With Vista, Microsoft's main sin was it's marketing. It built Vista as the Second Coming and of course the inevitable backlash is what we are seeing, much like the Segway debacle. Interestingly Windows 7 has be *undersold* in comparison, and MS has let it stand on it's own with relatively little hype.
And I do like the way Windows 7 works; it seems they've learned from Linux and OS/X, and I find that almost every peripheral I've plugged into my system has been recognized and configured with very little fuss. Sadly, they have created a user interface which is a bad pastiche of Gnome and OS/X's (I much prefer the uncluttered Windows Classic interface and dialog boxes), but overall I'm very happy with the experience.
No, tens of thousands of individuals with an agenda gives you a lot of rumour and innuendo, far more biased than what we have now. In the same way that communism seems like a great idea until you add humans to the equation, this utopia of free information will just end up in the same mess these things always do.
The older newspaper model does work, in that you have individuals (editors) responsible for producing what should be unbiased news. That individual can then be held to account for *not* producing unbiased news if the need arises. Contrast that with ten thousand semi-monkeys banging on keyboards farting out information which suits their personal agendas, each of which gets passed on as absolute fact by brain dead bloggers, and you have chaos.
Right now, if we deem Fox News to be unreliable and biased, we can call, ultimately, Rupert Murdoch to account for this. In a world in which news is spread with little accountability for it's provenance, we'd have a very hard time tracking down the individuals or groups responsible.
One of Windows' great failings was indeed it's poor handling of task annihilation, both when shutting down and when forcibly closing due to a hang. Whereas *nix OSs are firmly in control of the life and death of apps, it seems older versions of Windows would be at the mercy of the apps.
Win7 seems to have much better WMD to bring to bear on process killing from what I've seen so far - no waiting for Godot.
Overall Win7 has impressed me, although I do find the interface fiddly and cluttered in some ways, as well as being an attempt at marrying bits of both OSX and Gnome into a confusing mess. Personally I'd love to see a completely undecorated desktop with as little floating, fading, and farting around as possible.
Here we go again opening that old OS/2 vs. Windows bunfight. I remember back in the early-mid 90s the vicious flamewars that raged over, not performance while calculating complex spreadsheets or running demanding scientific applications, but bootup times. This had to be the most absurd argument I've ever witnessed, on a Pythonic scale.
As far as I'm concerned boot time is coffee making time in the morning, so I don't really lose any productivity because of it.
Indeed they occasionally had some excellent audio equipment back in the 70s and early 80s. It was kind of a mixed bag though dependent on where they sourced the components, but they did carry one of the very first receivers with an LED readout, which happened to be manufactured by Sherwood I believe. It had FET outputs which gave a really warm, sweet sound at 60 real watts per channel, similar to tube sound.
I think one of the main reasons it failed is that it was over-hyped. Kaman (spelling?) blathered on about how it would change the very foundation of life itself, before anyone even knew what it was he was selling. Thus, when the Segway was revealed, there was something of a "is that it?" response. There is an art to the undersell, which Kaman clearly had not mastered. It's one thing to rabbit on about how your new thingy is going to cause unicorns to puke rainbows, but you have to give at least *some* logical reason why, not "because I said so."
This brings up an interesting point. How the brain modifies itself as it learns determines it's eventual competence. From what we know, a brain that doesn't develop correctly is prone to all sorts of broken functionality, including psychoses of all kinds. So we have to build a learning machine which will mimic the development of a "normal" human brain by nurturing it as one does a child in a "normal" developmental atmosphere. Essentially, we have to create an infant human brain and raise it as a normal human being. And we have to hope that the brain is constructed such that it doesn't mimic abnormal human behaviour.
However, all of this raises some deep philosophical and ethical questions: If it does mature to become sentient, does it then gain human rights? Will this brain, being human in every respect, be programmed to grow old as we do and die within a normal human life span, or will we allow it to live forever, a scenario which opens up a whole other can of Dune-eque sandworms.
My point is that I do hope they thoroughly think through the implications of their actions before committing to this project. However, my feeling is that this is yet another scientific bit of hype in order to get funding for more ordinary research; such is the state of scientific research that a boffin has to resort to such sideshow barking merely to survive.
Krikey, if the great explorers of yore had nitpicked their respective missions to death like this we'd all still be living in caves in Africa. The men and women who get in these spaceships know the danger they're in and have the guts (the "right stuff") to see the mission through.
I think the most entertaining and creative IF, for me, was Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Just like reading a book, one made the scene in one's head, which was far more vivid than any of the best graphics cards of today. Also, every player would have his or her own vision of the scene, completely different from anyone else's.
