If you've never lost track of a meeting that you've scheduled, then either (A) you haven't run many projects or called many meetings, or (B) you have a nice laid-back job where you can just sit around keeping track of your meetings.
As for me, some days I can keep track, and some days I don't get two minutes in my office before someone else pops in asking for direction on some other project (or some other damned thing). Sometimes I have to call meetings not because *I* want a status update or because *I* want to say something, but because I know which 5 people need to be in the same room for 15 minutes and they won't do it unless I call a meeting.
If you want to be snippy, you can argue that I should have better employees and/or a personal assistant. And great, that's loads of help. But the whole point of the computerized calendar is to make it more efficient to keep track of appointments. If they're designed in such a way to force me to constantly review meetings individually, I'd call that a design flaw.
But since you're being snippy, I'll give you a tip: Meetings aren't bad or even something "to be avoided". Sometimes people just need to get in the same room for them to actually listen to each other and get things done. If you can run a successful project without meetings, then your running a very simple project. If you do need meetings (as any complex project will), but your meetings are just ineffective, then you're doing it wrong.
That's the whole concept of RSVP. If someone didn't respond to my snail mail party invite, I won't be expecting them to show up at my party.
I don't know if you've ever actually thrown a party, but excepting formal events (like weddings) you should usually expect that some percentage of guests just won't RSVP. If you invite 50 people and get 20 responses, you might want to prepare for 10-20 of the non-responders to show up (depending on the crowd). My point here is that RSVPs aren't always a reliable method of planning.
Also, there are some times when I'm the boss and I'm just going to call my meeting. If I know you work 9-5, I know your schedule is always open 10am-11am, and I know you haven't taken a vacation day tomorrow, I might just schedule a meeting for you at 10am and make it your responsibility to reschedule if you can't make it.
Again, use the Propose New Time feature. I usually send out invites saying "What time/day works for you? Thanks." They respond with a proposed time, and everything works great.
But my point is that by forcing the organizer to select a time first, it sets a certain amount of inertia to the process. And that's fine so long as the organizer is in a position to make suppositions about others' schedules, but otherwise, suggesting a time in the first place without having talked first, it feels to me like someone else penciling themselves into my schedule.
And please keep in mind that I'm not actually talking about the intent of the sender. I'm saying Outlook handles this badly IMO.
Opening the meeting in your calendar and selecting the Tracking tab is too much? If something was so important that I needed to spend a dozen+ man hours discussing it, I can take the 15 seconds to check that tab.
As I was saying elsewhere, it isn't convenient or obvious. I've had many situations where I've had someone else assume I was going to be at a meeting because I didn't decline, even though I never accepted either. I've had time where I got busy and neglected to check whether someone actually accepted my invite. I have a lot of meetings all the time, and sometimes I'm even going from one appointment to another. In some cases, when dealing with subordinates, I just set a meeting and expect that if they can't make it, they'll make sure to let me know. I don't have time to go around chasing them down, trying to make sure they're not ignoring my meeting invites. If I wanted to call around to make sure everyone was going to be at a meeting, I would do that instead of using a computerized calendar.
Yeah, but you have to go individually checking up on all your various meetings. There's no simple/prominent display of "all outstanding meeting invitations" that make it obvious that someone hasn't responded. I can go to my "Outlook Today" page or whatever they call it and see my outstanding tasks and meetings for the next couple days, but it won't show me who hasn't yet responded to meeting invites.
And if Outlook did let someone send you a "real" meeting request, you'd probably bitch and moan... "They expect me to do their job for them and fill out a meeting request? How rude. They should look at my schedule and send a request with the time already in there."
No, that's my point. I don't like other people looking at my schedule and trying to schedule me for a meeting with them. If they're within my company and I know them or they're my boss or something, then it's fine, but otherwise I want people to ask me when I'm free. I don't want them trying to make unilateral decisions about my schedule. My free/busy information only tells you whether I have a specific appointment scheduled, but it doesn't actually give you any clue as to whether I'm busy.
