There are many, many interface ideas out there; anyone who's attended a SIGCHI or similar conference can attest to just how many, how varied - and how weird - they can be.
However, it's getting pretty clear that the WIMP stuff we have really is pretty good. We hit upon something which while far from perfect still is reasonable. Other interface ideas need to be substantially better, and without serious flaws, and that is difficult to achieve.
Having a 3D component is a good example. There is little doubt that it will be used in _some_ form at some point in the future. It is also clear that getting it really right is not easy; so many projects have tried and failed already. When what we have is already pretty good, the bar is very high for mistakes, drawbacks and problems.
To connect back with some earlier desktop discussions recently, this is exactly why having a multitude of desktops is a good idea - not just two, but ten or more projects, all trying various ideas and directions. Chances are one of them at least will stumble upon a new, better way of doing something; a new, better way that the others then are free to copy and improve on. That is also why it is so important to have more than one toolkit - ultimately you are constrained to what the toolkit allows you to do, and thus you need more than one to take into different directions.
So if you weren't "educated" in programming but merely spent 20+ years doing it, you wren't really a programmer?
I read it differently; I think he means that there just weren't all that many programmers and programming jobs around about 30+ years ago, not even enough to support a formal path to train as one.
And I think that is a large part of the answer. The field has exploded over the past twenty years, and thus management and leadership jobs have expanded enough to absorb any older programmer that has wanted to stay in the business but not doing programming.
It seems that the choice of software is less important. ubuntu is gnome by default (as far as I know) if you want kde it is called kubuntu and since in general KDE seems to be more popular (/me runs from an angry mob of Gnome fans + assorted fans from the gazzilion other desktops out there) it is odd to see a gnome distro score so high.
Well, usually both Ubuntu and Redhat are very high on any use list; on distrowatch, Gnome-based distros have frequently been at the top. The vocal people - the ones that are very visible and audible - are a fairly small group, and not representative for the large group of users. You have to be both passionate and fairly knowledgeable to bother to vote or fill in survey results about such arcane things as the choice of desktop. Most people just don't care that strongly either way.
And I think that is exactly what Ubuntu is getting right. Yes, apt is nice, the distro has a lot of spit and polish applied, and it has a wide and current selection of packages to choose from. But most important, Ubuntu is inclusive. People on the mailing lists and forums really _don't_care_ if you're running Gnome or KDE; or if you prefer Vi or EMACs, or... People are all focused on making a nice system for you no matter what you happen to prefer. It's the idea that things should work well together, be cooperating, not competing.
Since that attitude is fairly pervasive on everything from mailing lists to Wiki docs, people feel welcome, they feel appreciated. It's easy to get help because it's easy to _ask_ for help; you can feel nobody is going to call you an idiot for asking a dumb question. I think that is really what sets it apart and what makes it so popular.
KDE runs under BSD as well as Linux. Gnome runs under Solaris.
Gnome runs under BSD. And as far as I know, there is a fairly recent port of KDE to Solaris. And XFCe is probably ported to more platforms than either of them:)
For me it's the exact opposite. I'm a lot more happy in Gnome; it doesn't get in my way. From the default Ubuntu installation I don't need to tweak anything desktop related, it all just works.
As for doing a usability study, you first have to decide what to measure, then to decide what your users are. "everything" and "everybody" are hopeless non-answers.
On what to measure, you could focus on several things: time spent dealing with the desktop rather than your work; number of desktop related problems run into; perceived comfort by the users. All of these (and many more) would be legitimate targets - and no need to pick only one, you'd pick some number of them that you can study at the same time. Probably the one that says the least is measuring the number of clicks - for measuring intrusivness or comfort, time spent on non-work tasks or user perception is probably much better.
On users, you need to decide wether you want people experienced users of other systems, or novices; people mainly Windows users, Mac users or exposed to both; the level of understanding and interest in computing; the kind of task the users are expected to be interested in (gaming, office work, home use, development, technical work); the age and education level. Also, you need to control for previous exposure (direct or indirect) to either desktop and to willingness to actually use either (or any Linux) desktop at all as part of the study. Controlling for the subject variation is all a hoary problem, and is the single most important factor in determining if the study would be useful of a piece of dross.
