I'll have to disagree with your "overshadowed" statement. Word is still the "standard" that the world operates under and what everyone compares to. Yes it's a flawed POS, but that's what it is.
There was an awesome first release of a word processor/desktop publishing tool a while back that allowed for all sorts of nifty layouts and flow control. It was called ClearLook, and was an OS/2 program. Now I use Pages. It's different and does everything I need. Mostly, it's WYSIWYG which Word is not.
The hatred is pretty easy to understand, if you think about the movies when they came out. Ep IV was decent, had a great story and was entertaining for the times. Ep V was most definitely not aimed at children. Ep VI was where a lot of fans went "WTF?" when the ewoks came out, but watched it anyways because they wanted a completed story arc.
The "enhanced" episodes are a degradation of the original movies in almost all ways. The new scenes almost all detract from the story or, worse yet, inject crap to bring them on par with the new trilogy.
Then there's the new series. Ep I was so bad I turned it off. It reminded me of The Goonies or other movies where children are screaming throughout a plotless movie. Ep II was worse. Ep III, despite terrible acting (really, Lucas, you couldn't hire someone that could at least have a smidgin of talent to play the flawed character that was to become the most evil villain in your universe?) was almost the equivalent of Ep VI which was, as stated before, the worse of the first three.
In all honesty, I expected Ep I to have been comprised of all three movies edited together to produce a less than 2 hour introduction to Ep II and III. (The part where he turns into Vader would have been in Ep II, leaving Ep III to showcase Vader's destruction of the Jedi and entire worlds that stood in his way, showing the beginning of Ep IV (such as the scene where Leia creates the video in R2D2).
It will be interesting to see if this is borne out in the benchmarks. I'm very curious regarding these details. It'd be very nice if the #1 CPU maker was on the same playing field as the current tech of the day. We would all benefit from that situation.
Ok, short answer since I hit the wrong button and lost the longer one:
I'm not talking about you and I here, we're talking about the masses who outnumber us 100K : 1 at least. They don't know Photoshop, unless, maybe, it's Photoshop Elements. If they know how to remove red eye, they will be "advanced" in their circles.
Regarding movies, they certainly don't know anything more complicated than Movie Maker or iMovie. There will be no CGI effects, masking, etc.
These people still routinely do what was routinely possible in 2000.
Are you even old enough to remember word processors in 1984? Spreadsheets in 1987?
I recall Visicalc (1979) and word star (1982), among many others over the years that I've used.
I realize you're being funny and quoting someone else who said those things, but seriously stop to think about them.
I remember Word Perfect 5.1 in my 80x24 16 color display running on my 286 with 640KB of RAM. Let me tell you, Word from 1994 was worlds better. WYSIWYG is an amazing accomplishment that wasn't easy to get right.
WYSIWYG? Sort of. They've still not gotten it right. Word is about the biggest pile of crap that's been foisted on us by MS other than the various flavors of Windows itself. It still has issues formatting between different printers, although this has improved significantly over the past 10 years.
I still yearn for the much better control over output afforded by WordPerfect or WordStar. (I should also note that I published a medium sized manuscript using Tex/Latex with embedded images, tables, etc and full cross-referenced ToC, footnotes, etc in the late 80s, thus my concepts of acceptable printed output might be much more critical than yours, as Word still cannot match what was easy to do in Tex/Latex in the mid 80s. Minor things like reflowing your document with insertions while keeping linked images on the same page or next page anchored in the top or bottom following standard publishing flow rules. But Hey! maybe I'm being too critical of that $500 "word processor" that's "sooooo awesome")
A spreadsheet in 1987 wasn't usable by a vast majority of people who were sophisticated enough to understand basic table structure. Excel from 1997 had enough of a GUI to help even less sophisticated people use functions instead of just using it as a pretty interface to store numbers
I'd say Excel peaked with 97's release and has been going downhill ever since. But that's just me. The really interesting part? Excel, for almost all intents and purposes, has added not one iota of real usefulness to 90+% of its users needs over what was available with Visicalc. Most people use it to
Make lists of stuff in a table format
Make simple tables of calculated items
DIsplay lists of data output from other sources so they can be sorted (actually, it's been so long that I don't recall if Visicalc allowed sorting, so this might be an improvement)
I'll grant you that viewing this output on screen in a GUI is an improvement, but that's just a display change which benefitted more from increased resolution than anything else. When viewing the grid, it's a grid and only so many lines can fit on a given resolution, GUI or no.
