Heaven forbid that the/. staff should pack those braincells with friends, family and life rather than the last 24 months of ~= 10 submissions a day! Man, I'm gunna start modding these 'yawn, been there done that' posts as redundant!
Hehe, you're preaching to the converted! But to play devil's advocate:
- can you garauntee support turnaround with OS?(ie, by talking OS, does he support paying people for support? accountability is a VERY important thing in politics.. you always have to make sure you can pass the buck:)
- are there certain applications/services in which there exists no suitable OS alternative, and how would you handle that? (I'd ask, because I've seen OS pundits try to claim that OS software X is better than propriatary Y, when in reality, they are years apart in their feature sets)
Anyhow, I'm just trying to think up questions and concerns voters might have about a politician who's interested in mandating the use of OS software in public services systems. It'd be interesting to see public reaction in his city to his attitude towards using OS software. Good luck to him!
be careful! don't promise a rose garden, thats all!
Okay, for real:
- tell people how much money you save
- you'll have to proove that OS software really won't have a negative impact on services and IT progress of your city
Basically, everything has to be on the upside versus propriatary software. If you can tie it in to huge $$$ saving by the city, thats a language every voter can talk.
AMEN!!!!!!!! I'm so tired of hearing people ask "Why isn't Apple successful in the way that MS is?" And my answer: "They don't really want to be or need to be!" Thats what I love about them. Obviously, they have to take care of their profits, but they arn't out to manipulate the credit card out of Joe Sixpack's wallet. They know their market segment, and stick to it, while doing as good a job as ANYONE with respect to hardware and software. The encouraging thing to read about here at/. is that it seems like people are seriously considering moving back to Macs (as many of us once were before we had to start paying tuition fees..;) Apple totally Gets It, for all the reasons you described, and I don't buy that techies arn't starting to wonder whats so bad about taking on a sugary desktop, the antithesis of hacker-cool, if it comes sitting on top of an OS who's closest relative is FreeBSD (with promises to keep Darwin up to date with FreeBSD no less!). The real clincher is that, if their market share does increase, it can only mean that Apple will be able to rely less on their hardware margins, thus making their notoriously expensive (note I didn't say overpriced) hardware a little more easy on the wallet. I think Apple will have its day. Once the functionality of computers becomes taken for granted, people/will/ start thinking about ease of use, stability and reliability more than they do these days, where the focus is still on the fastest and cheapest.
I think UML/is/ a nice way to get a quick view of an architecture or system. You know, just to get a flavour or feel of how a given system or software application is broken down into componants, and what the one-to-one/many-to-one relationships are on delegates, factories, etc.
Basically, if you think in an OO way when you're programming, UML makes sense and can help to give very quick 'summaries' of software systems.
That being said, I don't think that UMLs role in design and prototyping is as critical as some people make it out to be. I think it's more useful to give a top down view to a guest engineer or someone who did not participate in the design process to start getting an idea of where to muck about in a project when changes or fixes are needed.
To that end (and I develop CORBA apps), I don't feel I need to be an expert in UML, but I certainly don't have any quams with having to have a casual familiarity with it. That is, I can understand the language, but I don't really feel career-related pressure to speak it.
My point wasn't so much that the/entire/ industry would go out of business, but rather that the industry would have to scale back. Yes, I can live without the EMIs, the Sonys. I can't live without someone else handling the distribution and promotion, but it doesn't matter to me if my fan bass is 1% that of the Britteny Spears' of the world, and that the media company that represents me is 0.5% the size of Sony's music devision. My comment was more about scale and whole 'number of fans' versus 'number of fans who are willing to pay X dollars per concert, listening, viewing, etc'..
Give me a break. Can you please stop lumping the non-inuits living in the Arctic with the Canadian Inuits? I'm not excoriating North Americans (I am one.. actually, I'm Canadian); however, I was referring to a set of values that apply most appropriately within the context of North Americans. I can feel free to lump us together when I'm discussing certain values that are by and large unique to North America. And if you don't like generalizations, get used to them. You cannot talk without generalizing.
