Transactional NTFS/Registry. Being able to use begin/commit/rollback and be guaranteed ACIDic operation is incredibly sexy.
And having an API that is the technical equivalent of a plastic Fisher Price hammer is incredibly UNsexy.
Humour aside, your post is quite telling. The features you missed are tiny little things -- stuff that should take a company like MS a couple months AT MOST to implement. Not 2.5 years (I know Vista took 5, but I'll be generous, and use the "development reset" to the Windows 2003 codebase as the starting point.)
Vista reeks of mismanagement and a lack of direction. It's almost as if 25 programming teams were all let loose to change the OS as they saw fit, with no real eye towards a unified experience. Sadly, as far as I can tell from reading the blogs and watching Channel9 vids, that seems to be exactly what happened.
The only constant in the cast is the Doctor and he can "regenerate" every time the actor wants to move on to other things.
Well... technically, a Time Lord can only regenerate 12 time, and we're on the Tenth Doctor now. That said, I'm sure that if the show continued past #12 that the writers would find some plausible explanation. Come to think of it, I don't think that the 12 regeneration limit has actually been mentioned on screen, so they could be fine anyways...
Speech recognition, handwriting recognition, species recognition... all of these suck, and will CONTINUE to suck, until strong AI is developed.
I dunno... I mean, the Newton with six months of training had around 98% accuracy... Inkwell's based of the same algorithms, albeit tweaked slightly to accomadate from the difference input peripherals. I bet with a year of real research/development, Apple could take handwriting recognition off that list.
Unfortunately, the neo-cons would likely use the assasination of GW as a reason to plunge the country into facism (the country probably wouldn't object much, given what a bunch of pansies they were after 9/11).
Halo, on the other hand, was just the latest iteration of a long line of FPS inspired by Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.
The difference is, it did it well. Halo was popular because it was a master of its genre -- the weapons were perfectly balanced, the AI was good (grunts flocking, when scared, cowering behind Elites), and the levels were expansive and real-feeling (remember the amazing size of the first Halo level? How expansive it felt, and how you felt like you could roam around for ever?) It wasn't so much that Halo pioneered anything, just that it had a good plot, and that everything it tried, it did well (with the sole exception of high-speed collision detection.)
While most people just want something that works, there is no 'good' reason why the iPhone needs to be a totally closed platform. If Sun's new product is based on open standards and not locked and still gives a good customer experience, it will be far more than an iPhone.
Kind of. It's a matter of dev. tools alright -- Apple has them, Sun doesn't. Apple's iPhone dev kit is likely to have a cross-compiler functionality; write your software on the Mac, compile, load onto dev. iPhone. Sun has.... command line java compilers.
My Macbook Pro never got more than 3.5 hours of battery life.
Then dude, you should take it in. There's something wrong with it if it only gets 3.5 hours. I regularly top 4.0. My best time is something like 5.0 when word-processing, when turning the backlight down (the glossy screen helps make that a lot more bearable than it used to be). My old 12-inch iBook G3 (700mhz) could get about 6.0 under those conditions, and 6.5 hours if I clocked the G3 down to 300mhz (iCook.kext and, later, iCooked let you do that). Personally, given how much nicer the MacBook Pro is, I'm willing to trade an hour of battery life for it -- but I know some people aren't.
Also, do you have a 17-inch MacBook? That might be part of the problem too, you know;-)
This is a perfect example of the consequences politically expedient "free market" and some Libertarian pablum.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing! Unfortunately, you're a little incorrect. Were we in a truly free market, something like the DMCA (one of the main driving forces behind DRM) would not exist -- neither would groups like the RIAA/MPAA who can buy themselves any law they like.
Free markets only work when they really are free of interference...
We're talking about children here. Most adults would brush off what is called cyber bullying. But a large proportion of the teenage population doesn't yet have the maturity to deal with these things.
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing.
Part of the reason that a large proportion of the teenage population doesn't have that maturity is that, due to laws like this, and arguments like yours, they're never given a chance to develop it themselves until they reach college-age. In the 50's, nobody would have to said that a teenager "didn't have the maturity" to deal with someone making fun of him in front of his peers (and that's all "cyber-bullying" is.)
Maybe the solution to our children's development problems is just to... you know.... let them develop, and stop treating them like babies until they're 16.
It's tricky to sell machines without an OS because MS have some kind of conspiracy going, not because consumers generally just want the machine to come with the current Windows OS?
Not to sound like a smart-ass, but... yes. One of the things that has come to light (in court, actually) is that Microsoft will actively raise the price of Windows for OEM's who sell computers without an OS, and will threaten to refuse to sell Windows to OEM's that wish to ship other OS's in anything more than trivial quantities. This is one of the things that BeOS ran up against -- they almost worked out a deal with Toshiba (IIRC), to include BeOS alongside Windows. Microsoft told Toshiba that if they did that, they would be unable to purchase Windows licenses. Toshiba (or whoever it was, I can't remember for certain) then had to drop BeOS.
