You refine and you perfect the perfect Demo then amaze the onlookers.
This is true of lots of graphics software as well. They'll show their software with one click perfectly performing the desired operation. Then you feed it some of your own footage at home and the results are terrible.
"Demo footage always works." That's the first law of product evaluation. Never use Demo Footage.
All these people in the mall were shown was a super fast blur of windows appearing to function perfectly. Probably similar to the Mojave demonstration. "I like the flip thing." Yeah... and Windows + Tab does the exact same thing in windows so evidently you're not using Vista as well as you know.
People don't understand a thousandth of the features their computers offer. People believe that's their own fault not the UI designers. You have someone quickly flip through an application who is experienced and they marvel at how well it's designed. You hand them the computer and suddenly it becomes "Well I know it must be easy because you did it so fast, but I can't figure it out, I'm sorry."
Then again the video said it best. "So you're telling me we learned nothing. Yeah pretty much."
And I will often give up if it requires too many libraries to install.
I tried to install a collaborative note pad application recently.
First it needed the latest version of some runtime. Fine... downloaded that installed it. Then it wanted some obscure library. Which took me 15 minutes to find an installer for. Then it wanted to me to procure another DLL from some other organization, which apparently was out of date now but still required that version... long story short. It still wanted one more package and I really didn't feel like hunting down GTK and gave up.
This is a lesson in BAD installation experiences. I know it's great to build on other people's work so that your users can upgrades for free without any work on your part, but you better come to realize that a lot of people will just give up if they don't have the correct arcane assemblage of libraries and packages already installed.
We run almost exclusively system intensive high resource usage software. (100% CPU & 5GB+ of RAM, RAID arrays pushed to the limit when rendering.) Under these loads we've seen very little performance differences between OSes. Vista x64, Windows XPx64, Windows 7 x64. Across all 3 Windows apps it's effectively a wash.
Similarly I've seen very very marginal improvements while rendering on Linux.
The tests are kind of interesting in a "I suppose that's interesting" sort of way. But on a modern system how fast most OS features act is the split between milliseconds and who really cares?
The summary is highly misleading "Ubuntu as much as twice as fast!" At extremely short unnoticeable tasks which no human would care to measure except in a benchmark.
I've very very very rarely had the OS be a bottleneck. The last time I remember encountering a system slow down on a reasonably up to date system was when I was trying to run Shake on an OSX PPC G4. An older x86 system on Windows and Linux simply smoked it in every possible way. But that was far more to do with being a PowerPC chip than OSX itself. Oh yeah... and Vista's network transfer speeds when it was first released were embarassing. But those have been straightened out as far as I can tell from my experience.
There is nothing in the term President which implies he deserves to be a leader.
I can call myself president. Doesn't make it any more or less true. If I call myself president and convince enough people with Guns to let me do whatever I want... I'm just a guy who calls himself president and has a bunch of people with guns who will defend me.
No leadership is intrinsically worthy of respect. The only respect they deserve is that of spokesman for the people they represent. If they lead a very small minority then the leader of the oposition deserves more respect.
Uniting behind one "Big Tent" Linux doesn't mean you can't have other little linux distributions.
If anything Ubuntu is becoming that tent. Especially if Kubuntu were to be packaged on the same disk.
One linux for the masses and techies who don't want to to be bothered to compile all their packages and a bazillion baby linuxes for every niche application.
Most distributions are extremely similar. Nixing a few clones would probably be beneficial.
See that's where I think Fermi's Paradox still stands.
We're terribly interested in finding other species. I think any space faring species would be.
As soon as we have interstellar capabilities I would say we should send a powerful, self repairing transmitter to the nearest pulsar or notable object. And have it just start blasting ascending prime number pulses across the broadest spectrum possible.
If you want to get noticed... wait by a street corner not an alley. Go to a bus stop.
We should be looking at interesting places for broadcasts not scanning blindly.
Isn't every EULA a '* wrap license'? What do you do if you don't agree to a EULA? I don't know of any stores that will accept software once you've opened it. In order for anything in the EULA to be binding it needs to be agreed to prior to transaction. So it would seem to me by definition a EULA is legally worthless. I've spent money. Whatever was marketed on the packaging is what I agreed to purchase. No "take backs". Transaction done.
I think you give them too much credit. They'll never be shocked. They will be bankrupt and on the street homeless and still be fighting for the rights of the wealthy to continue screwing them.
Look at Joe the Plumber.
The idiots in this country who believe that hard work and long hours alone will make them 8 figures some day. The idiots who believe that their success is the result of their hardwork and their hardwork alone--that they don't owe anybody anything. "You're going to take away MY WEALTH!" When they have no wealth of their own.
