Face it, the emperor's naked. Scientists are just as bad as priests, maybe even worse, in that they want unquestioning obedience to their pet theory of the week.
Bill needs to get his head out of other people's assholes and worry about his own worldview, where we traded people in funny hats for people in lab-coats. Why does it matter what anybody believes? This is one of the core tenets of freedom - people can believe what they wish. Changing from one magic man to another won't make people less gullible.
I'm sure he's not the first person who got screwed because a friend, relative, employer, or government decided to use MS Office and forced others to simply deal with it.
Less projects, less new stuff. Both great by me. There are over 200 music players on Freshmeat. Why? That's ridiculous.
The quality of Free software should not be measured by the number of projects. Quite the opposite, in fact - fewer, better projects are what are needed.
The FSF (and the BSDs) could quite easily release software by developers under their aegis once it was tested and audited. This would reduce the need for individual developers to expose themselves to any risk. It would also, likely, keep the quality of released software very high, and keep the number of available packages from ballooning into insanity.
I'm not proposing any regulations. I'm not in government and can't afford to bribe / lobby them. What I am in favor of is somebody putting the brakes on this crazy clown car called software before it gets totally out of control. WE DON'T NEED ALL KINDS OF NEW SOFTWARE. We just need better, more refined software.
If such a regulation passed, these developers would simply pay more attention to security. People would still develop Free software, it's just that they would have a new motivation - to make SECURE software, not gee-whizzy stuff.
Well no shit Microsoft has argued against such a move. There's an entire industry that feeds off of the insecurity of the MS platform, and I am beginning to suspect that MS leaves holes in its software as part of a probable arrangement with the Federal Government, in exchange for being the primary user-facing IT platform there. What better way to spy on friends and enemies, to ruin centrifuges, and so forth, than to have the makers of the standard business / academic / government OS in your pocket?
I for one would love to see some moves toward making OS companies and application developers liable for their own fuck-ups. If an infants car seat chokes babies to death repeatedly, the product is recalled and the manufacturer is usually sued. People incur real, measurable, personal monetary, business, and emotional damages from poorly-crafted software.
If such a regulation passed, we'd see a lot more attention given to removing bugs, and a lot less attention given to creating new but probably useless features. Yes, I'm looking at both the Gnome3 and Win8 dev teams here.
Yes, and sometimes change is bad. Like when they snipped off your testicles. Of course, you could convince yourself, in your sadly deluded state, that you have arrived at some benefit because of your lack of testicles - kicks to the groin aren't as debilitating, you won't pollute the gene pool with your lackluster material, etc, but these are just cases of sad rationalization.
Nobody likes Windows 8. Nobody will willingly use it, except the poor fucks who buy the cheapest, flimsiest, most worthless excuses for computers. The problem is, more and more people are buying iPads, Linux netbooks, and Macs than ever.
Hey, though. You'll get the business market. Well, a puny percentage of them, anyway. Most will still be on XP until 2014, and 7 until 2020, but someday, right?!?
Automator is *perfect* for the tasks it is designed to accomplish. It has totally replaced shell scripting for most of the uses I previously had. If they could make it an even better tool somehow, I'd love it but as it stands, it's so much better than anything going.
Imagine trying to convince a graphic artist, who doesn't code, to create a shell script for (for example) changing a directory of images' size, applying a new color profile, applying bilingual Japanese and Arabic tags to the filename, sending them to an external drive, and then finally reducing each one into a thumbnail and emailing them to 1000 people. It would take a bash expert hours or even days to accomplish this task. With Automator I could have this all done more quickly than it took me to write this comment.
Perhaps your responsibilities include teaching children who do not know how to operate their iPads. This doesn't change the fact that any of the things you mention can be done on the iPad. I find it to be pretty easy to do a four-finger swipe to switch back and forth, but maybe it's more difficult for some people than others.
Serious writing has been done on a myriad of tools, each of which is suited to different users. I notice many students using cheap netbooks with strange operating systems struggling to view a web page in Firefox alongside a document in OpenOffice all the time, for instance. It's strange that somebody would use such a substandard set of tools for real work - even stranger than using an iPad which has one of the better word processors available today.
Everybody remembers the games that were made just to frustrate. This does not make them good games. If I sawed off your leg, slowly, over the course of hours, without anesthesia, you'd remember it as well, but this does NOT make it a good thing!
