You joke, but Microsoft has been trying to make their own version of Notes/Domino for as long as I have been working with it. I remember back in ~1996 I went to a MS event where they were telling us how Exchange was going to be the groupware product that surpassed Notes. It didn't take long before they gave up on creating a groupware environment via technical means, and just worked on redefining the word groupware.
Now in 2010, the closes they have is Sharepoint. I have been doing some research into it recently as I will soon be doing some work in it, and it appears to be somewhere between Notes/Domino 3 and 4. It appears to be a decade behind.
I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised because I will be working with it whether it is ahead of it's time or behind.
The irony in that is that the legal system that you endorse was created by people who didn't work within the system. They broke the law and implemented what you now say should be followed because it is the law.
Ahhh...You seem to be confused about what sugar is. Sugar comes from many sources. Not just sugar cane. Of course, your confusion is common, and a major reason why so many people have weight problems. They eat a ton sugar and think that it is healthy because it isn't fat, and it isn't cane sugar.
No doubt there were some painful financial situations for companies that picked the wrong horse in the video game industry, but the shift from large corporate controlled primarily cartridge based systems to more independent primarily tape and disk based systems doesn't make it a crash.
If everybody switched to Linux tomorrow (I know that isn't going to happen), and Microsoft went under, that wouldn't be a "PC crash". The same is true for when people went form Atari to C64. Most of the other systems you mention were only blips on the screen anyway.
So, the C64 and Spectrum never existed? There was no Commodore? The Vic-20 was introduced in 1980, and with the introduction of the upgraded C64 in, suprise, suprise, 1982, there was a huge shift from the Atari to the C64. With the C64 being an open platform, it no longer required a huge company to bankroll game development, and a slew of new developer entered the market.
It only looked like a crash because the huge companies that were required for the economics of cartridge only systems lost money, while independents took their customers.
Wikipedia can also verify the existence of the C64. Google will also find several million references to the huge library of games released in 1982-1983.
Urban myths happen. The Video game crash is one of them. Once they take on a life of their own, people start looking at whether they are plausible or not.
If there was a crash, how do you explain the C64? And don't forget the TI-99/4A which sold almost 3 million units during the so called crash and existed almost solely during the so called crash Q3-1981 through Q1-1984.
The US was in the same boat as the UK. There may have been a few companies that tried to jump into a thriving market and failed at the attempt, and people were shifting from Atari to C64, but that doesn't mean that there was a video game crash. Particularly from a user point of view.
When the Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Sega Saturns flopped, while the Genesis and SNES started to fade, it wasn't a "crash" either, although it was a very similar situation. Playstation took over, just as the C64/Spectrum did in the early 80's.
40 years of thinking like you has only increased the average size of Americans. The "Calories eaten - Calories burned" is a myth foisted on people that don't understand biology, and overeating is a symptom of what people like you tend to point out as the solution. The human body does not turn everything it consumes into energy. Much of it passes through. It also instructs us as to when it needs more energy. Taking in a huge amount of fuel that is a "use it now or store it as fat" fuel, leaves them hungry no matter how much they eat. Eating food that digests slowly leaves them satisfied. Unfortunately they have been convinced that slower digesting food (fat) is "bad".
People leave the table while stuffed thinking of snacks because they just ate what people like you call "healthy" food. Food that is all sugar. If they had eaten a nice fatty piece of meat, they would be walking away feeling satisfied.
Apparently you did not read the parent's post where he hypothesized about Americans being heavy because hormones secreted by bacteria make them eat too much. Then you apparently missed where I pointed out that over eating is not the problem. A primarily sugar diet is.
I didn't miss "paradigm shift". I also didn't miss it when it happened in the 70's causing many of the current health problems.
The real reason Americans are overweight is because they have been convinced to switch to a primarily sugar diet, and when that leads to being fat, they are told that they should starve themselves, try to make up for the effects of starvation with muscle building exercise, and eat an even higher ratio of sugar to other foods. This has been a vicious circle of ever worse diet since sometime around the early seventies when someone had the brilliant idea that since sugar has less calories for it's mass than fat, people will take in less calories and be thinner if they just eat sugar.
The C64 was where people were playing video games in the 1983. Video games where not dead, and trying to draw a line between console gaming a computer gaming is silly at best since you could put keyboards and floppy drives on many of the consoles, and you could put cartridges in many of the computers.