But you as the designer have no idea what environment your design will be viewed in. Is it a 1920x1200 15" laptop screen or a 1024x768 42" plasma? Is it a bright, large screen in a dim room, or an anemic PDA backlight fighting the morning sun? Will those thin verticals be slender and soaring, or will all vertical lines in the typeface disappear altogether? Will the serifs give a pleasant gravity to the text, or will it look like the screen got pixel cooties? You just do not know at the design stage.
And you have no idea about your user. People with bad eyesight may need to be able to bring the font size way up, or change the colors, or select a very strong, bold typeface as default, or be unable to read the content. And of course, using flash, you tend to shut out people that need special aids to read anything at all.
This thing just screams "my aestethics are more important than your reading. Filthy peasant."
My SO has no interest or talent for computers; she needs them for work and communication, that's all. She has all her older Macs still around, and she has the next-to-newest still connected along with the current machine since she feels more comfortable and secure getting to the data on it directly rather than moving it (and thus having the potential for application and OS version problems, lost or corrupted data and so on). She treats each one as a separate, volatile, black box, and once one is running, she does as little to it as possible.
Of course, as a result, she does have a lot less issues to deal with than I do with my machines:)
I loved Sawfish when it was the default window manager. Metacity, by contrast, felt impoverished. I've long since gotten used to Metacity, of course, and it's not half bad; it's just vaguely working in the background.
Not long ago, I tried out Sawfish again, just for old times' sake. It is absolutely horrible. I had forgotten - to take one example - that you actually had to pick which of several algorithms for edge affinity between windows to use. In Metacity, there is affinity, it works and up until that point I had never even thought about that. I never needed to. And that was just one of many, many such issues with Sawfish. Never on my life will I go back to such a demented design.
I remember actually liking spending two days reconfiguring my desktop in the old Gnome1 days - of course, that was just thesis avoidance behaviour, I realize now; in the abscence of a craptasticly tweakable UI, I would have had the university record on Tetris or northern Europe's cleanest student kitchen instead.
For the record, the 360 is selling significantly worse than the original did in the beginning - and that is despite a 25% cut in price compared to the US (you can probably order it cheaper from Japan than buying it in a local US store, even with the freight added). From the local media, the current buyers are just about exclusively those who will buy every new gaming platform and piece of gear, just to have everything.
But you also get dust. Little talked about, but if you change lenses much, dust is a real problem. They are not like the old analog SLRs, these things are magnets for it.
I've had my 350d since April. I change lenses frequently. I have so far had to puff away one visible speck with a blower, an operation that took all of ten seconds. While the issue certainly exists, dust really is far overrated as a problem for DSLRs.
And that problem does not go away with fixed-lens cameras. Compacts with a zoom pull air as they operate, and they aren't assembled in clean-rooms in any case, so you run the risk of getting visible specks there as well. With a DSLR it is easy to get it off by yourself; with a fixed-lens unit you'll have to send it off for disassembly and cleaning.
Have you looked at properly exposed and printed shots from a decent dSLR (eg, a Canon Rebel XT) and a decent point and shoot (eg, a Canon SD450)?
Yep. I own a 350D. The image quality is absolutely better, especially for high ISO. But the image quality I got from my previous compact was certainly good enough for my use - or I thought it was until the DSLR spoiled me. Image quality was not the reason for me to look at a DSLR; the reason was the ability to change lenses (that and the optical viewfinder). The rest is all gravy.
By the way, I have yet to print a picture, ever.:)
And although it's not the optimal solution, you can add accessories on to the Sony cams. I have a number of filters and fisheyes and wide angle lenses that screw on. Again, it's not optimal, but I'd rather blow dust off an exposed lens than try to blow it off some much more delicate sensor buried deep in my camera.
It may well be a good solution for some people. All I argue is that this one sits very awkwardly between compact cameras on one hand, and system cameras on the other.
