Actually, obtaining a CFE certification is extremely difficult despite your highly suspect statements to the contrary. The requirements include: A bachelor's degree in accounting or criminal justice plus 2 years of professional fraud investigation experience as a prerequisite; Recommendations from other established CFE's; Twenty units of CPE required annually; Passage of a comprehensive exam on issues related to Law, Criminology, Investigations, and Accounting. Most applicants study for about a year to prep for the exam. CFE is one of the most recognized and respected international credentials for professional fraud analysts in the world, with official recognition of the certification in over 100 countries. For more info, the website of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners is www.acfe.com.
Well, assessing your list of requirements, other than the "reccomendations" (which I assume she got), I personally know she has had all of that and more for several years (she's sixty, and also plays a mean guitar...).
It was HER assessment that the CFE cert. was (if I understand her correctly) kinda like being a MENSA member. Not really much of a "guarantee" that the CFE was actually good at spotting FRAUD, which can take sooooo many different forms...
As I said, her words, not mine. I know she can walk the walk. I personally can barely balance my own checkbook (not really, but...). Actually, I write ERP software for a living right now. It has "accounting" stuff in it, but it doesn't take too long before I feel a little uncomfortable, hoping I've got that part perfectly right for all scenarios...
Not with a Macbook Pro running OS X 10.7 Lion (or later) it isn't. It offers "Filevault 2" nearly instantaneous (insignificant performance hit) whole-disk encryption that is standards-compliant, quite robust, and completely and utterly transparent to the user.
Also, unless you are dual-booting with Bootcamp, even running a windows or Linux VM under Parallels or Fusion should afford the "drive container" the same encryption.
And if you are running Bootcamp, Windows Vista and 7 (and presumably 8) also offer whole-drive protection (I think it's called "Bitlocker"?) that would work for that partition as well, although I have no idea regarding performance, and since MacBooks don't have TPM chips, the "verification" routine is a little more clunky for Bitlocker, but still available.
Considering the cost of the alternative ($10k penalty (or more)), that $1100 MacBook Pro looks like a pretty damned good deal.
It takes far more than coding to make a game. The graphics need drawing, backgrounds and objects. The sounds need creating. The levels need designing. They all need testing and refining.
Angry Birds is far more sophisticated than you imagine. There ARE similar flash games available on line, such as one with a castles theme. But they aren't as enjoyable. They spent time to perfectly balance the mechanics and level design in Angry Birds. Angry Birds success wasn't a fluke. They didn't just market it well so that lots of people bought it... people played it incessantly, which shows how well it had been crafted.
I've created clones of 1980s games in less than a month. But an original game like Angry Birds, no that's far more work than that.
While I agree that there is more to creating an enjoyable game, please don't try to compare Angry Birds' development efforts for some of the major-motion-picture efforts of your typical FPS.
Angry Birds was successful because it was "accessible" to anyone. Not because it was particularly a "good" game. And certainly not because of massive development efforts.
Was it called NComputing? My last employer tried it as a way to cheat on Microsoft licensing costs before we switched half the business to web apps running in Ubuntu.
No. Doesn't look the same. The product I'm thinking of looked EXACTLY like the "Piston", even the "ports" side.
The possibility remains that I'm conflating two different products. But I DEFINITELY recognize that "form factor".
And they are getting paid on a hell of a lot more than 1-in-6 downloads.
With your obvious tenuous grasp on the business world, it's actually frightening that you tout yourself as being a "Certified Fraud Examiner".
But from what I understand from a friend of mine that took the course and has the cert. herself, that whole "certification" is a joke, and nothing more than a fraudulent, money-making scam itself.
PayPal is 5% + $0.05 if you're selling a $1 app. That's ten cents, a third of what Apple is charging. If your app is $20 then its 2.5% + $0.30, which is eighty cents. Compare that to the six dollars Apple will gouge you for. If this is what PayPal is offering to anyone with a bank account then I'm sure you can get a better deal if you look for it.
You're either a con or a liar, or both.
All PayPal is doing for their "cut" is providing only one of the services that Apple provides with the App Store. And they make money on every single transaction. When a user downloads a FREE App, Apple's costs aren't "free" for that transaction. They hosted the app, provided marketing, product placement, distribution, and other services, but they didn't make a dime off the download.
PayPal (and every other "payment processor") doesn't have to contend with any of that.
the microphone on a phone is made for the frequency range of the human voice which is 85Hz to 225Hz,
You're an idiot. Go back to school.
The fundamental frequency of the human voice (in speech) may very well only extend to 225 Hz (that figure is for a female speaking voice, IIRC, the male "fundamental" is about 125 Hz, typically), but the harmonics and other "consonant" sounds extend up over 3 kHz. The microphone in the iPhone/iPad goes well above that. Otherwise, you couldn't understand the speech in a phone conversation, because all the other side would hear would be "vowel sounds".