BTW, do you know what constitutes a valid generalization? It's a point or example or whathave you that holds true more often for the generalization than the exception(s). I maintain that my generalization is valid, discounting cultures within North America that do not participate in mainstream consumerism. Just don't lose sight of the fact that using a generalization prooves exactly what you're so eager to point out: that exceptions exist, and that the generalization doesn't always apply.
OF COURSE IT DOESN'T ALWAYS APPLY, DUMMY, THATS WHAT MAKES IT A GENERALIZATION.
I'll be sure to troll your posts and make sure you're not generalizing about Apple Users being lumped in with the rest of those very different Computer Users. And I'll make sure you never say "people", cause there are "women" in a group of "people", and "men", and "men arn't the same as women"!
Get it? For the context of my point, it was suitable to group North Americans together. For the most part, the behaviour I was describing is not particularly unique to any given subculture of North Americans.
We hope. Although, I think what usually happens is that you discover/what/ you're affecting long after the collateral-damage studies are done, and consequently, after the damage has been done. Unfortunately, I think we only discover/what/ we're doing after we've done it. This is one of the main prinicipals of technology: it is impossible to predict how they will affect the system you live in, and new technologies ALWAYS affect a system (be it physical or social) in a way that is, to varying degrees, different than your best predictions.
>Image a world where you can channelsurf what your neighbors are watching
"Honey, they're watching the history channel again, those sick perverts! That's it, I'm getting my hedge trimmer back from them first thing tommorow.... "
>it would likely put the entire industry out of business
You talk about it like it's a bad thing. I was wondering if content producers have entirely different economies in their heads. Ie, when push comes to shove, and we have to pay for as much as we're consuming, is Hollywood truely a viable business given the percieved amount of revenue-generating touchpoints the future holds for entertainment consumers?
The question is really going to become.. are Titus and Rugrats and Roswell really worth it once we're/forced/ to actually not bend the rules? Does anyone else wonder if consumers and content creators have entirely different economies in their heads?
Or quoting shows with friends. Or thinking about an episode in your head. Or... the joke is that all these companies seem to think there's a line in the sand. If anyone could please tell me where that line is, I could start my crusade...
Of course, it goes without saying that North Americans will likely shun products if they even/percieve/ that some of the purchase price of a product is to cover the cost of developing the color and shape of the product. They just don't believe that the design/does/ affect both physical task-based functionality and the emotional effect that physical objects in your working/living environment have on you. It's just not a value thats eschewed in the North American market.
Agreed. I think the beige box thing is just a lowest common demoninator design thing. Joe Consumer (but the most powerful guy in a capitalist economy) wants the cables in the back, 'so they dont get all messy'. Corp X believes him, because 'The Customer Is Always Right'. I'm waiting until this attitude in NA towards design (ie, trust the consumer, no matter what they say) bleeds into health care. ("No, you stupid surgeon, I want you to do my liver/before/ the heart!" "But, Joe, that might kill you..." "Damnit, who's money is paying for this operation!")
People in europe, and especially the UK, have far more faith in the unquantifiable science of design, and thus more money and time and resources are allocated towards industrial designers to solve the problems that North Americans still don't even/beleive in/ yet.
It's pack mentality. MS is a symbol of strength to those who believe in the "The best solution is the most widely adopted one." It represents a good slice of the American attitude towards solutions; if the most people believe it, and work hard enough to keep the blinders on, than it's (whatever it is) is justified and Right.
I personally chalk it up to evolution; some people are born to walk against the current to test and try new things, and some people, like this guy, are born to keep trying to turn them around again.. to join the rest of the sheep.
This is what Apple represents best; the notion that thinking different, that deviating from the norm, still leaves plenty of room to find the optimum solutions and innovations. Some people see the popular vote as the vindicaton of righteousness... and some people, including myself, know it makes a good starting point. That is, if you start with the popular vote, you're starting from the right place, because you havn't found the best solution yet.;) Thats what I like about Apple...
