Been there, done that. The GUI people on the Linux front need to drop dead and make way for people who care about user experience, not self-glorification.
Me, I tried to punch some sense into the Gnome project many years ago. There was a dedicated mailing list for GUI design. On that list, maybe three people had read any UI guidelines at all. Not a single person was an expert in the field. Very few had an understanding that you can not design a GUI in a laboratory without user-testing.
Unless there was a radical shift somewhere - but I don't see any signs of that in the final products - GUI design on Linux is a total and utter failure.
Theoretically, or in any terms that matter in the real world?
No matter what concepts you have, no matter what great ideas there are - if it doesn't make a difference in a real-life scenario, it's worthless.
And as far as I can see, and as far as the press reports, Vista doesn't appear to be any more secure than XP. Same problems with slightly different variations.
Also, Nethack has nowhere near the complexity of WoW. I'm sorry, but it doesn't have 3 dimensions. It doesn't care if you're actually facing your opponent, you can cast spells or attack in any direction without turning around. Nethack does have incredibly complex item interaction, but so does WoW.
No, what WoW has is apparent complexity. There's thousands of monsters and hundreds of weapons. The problem is that most of it is illusionary. In reality, there's maybe 10 kinds of monsters, each with a hundred or so variations of hit points, damage and (of course) visuals. And there's 5 weapons, in many variations.
Same for spells, potions, armour and even areas.
Nethack doesn't have much of that (especially not visuals), but what complexity it does have is real.
When you try to imagine the game without the graphics, you realize how little gameplay there actually is. It might be feasible to make a nethack-style game that captures every element of WoW gameplay, but that would be a very dull game indeed.
The one thing that Nethack lacks, that would make it an instant WoW-Killer, is multiplayer.
Seriously. Multiplayer-Nethack? That's 10 times the gameplay, depth and challenge of WoW right there.
Ok, maybe that's because I am an iPhone user, but I do care. See, on my desk I have this nifty input device called a keyboard. Works pretty well for me, I can type at slow speaking speed.
But the iPhone keyboard isn't suited for that very much. It's a lot better than any other phone keypad I've used so far, but still, typing is slow and more error-prone. So yes, a fairly reliable speech recognition would be much welcome. Also because I sometimes use it away from the desk, you know, and I might not have both hands free.
So let's see if they can do it for Google search. If that works, I'm sure more apps will follow. And I don't need 100% reliability when most of what I'd use it for is notes.
So, legitimately, how powerful is a wall-hanging logo for Pepsi in some random goofy youtube video ACTUALLY going to be?
A lot more than you realize.
Advertisement is one of the most heavily researched areas of our lives. A good fraction of psychology research is, directly or indirectly, related to the effects and effectiveness of advertisement. While it is almost impossible to correctly estimate any specific ad or campaign, the general effects of advertisement are extremely well researched.
So you don't consciously register the ads anymore. Do you think the advertisers care? No, not in the least. They were never targeting your consciousness anyways. Advertisement is about embedding stuff into your subconscious mind - desires for a specific product, good feelings about a specific brand, that kind of stuff.
Again, we are talking about the telecom industry right now. I never claimed that there isn't massive corruption going on in a different industry. So I still fail to see how Schröder is relevant.
And yes, corruption is largely the same everywhere. However, the markets differ. The US telecom market was never really opened, the global monopoly (AT&T) was simply replaced by a number of local monopolies. The german telecom market is different, as I pointed out in my first comment. There are no local monopolies. You have the choice of 3-4 players almost everywhere, and 5-6 in most large cities. The only local companies are small players (usually called "city carriers") who are far away from a monopoly. While the ex-government-monopoly still owns the largest share of the market, there's maybe three very remote places in the whole country where you don't have at least one other carrier who offers you service.
But having worked with these guys, I'm not so sure.
I should've added a disclaimer. I do work with these guys, and I'm talking CEO level.
There's bribes, then there's 'old boys networks' (traditionally the most powerful of all, especially in Germany), then there's lobbyists... Brussels is thick with them.
Berlin too (we were talking about Germany), and my company owns one of them. But last I checked, lobby work wasn't the same thing as bribes. I dislike the amount of influence lobbyists have as much as the next guy, but it isn't the same thing as bribery. But yes, there's lobbyists.
Remind me, what job did the former German Chancellor get when he left office?
Something in the energy industry. What's that got to do with the current argument?