While Wikipedia is frequently a very good source of information, in this case, it is simply wrong. The 2600 was killed by the C64, and the Colecovision/Intellevision/5200/7800 never really caught on. I was there, and I can tell you that there were more games being released than anyone could play.
It is a myth that was generated because the Atari 2600 finally died, and many of the big chain stores had huge amounts of money in Atari 2600 cartridges. This was compounded by several big companies trying to introduce their own systems and being completely trounced by the C64. The video game crash was a lot like the internet crash. A bunch of people jumped in with low value offerings, and lost money on it while the high value offerings continued to grow at the same rapid pace.
And there you go. When MacOS does something badly, it must be the users fault. No, green is not used because it is "optimum". If that was the case, it wouldn't be green after you pushed it. It doesn't resize to the document size, Go open iTunes. Click on the green button. (which for some reason is positioned vertically instead of horizontally) One of those screen sizes is not 'optimal'. I would say neither is, but we should all be able to agree that they can't both be the optimal size. Besides, wouldn't you claim that the whole UI is good and optimal? Shouldn't the whole screen be green in that case? Also the plus is NOT intuitive. Plus means Add. It should NEVER shrink the screen. It is the opposite of intuitive.
As for the menu, when you step away from your computer, and have two copies of RDP open. When you come back, how do you know which one the menu applies to? Don't say, you would just remember. Because that could be the next morning. Asking people to remember what the last window they clicked on the night before when there are perfectly good ways for the UI to tell them is bad UI design. (And no, the amount of space taken by a menu does not matter anymore. That is just a poor excuse for bad UI design.)
You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.
This is what Apple fans like to tell themselves. Sorry, but it isn't true, and sticking your head in the sand doesn't make it so. My computer usage far predates both Windows and Mac.
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behavior when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
What are you talking about? One of us is confused about the definition of "Modal". What I can tell you is that the X button on both Linux and Windows is very consistent. It closes the window, and any of the windows children. The only applications I have run across on Windows that do not follow the consistent behavior are bittorrent clients and IM clients. (Inconsistent, but I understand why.) With MacOS, it is all over the board.
The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.
You sound ridiculous saying this. The reason that the green + button causes grief is because for as long as any of us have been alive, we have agreed that a + symbol means 'add'. I means you are making something more or bigger. Green means go. So, a green + means go bigger. In fact, if the green + button was minimize/maximize, it would still be wrong. A green plus should never shrink a window.
So, no, it isn't because I am used to other OSes. It is because I am used to being a human who is part of society beyond Mac computers.
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debatable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
The placement of the menu was debatable back when single monitors where the only setup. Today, it isn't debatable any more. It is now simply a poor design. So, Apple uses a system that is bad for use at a desk and is neutral for a portable instead of using a UI that would work well for both. Notice I did not say "desktop" because when used at a desk, a laptop will often have two monitors hooked to it. It is funny that you use this argument, yet you claim that the OS is designed to be productive. An OS who chooses to make multiple monitors a second class citizen in it's UI design cannot be claimed as one that is designed to be productive.
I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
You are the only one claiming this. The mantra of Apple has been that "It just works" (and when it doesn't, it is the users fault) and is "Intuitive". There is nothing inherently more productive about Apples UI. In fact, it is things like the lack of a maximize button, the fact that to increase window size, you can only do it from the lower right corner, and putting the menu for a program on a different screen that the application, that makes the MacOS UI LESS productive.
While Clippy was a failed attempt at a better help system, the Start button is useful, productive AND intuitive. MacOS also has a start button of it's own. It is just split between the 'Appli
I can tell you why the Mac interface drives you nuts. Because compared to Windows and Linux, it sucks. For the most part they are all the same, but Macs have idiosyncrasies that you have to overcome. It is things like using a green + to shrink a window. That is just wrong. Things like the red X sometimes closing the application, and other times only closing the UI to the application leaving the to continue running.
Things like the menu bar being pegged to the top of the primary screen. That made sense when we only had one screen, and resolutions were so low that windows always needed to stack if you had more than one open at a time. Today we have multiple screens, so the 'flick the mouse to the corner' argument no longer applies, and having to figure out what application the menu bar applies to is just annoying and breaks the flow of work.
The list goes on and on, but Apple doesn't seem to want to admit that many parts of their UI are badly designed in the first place, or have become out of date for use on modern hardware, so they just keep repeating the mantra that Apple has an intuitive UI. I can definitely say that the emperor has no clothes.