Screw-on extenders are a sort-of kind-of partial solution in some cases. You'll sacrifice quite a bit of image quality, though, and there are a lot of cases where this kind of add-on just isn't possible; you can't make the lens faster than f/2.8 no matter what you add on to the end. And with a set of addons, you have the same bulk and fiddliness you'd have with a DSLR.
Dust, by the way, is way overblown (sic). Sometimes people make it sound like you need to clean the sensor every month or something, which just isn't the case. I've had to use a blower to get rid of a speck once every six months. I have yet to need to do anything invasive (like actually wiping it or anything). Unless you live in a desert environment, dust just isn't a problem. And unlike fixed-lens cameras, if you _do_ get a speck, it's easy to get rid of yourself. When you get a visible particle in a fixed-lens camera you need to send it off for disassembly.
I wasn't entirely clear. For a compact camera user (who already lives with a fixed lens and an electronic viewfinder) the largest gripe is usually image quality, especially at high ISO, due in large part to a small sensor. This Sony can be seen as an attempt to rectify that; throw on a sensor of the same size as a DSLR and you'll get comparative image quality. Of course, you'll get comparative size, weight and prize as well.
The Sony is the same size, weight and price range as a Canon 350D with the kit lens (a bit more, actually). It just isn't a compact camera anymore, and can't really compare to them. It throws away the huge advantage of small size entirely (which it has to do to use an APS size sensor). Apparently they also throw away other features compact users really like.
Instead it invites comparison with other cameras in the same size and price range - which are DSLRs. And from a DLSR users point of view, this is not all that compelling - in no small part because image quality is apparently not up where it should be and use of RAW format seems botched, but mostly because it lacks the flexibility of interchangeable lenses. The optics on this one is by all reviews superb. But you can't put on a really fast prime lens for nighttime photography; no real macro lens for insects or flowers; no long telephoto for sports or wildlife.
It relinquishes the benefits of a compact camera in order to compete with DSLRs on image quality. In the process, it pick up some of the same drawbacks (size and cost) but fails to incorporate any of the other benefits. And, in the end, it seems not to fully have achieved the desired image quality either.
For me, the whole point of LSR:s is the ability to change lenses as needed. Yes, the better image quality is nice too, but it's not _that_ huge a difference anymore. And this one (apart from being a Sony) has the drawback of being the same size as an SLR camera, without the benefit of switching lenses. I'd happily have either a pocketable point and shoot (small, light, inexpensive and quick and easy to use) or a DSLR (good image quality, great flexibility). This halfway thing is not the right thing for me.
I agree; OOffice is slow, bloated and full of still really obvious bugs (try writing a full stop in japanese; it'll end up in the upper right corner of the character cell, not the lower left). I much prefer the leaner, faster Abiword (still buggy, but at least the bugs have a snappy feeling), and most of all, Gnumeric over any other spreadsheet out there.
OOffice does have its place as a Word alternative, however. That's the kind of package it is aiming to be after all, and that brings with it most of the drawbacks. It's good for viewing and editing Word and presentation files. And if your basis of comparison is Word, you have different ideas on what constitutes bloat anyhow.
A mature, thoughtful organization would realize a couple of things. First, he is sitting with a whole lot of implicit knowledge about the current assignments. Having him spend the last two weeks document it all and bringing other people up to speed on it is a pretty good idea.
Second, he is leaving. There is a reason for it. Is it the salary? Personal conflicts? The hours? Too little challenge, or too heavy a workload? Is there a problem with the social climate at the IT department? A good organization will want to know, and conduct exit interviews to see if there are points they should improve. Perhaps even catch a disaster in the making before it explodes in their faces.
Third, he is now an ex-employee. He will go out in the world and socialize with his peers at other companies - some of whom his previous employer may well want to hire at some point in the future. If his final impresion of the company is that of a bunch of posterior orifices, that's what he'll be telling people when they ask him about his opinion on applying for a position there. If, on the other hand, they do a good job of taking care of him up until the moment his contract ends, showing interest as above and so on, the impression will be vastly better, and they'll effectively be sending out a PR representative that will be giving a much better impression about the company for years to come.