I distinctly recall it had a "boss key" (whatever happened to those?) which would bring up a Lotus 123-style spreadsheet. But on that sheet were a list of kinky sex objects - hilarious.
What's missing here is the reality that with software and OSs getting ever more complex and having ever more functionality built in, it would be nearly impossible to fully debug. I honestly think that the pace of technology is advancing too rapidly, and is perhaps too advanced for it's own good, such that the previous generation of software and hardware is never completely debugged before the next generation starts being implemented.
This is why Windows XP is lingering in the corporate world: it's bugs and shortcomings are now well known and in many cases fixed, or at least worked-around satisfactorily.
I used to work for the local IBM agency here in Bermuda, and I saw the way they handled mini/mainframe upgrades and innovation. It was very slow and deliberate, and you bought a contract every year that ensured that you would be running solidly. If you wanted to attach a peripheral to your machine, IBM themselves would have a record of your machine's configuration and certify whether that peripheral would work. And if for some reason the new piece of hardware or software didn't work their techs would be all over that machine to be sure it was working ASAP.
There's something to be said for slow, deliberate innovation.
My problem with Vista was mainly to do with the new UI. I found it cluttered and confining, with fiddly little details that frankly made my skin crawl (those little triangles next to folders M$ nicked from the Mac), and these are still evident in Win7; however I find Win7 far less claustrophobic. I like XP's Classic theme, which gives me the feeling of a nice, open space with no funky pictures or "helpful" UI tricks like exploding menus or windows fading in and out.
Those UI novelties, like sound schemes which spit Simpsons sound bites when you minimize windows, are cute for about five minutes then get really old really fast. I already saw XP as a feature-creeped version of Win2000, but Vista/Win7 are OTT in that regard.
I think that at a certain point late in the war Hitler was given over to simply lashing out in revenge at the world for his own failures. Thus the V for Vengeance program - it had nothing to do with gaining strategic or tactical successes.
It may have been the failure of the Battle of the Bulge which finally drove home the fact that any attempt at organized military action was futile and to start the long, child-like tantrum of self destruction which led to his downfall.
Very interesting post, some. In the same way, I will criticize Gnome for some of the same issues - certainly the excessively fat borders for windows give it a toy-like look and feel. I actually like the borders in the Windows Classic theme for XP and always set that as my default.
Well my confidence was a tad shaken when the documentum.com listing that google finds when you do a search comes up as a parked domain.
But it was completely shattered when clicking the link on ECM's site which promises me more information on their Collaboration and Document Management led to a Page not Found error. If they can't find their own information, how in the hell can they lay claim to being able to manage *mine*?
Regarding the news Tweets, how is that any different than what RSS was supposed to do for us? The only difference is that Tweets are limited to 140 characters, therefore a step back in terms of information available.
A bit off-topic, but I just had flashbacks to OS/2's attempt at getting complex formatting in an email client. Clearly not ready for primetime, I tried once to send something with a fancy font in a funky colour, and it sat there and chewed the HD for about 30 minutes before melting down. This on a quite powerful machine for it's time, with a good amount of RAM.
But it was certainly forward thinking of IBM to believe that future generations would have an insane desire to dress up their emails the way trailer-dwellers pollute their MySpace pages.
The thing about humans is that we may not be quite as aggressive as other animals, but we have the intelligence to do more damage when we *are* aggressive. Witness the atomic bomb.
That's what happens when you assign the duty of hard drive destruction to the lowest person on the totem pole, no doubt someone only a little better than your average fast food employee.
The fact is that with many thousands of computer systems being turned over in a large corporation there's bound to be some rogue drives out there whether innocently or not.
Can someone please explain to me what's with this obsession with "open" this and that? They make a product which facilitates the next great advancement in the television viewing paradigm. So what's wrong with rewarding them for that?
Please stop clinging to the auld, prehistoric internet ideal that everything on the net should be free. It's no longer a Utopian geek commune it was before the Great Unwashed were unleashed on the former ideal communist state that the internet used to be.
Y'all are free to come up with a competitive content-delivery mechanism - and charge people money for it! It only becomes a concern when industries conspire to exclude fair competition, which so far hasn't occurred.
So get off this "free everything" high horse for doG's sake.
This is very interesting. If Best Buy dies, will this leave the field open for independently owned electronic retailers with better customer service? It will be interesting to watch...
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With Vista, Microsoft's main sin was it's marketing. It built Vista as the Second Coming and of course the inevitable backlash is what we are seeing, much like the Segway debacle. Interestingly Windows 7 has be *undersold* in comparison, and MS has let it stand on it's own with relatively little hype.