You shouldn't judge the world-wide telecom market by the US "standard". T-Mobile is a german company, and part of the old government-owned telecommunications monopoly, so no need for bribery there. However, the german telecom market is very different from the US one, and there are no local monopolies. T-Com is still the largest player, but they other telcos don't have monopolies and most likely didn't make bribes.
As a matter of fact, high school is a great example where it shows that the old strategy fails. Bullying is mostly the art of provoking someone into acting first and thinking later, and in the few seconds inbetween embarassing themselves.
The only difference between the Nigerian scam and the casino scam, is the government IS involved in the casino scam and gets to share your money.
By far not the only difference. The most important difference is that at the casino you can walk out with more than you walked in with. The odds are against you, but it's possible.
I've yet to hear from someone actually getting the promised money in a 419 scam.
No you don't blame the victim, but even in law there is such a thing as being careless. It will not generally reduce the sentence of the guilty, but if you try to, for example, collect damages, they will be greatly reduced.
Being careless isn't the same as being stupid, though they often meet. What is important, though, is that people are responsible for their own actions. And that doesn't include only the guilty, it also includes the victim. The world has no responsibility to look out for you. It's nice if it does, and most of us are social people and responsible enough to help if it's not too much of a burden, but anyone acting as if the world is their nanny deserves being taught a lesson.
And yes, I've had mine. We all do, mostly during childhood. For some people, they come very late or they're slow learners. That's just how things work.
Before anyone tells Google that the sky is falling, let's see MS new vaporware in a real-life test first, shall we?
It wouldn't be the first time that they promise revolution, and deliver either nothing at all or a weak me-too product. So let's wait what it's really like. Complex applications are difficult to move to the web, and a "light" version often lacks the exact features that a good fraction of the users care about.
It's a mental shortcut. Not too long ago (in evolutionary terms of time) we lived in a hostile environment, where assuming everything that happened was potentially a danger and then later (after a few seconds) realizing it isn't and you can calm down again, is a much better survival strategy then thinking first and deciding that it really is a danger after careful thought, which would cost precious seconds.
The only thing that properly defines a delusion is that it is an incorrect belief.
Which requires you to define "incorrect". Now I'm all with you on the religion crap, in fact I think everyone who is deeply religious qualifies as insane. But it is a bit hard to define, because you can not go the way of falsification (religions are very good and making sure you can not "disprove" them) and you can not go the way of verification (because almost nothing in science is verified, if you apply the standard strictly).
I run a free online game. So I'm also on the "provider" side. My take is this:
What I provide free of charge is a present and should be taken as such, i.e. no obligations. On the other hand, I'm a responsible person and my players can count on me not simply pulling the plug one day without prior announcement and saying "party's over, go home".
So how do you answer the "how long" question? You can't. As long as I want to, the stuff I provide will be available, be it my game, my website with its papers, mirrors, etc. - and if I don't want to anymore, I'll be responsible in shutting it down with enough time and ahead warning.
But if you as a user rely on a free service, then you must take into account that it could go away any minute. If your business or your happiness depends on it, make sure you can launch a local copy.
I don't think any free (as in beer) project, Open Source or not, has any obligations to provide support at all, much less for any specific period of time. The people behind it, however, probably want a good reputation, and providing support and not going away suddenly is part of that.
It's a lot of soft factors, and that's why all things considered, I'd say the question isn't adequate.
I can guarantee you that quality from one supplier who has an exclusive license costs a lot more money than quality amongst competition from different suppliers.
They thought that when they opened the energy, telecom, train and many other markets.
Judging from today's perspective, it turns out that the telecom market is the only one where something along the lines of what was promised has actually happened. In most of the other markets, quality has dropped, prices have gone up. Whoops, the exact opposite of what should have happened.
Why? Two reasons. One, it turns out the former state-owned monopolies did actually take in monopoly rent, but since they had no compulsion to make profit, they spent it again and often on good things, such as quality, employee satisfaction and research. All things that make the product better. Two, the promised "market competition" doesn't happen in markets that naturally favour monopolies or oligopolies. Any market with huge entry costs works like that, because after consolidation few players ever enter the market again. Energy market is the prime example here.
So, in other words, no, competition alone will not necessarily make the product any cheaper nor better.
Brand awareness is a cool thing. Lots of people buy lots of stuff not from the cheapest sources. Clothes are a very obvious example, where the simple fact that your jeans was manufactured by X means it can cost 5x or 10x as much as the no-name jeans from China, and still more people will buy (brand) than chinese no-name.