Which is why it was the second option I suggested, the first being to keep your info private.
Even if you make it "private", there's still a decent chance it can leak one way or another. Like let's say you put something that says, "Only share within my network." So you let one of your coworkers into your network because he's your actual friend, but then he's dumb enough to set your boss as his friend. Suddenly your boss is in your network.
Of course, you can choose instead to only allow things to be visible by your direct friends, but that defeats a large part of the purpose of having social networks.
I think meeting invites are fine within a company, particularly if you're in a position where it's acceptable to unilaterally call a meeting. I don't believe that e-mail is unfriendly, but I also disagree that a meeting invite is "just an e-mail with a time and date field added on to it."
The reason I don't find meeting invites to be friendly is because the presentation of the invite doesn't make it seem like a friendly invitation. The interface (within Outlook, at least) presents itself as a demand on your calendar. "I've set this meeting. If you don't like it, you should actively decline, but otherwise I'll assume we're meeting."
You'll probably think I'm being silly, but let's look at some things Outlook doesn't do. AFAIK, you can't send a real "meeting request", for example. Unless you just send a normal e-mail asking this, Outlook won't send a non-time-specific calendar event saying, "I'd like to meet with you. Can you set a time that's convenient for you?"
Also, Outlook doesn't present you with an automatically generated list of who hasn't responded to your invitations. So unless you're paying attention or you check the meeting, you won't know that I neither accepted nor declined your meeting invite. This leads many people to assume that you've accepted until you specifically decline.
Because of all this, I'd generally prefer that someone sends me an e-mail saying, "Do you want to meet? If so, when is good for you?" Now, I might respond, "Yeah, let's meet. Schedule it and send me an invite." If that's not the general order of things, then I think a meeting invite presents itself as an order, "APPEAR AT MY MEETING!"
Something you share with one person may in turn be shared by that person with others. It's called discretion, get some.
If people had discretion, Facebook wouldn't have a business, because people wouldn't be throwing personal information online willy-nilly.
This is not technology related.
Sure it is, because the obvious question is, "What technology can Facebook come up with to mitigate this problem?" What kind of web/database magic could be worked that can improve social networking? People apparently need the ability to have intuitive fine-grained control over the information that they share, so that it's easily accessible to those who they want to allow access, but not available to others.
And this is just a subset of what is probably the huge problem that is data management. There are a lot of people generating loads of data every day. They're writing, taking pictures, making music, designing graphics, etc. They want to make sure they'll always have access to whatever they want but won't clutter their searches or fill up their disks. They want to be able to have all of their data available to themselves all the time, and be able to share any or all of it with whoever they want, but they still don't want everyone to have access. They want it all to be easy and they want it to be clear, what exists where, who can access what, how to access it all, and they want to make sure that everything that should be secure is secure.
In short, people want data management to work like magic. The technological problem is that, since magic doesn't actually exist, you have to make a close approximation of magic using computers.
Do you and your friends really use Outlook invites to schedule your personal lives? Talk about "yeesh".
Sorry, but I usually talk to my friends. Outlook seem inherently unfriendly to me. It's like saying, "I don't want to be bothered talking to you and trying to plan. I just want to set a meeting time." To me, it only makes sense when scheduling a meeting for subordinates within my own company (or someone else who you have authority to call to a meeting unilaterally). Otherwise, if you want my time, take the time to talk to me like a human being.
I think the main problem is we can't really come up with an open source scheduling system that's compelely new and innovative because you need compatibility with people outside your organization.
That's not all that true of the companies I've worked for. I'd be kind of annoyed if someone outside of my company sent me a meeting invite. You're not in my company; don't make assumptions about my scheduling.