I don't see anybody volunteering to go back to their 286 with vintage software, and there's a reason for that.
While no one in their right mind would go back to a 286 they might miss their PDP-11s and the like. They certainly still are using the vintage software. vi/vim/emacs, with updates, are still used by people who need it. Shell scripts are still in vogue, so much so that MS finally released an OS that has rudimentary script capabilities in it (Server 2008 R2). People who hit a windows machine and known anything about *nix machines will quickly miss things like find, grep, zip, tar etc, all standard tools more than 20 years old should they be involved in those tasks. Heck, if you're on windows, I bet you still use Notepad occasionally.
what's done routinely today wasn't even possible 10 years ago.
What's done routinely today: email, web browsing, picture editing, movie editing, were all routinely done 10 years ago. Granted there have been improvement in speed (mostly due to hardware improvements) and added capabilities, but the basics are all still there and still form the basis of what is done today.
W7 requires roughly 8.5GB for a standard installation, at least in my VM. Server 2008 R2 with nothing installed (it's "bare bones" after all, to be more "secure") runs about 16GB, also in a VM.
I can state this: the "bloat" is due to the fact that MS has never gone back and re-written anything, they've merely band-aided more and more crap on top of their old "kernel" (I hesitate to call something so lacking in design a kernel).
So I skimmed TFA (gasp!) and it appears that Intel is finally following AMDs lead by keeping thermal envelopes constant.
I note that this is still a effectively 2 CPUs with 3 cores each, but that's better than legacy Intel approaches, which would have been 3 sets of dual cores.
It will be interesting to see how independent performance benchmarks play out between the new processors that are coming out.
In any case saying that customers have a choice is bollocks. They had a choice ten years ago, and hopefully will again after five or ten years... Let's hope so.
Customers do have choices. The integration/cross-system compatibility has been significantly enhanced for both Linux/BSD and Macs with Windows office formats recently (so they don't speak fluent docx, neither does several 100 million earlier copies of Office).
As for the IE trap - when you take a shortcut you can get burned. Rather than develop to webstandards, they drank the MS coolaid, took the shortcut, and are now hosed.
As for MS's "sparkling" Q4, the initial reports I've seen indicate that W7 sales are coming at the expense of XP and earlier installations. In other words, they're replacements, not growth, in a growing market.
It's missing from the "oldest" gospel, at least in any meaningful form, as is the statement that he's the son of god and, now that you mention it, the piece on ascension. Just minor little pieces.
Language changes can also make a book unreadable. Try handing your average Joe Sixpack an original-text copy of The Canterbury Tales and see what they think of it.
I'd be more than happy if something I bought was still usable 600+ years from now.
A) turn their head to watch the person they're talking to B) release steering wheel to emphasize a point with both hands C) close eyes and shake head when listening
all indicate that some people can't do more than one conscious act at a time. They can either talk, listen, or chew gum, but not 2 out of the three. (FYI: talking is the conscious act - the rest are uncontrolled unconscious learned responses)
if android really takes off (and it seems to be starting that roll around now, given the number of devices coming out), that may change, as the dev environment is java based and so can be run on top of just about anything that can handle a java VM.
Java development on a Mac is a joy compared to any other system. (Unless you need a very specific JDK, in which case you will have the installation/configuration issues to overcome, but then you should wonder why you MUST use a specific JDK....)
I've looked at the new Droid. It still seems like an iPhone wanna be at this point. I own neither at this time, but it does seem telling to me that all smart phones compare themselves to the iPhone and want to rate themselves as better than the iPhone in this or that category. That tells me Apple definitely did something right with the iPhone.
