"What annoys some of us is that it's being presented as revolutionary. It's not. "
It is. Let me explain why, without the need for fanboy arm waving.
I've read this "it's not revolutionary, like it's being touted" argument before, and it seems to miss the essential point of what makes something "revolutionary." That is to say, capable of starting a revolution.
The ipod was, indeed, revolutionary. And the reason was simple -- not marketing (though most would agree apple did a pretty good job marketing it), and not, as you somewhat humorously suggest, the zombie-like effect of white headphones. The ipod essentially created the mp3 market, and with it, the online music business by taking on products that were *godawful* in design and, rather than focus on feature lists to beat them, devoted their attention exclusively to the few features that are were essential (ie. rip or buy and then locally listen to music) actually work. Sure, there's a bunch of innovation in the design (i.e. the accellerating scroll wheel) but the fact is that it's the whole package of the interface that makes the thing revolutionary. And this is what many folks on slashdot miss -- it's *not* about features. It's about usability. And making things usable is nontrivial. In short, just because the engineering team loves it, doesn't mean it's done. I'm glad you like your two year old SuperNerdPhone, but just because it has a complete feature set does not make it revolutionary. Because in order to start a revolution, you've got to have a mob. Apple's good at making products the mob can use (and occasionally enjoy, but that's really beside the point).
I also tire of the media's somewhat inane characterization of the iphone's interface as "fun" -- as in "other phones have done this before, but the iphone makes it fun!" It might be fun, but the real point is that people can use the damn features in the first place. They're having fun because they're not frustrated, as they've grown to expect when using non-basic features on phones.
I'm responsible for user experience at an online education company. A few months ago our board had an outside consultant compare our online platform to four other competitors. From the looks of the feature checklist, we were in a lot of trouble. The board looked at it and shook their heads. "We need to invest in our technology group to make ourselves more competitive!" they all screamed in unison. I shrugged when I heard this and sent my CEO a similar chart comparing the ipod to the other music players on the market. Based on this chart, the ipod was by far the least capable player. And yet it holds onto 80%+ of the marketplace. Hmm.
I never tire of reminding my engineer buddies about this basic tenet of product design: It's the interface, stupid. KISS indeed.
>>The de facto video editing app for professionals these days is Adobe Premiere.
This is absolutely true -- if by "professionals" you mean "wedding videographers"
"The Mac offers nothing special or unique in the field of digital arts today."
That's a pretty broad statement, and an incorrect one at that. Close, but incorrect.
Apple has, for the decade plus I have been using macs to do video/interactive production, ALWAYS been six months to a year away from being irrelevant. But they've always managed to pull something out of their sleeve (or events outside their control have conspired) to keep them relevant -- to always keep at least one tool on the mac which wasn't available in the PC world -- and not just OS level tools; actual software. First Photoshop and Illustrator; then, once these were ported to windows, Cosa (then Adobe) After Effects -- a compositing program that fundamentally changed the post production business, and which was mac only for several years. And, of course, ALL nonlinear editing systems which mattered were mac based -- AVID, videocube, sphere).
With the translation of After Effects to windows, and Microsoft's aggressive courting of Avid over to NT, I, like many others, thought Apple was doomed. I remember preparing a detailed plan for migration over to NT and then 2000. But but then apple came up with the cute little hat trick of firewire, EIDE hard drives and DV cameras (not their invention, of course but they were on all the right development groups to have a leg up in the DV standard) -- the new all-digital production paradigm which changed the entirety of video production pretty much everywhere. I remember sitting in my post suite using my first firewire card (made by radius, and bundled with a surprisingly robust DV editing package called EditDV), and realizing that the business model on which our company was based was irrelevant -- that the 2000 mac on my desk was suddenly capable of editing video at comperable (in some was superior) quality to the 225,000 editing suite sitting behind me. Video editing had gone the way of word processing, and Avid, with it's wildly expensive, custom hardware-dependent approach was the new Wang. This all while microsoft was busy announcing media technologies and then abandoning them.