Everybody in America dreams of winning the lottery or working hard and building a business which is going to make them millions. And when that happens they "sure as hell aren't going to pay to keep some lazy ass mexican to sit home and watch cable." They're all deluded that someday that millionaire will be them.
Are the rich and succesful by and large hard workers and productive members of society? Sure. Absolutely. But are they 100,000 times more useful to an organization? Are they 100,000 times more productive than a replacement? No. Our entire pay structure has gotten bent out of shape. Who pays the salaries of a large bank? The board. Is the Salary coming out of the board's pockets? Not really. What do they care if they pay their CEO 10 million or 11? And if the CEO makes 11 million then it only seems fair the board pays itself 2 each.
How can you rationally set the salary of someone who is your boss? How can you rationally set your own wage? No wonder it's completely blown itself out of proportion. You can't tell me there isn't someone out there who is a business genius who is willing to work for $1million a year. Based on the performance of the auto industry it's been obvious for over a decade you could take any manager in the corporate office and put them in power and get just as good of results.
We've gotten to the point now in these large organizations where we're paying 50x the price for.01x times the extra gain. But that's the American dream. Someday "I too could be that super over priced executive." Someday "I too could be that movie star." Someday "I too could be that lottery winner." And when that day comes! I don't want to pay the government a million dollars a year in taxes!
I thought EULAs were by and large found to be toothless since the customer must open the package to agree to it. By which point the transaction is complete sans EULA.
EULAs are in my book stupid but mostly harmless. It makes the company feel like its ass is covered but you can't agree to sign away rights. You can't agree to be a slave regardless what you sign.
I suppose the FTC could make them officially impotent but it's not high on my list of priorities.
Problem is wild animals can't really be reasoned with.
Just because Cows are exhibitionist sex aholics doesn't mean ever species will breed in captivity.
An ibex doesn't care if it's about to go extinct, it's going to be just as easy to breed in captivity if there are a million left or two.
Even some humans swear "if we were the last two people on earth they still wouldn't sleep with you"--Errr "them"! I meant to say "They wouldn't sleep with them"!
It's not misguided. We've evolved to survive in the PRESESNT ecosystem.
Attempting to maintain the current state of the world is our best hope of survival as a species.
Some of it might be misplaced. For instance I doubt a goat will ensure the survival of the human race but by and large maintaining the status quo is good for the humanity since we've been so successful in it.
Look around it there are at least 30 others in progressively more eroded states ALL AROUND IT. IN THE SAME PHOTO.
Impact crater with bump in the middle... impact crater with bump in the middle... impact crater with bump in the midle. that one is just much less windswept and eroded.
Use your eyes not your crazy brain. No on second thought... use your crazy brain. It fails the brain test too.
Don't you think NASA would photoshop out a secret NASA project. Or at least not send the sattelite to image its itsy bitsy little mars colony acros the vastness of Mars? Do you know what the chances of that are? Even if they didn't know about it they would then suddenly be excited or censor it when someone told them.
Not to mention it's pretty tricky to diver several trillion dollars to build a mars base without anyone noticing.
I would pay good money for a fast-booting basic Debian GNU/Linux system with the option to put the rest of the distro on a slice of hard drive for use after boot.
To some degree that's what windows 7 does.
It boots to desktop and then sets the additional services and applications as low priority processes.
You can still launch IE, word etc but if you watch the process list it's still often loading low priority features in the background.
Having two OSes, one fast-booting and one slow-booting, is a horrible kludge. It's like a car with two steering wheels, one only for parking.
Actually it sounds more like having two cars, one that's moving fast and one that's moving slow.
The problem the author is incompetantly attempting to define is that the fast booting Linux is often feature limited and that you must reboot into a real linux in order to use real applications.
It would be like having to pull off to the side of the road shut off the engine, flip a switch to Engine B and then start back up again in order to drive above 40mph in a hybrid. A sacrifice some are willing to make no doubt but like first generation electric cars give the user a bad taste in their mouth and misrepresents the potential of the system.
Windows XP SP2 was FARRRRR more than a service pack. It's a poor reference to compare every service pack to.
It was Windows XP + 2 years of Vista feature development back ported for free.
Windows XP SP2 was a gift to keep its customers happy at the cost of Vista development and release schedule.
Microsoft could have been a bunch of complete dicks and left XP to rot but instead they pulled out the stops and released a significant upgrade to an existing OS for free. Microsoft took almost their entire Vista team off of Vista and put them to work on SP2 for XP.