I think it's funny. I bought a Mac Powerbook 5 years ago because it met the needs for what I wanted. It was lighter than anything comparable and did what i needed it for. I quickly grew to like it a lot. The main reason at the time? Sleep/hibernate actually worked reliably. That was it.
I then experimented with some other features included with the OS such as photos and videos. I then noticed I spent no time dealing with the OS or application bizarreness, and realized I was starting to use it for everything I normally do in my personal life. I bought a MacBook Pro as it was comparable in price when spec'd out against a comparable Dell or Compaq. (Yes, it really was in fact $200 less for the same basic hardware - CPU/Hard Drive/RAM/Video/Screen Resolution)
I then decided to look at how it would work out with development, and within a couple of days realized that it was far superior, primarily because of the reliability and speed. I'd reboot maybe once every 2-3 months, a darn sight better than my work windows machine, which I then replaced with Linux. The main issue with the linux box I found is I had to spend too much time dealing with OS/application issues. And thus the promotion of the MBP to my full work/development machine. I now spend 99% of my time dealing with what I need to spend time on vs dealing with OS/App issues or rebooting. (Bringing up an entire system that runs 4GB plus across multiple components takes a significant portion of your time if you have to reboot once a day a more often, which I found was the case with Windows.)
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OK I live the WYSBYGI comment.
I'll have to disagree with your "overshadowed" statement. Word is still the "standard" that the world operates under and what everyone compares to. Yes it's a flawed POS, but that's what it is.
There was an awesome first release of a word processor/desktop publishing tool a while back that allowed for all sorts of nifty layouts and flow control. It was called ClearLook, and was an OS/2 program. Now I use Pages. It's different and does everything I need. Mostly, it's WYSIWYG which Word is not.
I could go on. I think you are an example of the type of fan that Lucas has little regard for.
Anyone older than 8 is a fan Lucas has little regard forin the past 2 decades.
BTW, THX-1138 was a college project.
The hatred is pretty easy to understand, if you think about the movies when they came out. Ep IV was decent, had a great story and was entertaining for the times. Ep V was most definitely not aimed at children. Ep VI was where a lot of fans went "WTF?" when the ewoks came out, but watched it anyways because they wanted a completed story arc.
The "enhanced" episodes are a degradation of the original movies in almost all ways. The new scenes almost all detract from the story or, worse yet, inject crap to bring them on par with the new trilogy.
Then there's the new series. Ep I was so bad I turned it off. It reminded me of The Goonies or other movies where children are screaming throughout a plotless movie. Ep II was worse. Ep III, despite terrible acting (really, Lucas, you couldn't hire someone that could at least have a smidgin of talent to play the flawed character that was to become the most evil villain in your universe?) was almost the equivalent of Ep VI which was, as stated before, the worse of the first three.
In all honesty, I expected Ep I to have been comprised of all three movies edited together to produce a less than 2 hour introduction to Ep II and III. (The part where he turns into Vader would have been in Ep II, leaving Ep III to showcase Vader's destruction of the Jedi and entire worlds that stood in his way, showing the beginning of Ep IV (such as the scene where Leia creates the video in R2D2).
It will be interesting to see if this is borne out in the benchmarks. I'm very curious regarding these details. It'd be very nice if the #1 CPU maker was on the same playing field as the current tech of the day. We would all benefit from that situation.
Ok, short answer since I hit the wrong button and lost the longer one:
I'm not talking about you and I here, we're talking about the masses who outnumber us 100K : 1 at least. They don't know Photoshop, unless, maybe, it's Photoshop Elements. If they know how to remove red eye, they will be "advanced" in their circles.
Regarding movies, they certainly don't know anything more complicated than Movie Maker or iMovie. There will be no CGI effects, masking, etc.
These people still routinely do what was routinely possible in 2000.
The WYSIWYG reference was in relation to Word. Word still blows at this.
I never got beyond WordPerfect 6 so can't speak to where it went afterwards.