And then there was Final Cut Pro. FCP was the first software based editor which was written by people who actually understood the demands and intricacies of video production, and almost a decade later there is nothing (including avid's cross platform software solution) which comes close. Add to this the transition to rock-solid OS X, increasingly competitive hardware, and apple's regular acquisition of high-quality production tools like Shake, all while microsoft floundered with 2000/XP's obviously broken security model and it's increasingly schitzophrenic media strategies ("Video for Windows! ActiveMovie! DirectShow! Windows Media! Whatever marketing has cooked up this month!"), it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the mac platform continues to offer a significant competitive advantage for folks working in many divisions of your vaguely worded "digital arts."
There are plenty of areas in which the mac platform is poor to irrellevant (high-end 3D work comes to mind), but video post is not amongst them. Today, I don't know any general purpose shops that don't have at least a few macs around. Well, let me reprhase that -- none that have survived more than five years. Many are purely mac based, and in the age of intel machines, boot camp and parallells, have just one or two machines equipped to run windows for that odd piece of sotware (video compression, DVD authoring suite) that they want to use over in the land of microsoft. They do this solely because it makes good fiscal sense, and it's not, as you suggest, purely because the designers are being sticks in the mud.
I'm not implying this will stay the case forever -- as I've mentioned, Apple has many competitors hungry to take their marketshare, and microsoft is a fierce, if often unfocused, competitor. It's entirely possible that in five years the mac will be irrelevant in this industry. But the exact opposite is
That's all well and good, but you need to factor in the hidden cost of no one wanting to sleep with someone driving a beat-up 12 yeaer old geo metro. Wheras the prius dude can't beat off the actresses and hippiechicks.
In related news, hydrogen based cars seem unlikely to replace traditional automobiles this year, due to their almost centurylong head start.
Sigh. Oh slashdot, how far you have fallen
Not to descend to the dictionary, but when you're arguing at an elementary school level (i.e. with folks who make up their own limited definitions in order to make a point) it's sometimes necessary:
Satire: A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
Satire isn't limited to irony, and there are more types of satire than you seem capable of recognizing. Jon Stuart, for example, is satirizing a typical news anchor, brilliantly, with no love lost for the news establishment (ditto the DS "corresondants." Carlin, in many places, actually is satirizing -- not through direct attack, as you state he does exclusively (his stories about how to determine what is and isn't a sin is pure satire). Ditto Pryor and Black (I'll leave it to you to determine what Black is satirizing DURING his rants; I doubt you'll get it). I'll give you Hicks was purely a direct attack guy in most instances.
Oh, and FYI, PDQ bach is not, and never has been funny. His jokes are the equivalent of a Star Trek Blooper reel -- inside jokes for folks who lack the necessary social skills to know what is *really* funny. It may make you feel better about those 8 years of piano lessons that you get him, but it doesn't really make him that clever -- just well researched. So painful how few people can tell the difference.
Only on slashdot could this be modded "insightful." Many of the funniest comedians have no love for the things they skewer. According to your theory, George Carlin simply can't be funny as he tears apart the church, business, or idiocy (he is, in fact, hilarious in all cases) . Richard Pryror?. Clearly, we need someone who can appreciate racism to tell jokes about it. Lewis Black? Bill Hicks? You offer a few positive examples of your all-encompassing theory (i.e. there are plenty of folks who skewer things they love) without addressing the avalache of evidence disproving it.
Sheesh. If you want to theorize about funny, you better *be* funny.
And by the way, just because colbert doesn't make you laugh doesn't mean he's not funny -- it means you dont' get him. There's a big difference. Not every comedian is going for breadth of audience, and that doesn't make them less funny than, say Larry the Cable Guy, any more than topology a lessor math than arithmetic.
If IE had a robust (and proven) security model, or microsoft had any idea how to design user interfaces, your "only an idiot" argument might hold water. But here's a news flash -- there are plenty of intelligent people who have little idea about what an activeX control is, or for that fact 20 other terms which are required reading for a user to effectively address security on an unmanaged (i.e. not centrally managed) windows box. All the valid arguments against macs given (sole source, sometimes cutsypants interface, lousy server performance at scale, low price/performance ratio) it's pretty hard to argue that they are not, in fact, more secure out of the box.