That simply is not true. We are obsessed with quantification, as Ive points out. You trust doctors to explain and cure illnesses, and you don't know the science behind it. You probably believe that the colors of your dwelling can have an effect on your emotional disposition
That people do not believe that the asthetics (nevermind that the physical representation, ie, design of a computer does not exist in a vacuum.. sometimes you must carry them, or tilt them, or upgrade them, etc) of tools have an effect on their interaction with them is one of the best illustrations of the complete lack of faith that North Americans exhibit in the importance of design. You may not be able to count your 'happy points', but to suggest that the look of your computer has absolutely no effect on you is rediculous. Just because you can't point the 'HowMuchMoneyDidItMakeMe-o-meter' or the 'HowHappyAmI-o-meter' at the box doesn't mean that the asthetics of a tool do not effect your efficiency, levels of stress, or usage endurance. To listen to designers and architechs proudly explain how the design of a physical environment or tool affected the behaviour of the users and dewellers of their creations is to understand that the less you think about design, and simply place your faith in 'the experts', the more successful it tends to be.
The speed at which you dismiss design vs. function suggests to me that you've never really given thought or faith to design, and thus never really experienced the benifits of proper industrial design. There is no clear line between function and asthetic, as you put it; a painting is a tool to stimulate parts of your brain that you want to stimulate, where as a tool is no good unless you can stand to look at it, use it, and spend time with it. Given the increase in stress of the average office worker, and the number of hours he or she spends with the tool known as the computer, it is a shame that people seem so quick to dismiss evironmental factors as having an effect on their emotional disposition.
To take it a step furthur, your bedroom is nothing but a tool to get some sleep in, so why not paint it completely black?
You are not the average user. The average user does not want to use CLIs any more than they want to identify objects in their room by printed labels rather than their natural physical represenstations. An advanced and well designed gui allows the user to customize his or her 'desktop' into a natural way that best suits the user. You may not believe that this is the best way to go, but according to usability studies, people suffer less anxiety and stress when using interfaces that resemble objects or concepts that the user is already familiar with.
Your goals are of pure efficiency, but you must understand that other people have other needs from an interface.
> Heck you have to manualy add files to the Apple menu
Oh my god, you actually have to do work to set up your working environment!? Heaven forbid! I prefer this 'opt in' approach to the customization of my desktop; my start menu is/littered/ with program groups for a program I might use once or twice a year. I'd have rather they/not/ get set up automagically. MacOS lets/me/ make the concious decisions that go into setting up my environment, which, in my opinion, goes a long way towards stress free computer use.
I think MacOS was better than dos/win up until maybe win95b. Your memory is short if you are just counting the ~7 -> 9.0 (or whatever the last version is) years. Yes, system 11. But hardware reliability and the fact that it was hard to actually screw your system up, something I've done more times than I can remember with Windows and a PC, made it an insanely reliable piece of hardware if you could handle the reboots (which I had to do nearly everytime I installed software on windows 9x, anyhow).
I was a Mac Head (not anymore, but seriously considering going back), and my experiences with Macs, while maybe not as 'techy' or 'hackish' as they were on the PC, were far more pleasurable and stress free. To each his or her own, of course.:)
Um. Since WHEN has apple been attempting to satisfy the average user? I think Apple has always stressed an almost religious-like devotion to developing the best (if not always most powerful) complete PC solution. (Disclaimer: I operate under the axiom that their hardware/costs/, often a point of contention, are due to Intel and MS's monopoly on the x86 platforms.) They have been responsible for so many innovations in the PC world, from the first mass marketed windows OS to having multi-head capable computers YEARS before you could do it on a PC on a single card. Look at the iPod. The only criticism I've heard levied against it (other than the tired, old price thing) is that it doesn't hook up to PCs (yet, but it will.)
Clearly, the avg user wants the cheapest thing that sits near the top of the mass-media performance chart. I also think the success of grey PCs is thanks, in part, to people's perception that they are not paying for the asthetics of the computer. It's a shame, because it's really inhibited the PC's sweaty desire to make it into the livingroom, nevermind turned people away from a GUI that usability experts tend to agree is extremely well organized and implemented.
But oh well. Everyone knows that consumers are idiots; we all operate at work under the assumption that best of breed solutions are riskier than the manipulative wool-over-the-eyes approach to selling, at least as far as new technologies go. And yes, I'm including myself here.
Well, software + hardware = money, so it's not quite cut and dried unless you're a pundit. Obviously, it was an underhanded attempt, but the beauty of having a monopoly is having an excuse to push your product when you are asked to give back to the market in punitive damages.