I think they're missing most of the "big picture" here
I think you might be missing the big picture here. Microsoft has been doing some pretty awful things to abuse the market even with governmental monitoring. For all the dirty tricks Microsoft pulls while being watched by the government, I'd hate to see what they'd do if no one were watching.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that the market should choose which product it wants to use, but the purpose of the governmental intervention is to preserve that possibility of choice. If Microsoft is allowed to leverage all their resources and power, they would be doing more to ensure that you have no choice.
We are at a point where we could probably do reasonably well with a large number of platforms, providing that they adhere to some basic standards.
I think this is especially the case considering that most of the platforms these days have settled on doing things in a pretty unix-y kind of way. Many file formats are the same, there are a lot of similarities in directory structures, and even a lot of programs and tools can by shared across different operating systems. I can run OpenOffice in Gnome on Solaris, or OpenOffice in Gnome on Linux, or BSD, or OpenOffice in Aqua on OSX. Even when BeOS was around (wish they'd kept going) they used a lot of Unix conventions.
The one thing that still gets to me is the lack of common filesystems. If I want to share an external hard drive between Linux, BSD, OSX, and Windows, then I pretty much have to use FAT. I don't want to use FAT. I know, there've been improvements on NTFS read/write and you can mount an HFS+ drive in Linux, but could they please work together on this? Agree on a filesystem that everyone thinks is at least semi-decent (ext3? zfs? xfs?), pursued whoever owns it to drop IP claims against competitors, and everyone support it fully. Please. It doesn't have to be the default, but just a fully supported filesystem.
If that's what you believe, then it seems that the only choice is to back politicians who are in the pocket of lobbies you like. So which politician is in the pocket of people who want internet privacy?
But the problem is that we get more and more screens to look at all the time. Our eyes get all the input, but that means the rest of our senses are just sitting around, basically, which is a waste.
Exactly. Use the other senses for a change. Where are all the smell and taste interfaces? When I'm on the NYC subway, I want to taste how close I am to the next stop. Actually, though, now that I think of it, the subway does seem to give a lot of information by smell.
Frankly, that's the problem I would have with this: I want to ignore my battery life most of the time. The only time I want to think about battery life is when it's just about to run out, and even then, I don't want some sort of a constant noise bugging me all the time.
I hate when cellphones/laptops beep incessantly when they're low on power. What if I know it's low on power and I just want to keep using it until it runs out? Do I need it to be beeping at me every 30 seconds? Most of the time, it's sufficient that I can glance at the battery indicator on the screen and know whether or not I should recharge it. Almost every device has something like that, and it's enough.
I'm under the impression that 10.5 is universal. But I could be mistaken-- I haven't tested it yet. Anyway, I only didn't mention that bit of confusion because PPC is going away. Let's just say you can definitely do it with any current Mac, but you might have to make adjustments for "legacy" hardware.
Why don't they have a built in media reader like every other good mobile laptop?
Because it's kind of a shitty design. To put in a "media reader", you're actually putting in several different media readers, all of which are going to be crappy and prone to break, and it will add bulk to the laptop. It's be one thing if the world would standardize on a specific card and therefore allow the use of a single reader.
Essentially, you don't need a media reader. You need a USB cord. Plug your camera (or phone or whatever) into your computer and download your pictures (or audio or whatever). "Media readers" are for people who think it looks cool to plug a little card into your computer-- old people who are sad because no one uses floppy disks anymore.
Speech recognition actually has more problems than that. For one, it's difficult to be sure about intent. Even when they put something like saying, "Computer!" before each command, you have to make sure you don't tell your friend, "Don't say 'Computer! delete this file.'" Do you see what I mean? Also, what about creative writing? Like when you want purposeful misspellings (Get a brain moran!), unusual punctuation-- like anyone would use such things, or choosing to employ whitespace in unusual ways. What about programming and writing symbols and such?
Or more simply, what about situations where you might just want an array of buttons? Like when you're playing video games or doing video editing, where you might want, say, 100 buttons laid out in front of you, each used for a specific function. What are you going to use then?