It will only take five minutes if you don't count most of the time spent on the process. Finding the packing material, putting things away, having the receptionist chat with the UPS guy for 10 minutes, etc., etc. takes longer than 5 minutes.
That's what I was thinking. RMA to the manufacturer, reseller, or Dell is likely going to cost you more than the bad part. Also, people keep saying how with enough machines you might have to hire an extra person, but that extra person is going to cost less than the markup on the branded computers.
It's not like you hire a $40 or more an hour tech to put machines together. That is pretty much a minimum wage job these days.
Humans have sensors that allow them to feel and perceive also. That is how we do it.
I agree the line between sentience and non-sentience is very ill defined, but in my opinion its clear that higher animals fall on the sentient side of it while laptops and cell phones fall on the non-sentient side of the line.
I don't disagree with this. But, feel and perceive is not in any way what defines it.
Don't forget that LCDs are cheaper in the long run. My LCD TV was free. Not the day I purchased it, but after a couple of years of use, the reduced electricity costs more than covered for the purchase price of the TV. With things like switching to LCD TVs, CFLs (Now that they work right), switching to power efficient HTPCs instead of space heater satellite boxes, as well as a few other energy saving efforts, I have reduced my power bill by $150-$200 a month while improving my quality of life.
The most common reason I have seen for people to buy LCD when they had the choice between LCD and CRT was that it would give them a bigger picture while increasing the livable space in their home. So as a practical matter, it made their homes larger.
Slashdot Mirror
Here you go. The official US government recommendation to eat a primarily sugar diet.
http://www.mypyramid.gov/pyramid/index.html
You joke, but Microsoft has been trying to make their own version of Notes/Domino for as long as I have been working with it. I remember back in ~1996 I went to a MS event where they were telling us how Exchange was going to be the groupware product that surpassed Notes. It didn't take long before they gave up on creating a groupware environment via technical means, and just worked on redefining the word groupware.
Now in 2010, the closes they have is Sharepoint. I have been doing some research into it recently as I will soon be doing some work in it, and it appears to be somewhere between Notes/Domino 3 and 4. It appears to be a decade behind.
I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised because I will be working with it whether it is ahead of it's time or behind.
The irony in that is that the legal system that you endorse was created by people who didn't work within the system. They broke the law and implemented what you now say should be followed because it is the law.
Ahhh...You seem to be confused about what sugar is. Sugar comes from many sources. Not just sugar cane. Of course, your confusion is common, and a major reason why so many people have weight problems. They eat a ton sugar and think that it is healthy because it isn't fat, and it isn't cane sugar.
One product name. C64.
No doubt there were some painful financial situations for companies that picked the wrong horse in the video game industry, but the shift from large corporate controlled primarily cartridge based systems to more independent primarily tape and disk based systems doesn't make it a crash.
If everybody switched to Linux tomorrow (I know that isn't going to happen), and Microsoft went under, that wouldn't be a "PC crash". The same is true for when people went form Atari to C64. Most of the other systems you mention were only blips on the screen anyway.
So, the C64 and Spectrum never existed? There was no Commodore? The Vic-20 was introduced in 1980, and with the introduction of the upgraded C64 in, suprise, suprise, 1982, there was a huge shift from the Atari to the C64. With the C64 being an open platform, it no longer required a huge company to bankroll game development, and a slew of new developer entered the market.
It only looked like a crash because the huge companies that were required for the economics of cartridge only systems lost money, while independents took their customers.
Wikipedia can also verify the existence of the C64. Google will also find several million references to the huge library of games released in 1982-1983.
Urban myths happen. The Video game crash is one of them. Once they take on a life of their own, people start looking at whether they are plausible or not.
If there was a crash, how do you explain the C64? And don't forget the TI-99/4A which sold almost 3 million units during the so called crash and existed almost solely during the so called crash Q3-1981 through Q1-1984.
The US was in the same boat as the UK. There may have been a few companies that tried to jump into a thriving market and failed at the attempt, and people were shifting from Atari to C64, but that doesn't mean that there was a video game crash. Particularly from a user point of view.
When the Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Sega Saturns flopped, while the Genesis and SNES started to fade, it wasn't a "crash" either, although it was a very similar situation. Playstation took over, just as the C64/Spectrum did in the early 80's.
No, they wouldn't. Why would Brazilians have greater access to cheap sugary products than we do?