Are you even old enough to remember word processors in 1984? Spreadsheets in 1987?
I recall Visicalc (1979) and word star (1982), among many others over the years that I've used.
I realize you're being funny and quoting someone else who said those things, but seriously stop to think about them.
I remember Word Perfect 5.1 in my 80x24 16 color display running on my 286 with 640KB of RAM. Let me tell you, Word from 1994 was worlds better. WYSIWYG is an amazing accomplishment that wasn't easy to get right.
WYSIWYG? Sort of. They've still not gotten it right. Word is about the biggest pile of crap that's been foisted on us by MS other than the various flavors of Windows itself. It still has issues formatting between different printers, although this has improved significantly over the past 10 years.
I still yearn for the much better control over output afforded by WordPerfect or WordStar. (I should also note that I published a medium sized manuscript using Tex/Latex with embedded images, tables, etc and full cross-referenced ToC, footnotes, etc in the late 80s, thus my concepts of acceptable printed output might be much more critical than yours, as Word still cannot match what was easy to do in Tex/Latex in the mid 80s. Minor things like reflowing your document with insertions while keeping linked images on the same page or next page anchored in the top or bottom following standard publishing flow rules. But Hey! maybe I'm being too critical of that $500 "word processor" that's "sooooo awesome")
A spreadsheet in 1987 wasn't usable by a vast majority of people who were sophisticated enough to understand basic table structure. Excel from 1997 had enough of a GUI to help even less sophisticated people use functions instead of just using it as a pretty interface to store numbers
I'd say Excel peaked with 97's release and has been going downhill ever since. But that's just me. The really interesting part? Excel, for almost all intents and purposes, has added not one iota of real usefulness to 90+% of its users needs over what was available with Visicalc. Most people use it to
I'll grant you that viewing this output on screen in a GUI is an improvement, but that's just a display change which benefitted more from increased resolution than anything else. When viewing the grid, it's a grid and only so many lines can fit on a given resolution, GUI or no.
I don't see anybody volunteering to go back to their 286 with vintage software, and there's a reason for that.
While no one in their right mind would go back to a 286 they might miss their PDP-11s and the like. They certainly still are using the vintage software. vi/vim/emacs, with updates, are still used by people who need it. Shell scripts are still in vogue, so much so that MS finally released an OS that has rudimentary script capabilities in it (Server 2008 R2). People who hit a windows machine and known anything about *nix machines will quickly miss things like find, grep, zip, tar etc, all standard tools more than 20 years old should they be involved in those tasks. Heck, if you're on windows, I bet you still use Notepad occasionally.
what's done routinely today wasn't even possible 10 years ago.
What's done routinely today: email, web browsing, picture editing, movie editing, were all routinely done 10 years ago. Granted there have been improvement in speed (mostly due to hardware improvements) and added capabilities, but the basics are all still there and still form the basis of what is done today.
W7 requires roughly 8.5GB for a standard installation, at least in my VM. Server 2008 R2 with nothing installed (it's "bare bones" after all, to be more "secure") runs about 16GB, also in a VM.
I can state this: the "bloat" is due to the fact that MS has never gone back and re-written anything, they've merely band-aided more and more crap on top of their old "kernel" (I hesitate to call something so lacking in design a kernel).
It was announced in Oct. It has a single shared L3 cache. Anon Intel fanboy? Whatever for? Embarrassed?
So I skimmed TFA (gasp!) and it appears that Intel is finally following AMDs lead by keeping thermal envelopes constant.
I note that this is still a effectively 2 CPUs with 3 cores each, but that's better than legacy Intel approaches, which would have been 3 sets of dual cores.
It will be interesting to see how independent performance benchmarks play out between the new processors that are coming out.
In any case saying that customers have a choice is bollocks. They had a choice ten years ago, and hopefully will again after five or ten years... Let's hope so.
Customers do have choices. The integration/cross-system compatibility has been significantly enhanced for both Linux/BSD and Macs with Windows office formats recently (so they don't speak fluent docx, neither does several 100 million earlier copies of Office).