We wouldn't be having this "XP vs Vista" discussion today if Microsoft hadn't put several years of development into a massive service pack to bring a significant portion of Vista's new hotness back to XP. Microsoft gave out a free OS upgrade. That doesn't mean they're going to give out every new version of their OS. Apple gave out one free upgrade as well (10.1) but don't expect them to continue the trend.
Service Packs patch bugs. New Versions add features. The only time I ever get new features in my service packs is with 3dsmax service packs for subscription holders. Even then it's just a bunch of freebies from the upcoming release handed out early to subscription holders who will be getting the upgrade for free anyway.
Vista Ultimate Upgrade Cost $135. OSX upgrade Cost $130. (There is no such thing as a stand alone copy of OSX since you're required by EULA to install it on a computer that already has OSX (Certified Apple Hardware)).
Wasn't the general concensus yesterday that "cloud" computing and web apps were too slow and too server intensive?
I don't see how offloading all the processing to giant centralized servers is cheaper and more efficient than giving everybody an inexpensive computer that can actaully run the applications needed.
"Never complain about slowness again." Yeah I'm sure running XP over the internet or intranet is going to be lightning fast, there'll be no backwards compatibility issues and everything will be glorious. More likely it'll be worse than runing Vista.
I remember back in college our dreamy eyed IT director wanted to switch all of our labs to thin clients. "Really you want to switch 60 top of the line workstations which need to stream HD video, render raytraced scenes and provide high frame rate viewports all on one server for 100+ people? What are you going to do stack 100 Quadro cards inside of a server along with 50 dual core processors? And you don't expect any software incompatibility problems?"
This is the IT person's dream. "No more computers to manage woohoo!" Unfortunately makes not sense in an environment where people actually need to use a computer.
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It's Demo Syndrome.
You refine and you perfect the perfect Demo then amaze the onlookers.
This is true of lots of graphics software as well. They'll show their software with one click perfectly performing the desired operation. Then you feed it some of your own footage at home and the results are terrible.
"Demo footage always works." That's the first law of product evaluation. Never use Demo Footage.
All these people in the mall were shown was a super fast blur of windows appearing to function perfectly. Probably similar to the Mojave demonstration. "I like the flip thing." Yeah... and Windows + Tab does the exact same thing in windows so evidently you're not using Vista as well as you know.
People don't understand a thousandth of the features their computers offer. People believe that's their own fault not the UI designers. You have someone quickly flip through an application who is experienced and they marvel at how well it's designed. You hand them the computer and suddenly it becomes "Well I know it must be easy because you did it so fast, but I can't figure it out, I'm sorry."
Then again the video said it best. "So you're telling me we learned nothing. Yeah pretty much."
Or it's a question of an optimization algorithm coming back to haunt them.
They might have tuned the algorithm to work best for large files at the expense of thousands of tiny files.
Knowing Microsoft, if this is the case, they made that decision based on the usage data telling them which occurs more often.
As much as I hate the default settings for lots of things in Windows it's hard to argue with their billion user strong computer use statistics. :D
20 seconds. (From TFA.) :)
And I will often give up if it requires too many libraries to install.
I tried to install a collaborative note pad application recently.
First it needed the latest version of some runtime. Fine... downloaded that installed it. Then it wanted some obscure library. Which took me 15 minutes to find an installer for. Then it wanted to me to procure another DLL from some other organization, which apparently was out of date now but still required that version... long story short. It still wanted one more package and I really didn't feel like hunting down GTK and gave up.
This is a lesson in BAD installation experiences. I know it's great to build on other people's work so that your users can upgrades for free without any work on your part, but you better come to realize that a lot of people will just give up if they don't have the correct arcane assemblage of libraries and packages already installed.
We run almost exclusively system intensive high resource usage software. (100% CPU & 5GB+ of RAM, RAID arrays pushed to the limit when rendering.) Under these loads we've seen very little performance differences between OSes. Vista x64, Windows XPx64, Windows 7 x64. Across all 3 Windows apps it's effectively a wash.
Similarly I've seen very very marginal improvements while rendering on Linux.
The tests are kind of interesting in a "I suppose that's interesting" sort of way. But on a modern system how fast most OS features act is the split between milliseconds and who really cares?
The summary is highly misleading "Ubuntu as much as twice as fast!" At extremely short unnoticeable tasks which no human would care to measure except in a benchmark.
I've very very very rarely had the OS be a bottleneck. The last time I remember encountering a system slow down on a reasonably up to date system was when I was trying to run Shake on an OSX PPC G4. An older x86 system on Windows and Linux simply smoked it in every possible way. But that was far more to do with being a PowerPC chip than OSX itself. Oh yeah... and Vista's network transfer speeds when it was first released were embarassing. But those have been straightened out as far as I can tell from my experience.