3) Because auth on Vista is such a tremendous pain in the ass that I end up disabling it.
This raises two points: 1) Authentication shouldn't be disable-able. 2) By preventing it from being disabled, MS would actually have to put work into making it usable day-to-day.
I've actually kinda liked my experience with Obj-C. I think that most people's objection to it stems from the fact that it's different from C and C++. C# certainly wins when it comes to familiarity -- but in terms of technical features, it doesn't have any advantages that I can see. Both are good OO languages, both have GC, both are reasonably good performance-wise, and both are well-supported by their respective "parents".
Agreed. Technically, you can do more stuff on Windows -- just as you can technically go more places in a SUV than you can in a sedan. But in reality, you never end up taking advantage of every little feature, relying instead on a core library of features. And when it comes to that "core library", Windows can't touch Mac OS X.
Because then the RIAA might actually get the fees. Don't mod me funny yet -- I'm serious. ROMS is supposed to hold the fees for the rights holder (in this case the RIAA). Both ROMS and Allofmp3.com have publicly stated that, upon proof of rights ownership, ROMS will release the royalities.
Of course, from the RIAA's perspective this would be bad -- since then they wouldn't have a case against Allofmp3.com. They stand to (at least they think they stand to) make more money by suing.
Like all gambling though -- they might end up with nothing instead of just less than they wanted...
Look up "YellowBox". Yes, it was publicly released. Yes, it did essentialy allow what you're describing (although it did require a recompile of software, it didn't require re-coding.) It was (thankfully) dropped, mainly because if it was successful, even in a state less transparent than what you described, it would have more or less killed Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
And what other company, pray tell, provides access to an H.264 version of YouTube content?
Transactional NTFS/Registry. Being able to use begin/commit/rollback and be guaranteed ACIDic operation is incredibly sexy.
And having an API that is the technical equivalent of a plastic Fisher Price hammer is incredibly UNsexy.
Humour aside, your post is quite telling. The features you missed are tiny little things -- stuff that should take a company like MS a couple months AT MOST to implement. Not 2.5 years (I know Vista took 5, but I'll be generous, and use the "development reset" to the Windows 2003 codebase as the starting point.)
Vista reeks of mismanagement and a lack of direction. It's almost as if 25 programming teams were all let loose to change the OS as they saw fit, with no real eye towards a unified experience. Sadly, as far as I can tell from reading the blogs and watching Channel9 vids, that seems to be exactly what happened.
Try leaving Japan sometime. They charge to leave.
I call shenanigans. Either they've changed the policy since I last visited (2005), or you got screwed by immigration....
The only constant in the cast is the Doctor and he can "regenerate" every time the actor wants to move on to other things.
Well... technically, a Time Lord can only regenerate 12 time, and we're on the Tenth Doctor now. That said, I'm sure that if the show continued past #12 that the writers would find some plausible explanation. Come to think of it, I don't think that the 12 regeneration limit has actually been mentioned on screen, so they could be fine anyways...
Speech recognition, handwriting recognition, species recognition... all of these suck, and will CONTINUE to suck, until strong AI is developed.
I dunno... I mean, the Newton with six months of training had around 98% accuracy... Inkwell's based of the same algorithms, albeit tweaked slightly to accomadate from the difference input peripherals. I bet with a year of real research/development, Apple could take handwriting recognition off that list.
Unfortunately, the neo-cons would likely use the assasination of GW as a reason to plunge the country into facism (the country probably wouldn't object much, given what a bunch of pansies they were after 9/11).
Halo, on the other hand, was just the latest iteration of a long line of FPS inspired by Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.
The difference is, it did it well. Halo was popular because it was a master of its genre -- the weapons were perfectly balanced, the AI was good (grunts flocking, when scared, cowering behind Elites), and the levels were expansive and real-feeling (remember the amazing size of the first Halo level? How expansive it felt, and how you felt like you could roam around for ever?) It wasn't so much that Halo pioneered anything, just that it had a good plot, and that everything it tried, it did well (with the sole exception of high-speed collision detection.)
While most people just want something that works, there is no 'good' reason why the iPhone needs to be a totally closed platform. If Sun's new product is based on open standards and not locked and still gives a good customer experience, it will be far more than an iPhone.
Kind of. It's a matter of dev. tools alright -- Apple has them, Sun doesn't. Apple's iPhone dev kit is likely to have a cross-compiler functionality; write your software on the Mac, compile, load onto dev. iPhone. Sun has.... command line java compilers.