Cheap production also isn't always an advantage. Many parents are quite sensitive about the possibility of toxic stuff in toys, and would rather buy a brand name (any brand) than a cheap no-name product. Some might even decide simply by price that if it's a little more expensive, it is probably better quality, not toxic, etc. - it happens in other markets.
Finally, within a few years, with the globalisation and "predator capitalism" (as a former German head of state once called it) party over and oil prices rising due to peak oil, etc. - local production might become a competitive factor again.
Since 7 is still a year or so away at this point they're just showing you mostly user interface changes with little or no changes to the core underlying os.
Excuse me?
A year or so away from release, they should be done with fundamental changes to the core OS. They should be working on the details and polish, before they send it of to testing and QA.
Of course, they'll probably pull a main component two months before release when it turns out it'll never work anyways, re-write some stuff and not have enough time for testing left.
You write a little about what you don't want, and hint at why, but really not enough to answer your question. Are you fundamentally opposed to violence for some reason, or is it just that mindless shooting bores you?
Yes, and that's why I say the game will be over once the "it has to read/write.doc" requirement goes away. Which will happen once alternatives that don't have enough market share. Trying to be compatible is suicide if you're writing a competing product. I think Apple "got" it with their iWorks suit. While it can import/export MS Office formats, that's not its strength, and its barely good enough for someone who wants to switch so he can open his old documents.
No; what's needed isn't stuff that's incompatible with Microsoft's stuff. It's stuff that is interchangeable as far as file sharing goes,
How much does M$ pay for spreading that lie?
OpenOffice has been on that road for many years, and is going nowhere. ODF was a much bigger step than the constant game of catch-up. You can not be interchangeable with a constantly changing, largely undocumented standard. Which is the game that M$ has been playing ever since: Change.doc just enough that some things break when you use something besides Word to work on it.
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The GUI people need to start shifting gears...
Been there, done that. The GUI people on the Linux front need to drop dead and make way for people who care about user experience, not self-glorification.
Me, I tried to punch some sense into the Gnome project many years ago. There was a dedicated mailing list for GUI design. On that list, maybe three people had read any UI guidelines at all. Not a single person was an expert in the field. Very few had an understanding that you can not design a GUI in a laboratory without user-testing.
Unless there was a radical shift somewhere - but I don't see any signs of that in the final products - GUI design on Linux is a total and utter failure.
Vista is more secure than XP.
Theoretically, or in any terms that matter in the real world?
No matter what concepts you have, no matter what great ideas there are - if it doesn't make a difference in a real-life scenario, it's worthless.
And as far as I can see, and as far as the press reports, Vista doesn't appear to be any more secure than XP. Same problems with slightly different variations.
True, that.
But what if someone were to solve that problem? What if?
Also, Nethack has nowhere near the complexity of WoW. I'm sorry, but it doesn't have 3 dimensions. It doesn't care if you're actually facing your opponent, you can cast spells or attack in any direction without turning around. Nethack does have incredibly complex item interaction, but so does WoW.
No, what WoW has is apparent complexity. There's thousands of monsters and hundreds of weapons. The problem is that most of it is illusionary. In reality, there's maybe 10 kinds of monsters, each with a hundred or so variations of hit points, damage and (of course) visuals. And there's 5 weapons, in many variations.
Same for spells, potions, armour and even areas.
Nethack doesn't have much of that (especially not visuals), but what complexity it does have is real.
When you try to imagine the game without the graphics, you realize how little gameplay there actually is. It might be feasible to make a nethack-style game that captures every element of WoW gameplay, but that would be a very dull game indeed.
The one thing that Nethack lacks, that would make it an instant WoW-Killer, is multiplayer.
Seriously. Multiplayer-Nethack? That's 10 times the gameplay, depth and challenge of WoW right there.
Something for iPhone users? I could care less.
Ok, maybe that's because I am an iPhone user, but I do care. See, on my desk I have this nifty input device called a keyboard. Works pretty well for me, I can type at slow speaking speed.
But the iPhone keyboard isn't suited for that very much. It's a lot better than any other phone keypad I've used so far, but still, typing is slow and more error-prone. So yes, a fairly reliable speech recognition would be much welcome. Also because I sometimes use it away from the desk, you know, and I might not have both hands free.