People use their iPads all the time to create "content." The iPad itself may not be ideally suited to some workflows, but with an external keyboard it is quite adequate for most people's needs - word processing, spreadsheets, creating drawings and presentations.
In fact on my wife's campus (she's an adjunct professor at PSU) there are tons of students using iPads for taking notes in class, recording lectures, writing papers, etc. It seems that they didn't get that memo you sent out.
No, manual window management is not something that's a burden. Manual window management is there to accommodate the fact that most computer users have unique workflows that are not amenable to a one-size-fits-all GUI imposed on them. Additionally, window management takes mere seconds and is typically done only once, when an application launches. Most modern UIs will remember where the user put the window the previous time, and put it back the next time the application is launched, making this a set it and forget it task.
This is perhaps one of the most common and deeply flawed arguments that Gnome3 and Win8 defenders use - it's "time for progress." Here's the truth: Progress halts when an agreeable arrangement occurs. Drinking glasses have been the same as they are now for a very long time. Kettles for boiling water, wrenches, screwdrivers, eyeglasses, the steering wheel, the volume knob, each of these has been pretty consistent for decades or centuries. There's a reason for this - progress is NO LONGER DESIRABLE when an "interface" or utility object arrives at its ideal form.
What is counterproductive for every task, is designing a new user interface merely to distinguish your product from the competition and forcing hundreds of millions or billions of hours in lost productivity and retraining in order to teach users how to do the EXACT SAME TASKS they already knew how to do.
Look at it this way, instead of trying justify the new crop of terrible UIs that are embodied in Gnome3, Unity, and Win8, let's ask ourselves - what new tasks do they allow users to accomplish? Can you Facebook "better" or write a word processed document "better" merely because the UI has changed? No, that'd be absurd to claim. Can you program more efficiently with the new interfaces? Likely not, and in fact this automagic mind-reading UI disease that is ballooning into an epidemic is causing massive backlash among the developers.
Let's just call out these new UIs (mentioned above) for what they are - an attempt to create a one size fits all solution so that the teams creating them can claim that they run on tablets, phones, desktops, and laptops with equal ease. The problem with this is that the one size fits all solution is always going to be far from ideal for most of these devices, and it shows.
We just ignore the problem, just like we ignore all the Manchurian Microchips that infest military, government, commercial, and personal computers in the USA.
Hey, guess what - any chip fabbed in China or Israel probably has extra code doing things we will never see.
"The whole "computing for idiots" mantra that started with the Mac was off-putting, and hasn't changed yet."
You're totally missing the point. Apple doesn't, and never has, made computers for idiots. They make computers for people who want to do their work using their computers, not WORK ON their computer. The Apple ][ series was designed at a time when the next best things were all jokes, designed and built for and by electronic engineers for no reason other than to say "hey I have a computer." It was different because it was useful, came fully assembled, and had lots of 3rd party support.
The Macintosh was and still is the go-to computer for people who want something that just plain works. You don't really use the Mac OS (any version!) because you use the applications. The OS just gets the hell out of the way, which is sort of the whole point.
And iTunes doesn't suck. It's bar none, the best music organization / playing / purchasing option out there. It organizes the library much better than you can. Sure, iTunes for Windows has problems, but that's because Microsoft poisons their OS and makes it suck.
"Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc. The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition."
No, no, no. The problem is that you don't understand the market, marketing, or making a good device. The Zen Micro was OK, but it was cheap. It's a creaky little hunk of shit. It had worse battery life, an awful UI, and very little worthwhile support. And let's not even talk about additional file formats. There are only 3 worth mentioning - MP3, MP4/AAC, and FLAC/ALAC.
You mention FM tuners. Nobody gave a shit about FM tuners, and they still don't. Some companies (like Apple) now have FM tuners in their phones, but that's only because the chipsets they use already had the tuner onboard, making it something that didn't require much, if any, additional circuitry.
You're one of those people who looks at two products and chooses the one with the longer list of bullet points. These kinds of products fail, because the secret of good design is to throw away every feature that people don't really need. This is why the iPad still outsells other tablets 1000:1 even though those other tablets have longer feature lists, faster processors, more RAM, SD slots, etc. The truth of this is that those additional features are only there to lengthen the list of bullet points (aside from the faster processors - you really need those to run a fucking Java ripoff with any speed).
"While the Office division stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete."