If you really feel this way, why not go after the term "computer?" Computers haven't been used primarily to compute numeric calculations for decades. They're now generic information processing devices -- and yet the name remains.
Real world language is live, fluid, and imprecise. Get used to it. Or swich to a dead/fake language like esperanto. And good luck trying to woo a girl with poetry written java (as well formed as it might be).
microsoft has also started offering its own proprietary air for free, in an attempt to muscle out the Earth's atmosphere from its traditional strength position in the marketplace.
Sony still makes good hardware -- their problem is that they have never been able to master software and user interfaces. They also have to learn to embrace open standards like mp3 when the market has already spoken rather than trying to push their own proprietary crap.
er, that's agnostic, not atheist. Both, IMHO, stronger positions from the getgo than basing your notion of the universe on a bunch of poems, short stories, allegories, bad lymrics, lies, and song lyrics which were then poorly assembled into a single collection which was then miscopied, mistranslated, altered for political purposes, lost, found, burned,lost again, mistranslated once again, and is viewed by many as the source of all truth.
Sheesh
If you consider google's map implementation beta and microsoft's Windows various iterations since 95 "finished product" then I'm honestly at a loss as to how to continue this conversation without resorting to finger puppets.
Sustainable? They're growing, making money hand over fist each quarter, and the new products they introduce are being adopted by a much wider audience than your "early adopters" comment implies. In short, they're building a powerful brand by building things people want, and they're making money while doing it. Sounds pretty sustainable to me. Oh, and did I mention that all of the best young talent seems to want to work there?
it doesn't matter what people think google is... it's about how they make their revenue. And they make their revenue through advertising. And they are wildly, wildly successful. Why? Beacause they have taken advantage of the internet to adopt a fundamentally different strategy than microsoft. Rather than relying upon customers to purchase software time and time again, leading to bloated unusable crap (i.e. virtually everything microsoft peddles to corporate users) Google writes incredibly useful and elegant web software which drives people towards its site, and then sells the fact that they are there (and the information it collects about them while they are there) to advertisers. That's great for two very important reasons -- the users (us) get great, useful tools for our day to day lives, and the advertisers reach, very effectively, the audiences they want to reach without pissing those audiences off in the process (er, banner ads/flash ads/ "click to skip this ad and continue to your article" anyone? Googles great innovation has been to put the consumer first, invest in talented developers to create great tools for the consumer, and in the process of actually generating revenue from all of this, not selling out to advertisers who, left to their own devices would shoot themselves in the foot by diluting the very tools which pull customers in (er, about.com anyone?)
Yes, that's absolutely correct, the environment was different preflood. Biblical scholars generally agree that preflood (PF), the atmosphere contained much higher concentrations of pixie dust and psychic voodoo waves.
>But busses and subways where they exist (Atlanta, for one) still carry the stigma of being the less-desirable mode of transportation. The ridership today still consists of the poor (mostly black) and the homeless. Nobody who can afford a car will take public transit.
That's a pretty big generatlization which predictably doesn't hold in all major american cities. While this is certainly true in, say, Philadelphia, where the public transit exists almost exclusively for the working poor (excuding the "Main Line" rail system that middle class white folk take in and out of the city), the New York Subway system is utilized by a fairly representative sample of the city's population. The reason? The subway is simply the most efficient way to get around the city in many, many instances. Only when this isn't the case is the sort of class-based statification you talk about prevalent.
>>And Odds are, if NASA builds it, it will meet all goals and exceed them.
Hmm. you should really think twice about making grandiose statements like that. In the recent (30 years) past, NASA does not in fact have great track record for exceeding expecations (see the original plan for 40 shuttle flights a year; the dubious early perfromance of their "faster cheaper better" initiative) . And by the way, they generally don't build this stuff - outside contractors do. The lack of internal expertise on the shuttle due to rampant outsourcing was one of the major contributing factors quoted in the report on the loss of columbia.