So yes, there are very good reasons not to just cancel his passcard and give him thirty minutes to pack his personal belongings before having him escorted out by a rent-a-cop.
Except when Kitty gets run over, or sneaks onto a truck bound for Vladivostok, or urinates on the wrong car, or gets caught by animal control, or... Quite apart from the lack of consideration towards your neighbours (people can be allergic, phobic or just plain don't want kittycrap in their yards), it's not good petkeeping to let it run free either.
If you want to have a cat in a city, keep it indoors or walk it leashed. Seriously. Just like with dogs, if they are trained to wear a leash as kittens they have no problem with it.
The highways/interstates were never intended as landing strips. Besides, when's the last time you heard of traffic being shut down/diverted for the practice landings?
Sweden does use public roads as military airfields. The idea is to be able to very quickly set up a temporary airfield, resupply the aircraft and then leave again. Not highways, though; it's usually secondary roads with a section straightened and widened, and with a few (normally empty) buildings in the nearby forest. And yes, I've seen a road closed off by air-force guards a few times and a fighter plane come down for landing and takeoff.
Earlier this year, there was a howl of outrage in the US about "eminent domain", where a bunch of houses were expropriated by the local council in order to let a developer tear them down and erect a building. The argument went that the building made by the developer - and the commercial activity that would result - would be much more valuable for the community than the run-down housing that was presently there, and thus it trumped the ownership and usage rights of the people that actually lived and had their busniesses there.
How is that different from you arguing that RIM has a right to those patents because they have a successful business around them while the patent owners do not?
It does make sense to have one "internet device" like this, with all the persistent stuff collected onto it, especially since it's expected to be running all the time.
The $10 crappy PC is cheap - but one faulty part and it'll be as expensive as the router again. And the router is small, it is quiet (no fan or harddrive), and you'll save enough on your electric bill compared to a whole PC that I really wonder if the PC is worth it at all.
If Sun were to GPL Java, they've have every Tom, Dick and Harry making an "improved platform independant language." They lose the marketshare, and browsers/websites have to start supporting a million little random Java-like applets.
You mean exactly like Python, Ruby, Perl and so on are suffering horribly from all their incompatible forks?
Under U.S. law, a company can be guilty of violating patents it didn't know about.
Try reading every law. Try finding a lawyer that knows every law. Now expand that to patents that even the Patent Office doesn't know exist.
I honestly did not know it wasn't allowed to drive without this "license" thingy and run over children while drunk. I don't own a TV, and nobody told me when I bought the car. Does that mean I'm off the hook according to you?
Patents: What is wrong is not that these companies aren't using them themselves (one of them did try before Blackberry showed up and failed). If you're so anti-government, don't you think you should be entitled to do whatever you like (including nothing at all) with your property? What they do with their patents is utterly beside the point.
What is wrong is what patents are being granted, and on what grounds. Immaterial patents were a bad idea. Restricting prior art to previous patents is another bad idea. Having a low bar for non-obviousness is a third one. Making it very expensive to challenge bad patents is really bad. If you then add to it that nobody workign in the system has any incentive to change it, it means we have a broken, dysfunctional system, and it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
None of you seem to have realised that the piece is what we in the UK call "satire". That's right, someone's making it up in order to try to be amusing or humourous.
I know well what satire is (I'm not American). The piece does miss the "humourus" part by a mile or so, though. Just calling people names in the most mean-spirited way is not exactly challenging and not great writing. This piece is satire the way Benny Hill was humour - easily mistaken for the real thing just as long as you don't actually look at it too closely.
And the ulterior motive for this "satire", as for the occasional other rants, are still to get a rise out of people, since it's an easy way to gather page hits without having to actually produce anything worthwile.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many, many interface ideas out there; anyone who's attended a SIGCHI or similar conference can attest to just how many, how varied - and how weird - they can be.
However, it's getting pretty clear that the WIMP stuff we have really is pretty good. We hit upon something which while far from perfect still is reasonable. Other interface ideas need to be substantially better, and without serious flaws, and that is difficult to achieve.