And I do like the way Windows 7 works; it seems they've learned from Linux and OS/X, and I find that almost every peripheral I've plugged into my system has been recognized and configured with very little fuss. Sadly, they have created a user interface which is a bad pastiche of Gnome and OS/X's (I much prefer the uncluttered Windows Classic interface and dialog boxes), but overall I'm very happy with the experience.
No, tens of thousands of individuals with an agenda gives you a lot of rumour and innuendo, far more biased than what we have now. In the same way that communism seems like a great idea until you add humans to the equation, this utopia of free information will just end up in the same mess these things always do.
The older newspaper model does work, in that you have individuals (editors) responsible for producing what should be unbiased news. That individual can then be held to account for *not* producing unbiased news if the need arises. Contrast that with ten thousand semi-monkeys banging on keyboards farting out information which suits their personal agendas, each of which gets passed on as absolute fact by brain dead bloggers, and you have chaos.
Right now, if we deem Fox News to be unreliable and biased, we can call, ultimately, Rupert Murdoch to account for this. In a world in which news is spread with little accountability for it's provenance, we'd have a very hard time tracking down the individuals or groups responsible.
One of Windows' great failings was indeed it's poor handling of task annihilation, both when shutting down and when forcibly closing due to a hang. Whereas *nix OSs are firmly in control of the life and death of apps, it seems older versions of Windows would be at the mercy of the apps.
Win7 seems to have much better WMD to bring to bear on process killing from what I've seen so far - no waiting for Godot.
Overall Win7 has impressed me, although I do find the interface fiddly and cluttered in some ways, as well as being an attempt at marrying bits of both OSX and Gnome into a confusing mess. Personally I'd love to see a completely undecorated desktop with as little floating, fading, and farting around as possible.
Here we go again opening that old OS/2 vs. Windows bunfight. I remember back in the early-mid 90s the vicious flamewars that raged over, not performance while calculating complex spreadsheets or running demanding scientific applications, but bootup times. This had to be the most absurd argument I've ever witnessed, on a Pythonic scale.
As far as I'm concerned boot time is coffee making time in the morning, so I don't really lose any productivity because of it.
Indeed they occasionally had some excellent audio equipment back in the 70s and early 80s. It was kind of a mixed bag though dependent on where they sourced the components, but they did carry one of the very first receivers with an LED readout, which happened to be manufactured by Sherwood I believe. It had FET outputs which gave a really warm, sweet sound at 60 real watts per channel, similar to tube sound.
I think one of the main reasons it failed is that it was over-hyped. Kaman (spelling?) blathered on about how it would change the very foundation of life itself, before anyone even knew what it was he was selling. Thus, when the Segway was revealed, there was something of a "is that it?" response. There is an art to the undersell, which Kaman clearly had not mastered. It's one thing to rabbit on about how your new thingy is going to cause unicorns to puke rainbows, but you have to give at least *some* logical reason why, not "because I said so."
This brings up an interesting point. How the brain modifies itself as it learns determines it's eventual competence. From what we know, a brain that doesn't develop correctly is prone to all sorts of broken functionality, including psychoses of all kinds. So we have to build a learning machine which will mimic the development of a "normal" human brain by nurturing it as one does a child in a "normal" developmental atmosphere. Essentially, we have to create an infant human brain and raise it as a normal human being. And we have to hope that the brain is constructed such that it doesn't mimic abnormal human behaviour.
However, all of this raises some deep philosophical and ethical questions: If it does mature to become sentient, does it then gain human rights? Will this brain, being human in every respect, be programmed to grow old as we do and die within a normal human life span, or will we allow it to live forever, a scenario which opens up a whole other can of Dune-eque sandworms.
My point is that I do hope they thoroughly think through the implications of their actions before committing to this project. However, my feeling is that this is yet another scientific bit of hype in order to get funding for more ordinary research; such is the state of scientific research that a boffin has to resort to such sideshow barking merely to survive.
Krikey, if the great explorers of yore had nitpicked their respective missions to death like this we'd all still be living in caves in Africa. The men and women who get in these spaceships know the danger they're in and have the guts (the "right stuff") to see the mission through.
Sheesh!
If so, we're sitting on a very nice lump of ambergris. Used to be big business here in Bermuda, useful in the cosmetics industry.
I think the most entertaining and creative IF, for me, was Leather Goddesses of Phobos. Just like reading a book, one made the scene in one's head, which was far more vivid than any of the best graphics cards of today. Also, every player would have his or her own vision of the scene, completely different from anyone else's.