Sorry, but keyboards are *extremely* efficient for text input and computer control. Speech recognition can be useful for some certain specific uses, but it's not a good keyboard replacement until you can build an AI smart enough to inuit the intent of your speech, and not just interpret what words you're using.
Ok, but I've also heard some misguided environmentalists protesting the construction of new coal-burning plants, when the purpose of the new coal-burning plant is to replace an old plant with one that would be cleaner and more efficient. I feel like saying, "Ok, I get it, you don't like coal. But if you're going to have a coal-burning plant, wouldn't you rather have one that's relatively environmentally friendly?" The US has electricity problems, and we should be working on solutions that harm the environment as little as possible.
I also hear lots of people who are against wind power because birds sometimes get hurt, they're against water power because it harms fish populations, they're against coal/oil because it causes air pollution, and they're against nuclear because (they believe that) the nuclear power plant will explode like a nuclear bomb. It's frustrating.
I would modify your answer a bit to "vendors focussing on bright, shiny, new versions of their products that don't actually do a better job of solving old problems."
Just as the first example that comes to mind, I've been using Microsoft Exchange, for example, for about 10 years (IIRC). Back when we first started using it, it worked ok for the most part, but had a couple problems. First, you had to buy 3rd party spam and virus protection. Second, backups were slow and annoying to restore because of the nature of the DB that Exchange uses. Third, if the DB became corrupt or anything happened, it was difficult to get all that stuff working again. Forth, users kept using up too much space, and we had to figure out how we were going to manage disk resources without losing important information. Fifth, as users mailboxes became large, they became slow and unresponsive, and it was hard to find specific messages.
So basically, you had to buy 3rd party applications for backups, malware protection, archiving, and none of that stuff really worked quite well. None of it was trouble-free. After 10 years of dealing with that crap, and several paid upgrades to Exchange, none of it is very much improved. Some of the 3rd party software has gotten a little better, but it's still not good.
Microsoft is a particularly bad offender of this. In all my various IT roles that I've had to fill, I have yet to actually use an "improvements" to Windows since Windows 2000. It's always kind of crappy and incomplete, and the result is that you have to buy 3rd party software to fill in the gaps. But then, with all the various 3rd party solutions, you have all the various proprietary methods for achieving things, and no standards.
So maybe the author of the article is correct to list "Microsoft's strangle hold" as a big problem. Linux and OSX have shown a lot of progress in actually making things faster, more efficient, and easier to operate (at least relative to their respective systems from 10 years ago). Microsoft seemed to give up on making improvements around 2000, and everyone else followed their lead.
The hallmark of good design is that people don't have to know how it works under the hood. How many people who drive cars on a daily basis can describe the basics of what is going on in the engine?
I'd generally agree with you, but an awful lot of people just don't want to learn how to use a computer. At all. It's like if people refused to learn the difference between the gas pedal and the brake, bought manual transmissions but left it in reverse all day, didn't stop and stop signs and drove on the wrong side of the road. And then when you suggest that those people took driving lessons, they exclaimed, "But why can't someone just make driving easier?!"
People shouldn't have to know about the internals of how a computer works, but I wish they were willing to learn how to operate them.
I think the main mistake people make in looking at these interfaces is looking for something to replace the keyboard. In reality, keyboards are extremely efficient methods of text-input, and I don't expect they'll be replaced anytime soon. Even speech-recognition isn't as simple and efficient as typing unless you're doing it for specific tasks.
And that's where these new input methods could potentially shine: in specific tasks. I don't think computer programmers will be using multi-touch for entering text, for example. It won't be all that great for for general-purpose computing. But for specialized systems, kiosks, and various control panels? Sure. I wouldn't be surprised to see multitouch-screens on PCs so that users could sort their files "by hand" or rotate their photos manually.
So I wouldn't be surprised if these things became very useful, but I just wouldn't expect them to replace a good keyboard and mouse for general computing, at least not anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've never lost track of a meeting that you've scheduled, then either (A) you haven't run many projects or called many meetings, or (B) you have a nice laid-back job where you can just sit around keeping track of your meetings.