Having a 3D component is a good example. There is little doubt that it will be used in _some_ form at some point in the future. It is also clear that getting it really right is not easy; so many projects have tried and failed already. When what we have is already pretty good, the bar is very high for mistakes, drawbacks and problems.
To connect back with some earlier desktop discussions recently, this is exactly why having a multitude of desktops is a good idea - not just two, but ten or more projects, all trying various ideas and directions. Chances are one of them at least will stumble upon a new, better way of doing something; a new, better way that the others then are free to copy and improve on. That is also why it is so important to have more than one toolkit - ultimately you are constrained to what the toolkit allows you to do, and thus you need more than one to take into different directions.
So if you weren't "educated" in programming but merely spent 20+ years doing it, you wren't really a programmer?
I read it differently; I think he means that there just weren't all that many programmers and programming jobs around about 30+ years ago, not even enough to support a formal path to train as one.
And I think that is a large part of the answer. The field has exploded over the past twenty years, and thus management and leadership jobs have expanded enough to absorb any older programmer that has wanted to stay in the business but not doing programming.
It seems that the choice of software is less important. ubuntu is gnome by default (as far as I know) if you want kde it is called kubuntu and since in general KDE seems to be more popular (/me runs from an angry mob of Gnome fans + assorted fans from the gazzilion other desktops out there) it is odd to see a gnome distro score so high.
... People are all focused on making a nice system for you no matter what you happen to prefer. It's the idea that things should work well together, be cooperating, not competing.
Well, usually both Ubuntu and Redhat are very high on any use list; on distrowatch, Gnome-based distros have frequently been at the top. The vocal people - the ones that are very visible and audible - are a fairly small group, and not representative for the large group of users. You have to be both passionate and fairly knowledgeable to bother to vote or fill in survey results about such arcane things as the choice of desktop. Most people just don't care that strongly either way.
And I think that is exactly what Ubuntu is getting right. Yes, apt is nice, the distro has a lot of spit and polish applied, and it has a wide and current selection of packages to choose from. But most important, Ubuntu is inclusive. People on the mailing lists and forums really _don't_care_ if you're running Gnome or KDE; or if you prefer Vi or EMACs, or
Since that attitude is fairly pervasive on everything from mailing lists to Wiki docs, people feel welcome, they feel appreciated. It's easy to get help because it's easy to _ask_ for help; you can feel nobody is going to call you an idiot for asking a dumb question. I think that is really what sets it apart and what makes it so popular.
The best usability desktop is where
.
1. Ctrl+C (Copy), Ctrl+X(Cut) Ctrl+A (Select All) Ctrl +V(Paste) Ctrl+P (Print)
works in all applications you open out of the box.
2. You open up a file Browser, go to the folder you wanna browse and type the first letter of the file and the cursor takes you there.
One has to agree, whatever follows MS Windows closely.
In this case that would be kde handsdown
Gnome works the same (as does, I believe, most other DE:s out there).
Why is it, byt the way, always kde-users that seem to frame this all as some big fight, with a winner and loser?
KDE runs under BSD as well as Linux. Gnome runs under Solaris.
:)
Gnome runs under BSD. And as far as I know, there is a fairly recent port of KDE to Solaris. And XFCe is probably ported to more platforms than either of them
For me it's the exact opposite. I'm a lot more happy in Gnome; it doesn't get in my way. From the default Ubuntu installation I don't need to tweak anything desktop related, it all just works.
As for doing a usability study, you first have to decide what to measure, then to decide what your users are. "everything" and "everybody" are hopeless non-answers.
On what to measure, you could focus on several things: time spent dealing with the desktop rather than your work; number of desktop related problems run into; perceived comfort by the users. All of these (and many more) would be legitimate targets - and no need to pick only one, you'd pick some number of them that you can study at the same time. Probably the one that says the least is measuring the number of clicks - for measuring intrusivness or comfort, time spent on non-work tasks or user perception is probably much better.
