than what we got with XP SP1 -- lots of bug fixes and a few new features. Keep in mind that "hope" and "expect" are two very different things. Many of us would like to see Windows 7 be a significant re-write. But realistically, I can't see how that could happen.
Parenthetically, why are we all crouched over our keyboards on a Sunday morning?
I agree, but, well, lower requirements is a big one. I remember an article in /. that pontificated that "Vista runs fine on any processor 3 Ghz and above" which is a bar that none of my computers can reach. Some are limited by architecture to 2 Gbytes ram, another buzzkill. (And why should I buy bleeding edge hardware -- in this economy -- to run Vista when XP runs fine?) If Windows 7 (any version) can run on netbook-level hardware, it actually has a chance in hell of replacing some of my XP installations. [1]
And yet... and yet, when Vista was still in beta, we heard reports that it was faster than XP, and look how that turned out. So we really can't go by the beta, we have to wait for reports about the finished product. And then we find out if Microsoft really has made an effort to make the codebase more efficient, or if their real plan was to wait two more years for the hardware to catch up with Windows' gargantuan requirements.
Before someone brings it up, I'm aware that much of Vista's performance issue was the way DRM was implemented. But since DRM is part and parcel with the operating system, it counts. It's the total end to end performance that makes the user experience, so it's not legitimate to say "the new OS really is much faster than the previous release, all those pauses and long execution times you're seeing is because the OS has to check every bit to make sure you haven't stolen something".
Assuming, of course, there is some new feature I absolutely have to have. I didn't see any in Vista. Yes, it had a snazzy new interface. But since I turned off XP's snazzy new interface and all the irritating special effects when I installed it, why would I base a buying decision on yet another snazzy new interface I have to turn off?
I don't see why this is surprising. This is just Windows Vista service pack 3 after all. Naturally the beta is going to be more stable than the initial Vista beta.
You can't be serious. This is Hollywood -- they're as likely to take whatever the current administration wants and do the exact opposite. They make politically charged movies that even moviegoers don't care to see. That the producers decided to soft-pedal the negative portrayal of some dead President because of the views of a current administration of the same political party seems extremely unlikely. At least, this year. After January, who knows.