I distinctly recall it had a "boss key" (whatever happened to those?) which would bring up a Lotus 123-style spreadsheet. But on that sheet were a list of kinky sex objects - hilarious.
What's missing here is the reality that with software and OSs getting ever more complex and having ever more functionality built in, it would be nearly impossible to fully debug. I honestly think that the pace of technology is advancing too rapidly, and is perhaps too advanced for it's own good, such that the previous generation of software and hardware is never completely debugged before the next generation starts being implemented.
This is why Windows XP is lingering in the corporate world: it's bugs and shortcomings are now well known and in many cases fixed, or at least worked-around satisfactorily.
I used to work for the local IBM agency here in Bermuda, and I saw the way they handled mini/mainframe upgrades and innovation. It was very slow and deliberate, and you bought a contract every year that ensured that you would be running solidly. If you wanted to attach a peripheral to your machine, IBM themselves would have a record of your machine's configuration and certify whether that peripheral would work. And if for some reason the new piece of hardware or software didn't work their techs would be all over that machine to be sure it was working ASAP.
There's something to be said for slow, deliberate innovation.
But their porn is pretty good...
My problem with Vista was mainly to do with the new UI. I found it cluttered and confining, with fiddly little details that frankly made my skin crawl (those little triangles next to folders M$ nicked from the Mac), and these are still evident in Win7; however I find Win7 far less claustrophobic. I like XP's Classic theme, which gives me the feeling of a nice, open space with no funky pictures or "helpful" UI tricks like exploding menus or windows fading in and out.
Those UI novelties, like sound schemes which spit Simpsons sound bites when you minimize windows, are cute for about five minutes then get really old really fast. I already saw XP as a feature-creeped version of Win2000, but Vista/Win7 are OTT in that regard.
And oddly enough, the results of the poll were announced before polling began...
Urban legend or not, that may well be true to an extent.
I think that at a certain point late in the war Hitler was given over to simply lashing out in revenge at the world for his own failures. Thus the V for Vengeance program - it had nothing to do with gaining strategic or tactical successes.
It may have been the failure of the Battle of the Bulge which finally drove home the fact that any attempt at organized military action was futile and to start the long, child-like tantrum of self destruction which led to his downfall.
Very interesting post, some. In the same way, I will criticize Gnome for some of the same issues - certainly the excessively fat borders for windows give it a toy-like look and feel. I actually like the borders in the Windows Classic theme for XP and always set that as my default.
Well my confidence was a tad shaken when the documentum.com listing that google finds when you do a search comes up as a parked domain.
But it was completely shattered when clicking the link on ECM's site which promises me more information on their Collaboration and Document Management led to a Page not Found error. If they can't find their own information, how in the hell can they lay claim to being able to manage *mine*?
Regarding the news Tweets, how is that any different than what RSS was supposed to do for us? The only difference is that Tweets are limited to 140 characters, therefore a step back in terms of information available.
Is there such thing as an expected error? If so, couldn't one avoid that error easily enough? What's up with that?
Also, I got this little doozie a while back on a customer's machine.
A bit off-topic, but I just had flashbacks to OS/2's attempt at getting complex formatting in an email client. Clearly not ready for primetime, I tried once to send something with a fancy font in a funky colour, and it sat there and chewed the HD for about 30 minutes before melting down. This on a quite powerful machine for it's time, with a good amount of RAM.
But it was certainly forward thinking of IBM to believe that future generations would have an insane desire to dress up their emails the way trailer-dwellers pollute their MySpace pages.
The thing about humans is that we may not be quite as aggressive as other animals, but we have the intelligence to do more damage when we *are* aggressive. Witness the atomic bomb.
That's what happens when you assign the duty of hard drive destruction to the lowest person on the totem pole, no doubt someone only a little better than your average fast food employee.
The fact is that with many thousands of computer systems being turned over in a large corporation there's bound to be some rogue drives out there whether innocently or not.
Can someone please explain to me what's with this obsession with "open" this and that? They make a product which facilitates the next great advancement in the television viewing paradigm. So what's wrong with rewarding them for that?
Please stop clinging to the auld, prehistoric internet ideal that everything on the net should be free. It's no longer a Utopian geek commune it was before the Great Unwashed were unleashed on the former ideal communist state that the internet used to be.
Y'all are free to come up with a competitive content-delivery mechanism - and charge people money for it! It only becomes a concern when industries conspire to exclude fair competition, which so far hasn't occurred.
So get off this "free everything" high horse for doG's sake.
Sheesh!
This is very interesting. If Best Buy dies, will this leave the field open for independently owned electronic retailers with better customer service? It will be interesting to watch...