So let's see if they can do it for Google search. If that works, I'm sure more apps will follow. And I don't need 100% reliability when most of what I'd use it for is notes.
So, legitimately, how powerful is a wall-hanging logo for Pepsi in some random goofy youtube video ACTUALLY going to be?
A lot more than you realize.
Advertisement is one of the most heavily researched areas of our lives. A good fraction of psychology research is, directly or indirectly, related to the effects and effectiveness of advertisement. While it is almost impossible to correctly estimate any specific ad or campaign, the general effects of advertisement are extremely well researched.
So you don't consciously register the ads anymore. Do you think the advertisers care? No, not in the least. They were never targeting your consciousness anyways. Advertisement is about embedding stuff into your subconscious mind - desires for a specific product, good feelings about a specific brand, that kind of stuff.
Again, we are talking about the telecom industry right now. I never claimed that there isn't massive corruption going on in a different industry. So I still fail to see how Schröder is relevant.
And yes, corruption is largely the same everywhere. However, the markets differ. The US telecom market was never really opened, the global monopoly (AT&T) was simply replaced by a number of local monopolies. The german telecom market is different, as I pointed out in my first comment. There are no local monopolies. You have the choice of 3-4 players almost everywhere, and 5-6 in most large cities. The only local companies are small players (usually called "city carriers") who are far away from a monopoly. While the ex-government-monopoly still owns the largest share of the market, there's maybe three very remote places in the whole country where you don't have at least one other carrier who offers you service.
But having worked with these guys, I'm not so sure.
I should've added a disclaimer. I do work with these guys, and I'm talking CEO level.
There's bribes, then there's 'old boys networks' (traditionally the most powerful of all, especially in Germany), then there's lobbyists...
Brussels is thick with them.
Berlin too (we were talking about Germany), and my company owns one of them. But last I checked, lobby work wasn't the same thing as bribes. I dislike the amount of influence lobbyists have as much as the next guy, but it isn't the same thing as bribery. But yes, there's lobbyists.
Remind me, what job did the former German Chancellor get when he left office?
Something in the energy industry. What's that got to do with the current argument?
You shouldn't judge the world-wide telecom market by the US "standard". T-Mobile is a german company, and part of the old government-owned telecommunications monopoly, so no need for bribery there. However, the german telecom market is very different from the US one, and there are no local monopolies. T-Com is still the largest player, but they other telcos don't have monopolies and most likely didn't make bribes.
As a matter of fact, high school is a great example where it shows that the old strategy fails. Bullying is mostly the art of provoking someone into acting first and thinking later, and in the few seconds inbetween embarassing themselves.
The only difference between the Nigerian scam and the casino scam, is the government IS involved in the casino scam and gets to share your money.
By far not the only difference. The most important difference is that at the casino you can walk out with more than you walked in with. The odds are against you, but it's possible.
I've yet to hear from someone actually getting the promised money in a 419 scam.
Yeah, that's the part that I don't get.
At what point did her husband take the stupid pill and forgot to take away her options of ruining him?
No you don't blame the victim, but even in law there is such a thing as being careless. It will not generally reduce the sentence of the guilty, but if you try to, for example, collect damages, they will be greatly reduced.
Being careless isn't the same as being stupid, though they often meet. What is important, though, is that people are responsible for their own actions. And that doesn't include only the guilty, it also includes the victim. The world has no responsibility to look out for you. It's nice if it does, and most of us are social people and responsible enough to help if it's not too much of a burden, but anyone acting as if the world is their nanny deserves being taught a lesson.
And yes, I've had mine. We all do, mostly during childhood. For some people, they come very late or they're slow learners. That's just how things work.
Before anyone tells Google that the sky is falling, let's see MS new vaporware in a real-life test first, shall we?
It wouldn't be the first time that they promise revolution, and deliver either nothing at all or a weak me-too product. So let's wait what it's really like. Complex applications are difficult to move to the web, and a "light" version often lacks the exact features that a good fraction of the users care about.
It's a mental shortcut. Not too long ago (in evolutionary terms of time) we lived in a hostile environment, where assuming everything that happened was potentially a danger and then later (after a few seconds) realizing it isn't and you can calm down again, is a much better survival strategy then thinking first and deciding that it really is a danger after careful thought, which would cost precious seconds.
The only thing that properly defines a delusion is that it is an incorrect belief.