As for me, some days I can keep track, and some days I don't get two minutes in my office before someone else pops in asking for direction on some other project (or some other damned thing). Sometimes I have to call meetings not because *I* want a status update or because *I* want to say something, but because I know which 5 people need to be in the same room for 15 minutes and they won't do it unless I call a meeting.
If you want to be snippy, you can argue that I should have better employees and/or a personal assistant. And great, that's loads of help. But the whole point of the computerized calendar is to make it more efficient to keep track of appointments. If they're designed in such a way to force me to constantly review meetings individually, I'd call that a design flaw.
But since you're being snippy, I'll give you a tip: Meetings aren't bad or even something "to be avoided". Sometimes people just need to get in the same room for them to actually listen to each other and get things done. If you can run a successful project without meetings, then your running a very simple project. If you do need meetings (as any complex project will), but your meetings are just ineffective, then you're doing it wrong.
I don't know if you've ever actually thrown a party, but excepting formal events (like weddings) you should usually expect that some percentage of guests just won't RSVP. If you invite 50 people and get 20 responses, you might want to prepare for 10-20 of the non-responders to show up (depending on the crowd). My point here is that RSVPs aren't always a reliable method of planning.
Also, there are some times when I'm the boss and I'm just going to call my meeting. If I know you work 9-5, I know your schedule is always open 10am-11am, and I know you haven't taken a vacation day tomorrow, I might just schedule a meeting for you at 10am and make it your responsibility to reschedule if you can't make it.
But my point is that by forcing the organizer to select a time first, it sets a certain amount of inertia to the process. And that's fine so long as the organizer is in a position to make suppositions about others' schedules, but otherwise, suggesting a time in the first place without having talked first, it feels to me like someone else penciling themselves into my schedule.
And please keep in mind that I'm not actually talking about the intent of the sender. I'm saying Outlook handles this badly IMO.
As I was saying elsewhere, it isn't convenient or obvious. I've had many situations where I've had someone else assume I was going to be at a meeting because I didn't decline, even though I never accepted either. I've had time where I got busy and neglected to check whether someone actually accepted my invite. I have a lot of meetings all the time, and sometimes I'm even going from one appointment to another. In some cases, when dealing with subordinates, I just set a meeting and expect that if they can't make it, they'll make sure to let me know. I don't have time to go around chasing them down, trying to make sure they're not ignoring my meeting invites. If I wanted to call around to make sure everyone was going to be at a meeting, I would do that instead of using a computerized calendar.
Yeah, but you have to go individually checking up on all your various meetings. There's no simple/prominent display of "all outstanding meeting invitations" that make it obvious that someone hasn't responded. I can go to my "Outlook Today" page or whatever they call it and see my outstanding tasks and meetings for the next couple days, but it won't show me who hasn't yet responded to meeting invites.
And if Outlook did let someone send you a "real" meeting request, you'd probably bitch and moan... "They expect me to do their job for them and fill out a meeting request? How rude. They should look at my schedule and send a request with the time already in there."
No, that's my point. I don't like other people looking at my schedule and trying to schedule me for a meeting with them. If they're within my company and I know them or they're my boss or something, then it's fine, but otherwise I want people to ask me when I'm free. I don't want them trying to make unilateral decisions about my schedule. My free/busy information only tells you whether I have a specific appointment scheduled, but it doesn't actually give you any clue as to whether I'm busy.
Which is why it was the second option I suggested, the first being to keep your info private.
Even if you make it "private", there's still a decent chance it can leak one way or another. Like let's say you put something that says, "Only share within my network." So you let one of your coworkers into your network because he's your actual friend, but then he's dumb enough to set your boss as his friend. Suddenly your boss is in your network.
Of course, you can choose instead to only allow things to be visible by your direct friends, but that defeats a large part of the purpose of having social networks.