You can use boring gray menu bars. It's still around for accessibility (vision impaired people etc.)
There is nothing in the term President which implies he deserves to be a leader.
I can call myself president. Doesn't make it any more or less true. If I call myself president and convince enough people with Guns to let me do whatever I want... I'm just a guy who calls himself president and has a bunch of people with guns who will defend me.
No leadership is intrinsically worthy of respect. The only respect they deserve is that of spokesman for the people they represent. If they lead a very small minority then the leader of the oposition deserves more respect.
Won't be able to. Remember? Dead.
Especially when most of the 'choice' people want could be delivered through an 'advanced install options' menu.
Get the foundation perfect for one distro and then create some pre-sets. "File Server, WebServer, FTP Server, Workstation, Netbook". Etc.
Why pick on office.
I've never once had an install repair utility fix ANY program EVER.
Uniting behind one "Big Tent" Linux doesn't mean you can't have other little linux distributions.
If anything Ubuntu is becoming that tent. Especially if Kubuntu were to be packaged on the same disk.
One linux for the masses and techies who don't want to to be bothered to compile all their packages and a bazillion baby linuxes for every niche application.
Most distributions are extremely similar. Nixing a few clones would probably be beneficial.
Between the various taxes I already pay out about 40% of my income -- and I don't even make $35k/yr. WTF is wrong with that picture?
Your accountant evidently. Why are you paying out 40% on $35k a year?
See that's where I think Fermi's Paradox still stands.
We're terribly interested in finding other species. I think any space faring species would be.
As soon as we have interstellar capabilities I would say we should send a powerful, self repairing transmitter to the nearest pulsar or notable object. And have it just start blasting ascending prime number pulses across the broadest spectrum possible.
If you want to get noticed... wait by a street corner not an alley. Go to a bus stop.
We should be looking at interesting places for broadcasts not scanning blindly.
Isn't every EULA a '* wrap license'? What do you do if you don't agree to a EULA? I don't know of any stores that will accept software once you've opened it. In order for anything in the EULA to be binding it needs to be agreed to prior to transaction. So it would seem to me by definition a EULA is legally worthless. I've spent money. Whatever was marketed on the packaging is what I agreed to purchase. No "take backs". Transaction done.
I think you give them too much credit. They'll never be shocked. They will be bankrupt and on the street homeless and still be fighting for the rights of the wealthy to continue screwing them.
Look at Joe the Plumber.
The idiots in this country who believe that hard work and long hours alone will make them 8 figures some day. The idiots who believe that their success is the result of their hardwork and their hardwork alone--that they don't owe anybody anything. "You're going to take away MY WEALTH!" When they have no wealth of their own.
Everybody in America dreams of winning the lottery or working hard and building a business which is going to make them millions. And when that happens they "sure as hell aren't going to pay to keep some lazy ass mexican to sit home and watch cable." They're all deluded that someday that millionaire will be them.
Are the rich and succesful by and large hard workers and productive members of society? Sure. Absolutely. But are they 100,000 times more useful to an organization? Are they 100,000 times more productive than a replacement? No. Our entire pay structure has gotten bent out of shape. Who pays the salaries of a large bank? The board. Is the Salary coming out of the board's pockets? Not really. What do they care if they pay their CEO 10 million or 11? And if the CEO makes 11 million then it only seems fair the board pays itself 2 each.
How can you rationally set the salary of someone who is your boss? How can you rationally set your own wage? No wonder it's completely blown itself out of proportion. You can't tell me there isn't someone out there who is a business genius who is willing to work for $1million a year. Based on the performance of the auto industry it's been obvious for over a decade you could take any manager in the corporate office and put them in power and get just as good of results.
We've gotten to the point now in these large organizations where we're paying 50x the price for .01x times the extra gain. But that's the American dream. Someday "I too could be that super over priced executive." Someday "I too could be that movie star." Someday "I too could be that lottery winner." And when that day comes! I don't want to pay the government a million dollars a year in taxes!
I thought EULAs were by and large found to be toothless since the customer must open the package to agree to it. By which point the transaction is complete sans EULA.
EULAs are in my book stupid but mostly harmless. It makes the company feel like its ass is covered but you can't agree to sign away rights. You can't agree to be a slave regardless what you sign.
I suppose the FTC could make them officially impotent but it's not high on my list of priorities.
Problem is wild animals can't really be reasoned with.
Just because Cows are exhibitionist sex aholics doesn't mean ever species will breed in captivity.
An ibex doesn't care if it's about to go extinct, it's going to be just as easy to breed in captivity if there are a million left or two.