Which requires you to define "incorrect". Now I'm all with you on the religion crap, in fact I think everyone who is deeply religious qualifies as insane. But it is a bit hard to define, because you can not go the way of falsification (religions are very good and making sure you can not "disprove" them) and you can not go the way of verification (because almost nothing in science is verified, if you apply the standard strictly).
I run a free online game. So I'm also on the "provider" side. My take is this:
What I provide free of charge is a present and should be taken as such, i.e. no obligations. On the other hand, I'm a responsible person and my players can count on me not simply pulling the plug one day without prior announcement and saying "party's over, go home".
So how do you answer the "how long" question? You can't. As long as I want to, the stuff I provide will be available, be it my game, my website with its papers, mirrors, etc. - and if I don't want to anymore, I'll be responsible in shutting it down with enough time and ahead warning.
But if you as a user rely on a free service, then you must take into account that it could go away any minute. If your business or your happiness depends on it, make sure you can launch a local copy.
I don't think any free (as in beer) project, Open Source or not, has any obligations to provide support at all, much less for any specific period of time. The people behind it, however, probably want a good reputation, and providing support and not going away suddenly is part of that.
It's a lot of soft factors, and that's why all things considered, I'd say the question isn't adequate.
I can guarantee you that quality from one supplier who has an exclusive license costs a lot more money than quality amongst competition from different suppliers.
They thought that when they opened the energy, telecom, train and many other markets.
Judging from today's perspective, it turns out that the telecom market is the only one where something along the lines of what was promised has actually happened. In most of the other markets, quality has dropped, prices have gone up. Whoops, the exact opposite of what should have happened.
Why? Two reasons.
One, it turns out the former state-owned monopolies did actually take in monopoly rent, but since they had no compulsion to make profit, they spent it again and often on good things, such as quality, employee satisfaction and research. All things that make the product better.
Two, the promised "market competition" doesn't happen in markets that naturally favour monopolies or oligopolies. Any market with huge entry costs works like that, because after consolidation few players ever enter the market again. Energy market is the prime example here.
So, in other words, no, competition alone will not necessarily make the product any cheaper nor better.
Brand awareness is a cool thing. Lots of people buy lots of stuff not from the cheapest sources. Clothes are a very obvious example, where the simple fact that your jeans was manufactured by X means it can cost 5x or 10x as much as the no-name jeans from China, and still more people will buy (brand) than chinese no-name.
Cheap production also isn't always an advantage. Many parents are quite sensitive about the possibility of toxic stuff in toys, and would rather buy a brand name (any brand) than a cheap no-name product. Some might even decide simply by price that if it's a little more expensive, it is probably better quality, not toxic, etc. - it happens in other markets.
Finally, within a few years, with the globalisation and "predator capitalism" (as a former German head of state once called it) party over and oil prices rising due to peak oil, etc. - local production might become a competitive factor again.
So, they are essentially releasing Vista SP1 as "windos 7", right?
Given the development time, that shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. What did you expect? A total rewrite-from-scratch?
Since 7 is still a year or so away at this point they're just showing you mostly user interface changes with little or no changes to the core underlying os.
Excuse me?
A year or so away from release, they should be done with fundamental changes to the core OS. They should be working on the details and polish, before they send it of to testing and QA.
Of course, they'll probably pull a main component two months before release when it turns out it'll never work anyways, re-write some stuff and not have enough time for testing left.
What exactly is it that you do want?
You write a little about what you don't want, and hint at why, but really not enough to answer your question. Are you fundamentally opposed to violence for some reason, or is it just that mindless shooting bores you?
Ok, if you put it that way, the story changes.
Yes, and that's why I say the game will be over once the "it has to read/write .doc" requirement goes away. Which will happen once alternatives that don't have enough market share. Trying to be compatible is suicide if you're writing a competing product. I think Apple "got" it with their iWorks suit. While it can import/export MS Office formats, that's not its strength, and its barely good enough for someone who wants to switch so he can open his old documents.
No; what's needed isn't stuff that's incompatible with Microsoft's stuff. It's stuff that is interchangeable as far as file sharing goes,
How much does M$ pay for spreading that lie?
OpenOffice has been on that road for many years, and is going nowhere. ODF was a much bigger step than the constant game of catch-up. You can not be interchangeable with a constantly changing, largely undocumented standard. Which is the game that M$ has been playing ever since: Change .doc just enough that some things break when you use something besides Word to work on it.