I think meeting invites are fine within a company, particularly if you're in a position where it's acceptable to unilaterally call a meeting. I don't believe that e-mail is unfriendly, but I also disagree that a meeting invite is "just an e-mail with a time and date field added on to it."
The reason I don't find meeting invites to be friendly is because the presentation of the invite doesn't make it seem like a friendly invitation. The interface (within Outlook, at least) presents itself as a demand on your calendar. "I've set this meeting. If you don't like it, you should actively decline, but otherwise I'll assume we're meeting."
You'll probably think I'm being silly, but let's look at some things Outlook doesn't do. AFAIK, you can't send a real "meeting request", for example. Unless you just send a normal e-mail asking this, Outlook won't send a non-time-specific calendar event saying, "I'd like to meet with you. Can you set a time that's convenient for you?"
Also, Outlook doesn't present you with an automatically generated list of who hasn't responded to your invitations. So unless you're paying attention or you check the meeting, you won't know that I neither accepted nor declined your meeting invite. This leads many people to assume that you've accepted until you specifically decline.
Because of all this, I'd generally prefer that someone sends me an e-mail saying, "Do you want to meet? If so, when is good for you?" Now, I might respond, "Yeah, let's meet. Schedule it and send me an invite." If that's not the general order of things, then I think a meeting invite presents itself as an order, "APPEAR AT MY MEETING!"
Something you share with one person may in turn be shared by that person with others. It's called discretion, get some.
If people had discretion, Facebook wouldn't have a business, because people wouldn't be throwing personal information online willy-nilly.
This is not technology related.
Sure it is, because the obvious question is, "What technology can Facebook come up with to mitigate this problem?" What kind of web/database magic could be worked that can improve social networking? People apparently need the ability to have intuitive fine-grained control over the information that they share, so that it's easily accessible to those who they want to allow access, but not available to others.
And this is just a subset of what is probably the huge problem that is data management. There are a lot of people generating loads of data every day. They're writing, taking pictures, making music, designing graphics, etc. They want to make sure they'll always have access to whatever they want but won't clutter their searches or fill up their disks. They want to be able to have all of their data available to themselves all the time, and be able to share any or all of it with whoever they want, but they still don't want everyone to have access. They want it all to be easy and they want it to be clear, what exists where, who can access what, how to access it all, and they want to make sure that everything that should be secure is secure.
In short, people want data management to work like magic. The technological problem is that, since magic doesn't actually exist, you have to make a close approximation of magic using computers.
Or just not use Facebook in the first place.
Yes, that is an easily solution, but probably not one that the people at Facebook would favor. That's what the story is about.
Do you and your friends really use Outlook invites to schedule your personal lives? Talk about "yeesh".
Sorry, but I usually talk to my friends. Outlook seem inherently unfriendly to me. It's like saying, "I don't want to be bothered talking to you and trying to plan. I just want to set a meeting time." To me, it only makes sense when scheduling a meeting for subordinates within my own company (or someone else who you have authority to call to a meeting unilaterally). Otherwise, if you want my time, take the time to talk to me like a human being.
Yeah, I'm really hoping the rest of the non-Microsoft world will center around the standard, and it will end up that CalDav:calendars::IMAP:mail.
I think the main problem is we can't really come up with an open source scheduling system that's compelely new and innovative because you need compatibility with people outside your organization.
That's not all that true of the companies I've worked for. I'd be kind of annoyed if someone outside of my company sent me a meeting invite. You're not in my company; don't make assumptions about my scheduling.
I think they're missing most of the "big picture" here
I think you might be missing the big picture here. Microsoft has been doing some pretty awful things to abuse the market even with governmental monitoring. For all the dirty tricks Microsoft pulls while being watched by the government, I'd hate to see what they'd do if no one were watching.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that the market should choose which product it wants to use, but the purpose of the governmental intervention is to preserve that possibility of choice. If Microsoft is allowed to leverage all their resources and power, they would be doing more to ensure that you have no choice.