I have to disagree here. The Office division isn't stabbing the rest of MS in the back with a machete. After all, that'd be an effective tool and MS doesn't believe in those. What they did was take a Cabbage Patch Kid, melt the head into a narrow cylinder of goo, tape a piece of confetti onto the end, and stab the other divisions in the back with it even though it's not very sharp. They did it with sheer willpower, because they believe in making their own dog food and eating it too.
The iPad sold well because it's a high quality product with better features and a better OS than the competition. Until somebody else can come up with something better (NOT BLOODY LIKELY considering all they are doing is furiously copying Apple) Apple will continue to own the tablet space.
People like the iPad because it's easy, and it was successful partially thanks to a very rich software library from launch.
Just pretending that Apple's success is because they magically make buy their stuff might make you happy, but it's not the truth of the matter.
Apple makes easy-to-use products that are far better than anything else out there. Until somebody else can do that better, AND release a product with a good software library, they will continue to own the market.
Oh come on, Samsung has a clear focus. Copying Apple seems to work for them. At least all the Google fanboys who want an iPhone have a look-alike so they can eat their own dog food and not gag on it.
It appears to be quite acceptable, as many people are buying the Retina Macbook. As mug funky says, you could use simple pixel doubling and it'd look fine.
Anyway I have been running games at reduced resolution for years on LCDs, as it produces a virtual anti-aliasing that often looks better than the OpenGL / DirectX equivalent.
I think you missed the point. You can't really see the teeny tiny pixels at a Retina type resolution while you are playing WoW or whatever your crack is. In these cases, you simply turn down the resolution. As there's literally no point whatsoever in running 3D games at that resolution, why complain about it?
Yes, the idea is to make text look better. For games you just turn down the resolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Face it, the emperor's naked. Scientists are just as bad as priests, maybe even worse, in that they want unquestioning obedience to their pet theory of the week.
Bill needs to get his head out of other people's assholes and worry about his own worldview, where we traded people in funny hats for people in lab-coats. Why does it matter what anybody believes? This is one of the core tenets of freedom - people can believe what they wish. Changing from one magic man to another won't make people less gullible.
You'd have to be a drooling moron to go without a tinfoil hat these days. The Ars article reeks of weasel words.
Well, that, and the fact that iOS users actually pay money for software. Android users are cheap, and a developer is going to go where the money is.
I'm sure he's not the first person who got screwed because a friend, relative, employer, or government decided to use MS Office and forced others to simply deal with it.
Less projects, less new stuff. Both great by me. There are over 200 music players on Freshmeat. Why? That's ridiculous.
The quality of Free software should not be measured by the number of projects. Quite the opposite, in fact - fewer, better projects are what are needed.
The FSF (and the BSDs) could quite easily release software by developers under their aegis once it was tested and audited. This would reduce the need for individual developers to expose themselves to any risk. It would also, likely, keep the quality of released software very high, and keep the number of available packages from ballooning into insanity.
I'm not proposing any regulations. I'm not in government and can't afford to bribe / lobby them. What I am in favor of is somebody putting the brakes on this crazy clown car called software before it gets totally out of control. WE DON'T NEED ALL KINDS OF NEW SOFTWARE. We just need better, more refined software.
If such a regulation passed, these developers would simply pay more attention to security. People would still develop Free software, it's just that they would have a new motivation - to make SECURE software, not gee-whizzy stuff.
Well no shit Microsoft has argued against such a move. There's an entire industry that feeds off of the insecurity of the MS platform, and I am beginning to suspect that MS leaves holes in its software as part of a probable arrangement with the Federal Government, in exchange for being the primary user-facing IT platform there. What better way to spy on friends and enemies, to ruin centrifuges, and so forth, than to have the makers of the standard business / academic / government OS in your pocket?
I for one would love to see some moves toward making OS companies and application developers liable for their own fuck-ups. If an infants car seat chokes babies to death repeatedly, the product is recalled and the manufacturer is usually sued. People incur real, measurable, personal monetary, business, and emotional damages from poorly-crafted software.
If such a regulation passed, we'd see a lot more attention given to removing bugs, and a lot less attention given to creating new but probably useless features. Yes, I'm looking at both the Gnome3 and Win8 dev teams here.
Bullshit.
You know what's hilarious? The fact that MS Office documents often don't open correctly even between different revisions of MS Office.
So, you're fucked either way, but in one case, you are fucked for free and in the other it's $499 to get fucked.