But be careful man.. you sound as fundamentalist about the issues (ie, you sound like they are black and white) as any devout MS marketer/salesperson would be about the value of their own products in the classroom.
As someone else pointed out a while back, it does make sense to provide schools with the same OS their parents have at home. It's kind of a catch 22, if you ask me.
On a side note: Apple! It's *nix with a simple to use GUI, so you get the both of best worlds for the next generation of users. Then, they can take their pick once they have the money for a computer. I don't mind propriatary software all/that/ much.. it's just the overzealous fundamentalist marketing and underhanded lock-in strategies that bother me most about MS. Apple isn't nearly so bad at this, for instance....
Fair enough. I see your points.:) but one last thing...
they can log in with a non-editor account
.. I guess my point is, if they can abuse mod points, then they'd just work around the 'editor mod' notices by making user accounts with unlimited mods, or creating new accounts, or.. well, whatever. I don't know if these 'editors' don't have that power, but you also have to consider that the/. team also has to trust each other to some degree, so it's possible that implenting these types of features would just make the staff of/. not trust each other or work as a team, or whatever.
I see your points tho. It's a good idea, but I guess I think it's a little moot given the circumstances. If someone wants to abuse their powers, they will always find a way; and you don't want to start an internal/. staff bughunt. I know from running my own sites that sometimes you have to tolerate the bad apple(s) for the greater good of the team or the community. I don't know if you'll buy that, but it happened to me.
My faith-o-meter in this planet just rose a little. That would have busticated me had MS been able to lock in the next generation of kids with their products as a 'punishment'.
Okay then, see my second post. They'd no doubt have to deal with FAR more flak than they already do if people knew it was editors that moderated them in a way they didn't agree with. I know, increased powers = increased accountability, but I can understand being an editor and not wanting to deal with the 5 fold increase in hate mail because people suddently know it's an/editor/ that modded their post instead of a lowly not-flame-worthy reg user.
Slashdot Mirror
Heaven forbid that the /. staff should pack those braincells with friends, family and life rather than the last 24 months of ~= 10 submissions a day! Man, I'm gunna start modding these 'yawn, been there done that' posts as redundant!
Hehe, you're preaching to the converted! But to play devil's advocate:
.. you always have to make sure you can pass the buck :)
- can you garauntee support turnaround with OS?(ie, by talking OS, does he support paying people for support? accountability is a VERY important thing in politics
- are there certain applications/services in which there exists no suitable OS alternative, and how would you handle that? (I'd ask, because I've seen OS pundits try to claim that OS software X is better than propriatary Y, when in reality, they are years apart in their feature sets)
Anyhow, I'm just trying to think up questions and concerns voters might have about a politician who's interested in mandating the use of OS software in public services systems. It'd be interesting to see public reaction in his city to his attitude towards using OS software. Good luck to him!
be careful! don't promise a rose garden, thats all!
Okay, for real:
- tell people how much money you save
- you'll have to proove that OS software really won't have a negative impact on services and IT progress of your city
Basically, everything has to be on the upside versus propriatary software. If you can tie it in to huge $$$ saving by the city, thats a language every voter can talk.
AMEN!!!!!!!! I'm so tired of hearing people ask "Why isn't Apple successful in the way that MS is?" And my answer: "They don't really want to be or need to be!" Thats what I love about them. Obviously, they have to take care of their profits, but they arn't out to manipulate the credit card out of Joe Sixpack's wallet. They know their market segment, and stick to it, while doing as good a job as ANYONE with respect to hardware and software. The encouraging thing to read about here at /. is that it seems like people are seriously considering moving back to Macs (as many of us once were before we had to start paying tuition fees .. ;) Apple totally Gets It, for all the reasons you described, and I don't buy that techies arn't starting to wonder whats so bad about taking on a sugary desktop, the antithesis of hacker-cool, if it comes sitting on top of an OS who's closest relative is FreeBSD (with promises to keep Darwin up to date with FreeBSD no less!). The real clincher is that, if their market share does increase, it can only mean that Apple will be able to rely less on their hardware margins, thus making their notoriously expensive (note I didn't say overpriced) hardware a little more easy on the wallet. I think Apple will have its day. Once the functionality of computers becomes taken for granted, people /will/ start thinking about ease of use, stability and reliability more than they do these days, where the focus is still on the fastest and cheapest.