On users, you need to decide wether you want people experienced users of other systems, or novices; people mainly Windows users, Mac users or exposed to both; the level of understanding and interest in computing; the kind of task the users are expected to be interested in (gaming, office work, home use, development, technical work); the age and education level. Also, you need to control for previous exposure (direct or indirect) to either desktop and to willingness to actually use either (or any Linux) desktop at all as part of the study. Controlling for the subject variation is all a hoary problem, and is the single most important factor in determining if the study would be useful of a piece of dross.
But you as the designer have no idea what environment your design will be viewed in. Is it a 1920x1200 15" laptop screen or a 1024x768 42" plasma? Is it a bright, large screen in a dim room, or an anemic PDA backlight fighting the morning sun? Will those thin verticals be slender and soaring, or will all vertical lines in the typeface disappear altogether? Will the serifs give a pleasant gravity to the text, or will it look like the screen got pixel cooties? You just do not know at the design stage.
And you have no idea about your user. People with bad eyesight may need to be able to bring the font size way up, or change the colors, or select a very strong, bold typeface as default, or be unable to read the content. And of course, using flash, you tend to shut out people that need special aids to read anything at all.
This thing just screams "my aestethics are more important than your reading. Filthy peasant."
My SO has no interest or talent for computers; she needs them for work and communication, that's all. She has all her older Macs still around, and she has the next-to-newest still connected along with the current machine since she feels more comfortable and secure getting to the data on it directly rather than moving it (and thus having the potential for application and OS version problems, lost or corrupted data and so on). She treats each one as a separate, volatile, black box, and once one is running, she does as little to it as possible.
:)
Of course, as a result, she does have a lot less issues to deal with than I do with my machines
I loved Sawfish when it was the default window manager. Metacity, by contrast, felt impoverished. I've long since gotten used to Metacity, of course, and it's not half bad; it's just vaguely working in the background.
Not long ago, I tried out Sawfish again, just for old times' sake. It is absolutely horrible. I had forgotten - to take one example - that you actually had to pick which of several algorithms for edge affinity between windows to use. In Metacity, there is affinity, it works and up until that point I had never even thought about that. I never needed to. And that was just one of many, many such issues with Sawfish. Never on my life will I go back to such a demented design.
I remember actually liking spending two days reconfiguring my desktop in the old Gnome1 days - of course, that was just thesis avoidance behaviour, I realize now; in the abscence of a craptasticly tweakable UI, I would have had the university record on Tetris or northern Europe's cleanest student kitchen instead.
For the record, the 360 is selling significantly worse than the original did in the beginning - and that is despite a 25% cut in price compared to the US (you can probably order it cheaper from Japan than buying it in a local US store, even with the freight added). From the local media, the current buyers are just about exclusively those who will buy every new gaming platform and piece of gear, just to have everything.
But you also get dust. Little talked about, but if you change lenses much, dust is a real problem. They are not like the old analog SLRs, these things are magnets for it.
I've had my 350d since April. I change lenses frequently. I have so far had to puff away one visible speck with a blower, an operation that took all of ten seconds. While the issue certainly exists, dust really is far overrated as a problem for DSLRs.
And that problem does not go away with fixed-lens cameras. Compacts with a zoom pull air as they operate, and they aren't assembled in clean-rooms in any case, so you run the risk of getting visible specks there as well. With a DSLR it is easy to get it off by yourself; with a fixed-lens unit you'll have to send it off for disassembly and cleaning.
Have you looked at properly exposed and printed shots from a decent dSLR (eg, a Canon Rebel XT) and a decent point and shoot (eg, a Canon SD450)?
:)
Yep. I own a 350D. The image quality is absolutely better, especially for high ISO. But the image quality I got from my previous compact was certainly good enough for my use - or I thought it was until the DSLR spoiled me. Image quality was not the reason for me to look at a DSLR; the reason was the ability to change lenses (that and the optical viewfinder). The rest is all gravy.
By the way, I have yet to print a picture, ever.
And although it's not the optimal solution, you can add accessories on to the Sony cams. I have a number of filters and fisheyes and wide angle lenses that screw on. Again, it's not optimal, but I'd rather blow dust off an exposed lens than try to blow it off some much more delicate sensor buried deep in my camera.