Yes, and sometimes change is bad. Like when they snipped off your testicles. Of course, you could convince yourself, in your sadly deluded state, that you have arrived at some benefit because of your lack of testicles - kicks to the groin aren't as debilitating, you won't pollute the gene pool with your lackluster material, etc, but these are just cases of sad rationalization.
Nobody likes Windows 8. Nobody will willingly use it, except the poor fucks who buy the cheapest, flimsiest, most worthless excuses for computers. The problem is, more and more people are buying iPads, Linux netbooks, and Macs than ever.
Hey, though. You'll get the business market. Well, a puny percentage of them, anyway. Most will still be on XP until 2014, and 7 until 2020, but someday, right?!?
Riiight.
Automator is *perfect* for the tasks it is designed to accomplish. It has totally replaced shell scripting for most of the uses I previously had. If they could make it an even better tool somehow, I'd love it but as it stands, it's so much better than anything going.
Imagine trying to convince a graphic artist, who doesn't code, to create a shell script for (for example) changing a directory of images' size, applying a new color profile, applying bilingual Japanese and Arabic tags to the filename, sending them to an external drive, and then finally reducing each one into a thumbnail and emailing them to 1000 people. It would take a bash expert hours or even days to accomplish this task. With Automator I could have this all done more quickly than it took me to write this comment.
Perhaps your responsibilities include teaching children who do not know how to operate their iPads. This doesn't change the fact that any of the things you mention can be done on the iPad. I find it to be pretty easy to do a four-finger swipe to switch back and forth, but maybe it's more difficult for some people than others.
Serious writing has been done on a myriad of tools, each of which is suited to different users. I notice many students using cheap netbooks with strange operating systems struggling to view a web page in Firefox alongside a document in OpenOffice all the time, for instance. It's strange that somebody would use such a substandard set of tools for real work - even stranger than using an iPad which has one of the better word processors available today.
Everybody remembers the games that were made just to frustrate. This does not make them good games. If I sawed off your leg, slowly, over the course of hours, without anesthesia, you'd remember it as well, but this does NOT make it a good thing!
So was the guy Asian or from Ancient Egypt? One set uses asian characters, the other hieroglyphics.
Didn't you read the fine print on the box? You know, the note that said "Ubisoft?"
People use their iPads all the time to create "content." The iPad itself may not be ideally suited to some workflows, but with an external keyboard it is quite adequate for most people's needs - word processing, spreadsheets, creating drawings and presentations.
In fact on my wife's campus (she's an adjunct professor at PSU) there are tons of students using iPads for taking notes in class, recording lectures, writing papers, etc. It seems that they didn't get that memo you sent out.
No, manual window management is not something that's a burden. Manual window management is there to accommodate the fact that most computer users have unique workflows that are not amenable to a one-size-fits-all GUI imposed on them. Additionally, window management takes mere seconds and is typically done only once, when an application launches. Most modern UIs will remember where the user put the window the previous time, and put it back the next time the application is launched, making this a set it and forget it task.
This is perhaps one of the most common and deeply flawed arguments that Gnome3 and Win8 defenders use - it's "time for progress." Here's the truth: Progress halts when an agreeable arrangement occurs. Drinking glasses have been the same as they are now for a very long time. Kettles for boiling water, wrenches, screwdrivers, eyeglasses, the steering wheel, the volume knob, each of these has been pretty consistent for decades or centuries. There's a reason for this - progress is NO LONGER DESIRABLE when an "interface" or utility object arrives at its ideal form.
What is counterproductive for every task, is designing a new user interface merely to distinguish your product from the competition and forcing hundreds of millions or billions of hours in lost productivity and retraining in order to teach users how to do the EXACT SAME TASKS they already knew how to do.
Look at it this way, instead of trying justify the new crop of terrible UIs that are embodied in Gnome3, Unity, and Win8, let's ask ourselves - what new tasks do they allow users to accomplish? Can you Facebook "better" or write a word processed document "better" merely because the UI has changed? No, that'd be absurd to claim. Can you program more efficiently with the new interfaces? Likely not, and in fact this automagic mind-reading UI disease that is ballooning into an epidemic is causing massive backlash among the developers.
Let's just call out these new UIs (mentioned above) for what they are - an attempt to create a one size fits all solution so that the teams creating them can claim that they run on tablets, phones, desktops, and laptops with equal ease. The problem with this is that the one size fits all solution is always going to be far from ideal for most of these devices, and it shows.