I think UML /is/ a nice way to get a quick view of an architecture or system. You know, just to get a flavour or feel of how a given system or software application is broken down into componants, and what the one-to-one/many-to-one relationships are on delegates, factories, etc.
Basically, if you think in an OO way when you're programming, UML makes sense and can help to give very quick 'summaries' of software systems.
That being said, I don't think that UMLs role in design and prototyping is as critical as some people make it out to be. I think it's more useful to give a top down view to a guest engineer or someone who did not participate in the design process to start getting an idea of where to muck about in a project when changes or fixes are needed.
To that end (and I develop CORBA apps), I don't feel I need to be an expert in UML, but I certainly don't have any quams with having to have a casual familiarity with it. That is, I can understand the language, but I don't really feel career-related pressure to speak it.
My point wasn't so much that the /entire/ industry would go out of business, but rather that the industry would have to scale back. Yes, I can live without the EMIs, the Sonys. I can't live without someone else handling the distribution and promotion, but it doesn't matter to me if my fan bass is 1% that of the Britteny Spears' of the world, and that the media company that represents me is 0.5% the size of Sony's music devision. My comment was more about scale and whole 'number of fans' versus 'number of fans who are willing to pay X dollars per concert, listening, viewing, etc' ..
Give me a break. Can you please stop lumping the non-inuits living in the Arctic with the Canadian Inuits? I'm not excoriating North Americans (I am one .. actually, I'm Canadian); however, I was referring to a set of values that apply most appropriately within the context of North Americans. I can feel free to lump us together when I'm discussing certain values that are by and large unique to North America. And if you don't like generalizations, get used to them. You cannot talk without generalizing.
BTW, do you know what constitutes a valid generalization? It's a point or example or whathave you that holds true more often for the generalization than the exception(s). I maintain that my generalization is valid, discounting cultures within North America that do not participate in mainstream consumerism. Just don't lose sight of the fact that using a generalization prooves exactly what you're so eager to point out: that exceptions exist, and that the generalization doesn't always apply.
OF COURSE IT DOESN'T ALWAYS APPLY, DUMMY, THATS WHAT MAKES IT A GENERALIZATION.
I'll be sure to troll your posts and make sure you're not generalizing about Apple Users being lumped in with the rest of those very different Computer Users. And I'll make sure you never say "people", cause there are "women" in a group of "people", and "men", and "men arn't the same as women"!
Get it? For the context of my point, it was suitable to group North Americans together. For the most part, the behaviour I was describing is not particularly unique to any given subculture of North Americans.
We hope. Although, I think what usually happens is that you discover /what/ you're affecting long after the collateral-damage studies are done, and consequently, after the damage has been done. Unfortunately, I think we only discover /what/ we're doing after we've done it. This is one of the main prinicipals of technology: it is impossible to predict how they will affect the system you live in, and new technologies ALWAYS affect a system (be it physical or social) in a way that is, to varying degrees, different than your best predictions.
.. until we have to send out the second swarm to monitor for the pollution levels the first swarm cause? ;)
Yeah, it might sound like a troll, but it's not! Honestly, how do we know these robots won't affect the ecology of the water they are placed in?
>Image a world where you can channelsurf what your neighbors are watching
.... "
"Honey, they're watching the history channel again, those sick perverts! That's it, I'm getting my hedge trimmer back from them first thing tommorow
>it would likely put the entire industry out of business
You talk about it like it's a bad thing. I was wondering if content producers have entirely different economies in their heads. Ie, when push comes to shove, and we have to pay for as much as we're consuming, is Hollywood truely a viable business given the percieved amount of revenue-generating touchpoints the future holds for entertainment consumers?
The question is really going to become .. are Titus and Rugrats and Roswell really worth it once we're /forced/ to actually not bend the rules? Does anyone else wonder if consumers and content creators have entirely different economies in their heads?
Or quoting shows with friends. Or thinking about an episode in your head. Or ... the joke is that all these companies seem to think there's a line in the sand. If anyone could please tell me where that line is, I could start my crusade ...