It may well be a good solution for some people. All I argue is that this one sits very awkwardly between compact cameras on one hand, and system cameras on the other.
Screw-on extenders are a sort-of kind-of partial solution in some cases. You'll sacrifice quite a bit of image quality, though, and there are a lot of cases where this kind of add-on just isn't possible; you can't make the lens faster than f/2.8 no matter what you add on to the end. And with a set of addons, you have the same bulk and fiddliness you'd have with a DSLR.
Dust, by the way, is way overblown (sic). Sometimes people make it sound like you need to clean the sensor every month or something, which just isn't the case. I've had to use a blower to get rid of a speck once every six months. I have yet to need to do anything invasive (like actually wiping it or anything). Unless you live in a desert environment, dust just isn't a problem. And unlike fixed-lens cameras, if you _do_ get a speck, it's easy to get rid of yourself. When you get a visible particle in a fixed-lens camera you need to send it off for disassembly.
I wasn't entirely clear. For a compact camera user (who already lives with a fixed lens and an electronic viewfinder) the largest gripe is usually image quality, especially at high ISO, due in large part to a small sensor. This Sony can be seen as an attempt to rectify that; throw on a sensor of the same size as a DSLR and you'll get comparative image quality. Of course, you'll get comparative size, weight and prize as well.
The Sony is the same size, weight and price range as a Canon 350D with the kit lens (a bit more, actually). It just isn't a compact camera anymore, and can't really compare to them. It throws away the huge advantage of small size entirely (which it has to do to use an APS size sensor). Apparently they also throw away other features compact users really like.
Instead it invites comparison with other cameras in the same size and price range - which are DSLRs. And from a DLSR users point of view, this is not all that compelling - in no small part because image quality is apparently not up where it should be and use of RAW format seems botched, but mostly because it lacks the flexibility of interchangeable lenses. The optics on this one is by all reviews superb. But you can't put on a really fast prime lens for nighttime photography; no real macro lens for insects or flowers; no long telephoto for sports or wildlife.
It relinquishes the benefits of a compact camera in order to compete with DSLRs on image quality. In the process, it pick up some of the same drawbacks (size and cost) but fails to incorporate any of the other benefits. And, in the end, it seems not to fully have achieved the desired image quality either.
For me, the whole point of LSR:s is the ability to change lenses as needed. Yes, the better image quality is nice too, but it's not _that_ huge a difference anymore. And this one (apart from being a Sony) has the drawback of being the same size as an SLR camera, without the benefit of switching lenses. I'd happily have either a pocketable point and shoot (small, light, inexpensive and quick and easy to use) or a DSLR (good image quality, great flexibility). This halfway thing is not the right thing for me.
Of course if you want nice weather too you could look in a place called Australia ;)
John Howard.
I agree; OOffice is slow, bloated and full of still really obvious bugs (try writing a full stop in japanese; it'll end up in the upper right corner of the character cell, not the lower left). I much prefer the leaner, faster Abiword (still buggy, but at least the bugs have a snappy feeling), and most of all, Gnumeric over any other spreadsheet out there.
OOffice does have its place as a Word alternative, however. That's the kind of package it is aiming to be after all, and that brings with it most of the drawbacks. It's good for viewing and editing Word and presentation files. And if your basis of comparison is Word, you have different ideas on what constitutes bloat anyhow.
A mature, thoughtful organization would realize a couple of things. First, he is sitting with a whole lot of implicit knowledge about the current assignments. Having him spend the last two weeks document it all and bringing other people up to speed on it is a pretty good idea.
Second, he is leaving. There is a reason for it. Is it the salary? Personal conflicts? The hours? Too little challenge, or too heavy a workload? Is there a problem with the social climate at the IT department? A good organization will want to know, and conduct exit interviews to see if there are points they should improve. Perhaps even catch a disaster in the making before it explodes in their faces.