40 years of thinking like you has only increased the average size of Americans. The "Calories eaten - Calories burned" is a myth foisted on people that don't understand biology, and overeating is a symptom of what people like you tend to point out as the solution. The human body does not turn everything it consumes into energy. Much of it passes through. It also instructs us as to when it needs more energy. Taking in a huge amount of fuel that is a "use it now or store it as fat" fuel, leaves them hungry no matter how much they eat. Eating food that digests slowly leaves them satisfied. Unfortunately they have been convinced that slower digesting food (fat) is "bad". People leave the table while stuffed thinking of snacks because they just ate what people like you call "healthy" food. Food that is all sugar. If they had eaten a nice fatty piece of meat, they would be walking away feeling satisfied.
Apparently you did not read the parent's post where he hypothesized about Americans being heavy because hormones secreted by bacteria make them eat too much. Then you apparently missed where I pointed out that over eating is not the problem. A primarily sugar diet is.
I didn't miss "paradigm shift". I also didn't miss it when it happened in the 70's causing many of the current health problems.
Dude, "hgh-fructose corn syrup" IS sugar. Half the problem is that most Americans don't know what sugar is. Apparently you don't either.
The real reason Americans are overweight is because they have been convinced to switch to a primarily sugar diet, and when that leads to being fat, they are told that they should starve themselves, try to make up for the effects of starvation with muscle building exercise, and eat an even higher ratio of sugar to other foods. This has been a vicious circle of ever worse diet since sometime around the early seventies when someone had the brilliant idea that since sugar has less calories for it's mass than fat, people will take in less calories and be thinner if they just eat sugar.
The C64 was where people were playing video games in the 1983. Video games where not dead, and trying to draw a line between console gaming a computer gaming is silly at best since you could put keyboards and floppy drives on many of the consoles, and you could put cartridges in many of the computers.
While Wikipedia is frequently a very good source of information, in this case, it is simply wrong. The 2600 was killed by the C64, and the Colecovision/Intellevision/5200/7800 never really caught on. I was there, and I can tell you that there were more games being released than anyone could play.
Yes, the OP asked if video games were near dead in the US. That is the only market I was really talking about.
It is a myth that was generated because the Atari 2600 finally died, and many of the big chain stores had huge amounts of money in Atari 2600 cartridges. This was compounded by several big companies trying to introduce their own systems and being completely trounced by the C64. The video game crash was a lot like the internet crash. A bunch of people jumped in with low value offerings, and lost money on it while the high value offerings continued to grow at the same rapid pace.
And there you go. When MacOS does something badly, it must be the users fault. No, green is not used because it is "optimum". If that was the case, it wouldn't be green after you pushed it. It doesn't resize to the document size, Go open iTunes. Click on the green button. (which for some reason is positioned vertically instead of horizontally) One of those screen sizes is not 'optimal'. I would say neither is, but we should all be able to agree that they can't both be the optimal size. Besides, wouldn't you claim that the whole UI is good and optimal? Shouldn't the whole screen be green in that case? Also the plus is NOT intuitive. Plus means Add. It should NEVER shrink the screen. It is the opposite of intuitive.
As for the menu, when you step away from your computer, and have two copies of RDP open. When you come back, how do you know which one the menu applies to? Don't say, you would just remember. Because that could be the next morning. Asking people to remember what the last window they clicked on the night before when there are perfectly good ways for the UI to tell them is bad UI design. (And no, the amount of space taken by a menu does not matter anymore. That is just a poor excuse for bad UI design.)
You are just used to the idiosyncrasies of different desktop environments to the point that you don't think about them any more.
This is what Apple fans like to tell themselves. Sorry, but it isn't true, and sticking your head in the sand doesn't make it so. My computer usage far predates both Windows and Mac.
It's a bit silly, for instance, to criticize Apple's UI for inconsistency in close/exit behavior when you click the red X window control, when this button is modal in all other major UIs, with no indication of which mode you are in (hint: it's usually close mode if there is one window open, and exit otherwise).
What are you talking about? One of us is confused about the definition of "Modal". What I can tell you is that the X button on both Linux and Windows is very consistent. It closes the window, and any of the windows children. The only applications I have run across on Windows that do not follow the consistent behavior are bittorrent clients and IM clients. (Inconsistent, but I understand why.) With MacOS, it is all over the board.
The green zoom button always causes grief to new users because they think it's ought to be a minimize/maximize button, which it isn't. This expectation is entirely a consequence of coming from UIs that treat minimize/maximize as a primary UI operation.