Slashdot Mirror
IT Mindset: "The ticking thing is no longer ticking. We apologize for the invonvenience and will alert you when we have corrected the problem"
It is. Let me explain why, without the need for fanboy arm waving.
I've read this "it's not revolutionary, like it's being touted" argument before, and it seems to miss the essential point of what makes something "revolutionary." That is to say, capable of starting a revolution.
The ipod was, indeed, revolutionary. And the reason was simple -- not marketing (though most would agree apple did a pretty good job marketing it), and not, as you somewhat humorously suggest, the zombie-like effect of white headphones. The ipod essentially created the mp3 market, and with it, the online music business by taking on products that were *godawful* in design and, rather than focus on feature lists to beat them, devoted their attention exclusively to the few features that are were essential (ie. rip or buy and then locally listen to music) actually work. Sure, there's a bunch of innovation in the design (i.e. the accellerating scroll wheel) but the fact is that it's the whole package of the interface that makes the thing revolutionary. And this is what many folks on slashdot miss -- it's *not* about features. It's about usability. And making things usable is nontrivial. In short, just because the engineering team loves it, doesn't mean it's done. I'm glad you like your two year old SuperNerdPhone, but just because it has a complete feature set does not make it revolutionary. Because in order to start a revolution, you've got to have a mob. Apple's good at making products the mob can use (and occasionally enjoy, but that's really beside the point).
I also tire of the media's somewhat inane characterization of the iphone's interface as "fun" -- as in "other phones have done this before, but the iphone makes it fun!" It might be fun, but the real point is that people can use the damn features in the first place. They're having fun because they're not frustrated, as they've grown to expect when using non-basic features on phones.
I'm responsible for user experience at an online education company. A few months ago our board had an outside consultant compare our online platform to four other competitors. From the looks of the feature checklist, we were in a lot of trouble. The board looked at it and shook their heads. "We need to invest in our technology group to make ourselves more competitive!" they all screamed in unison. I shrugged when I heard this and sent my CEO a similar chart comparing the ipod to the other music players on the market. Based on this chart, the ipod was by far the least capable player. And yet it holds onto 80%+ of the marketplace. Hmm.
I never tire of reminding my engineer buddies about this basic tenet of product design: It's the interface, stupid. KISS indeed.
>>The de facto video editing app for professionals these days is Adobe Premiere. This is absolutely true -- if by "professionals" you mean "wedding videographers"
"The Mac offers nothing special or unique in the field of digital arts today."
That's a pretty broad statement, and an incorrect one at that. Close, but incorrect.
Apple has, for the decade plus I have been using macs to do video/interactive production, ALWAYS been six months to a year away from being irrelevant. But they've always managed to pull something out of their sleeve (or events outside their control have conspired) to keep them relevant -- to always keep at least one tool on the mac which wasn't available in the PC world -- and not just OS level tools; actual software. First Photoshop and Illustrator; then, once these were ported to windows, Cosa (then Adobe) After Effects -- a compositing program that fundamentally changed the post production business, and which was mac only for several years. And, of course, ALL nonlinear editing systems which mattered were mac based -- AVID, videocube, sphere).
With the translation of After Effects to windows, and Microsoft's aggressive courting of Avid over to NT, I, like many others, thought Apple was doomed. I remember preparing a detailed plan for migration over to NT and then 2000. But but then apple came up with the cute little hat trick of firewire, EIDE hard drives and DV cameras (not their invention, of course but they were on all the right development groups to have a leg up in the DV standard) -- the new all-digital production paradigm which changed the entirety of video production pretty much everywhere. I remember sitting in my post suite using my first firewire card (made by radius, and bundled with a surprisingly robust DV editing package called EditDV), and realizing that the business model on which our company was based was irrelevant -- that the 2000 mac on my desk was suddenly capable of editing video at comperable (in some was superior) quality to the 225,000 editing suite sitting behind me. Video editing had gone the way of word processing, and Avid, with it's wildly expensive, custom hardware-dependent approach was the new Wang. This all while microsoft was busy announcing media technologies and then abandoning them.