Third, he is now an ex-employee. He will go out in the world and socialize with his peers at other companies - some of whom his previous employer may well want to hire at some point in the future. If his final impresion of the company is that of a bunch of posterior orifices, that's what he'll be telling people when they ask him about his opinion on applying for a position there. If, on the other hand, they do a good job of taking care of him up until the moment his contract ends, showing interest as above and so on, the impression will be vastly better, and they'll effectively be sending out a PR representative that will be giving a much better impression about the company for years to come.
So yes, there are very good reasons not to just cancel his passcard and give him thirty minutes to pack his personal belongings before having him escorted out by a rent-a-cop.
Kitty goes out, Kitty comes back in.
Except when Kitty gets run over, or sneaks onto a truck bound for Vladivostok, or urinates on the wrong car, or gets caught by animal control, or... Quite apart from the lack of consideration towards your neighbours (people can be allergic, phobic or just plain don't want kittycrap in their yards), it's not good petkeeping to let it run free either.
If you want to have a cat in a city, keep it indoors or walk it leashed. Seriously. Just like with dogs, if they are trained to wear a leash as kittens they have no problem with it.
The highways/interstates were never intended as landing strips. Besides, when's the last time you heard of traffic being shut down/diverted for the practice landings?
Sweden does use public roads as military airfields. The idea is to be able to very quickly set up a temporary airfield, resupply the aircraft and then leave again. Not highways, though; it's usually secondary roads with a section straightened and widened, and with a few (normally empty) buildings in the nearby forest. And yes, I've seen a road closed off by air-force guards a few times and a fighter plane come down for landing and takeoff.
Earlier this year, there was a howl of outrage in the US about "eminent domain", where a bunch of houses were expropriated by the local council in order to let a developer tear them down and erect a building. The argument went that the building made by the developer - and the commercial activity that would result - would be much more valuable for the community than the run-down housing that was presently there, and thus it trumped the ownership and usage rights of the people that actually lived and had their busniesses there.
How is that different from you arguing that RIM has a right to those patents because they have a successful business around them while the patent owners do not?
It does make sense to have one "internet device" like this, with all the persistent stuff collected onto it, especially since it's expected to be running all the time.
The $10 crappy PC is cheap - but one faulty part and it'll be as expensive as the router again. And the router is small, it is quiet (no fan or harddrive), and you'll save enough on your electric bill compared to a whole PC that I really wonder if the PC is worth it at all.
If Sun were to GPL Java, they've have every Tom, Dick and Harry making an "improved platform independant language." They lose the marketshare, and browsers/websites have to start supporting a million little random Java-like applets.
You mean exactly like Python, Ruby, Perl and so on are suffering horribly from all their incompatible forks?
Under U.S. law, a company can be guilty of violating patents it didn't know about.
Try reading every law. Try finding a lawyer that knows every law. Now expand that to patents that even the Patent Office doesn't know exist.
I honestly did not know it wasn't allowed to drive without this "license" thingy and run over children while drunk. I don't own a TV, and nobody told me when I bought the car. Does that mean I'm off the hook according to you?
Patents: What is wrong is not that these companies aren't using them themselves (one of them did try before Blackberry showed up and failed). If you're so anti-government, don't you think you should be entitled to do whatever you like (including nothing at all) with your property? What they do with their patents is utterly beside the point.
What is wrong is what patents are being granted, and on what grounds. Immaterial patents were a bad idea. Restricting prior art to previous patents is another bad idea. Having a low bar for non-obviousness is a third one. Making it very expensive to challenge bad patents is really bad. If you then add to it that nobody workign in the system has any incentive to change it, it means we have a broken, dysfunctional system, and it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.
None of you seem to have realised that the piece is what we in the UK call "satire". That's right, someone's making it up in order to try to be amusing or humourous.
I know well what satire is (I'm not American). The piece does miss the "humourus" part by a mile or so, though. Just calling people names in the most mean-spirited way is not exactly challenging and not great writing. This piece is satire the way Benny Hill was humour - easily mistaken for the real thing just as long as you don't actually look at it too closely.
And the ulterior motive for this "satire", as for the occasional other rants, are still to get a rise out of people, since it's an easy way to gather page hits without having to actually produce anything worthwile.