Of course, it goes without saying that North Americans will likely shun products if they even /percieve/ that some of the purchase price of a product is to cover the cost of developing the color and shape of the product. They just don't believe that the design /does/ affect both physical task-based functionality and the emotional effect that physical objects in your working/living environment have on you. It's just not a value thats eschewed in the North American market.
Agreed. I think the beige box thing is just a lowest common demoninator design thing. Joe Consumer (but the most powerful guy in a capitalist economy) wants the cables in the back, 'so they dont get all messy'. Corp X believes him, because 'The Customer Is Always Right'. I'm waiting until this attitude in NA towards design (ie, trust the consumer, no matter what they say) bleeds into health care. ("No, you stupid surgeon, I want you to do my liver /before/ the heart!" "But, Joe, that might kill you ..." "Damnit, who's money is paying for this operation!")
/beleive in/ yet.
People in europe, and especially the UK, have far more faith in the unquantifiable science of design, and thus more money and time and resources are allocated towards industrial designers to solve the problems that North Americans still don't even
It's pack mentality. MS is a symbol of strength to those who believe in the "The best solution is the most widely adopted one." It represents a good slice of the American attitude towards solutions; if the most people believe it, and work hard enough to keep the blinders on, than it's (whatever it is) is justified and Right.
.. to join the rest of the sheep.
... and some people, including myself, know it makes a good starting point. That is, if you start with the popular vote, you're starting from the right place, because you havn't found the best solution yet. ;) Thats what I like about Apple ...
I personally chalk it up to evolution; some people are born to walk against the current to test and try new things, and some people, like this guy, are born to keep trying to turn them around again
This is what Apple represents best; the notion that thinking different, that deviating from the norm, still leaves plenty of room to find the optimum solutions and innovations. Some people see the popular vote as the vindicaton of righteousness
That simply is not true. We are obsessed with quantification, as Ive points out. You trust doctors to explain and cure illnesses, and you don't know the science behind it. You probably believe that the colors of your dwelling can have an effect on your emotional disposition
.. sometimes you must carry them, or tilt them, or upgrade them, etc) of tools have an effect on their interaction with them is one of the best illustrations of the complete lack of faith that North Americans exhibit in the importance of design. You may not be able to count your 'happy points', but to suggest that the look of your computer has absolutely no effect on you is rediculous. Just because you can't point the 'HowMuchMoneyDidItMakeMe-o-meter' or the 'HowHappyAmI-o-meter' at the box doesn't mean that the asthetics of a tool do not effect your efficiency, levels of stress, or usage endurance. To listen to designers and architechs proudly explain how the design of a physical environment or tool affected the behaviour of the users and dewellers of their creations is to understand that the less you think about design, and simply place your faith in 'the experts', the more successful it tends to be.
That people do not believe that the asthetics (nevermind that the physical representation, ie, design of a computer does not exist in a vacuum
The speed at which you dismiss design vs. function suggests to me that you've never really given thought or faith to design, and thus never really experienced the benifits of proper industrial design. There is no clear line between function and asthetic, as you put it; a painting is a tool to stimulate parts of your brain that you want to stimulate, where as a tool is no good unless you can stand to look at it, use it, and spend time with it. Given the increase in stress of the average office worker, and the number of hours he or she spends with the tool known as the computer, it is a shame that people seem so quick to dismiss evironmental factors as having an effect on their emotional disposition.
To take it a step furthur, your bedroom is nothing but a tool to get some sleep in, so why not paint it completely black?
You are not the average user. The average user does not want to use CLIs any more than they want to identify objects in their room by printed labels rather than their natural physical represenstations. An advanced and well designed gui allows the user to customize his or her 'desktop' into a natural way that best suits the user. You may not believe that this is the best way to go, but according to usability studies, people suffer less anxiety and stress when using interfaces that resemble objects or concepts that the user is already familiar with.
/littered/ with program groups for a program I might use once or twice a year. I'd have rather they /not/ get set up automagically. MacOS lets /me/ make the concious decisions that go into setting up my environment, which, in my opinion, goes a long way towards stress free computer use.
Your goals are of pure efficiency, but you must understand that other people have other needs from an interface.