We are at a point where we could probably do reasonably well with a large number of platforms, providing that they adhere to some basic standards.
I think this is especially the case considering that most of the platforms these days have settled on doing things in a pretty unix-y kind of way. Many file formats are the same, there are a lot of similarities in directory structures, and even a lot of programs and tools can by shared across different operating systems. I can run OpenOffice in Gnome on Solaris, or OpenOffice in Gnome on Linux, or BSD, or OpenOffice in Aqua on OSX. Even when BeOS was around (wish they'd kept going) they used a lot of Unix conventions.
The one thing that still gets to me is the lack of common filesystems. If I want to share an external hard drive between Linux, BSD, OSX, and Windows, then I pretty much have to use FAT. I don't want to use FAT. I know, there've been improvements on NTFS read/write and you can mount an HFS+ drive in Linux, but could they please work together on this? Agree on a filesystem that everyone thinks is at least semi-decent (ext3? zfs? xfs?), pursued whoever owns it to drop IP claims against competitors, and everyone support it fully. Please. It doesn't have to be the default, but just a fully supported filesystem.
If that's what you believe, then it seems that the only choice is to back politicians who are in the pocket of lobbies you like. So which politician is in the pocket of people who want internet privacy?
But the problem is that we get more and more screens to look at all the time. Our eyes get all the input, but that means the rest of our senses are just sitting around, basically, which is a waste.
Exactly. Use the other senses for a change. Where are all the smell and taste interfaces? When I'm on the NYC subway, I want to taste how close I am to the next stop. Actually, though, now that I think of it, the subway does seem to give a lot of information by smell.
that is much more difficult to ignore.
Frankly, that's the problem I would have with this: I want to ignore my battery life most of the time. The only time I want to think about battery life is when it's just about to run out, and even then, I don't want some sort of a constant noise bugging me all the time.
I hate when cellphones/laptops beep incessantly when they're low on power. What if I know it's low on power and I just want to keep using it until it runs out? Do I need it to be beeping at me every 30 seconds? Most of the time, it's sufficient that I can glance at the battery indicator on the screen and know whether or not I should recharge it. Almost every device has something like that, and it's enough.
I'm under the impression that 10.5 is universal. But I could be mistaken-- I haven't tested it yet. Anyway, I only didn't mention that bit of confusion because PPC is going away. Let's just say you can definitely do it with any current Mac, but you might have to make adjustments for "legacy" hardware.
Why don't they have a built in media reader like every other good mobile laptop?
Because it's kind of a shitty design. To put in a "media reader", you're actually putting in several different media readers, all of which are going to be crappy and prone to break, and it will add bulk to the laptop. It's be one thing if the world would standardize on a specific card and therefore allow the use of a single reader.
Essentially, you don't need a media reader. You need a USB cord. Plug your camera (or phone or whatever) into your computer and download your pictures (or audio or whatever). "Media readers" are for people who think it looks cool to plug a little card into your computer-- old people who are sad because no one uses floppy disks anymore.
Speech recognition actually has more problems than that. For one, it's difficult to be sure about intent. Even when they put something like saying, "Computer!" before each command, you have to make sure you don't tell your friend, "Don't say 'Computer! delete this file.'" Do you see what I mean? Also, what about creative writing? Like when you want purposeful misspellings (Get a brain moran!), unusual punctuation-- like anyone would use such things, or choosing to employ whitespace in unusual ways. What about programming and writing symbols and such?
Or more simply, what about situations where you might just want an array of buttons? Like when you're playing video games or doing video editing, where you might want, say, 100 buttons laid out in front of you, each used for a specific function. What are you going to use then?
Sorry, but keyboards are *extremely* efficient for text input and computer control. Speech recognition can be useful for some certain specific uses, but it's not a good keyboard replacement until you can build an AI smart enough to inuit the intent of your speech, and not just interpret what words you're using.
Maybe it's something like: you can use any hardware and any apps you want, but they can only connect to Verizon paid services.