As for the IE trap - when you take a shortcut you can get burned. Rather than develop to webstandards, they drank the MS coolaid, took the shortcut, and are now hosed.
As for MS's "sparkling" Q4, the initial reports I've seen indicate that W7 sales are coming at the expense of XP and earlier installations. In other words, they're replacements, not growth, in a growing market.
He's PD in Britain already, I believe, but still trademarked. So nothing new can be created using the mouse.
What? Of course it will end. Everybody dies.
Are you sure?
It's missing from the "oldest" gospel, at least in any meaningful form, as is the statement that he's the son of god and, now that you mention it, the piece on ascension. Just minor little pieces.
I apparently did check it.
I guess the little issue of "the resurrection" missing from the Codex Sinaiticus is not an important theological point?
If I had a magic time machine and went back to 1999 the only thing I would be doing is selling short.
Or buying a lottery ticket.
The Last Question is a pretty cool story.
I've still got my copies of games that are 20 years old. They're interesting to review every now and again.
Good thing I kept that old Pentium around, although even it has issues with a couple of older games running too fast.
Language changes can also make a book unreadable. Try handing your average Joe Sixpack an original-text copy of The Canterbury Tales and see what they think of it.
I'd be more than happy if something I bought was still usable 600+ years from now.
I guess you missed the IE8 zero day exploit just last week? It's only the latest way in which PC users get owned through no fault of their own.
So you'd be ok with that book not being readable in 10 years? (Self-destructing a la Mission Impossible)
That sounds like driving on the freeway.
By your logic, since some can't do it, then none should do it.
I'm fine with that - because then I can drive alone....
Honestly, while watching some people talk by
A) turn their head to watch the person they're talking to
B) release steering wheel to emphasize a point with both hands
C) close eyes and shake head when listening
all indicate that some people can't do more than one conscious act at a time. They can either talk, listen, or chew gum, but not 2 out of the three. (FYI: talking is the conscious act - the rest are uncontrolled unconscious learned responses)
These are probably the same people that were talking on cell phones while walking into a telephone pole so hard they wound up in the ER.
if android really takes off (and it seems to be starting that roll around now, given the number of devices coming out), that may change, as the dev environment is java based and so can be run on top of just about anything that can handle a java VM.
Java development on a Mac is a joy compared to any other system. (Unless you need a very specific JDK, in which case you will have the installation/configuration issues to overcome, but then you should wonder why you MUST use a specific JDK....)
I've looked at the new Droid. It still seems like an iPhone wanna be at this point. I own neither at this time, but it does seem telling to me that all smart phones compare themselves to the iPhone and want to rate themselves as better than the iPhone in this or that category. That tells me Apple definitely did something right with the iPhone.
I think it's funny. I bought a Mac Powerbook 5 years ago because it met the needs for what I wanted. It was lighter than anything comparable and did what i needed it for. I quickly grew to like it a lot. The main reason at the time? Sleep/hibernate actually worked reliably. That was it.
I then experimented with some other features included with the OS such as photos and videos. I then noticed I spent no time dealing with the OS or application bizarreness, and realized I was starting to use it for everything I normally do in my personal life. I bought a MacBook Pro as it was comparable in price when spec'd out against a comparable Dell or Compaq. (Yes, it really was in fact $200 less for the same basic hardware - CPU/Hard Drive/RAM/Video/Screen Resolution)
I then decided to look at how it would work out with development, and within a couple of days realized that it was far superior, primarily because of the reliability and speed. I'd reboot maybe once every 2-3 months, a darn sight better than my work windows machine, which I then replaced with Linux. The main issue with the linux box I found is I had to spend too much time dealing with OS/application issues. And thus the promotion of the MBP to my full work/development machine. I now spend 99% of my time dealing with what I need to spend time on vs dealing with OS/App issues or rebooting. (Bringing up an entire system that runs 4GB plus across multiple components takes a significant portion of your time if you have to reboot once a day a more often, which I found was the case with Windows.)