Even some humans swear "if we were the last two people on earth they still wouldn't sleep with you"--Errr "them"! I meant to say "They wouldn't sleep with them"!
It's not misguided. We've evolved to survive in the PRESESNT ecosystem.
Attempting to maintain the current state of the world is our best hope of survival as a species.
Some of it might be misplaced. For instance I doubt a goat will ensure the survival of the human race but by and large maintaining the status quo is good for the humanity since we've been so successful in it.
It's a pristine impact crater.
Look around it there are at least 30 others in progressively more eroded states ALL AROUND IT. IN THE SAME PHOTO.
Impact crater with bump in the middle... impact crater with bump in the middle... impact crater with bump in the midle. that one is just much less windswept and eroded.
Use your eyes not your crazy brain. No on second thought... use your crazy brain. It fails the brain test too.
Don't you think NASA would photoshop out a secret NASA project. Or at least not send the sattelite to image its itsy bitsy little mars colony acros the vastness of Mars? Do you know what the chances of that are? Even if they didn't know about it they would then suddenly be excited or censor it when someone told them.
Not to mention it's pretty tricky to diver several trillion dollars to build a mars base without anyone noticing.
Except that in every landslide the opponent almost universally concedes (In US politics).
I would pay good money for a fast-booting basic Debian GNU/Linux system with the option to put the rest of the distro on a slice of hard drive for use after boot.
To some degree that's what windows 7 does.
It boots to desktop and then sets the additional services and applications as low priority processes.
You can still launch IE, word etc but if you watch the process list it's still often loading low priority features in the background.
Having two OSes, one fast-booting and one slow-booting, is a horrible kludge. It's like a car with two steering wheels, one only for parking.
Actually it sounds more like having two cars, one that's moving fast and one that's moving slow.
The problem the author is incompetantly attempting to define is that the fast booting Linux is often feature limited and that you must reboot into a real linux in order to use real applications.
It would be like having to pull off to the side of the road shut off the engine, flip a switch to Engine B and then start back up again in order to drive above 40mph in a hybrid. A sacrifice some are willing to make no doubt but like first generation electric cars give the user a bad taste in their mouth and misrepresents the potential of the system.
Windows XP SP2 was FARRRRR more than a service pack. It's a poor reference to compare every service pack to.
It was Windows XP + 2 years of Vista feature development back ported for free.
Windows XP SP2 was a gift to keep its customers happy at the cost of Vista development and release schedule.
Microsoft could have been a bunch of complete dicks and left XP to rot but instead they pulled out the stops and released a significant upgrade to an existing OS for free. Microsoft took almost their entire Vista team off of Vista and put them to work on SP2 for XP.
We wouldn't be having this "XP vs Vista" discussion today if Microsoft hadn't put several years of development into a massive service pack to bring a significant portion of Vista's new hotness back to XP. Microsoft gave out a free OS upgrade. That doesn't mean they're going to give out every new version of their OS. Apple gave out one free upgrade as well (10.1) but don't expect them to continue the trend.
Service Packs patch bugs. New Versions add features. The only time I ever get new features in my service packs is with 3dsmax service packs for subscription holders. Even then it's just a bunch of freebies from the upcoming release handed out early to subscription holders who will be getting the upgrade for free anyway.
Vista Ultimate Upgrade Cost $135. OSX upgrade Cost $130. (There is no such thing as a stand alone copy of OSX since you're required by EULA to install it on a computer that already has OSX (Certified Apple Hardware)).
Since when have service packs added new features?
I thought Service Packs were bug fixes bundled together?
Windows 7 isn't just a bunch of Bug Fixes. That's Windows Vista SP1 and SP2.
Windows 7 is as different from Vista as Windows XP from Windows 2000.
Wasn't the general concensus yesterday that "cloud" computing and web apps were too slow and too server intensive?
I don't see how offloading all the processing to giant centralized servers is cheaper and more efficient than giving everybody an inexpensive computer that can actaully run the applications needed.
"Never complain about slowness again." Yeah I'm sure running XP over the internet or intranet is going to be lightning fast, there'll be no backwards compatibility issues and everything will be glorious. More likely it'll be worse than runing Vista.
I remember back in college our dreamy eyed IT director wanted to switch all of our labs to thin clients. "Really you want to switch 60 top of the line workstations which need to stream HD video, render raytraced scenes and provide high frame rate viewports all on one server for 100+ people? What are you going to do stack 100 Quadro cards inside of a server along with 50 dual core processors? And you don't expect any software incompatibility problems?"
This is the IT person's dream. "No more computers to manage woohoo!" Unfortunately makes not sense in an environment where people actually need to use a computer.