And then there was Final Cut Pro. FCP was the first software based editor which was written by people who actually understood the demands and intricacies of video production, and almost a decade later there is nothing (including avid's cross platform software solution) which comes close. Add to this the transition to rock-solid OS X, increasingly competitive hardware, and apple's regular acquisition of high-quality production tools like Shake, all while microsoft floundered with 2000/XP's obviously broken security model and it's increasingly schitzophrenic media strategies ("Video for Windows! ActiveMovie! DirectShow! Windows Media! Whatever marketing has cooked up this month!"), it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the mac platform continues to offer a significant competitive advantage for folks working in many divisions of your vaguely worded "digital arts."
There are plenty of areas in which the mac platform is poor to irrellevant (high-end 3D work comes to mind), but video post is not amongst them. Today, I don't know any general purpose shops that don't have at least a few macs around. Well, let me reprhase that -- none that have survived more than five years. Many are purely mac based, and in the age of intel machines, boot camp and parallells, have just one or two machines equipped to run windows for that odd piece of sotware (video compression, DVD authoring suite) that they want to use over in the land of microsoft. They do this solely because it makes good fiscal sense, and it's not, as you suggest, purely because the designers are being sticks in the mud.
I'm not implying this will stay the case forever -- as I've mentioned, Apple has many competitors hungry to take their marketshare, and microsoft is a fierce, if often unfocused, competitor. It's entirely possible that in five years the mac will be irrelevant in this industry. But the exact opposite is
That's all well and good, but you need to factor in the hidden cost of no one wanting to sleep with someone driving a beat-up 12 yeaer old geo metro. Wheras the prius dude can't beat off the actresses and hippiechicks.
In related news, hydrogen based cars seem unlikely to replace traditional automobiles this year, due to their almost centurylong head start. Sigh. Oh slashdot, how far you have fallen
Not to descend to the dictionary, but when you're arguing at an elementary school level (i.e. with folks who make up their own limited definitions in order to make a point) it's sometimes necessary: Satire: A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit. Satire isn't limited to irony, and there are more types of satire than you seem capable of recognizing. Jon Stuart, for example, is satirizing a typical news anchor, brilliantly, with no love lost for the news establishment (ditto the DS "corresondants." Carlin, in many places, actually is satirizing -- not through direct attack, as you state he does exclusively (his stories about how to determine what is and isn't a sin is pure satire). Ditto Pryor and Black (I'll leave it to you to determine what Black is satirizing DURING his rants; I doubt you'll get it). I'll give you Hicks was purely a direct attack guy in most instances. Oh, and FYI, PDQ bach is not, and never has been funny. His jokes are the equivalent of a Star Trek Blooper reel -- inside jokes for folks who lack the necessary social skills to know what is *really* funny. It may make you feel better about those 8 years of piano lessons that you get him, but it doesn't really make him that clever -- just well researched. So painful how few people can tell the difference.
Only on slashdot could this be modded "insightful." Many of the funniest comedians have no love for the things they skewer. According to your theory, George Carlin simply can't be funny as he tears apart the church, business, or idiocy (he is, in fact, hilarious in all cases) . Richard Pryror?. Clearly, we need someone who can appreciate racism to tell jokes about it. Lewis Black? Bill Hicks? You offer a few positive examples of your all-encompassing theory (i.e. there are plenty of folks who skewer things they love) without addressing the avalache of evidence disproving it. Sheesh. If you want to theorize about funny, you better *be* funny. And by the way, just because colbert doesn't make you laugh doesn't mean he's not funny -- it means you dont' get him. There's a big difference. Not every comedian is going for breadth of audience, and that doesn't make them less funny than, say Larry the Cable Guy, any more than topology a lessor math than arithmetic.
If IE had a robust (and proven) security model, or microsoft had any idea how to design user interfaces, your "only an idiot" argument might hold water. But here's a news flash -- there are plenty of intelligent people who have little idea about what an activeX control is, or for that fact 20 other terms which are required reading for a user to effectively address security on an unmanaged (i.e. not centrally managed) windows box. All the valid arguments against macs given (sole source, sometimes cutsypants interface, lousy server performance at scale, low price/performance ratio) it's pretty hard to argue that they are not, in fact, more secure out of the box.