I agree, though-- it sounds great, but what's the catch? I have a hard time believing there's no catch.
Ok, but I've also heard some misguided environmentalists protesting the construction of new coal-burning plants, when the purpose of the new coal-burning plant is to replace an old plant with one that would be cleaner and more efficient. I feel like saying, "Ok, I get it, you don't like coal. But if you're going to have a coal-burning plant, wouldn't you rather have one that's relatively environmentally friendly?" The US has electricity problems, and we should be working on solutions that harm the environment as little as possible.
I also hear lots of people who are against wind power because birds sometimes get hurt, they're against water power because it harms fish populations, they're against coal/oil because it causes air pollution, and they're against nuclear because (they believe that) the nuclear power plant will explode like a nuclear bomb. It's frustrating.
I would modify your answer a bit to "vendors focussing on bright, shiny, new versions of their products that don't actually do a better job of solving old problems."
Just as the first example that comes to mind, I've been using Microsoft Exchange, for example, for about 10 years (IIRC). Back when we first started using it, it worked ok for the most part, but had a couple problems. First, you had to buy 3rd party spam and virus protection. Second, backups were slow and annoying to restore because of the nature of the DB that Exchange uses. Third, if the DB became corrupt or anything happened, it was difficult to get all that stuff working again. Forth, users kept using up too much space, and we had to figure out how we were going to manage disk resources without losing important information. Fifth, as users mailboxes became large, they became slow and unresponsive, and it was hard to find specific messages.
So basically, you had to buy 3rd party applications for backups, malware protection, archiving, and none of that stuff really worked quite well. None of it was trouble-free. After 10 years of dealing with that crap, and several paid upgrades to Exchange, none of it is very much improved. Some of the 3rd party software has gotten a little better, but it's still not good.
Microsoft is a particularly bad offender of this. In all my various IT roles that I've had to fill, I have yet to actually use an "improvements" to Windows since Windows 2000. It's always kind of crappy and incomplete, and the result is that you have to buy 3rd party software to fill in the gaps. But then, with all the various 3rd party solutions, you have all the various proprietary methods for achieving things, and no standards.
So maybe the author of the article is correct to list "Microsoft's strangle hold" as a big problem. Linux and OSX have shown a lot of progress in actually making things faster, more efficient, and easier to operate (at least relative to their respective systems from 10 years ago). Microsoft seemed to give up on making improvements around 2000, and everyone else followed their lead.
The hallmark of good design is that people don't have to know how it works under the hood. How many people who drive cars on a daily basis can describe the basics of what is going on in the engine?
I'd generally agree with you, but an awful lot of people just don't want to learn how to use a computer. At all. It's like if people refused to learn the difference between the gas pedal and the brake, bought manual transmissions but left it in reverse all day, didn't stop and stop signs and drove on the wrong side of the road. And then when you suggest that those people took driving lessons, they exclaimed, "But why can't someone just make driving easier?!"
People shouldn't have to know about the internals of how a computer works, but I wish they were willing to learn how to operate them.
I think the main mistake people make in looking at these interfaces is looking for something to replace the keyboard. In reality, keyboards are extremely efficient methods of text-input, and I don't expect they'll be replaced anytime soon. Even speech-recognition isn't as simple and efficient as typing unless you're doing it for specific tasks.
And that's where these new input methods could potentially shine: in specific tasks. I don't think computer programmers will be using multi-touch for entering text, for example. It won't be all that great for for general-purpose computing. But for specialized systems, kiosks, and various control panels? Sure. I wouldn't be surprised to see multitouch-screens on PCs so that users could sort their files "by hand" or rotate their photos manually.
So I wouldn't be surprised if these things became very useful, but I just wouldn't expect them to replace a good keyboard and mouse for general computing, at least not anytime soon.
Do people in the USA have no sense of proportion?
No, we don't.
/proud US citizen, but obviously we have no sense of proportion or balance. Or finesse, diplomacy, or moderation.