We just ignore the problem, just like we ignore all the Manchurian Microchips that infest military, government, commercial, and personal computers in the USA.
Hey, guess what - any chip fabbed in China or Israel probably has extra code doing things we will never see.
"The whole "computing for idiots" mantra that started with the Mac was off-putting, and hasn't changed yet."
You're totally missing the point. Apple doesn't, and never has, made computers for idiots. They make computers for people who want to do their work using their computers, not WORK ON their computer. The Apple ][ series was designed at a time when the next best things were all jokes, designed and built for and by electronic engineers for no reason other than to say "hey I have a computer." It was different because it was useful, came fully assembled, and had lots of 3rd party support.
The Macintosh was and still is the go-to computer for people who want something that just plain works. You don't really use the Mac OS (any version!) because you use the applications. The OS just gets the hell out of the way, which is sort of the whole point.
And iTunes doesn't suck. It's bar none, the best music organization / playing / purchasing option out there. It organizes the library much better than you can. Sure, iTunes for Windows has problems, but that's because Microsoft poisons their OS and makes it suck.
"Creative and others had products that beat the iPod, both before and after the iPod's launch. In contrast to the iPod of the time, my old Zen Micro played more formats of music, supported music stores that had legal DRM-free music, received and recorded FM radio, allowed playlist editing on the device, had a user-replaceable battery, etc. etc. The explanation is the reality distortion field, not the inferiority of the competition."
No, no, no. The problem is that you don't understand the market, marketing, or making a good device. The Zen Micro was OK, but it was cheap. It's a creaky little hunk of shit. It had worse battery life, an awful UI, and very little worthwhile support. And let's not even talk about additional file formats. There are only 3 worth mentioning - MP3, MP4/AAC, and FLAC/ALAC.
You mention FM tuners. Nobody gave a shit about FM tuners, and they still don't. Some companies (like Apple) now have FM tuners in their phones, but that's only because the chipsets they use already had the tuner onboard, making it something that didn't require much, if any, additional circuitry.
You're one of those people who looks at two products and chooses the one with the longer list of bullet points. These kinds of products fail, because the secret of good design is to throw away every feature that people don't really need. This is why the iPad still outsells other tablets 1000:1 even though those other tablets have longer feature lists, faster processors, more RAM, SD slots, etc. The truth of this is that those additional features are only there to lengthen the list of bullet points (aside from the faster processors - you really need those to run a fucking Java ripoff with any speed).
"While the Office division stabs everyone else in the back. Repeatedly. With a machete."
I have to disagree here. The Office division isn't stabbing the rest of MS in the back with a machete. After all, that'd be an effective tool and MS doesn't believe in those. What they did was take a Cabbage Patch Kid, melt the head into a narrow cylinder of goo, tape a piece of confetti onto the end, and stab the other divisions in the back with it even though it's not very sharp. They did it with sheer willpower, because they believe in making their own dog food and eating it too.
The iPad sold well because it's a high quality product with better features and a better OS than the competition. Until somebody else can come up with something better (NOT BLOODY LIKELY considering all they are doing is furiously copying Apple) Apple will continue to own the tablet space.
People like the iPad because it's easy, and it was successful partially thanks to a very rich software library from launch.
Just pretending that Apple's success is because they magically make buy their stuff might make you happy, but it's not the truth of the matter.
Apple makes easy-to-use products that are far better than anything else out there. Until somebody else can do that better, AND release a product with a good software library, they will continue to own the market.
Oh come on, Samsung has a clear focus. Copying Apple seems to work for them. At least all the Google fanboys who want an iPhone have a look-alike so they can eat their own dog food and not gag on it.
It appears to be quite acceptable, as many people are buying the Retina Macbook. As mug funky says, you could use simple pixel doubling and it'd look fine.
Anyway I have been running games at reduced resolution for years on LCDs, as it produces a virtual anti-aliasing that often looks better than the OpenGL / DirectX equivalent.
I think you missed the point. You can't really see the teeny tiny pixels at a Retina type resolution while you are playing WoW or whatever your crack is. In these cases, you simply turn down the resolution. As there's literally no point whatsoever in running 3D games at that resolution, why complain about it?
Yes, the idea is to make text look better. For games you just turn down the resolution.