If you really feel this way, why not go after the term "computer?" Computers haven't been used primarily to compute numeric calculations for decades. They're now generic information processing devices -- and yet the name remains. Real world language is live, fluid, and imprecise. Get used to it. Or swich to a dead/fake language like esperanto. And good luck trying to woo a girl with poetry written java (as well formed as it might be).
microsoft has also started offering its own proprietary air for free, in an attempt to muscle out the Earth's atmosphere from its traditional strength position in the marketplace.
Sony still makes good hardware -- their problem is that they have never been able to master software and user interfaces. They also have to learn to embrace open standards like mp3 when the market has already spoken rather than trying to push their own proprietary crap.
er, that's agnostic, not atheist. Both, IMHO, stronger positions from the getgo than basing your notion of the universe on a bunch of poems, short stories, allegories, bad lymrics, lies, and song lyrics which were then poorly assembled into a single collection which was then miscopied, mistranslated, altered for political purposes, lost, found, burned,lost again, mistranslated once again, and is viewed by many as the source of all truth. Sheesh
If you consider google's map implementation beta and microsoft's Windows various iterations since 95 "finished product" then I'm honestly at a loss as to how to continue this conversation without resorting to finger puppets.
Sustainable? They're growing, making money hand over fist each quarter, and the new products they introduce are being adopted by a much wider audience than your "early adopters" comment implies. In short, they're building a powerful brand by building things people want, and they're making money while doing it. Sounds pretty sustainable to me. Oh, and did I mention that all of the best young talent seems to want to work there?
it doesn't matter what people think google is... it's about how they make their revenue. And they make their revenue through advertising. And they are wildly, wildly successful. Why? Beacause they have taken advantage of the internet to adopt a fundamentally different strategy than microsoft. Rather than relying upon customers to purchase software time and time again, leading to bloated unusable crap (i.e. virtually everything microsoft peddles to corporate users) Google writes incredibly useful and elegant web software which drives people towards its site, and then sells the fact that they are there (and the information it collects about them while they are there) to advertisers. That's great for two very important reasons -- the users (us) get great, useful tools for our day to day lives, and the advertisers reach, very effectively, the audiences they want to reach without pissing those audiences off in the process (er, banner ads/flash ads/ "click to skip this ad and continue to your article" anyone? Googles great innovation has been to put the consumer first, invest in talented developers to create great tools for the consumer, and in the process of actually generating revenue from all of this, not selling out to advertisers who, left to their own devices would shoot themselves in the foot by diluting the very tools which pull customers in (er, about.com anyone?)
Yes, that's absolutely correct, the environment was different preflood. Biblical scholars generally agree that preflood (PF), the atmosphere contained much higher concentrations of pixie dust and psychic voodoo waves.
>But busses and subways where they exist (Atlanta, for one) still carry the stigma of being the less-desirable mode of transportation. The ridership today still consists of the poor (mostly black) and the homeless. Nobody who can afford a car will take public transit.
That's a pretty big generatlization which predictably doesn't hold in all major american cities. While this is certainly true in, say, Philadelphia, where the public transit exists almost exclusively for the working poor (excuding the "Main Line" rail system that middle class white folk take in and out of the city), the New York Subway system is utilized by a fairly representative sample of the city's population. The reason? The subway is simply the most efficient way to get around the city in many, many instances. Only when this isn't the case is the sort of class-based statification you talk about prevalent.
>>And Odds are, if NASA builds it, it will meet all goals and exceed them.
Hmm. you should really think twice about making grandiose statements like that. In the recent (30 years) past, NASA does not in fact have great track record for exceeding expecations (see the original plan for 40 shuttle flights a year; the dubious early perfromance of their "faster cheaper better" initiative) . And by the way, they generally don't build this stuff - outside contractors do. The lack of internal expertise on the shuttle due to rampant outsourcing was one of the major contributing factors quoted in the report on the loss of columbia.