You sound ridiculous saying this. The reason that the green + button causes grief is because for as long as any of us have been alive, we have agreed that a + symbol means 'add'. I means you are making something more or bigger. Green means go. So, a green + means go bigger. In fact, if the green + button was minimize/maximize, it would still be wrong. A green plus should never shrink a window.
So, no, it isn't because I am used to other OSes. It is because I am used to being a human who is part of society beyond Mac computers.
The menu bar pegged to the primary screen is indeed an old and debatable quirk of Mac OSes, but it should be noted that your criticism doesn't really apply to the portable market, which might explain why Apple has so much success there.
The placement of the menu was debatable back when single monitors where the only setup. Today, it isn't debatable any more. It is now simply a poor design. So, Apple uses a system that is bad for use at a desk and is neutral for a portable instead of using a UI that would work well for both. Notice I did not say "desktop" because when used at a desk, a laptop will often have two monitors hooked to it. It is funny that you use this argument, yet you claim that the OS is designed to be productive. An OS who chooses to make multiple monitors a second class citizen in it's UI design cannot be claimed as one that is designed to be productive.
I agree that it is inaccurate to describe Apple's UI as intuitive---parts of it are astonishingly sophisticated. Intuitive suggests that it should be easy for new users, but that is the way of Clippy and Start buttons. Apple doesn't design to be intuitive--that's a leftover meme from 1985. Apple designs to be productive, which makes it annoying for people who already have burned in productivity habits from platforms where this is less of a design ethic.
You are the only one claiming this. The mantra of Apple has been that "It just works" (and when it doesn't, it is the users fault) and is "Intuitive". There is nothing inherently more productive about Apples UI. In fact, it is things like the lack of a maximize button, the fact that to increase window size, you can only do it from the lower right corner, and putting the menu for a program on a different screen that the application, that makes the MacOS UI LESS productive.
While Clippy was a failed attempt at a better help system, the Start button is useful, productive AND intuitive. MacOS also has a start button of it's own. It is just split between the 'Appli
I can tell you why the Mac interface drives you nuts. Because compared to Windows and Linux, it sucks. For the most part they are all the same, but Macs have idiosyncrasies that you have to overcome. It is things like using a green + to shrink a window. That is just wrong. Things like the red X sometimes closing the application, and other times only closing the UI to the application leaving the to continue running.
Things like the menu bar being pegged to the top of the primary screen. That made sense when we only had one screen, and resolutions were so low that windows always needed to stack if you had more than one open at a time. Today we have multiple screens, so the 'flick the mouse to the corner' argument no longer applies, and having to figure out what application the menu bar applies to is just annoying and breaks the flow of work.
The list goes on and on, but Apple doesn't seem to want to admit that many parts of their UI are badly designed in the first place, or have become out of date for use on modern hardware, so they just keep repeating the mantra that Apple has an intuitive UI. I can definitely say that the emperor has no clothes.
It will only take five minutes if you don't count most of the time spent on the process. Finding the packing material, putting things away, having the receptionist chat with the UPS guy for 10 minutes, etc., etc. takes longer than 5 minutes.
That's what I was thinking. RMA to the manufacturer, reseller, or Dell is likely going to cost you more than the bad part. Also, people keep saying how with enough machines you might have to hire an extra person, but that extra person is going to cost less than the markup on the branded computers.
It's not like you hire a $40 or more an hour tech to put machines together. That is pretty much a minimum wage job these days.
Something that can love.
(Yes, that was a joke.)
I agree the line between sentience and non-sentience is very ill defined, but in my opinion its clear that higher animals fall on the sentient side of it while laptops and cell phones fall on the non-sentient side of the line.
I don't disagree with this. But, feel and perceive is not in any way what defines it.
They feel my touch, and respond to it.
My laptop and phone can feel and perceive. I don't think that qualifies them as sentience.
The problem with the term sentience is that it is a word like 'Lots". We know what it means, but it is a sliding scale.
Don't forget that LCDs are cheaper in the long run. My LCD TV was free. Not the day I purchased it, but after a couple of years of use, the reduced electricity costs more than covered for the purchase price of the TV. With things like switching to LCD TVs, CFLs (Now that they work right), switching to power efficient HTPCs instead of space heater satellite boxes, as well as a few other energy saving efforts, I have reduced my power bill by $150-$200 a month while improving my quality of life.
The most common reason I have seen for people to buy LCD when they had the choice between LCD and CRT was that it would give them a bigger picture while increasing the livable space in their home. So as a practical matter, it made their homes larger.