> Heck you have to manualy add files to the Apple menu
Oh my god, you actually have to do work to set up your working environment!? Heaven forbid! I prefer this 'opt in' approach to the customization of my desktop; my start menu is
I think MacOS was better than dos/win up until maybe win95b. Your memory is short if you are just counting the ~7 -> 9.0 (or whatever the last version is) years. Yes, system 11. But hardware reliability and the fact that it was hard to actually screw your system up, something I've done more times than I can remember with Windows and a PC, made it an insanely reliable piece of hardware if you could handle the reboots (which I had to do nearly everytime I installed software on windows 9x, anyhow).
:)
I was a Mac Head (not anymore, but seriously considering going back), and my experiences with Macs, while maybe not as 'techy' or 'hackish' as they were on the PC, were far more pleasurable and stress free. To each his or her own, of course.
Um. Since WHEN has apple been attempting to satisfy the average user? I think Apple has always stressed an almost religious-like devotion to developing the best (if not always most powerful) complete PC solution. (Disclaimer: I operate under the axiom that their hardware /costs/, often a point of contention, are due to Intel and MS's monopoly on the x86 platforms.) They have been responsible for so many innovations in the PC world, from the first mass marketed windows OS to having multi-head capable computers YEARS before you could do it on a PC on a single card. Look at the iPod. The only criticism I've heard levied against it (other than the tired, old price thing) is that it doesn't hook up to PCs (yet, but it will.)
Clearly, the avg user wants the cheapest thing that sits near the top of the mass-media performance chart. I also think the success of grey PCs is thanks, in part, to people's perception that they are not paying for the asthetics of the computer. It's a shame, because it's really inhibited the PC's sweaty desire to make it into the livingroom, nevermind turned people away from a GUI that usability experts tend to agree is extremely well organized and implemented.
But oh well. Everyone knows that consumers are idiots; we all operate at work under the assumption that best of breed solutions are riskier than the manipulative wool-over-the-eyes approach to selling, at least as far as new technologies go. And yes, I'm including myself here.
Well, software + hardware = money, so it's not quite cut and dried unless you're a pundit. Obviously, it was an underhanded attempt, but the beauty of having a monopoly is having an excuse to push your product when you are asked to give back to the market in punitive damages.
.. you sound as fundamentalist about the issues (ie, you sound like they are black and white) as any devout MS marketer/salesperson would be about the value of their own products in the classroom.
/that/ much .. it's just the overzealous fundamentalist marketing and underhanded lock-in strategies that bother me most about MS. Apple isn't nearly so bad at this, for instance ....
But be careful man
As someone else pointed out a while back, it does make sense to provide schools with the same OS their parents have at home. It's kind of a catch 22, if you ask me.
On a side note: Apple! It's *nix with a simple to use GUI, so you get the both of best worlds for the next generation of users. Then, they can take their pick once they have the money for a computer. I don't mind propriatary software all
Fair enough. I see your points. :) but one last thing ...
.. well, whatever. I don't know if these 'editors' don't have that power, but you also have to consider that the /. team also has to trust each other to some degree, so it's possible that implenting these types of features would just make the staff of /. not trust each other or work as a team, or whatever.
/. staff bughunt. I know from running my own sites that sometimes you have to tolerate the bad apple(s) for the greater good of the team or the community. I don't know if you'll buy that, but it happened to me.
they can log in with a non-editor account
.. I guess my point is, if they can abuse mod points, then they'd just work around the 'editor mod' notices by making user accounts with unlimited mods, or creating new accounts, or
I see your points tho. It's a good idea, but I guess I think it's a little moot given the circumstances. If someone wants to abuse their powers, they will always find a way; and you don't want to start an internal
Oops: busticated
... :(
I knew there was a preview button for a reason
Gooooood!
My faith-o-meter in this planet just rose a little. That would have busticated me had MS been able to lock in the next generation of kids with their products as a 'punishment'.
Okay then, see my second post. They'd no doubt have to deal with FAR more flak than they already do if people knew it was editors that moderated them in a way they didn't agree with. I know, increased powers = increased accountability, but I can understand being an editor and not wanting to deal with the 5 fold increase in hate mail because people suddently know it's an /editor/ that modded their post instead of a lowly not-flame-worthy reg user.