Sync speed is different than sustained transfer speed.
My Macbook Pro never got more than 3.5 hours of battery life.
;-)
Then dude, you should take it in. There's something wrong with it if it only gets 3.5 hours. I regularly top 4.0. My best time is something like 5.0 when word-processing, when turning the backlight down (the glossy screen helps make that a lot more bearable than it used to be). My old 12-inch iBook G3 (700mhz) could get about 6.0 under those conditions, and 6.5 hours if I clocked the G3 down to 300mhz (iCook.kext and, later, iCooked let you do that). Personally, given how much nicer the MacBook Pro is, I'm willing to trade an hour of battery life for it -- but I know some people aren't.
Also, do you have a 17-inch MacBook? That might be part of the problem too, you know
This is a perfect example of the consequences politically expedient "free market" and some Libertarian pablum.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing! Unfortunately, you're a little incorrect. Were we in a truly free market, something like the DMCA (one of the main driving forces behind DRM) would not exist -- neither would groups like the RIAA/MPAA who can buy themselves any law they like.
Free markets only work when they really are free of interference...
improvements in RSS, CSS, and AJAX
Sh*t. "Improvements"? Didn't we do this a decade ago?
We're talking about children here. Most adults would brush off what is called cyber bullying. But a large proportion of the teenage population doesn't yet have the maturity to deal with these things.
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing.
Part of the reason that a large proportion of the teenage population doesn't have that maturity is that, due to laws like this, and arguments like yours, they're never given a chance to develop it themselves until they reach college-age. In the 50's, nobody would have to said that a teenager "didn't have the maturity" to deal with someone making fun of him in front of his peers (and that's all "cyber-bullying" is.)
Maybe the solution to our children's development problems is just to... you know.... let them develop, and stop treating them like babies until they're 16.
Doom XV online
Fuck online... come on down to Lab 6 and play for real!
-Andrew Hackman
Union Aerospace Corporation
She hasn't got to D yet.
Fuck.
-Zach Zenmann
It's tricky to sell machines without an OS because MS have some kind of conspiracy going, not because consumers generally just want the machine to come with the current Windows OS?
Not to sound like a smart-ass, but... yes. One of the things that has come to light (in court, actually) is that Microsoft will actively raise the price of Windows for OEM's who sell computers without an OS, and will threaten to refuse to sell Windows to OEM's that wish to ship other OS's in anything more than trivial quantities. This is one of the things that BeOS ran up against -- they almost worked out a deal with Toshiba (IIRC), to include BeOS alongside Windows. Microsoft told Toshiba that if they did that, they would be unable to purchase Windows licenses. Toshiba (or whoever it was, I can't remember for certain) then had to drop BeOS.
Having kids, I don't think this is misguided...
If you don't see anything wrong with it, then I think that your having kids was misguided....
Nope. The Macbook's proc, like most laptops, isn't socketed.
Nothing for you to see here, please move along
See, it's attitudes like that....
You realize that the staining problem was resolved a long, long time ago? And that the black shows dirt/scratches/wear better?
:)
Ok... good. I just wanted to make sure you didn't buy a black MacBook for all the wrong reasons.
3) Because auth on Vista is such a tremendous pain in the ass that I end up disabling it.
This raises two points: 1) Authentication shouldn't be disable-able. 2) By preventing it from being disabled, MS would actually have to put work into making it usable day-to-day.
I've actually kinda liked my experience with Obj-C. I think that most people's objection to it stems from the fact that it's different from C and C++. C# certainly wins when it comes to familiarity -- but in terms of technical features, it doesn't have any advantages that I can see. Both are good OO languages, both have GC, both are reasonably good performance-wise, and both are well-supported by their respective "parents".
Agreed. Technically, you can do more stuff on Windows -- just as you can technically go more places in a SUV than you can in a sedan. But in reality, you never end up taking advantage of every little feature, relying instead on a core library of features. And when it comes to that "core library", Windows can't touch Mac OS X.
Because then the RIAA might actually get the fees. Don't mod me funny yet -- I'm serious. ROMS is supposed to hold the fees for the rights holder (in this case the RIAA). Both ROMS and Allofmp3.com have publicly stated that, upon proof of rights ownership, ROMS will release the royalities.
Of course, from the RIAA's perspective this would be bad -- since then they wouldn't have a case against Allofmp3.com. They stand to (at least they think they stand to) make more money by suing.
Like all gambling though -- they might end up with nothing instead of just less than they wanted...
Look up "YellowBox". Yes, it was publicly released. Yes, it did essentialy allow what you're describing (although it did require a recompile of software, it didn't require re-coding.) It was (thankfully) dropped, mainly because if it was successful, even in a state less transparent than what you described, it would have more or less killed Apple.