And, it's easily proven: Just take your typical cellphone and record some music with the microphone. Do you understand the lyrics? 3 kHz upper limit. Do you hear the cymbals? 20 kHz+ upper limit (although the phone probably tops out at about 10 kHz or so).
As a (I suppose) musician, you should be well aware that the condenser microphones that are used in most inexpensive phones and other devices have an excellent frequency response, particularly in the upper regions. That's why condenser mics. are the favorite for mic-ing snare drums, drum kit "overheads", and acoustic guitar.
I can't stand technically-ignorant musicians, who then spout their (non)-wisdom as if they were some sort of "expert", just because they can play a Pentatonic scale and some "Power Chords" with some fluency.
I sure hope your sound man is smarter than you, or I pity your audiences...
and $3 billion for Apple at 30cents out of every dollar. Quite a tidy sum for the gatekeeper, is it any wonder that Microsoft would like to wall their own garden?
That "gatekeeper" is also providing:
Hosting and Bandwidth
Advertising
Marketing
Placement in a wildly successful "one-stop-shopping" online "store", with a frickin' BUTTON to said store on EVERY iOS device, creating a somewhat "captive" audience of millions and millions of users, the vast majority of which WHO WILL BE LOOKING EXACTLY ONE PLACE FOR APPS.
It's not 1999 anymore, there are a gazillion infrastructure-as-a-service companies out there with the most prominent being Amazon. You can host a static site and downloads from S3 for twelve cents a gig. Servers are available by the hour from dozens of vendors and monthly from dozens more for prices similar to what people pay for their personal phone service. With proper automation (Chef/Puppet/CFEngine/etc...) you can spin things up in minutes. If you don't want to DIY you can go anywhere from AppEngine/Heroku style hosting all the way to vendors that will take care of everything. All for a lot less than Apple no-competition gouging.
And how, pray tell, is anyone going to even know you exist? The internet is big. Really big.
You really are an idiot. The App Store (with its "captive" audience) is the greatest software marketing tool since, well, forever.
This would particularly be interesting if you take off the outliers. Remove Angry Birds, and any other really big hit apps and then see what it looks like for the masses of developers.
The "masses of developers" haven't put the work in to developing their app that the Angry Birds programmers did.
OMG!
If Angry Birds took more than a month to code, something is seriously wrong. It looks like a frickin' Flash game, fercrissakes.
The only real lesson I got from there is "don't quit your day job". 34% of Apple dev's and 44% of Android devs make less than $500 per app per month, and 95% make $2-3k per app per month on average (and, if general distribution didn't change much since 2011, the profits distribution is reeeeeeeal skewed towards the top) with $22-27k to make it, so if you're lucky you'll break even in 7-8 months.
I don't know about you, but even $500 extra per month is not "nothing". And if you're the typical iOS developer, that is doing this in their "spare time", there is not really a concept of "breaking even", unless you "pay yourself" for sitting around watching TV, playing games, etc.
So, although most iOS devs. won't be able to "quit their day job", I wonder how many would argue that it hasn't contributed significantly to their personal "bottom line"?
As a developer for the App Store, you don't have to pay for:
Hosting and Bandwidth
Advertising
Marketing
Placement in a wildly successful "one-stop-shopping" online "store", with a frickin' BUTTON to said store on EVERY iOS device, creating a somewhat "captive" audience of millions and millions of users, the vast majority of which WHO WILL BE LOOKING EXACTLY ONE PLACE FOR APPS.
Credit Card Processing
Payment Collection
Distribution
BEFORE you even have the first sale.
In every other business model, you have already had to shell-out of your pockets for those costs, and the costs keep on comin' regardless of whether you sell zero copies, or a million copies, of your application.
So, it looks like it is the "conventional" software distribution model that requires "big pockets" going in.
mjwx is right - it's a rube's game to develop for iPhone. It's certainly not something you can design a major company around.
Maybe not a "major company"; but it can sure put a smile on the face of many small, independent developers. Which, BTW, should fit in nicely with the/. crowd.
So, $7 billion made from 40 billion downloads equals $1 for every 5.7 downloads. Ouch indeed.
That downloads figure includes all the free apps as well.
If we divide that 7 Billion over the 5 Million registered developer accounts they have made in the entire time that the store has been running (5 years) they've made $1400 each. That's not even enough to pay for the 5x$99 fees and $1500 for the Mac needed to do development.
That would be pretty disingenuous given developer registration is free and that the app store currently has around 775,000 apps, your numbers make no sense. Even if you made the obviously false assumption that every app was paid or supported by iAds it still works out to an average of around $9000 per app.
Not to mention the "$1500 Mac" "Requirement" is nearly 300% inflated. Mac minis are great for development, and start at $600. And that doesn't even count the developers that already had an Intel Mac for other development (like all those Linux devs. who have MacBooks, for example).
In other words, the GP needs to stop lying through his teeth.
Seven Beeeel-Yon dollars is a way significant figure, any way you slice it.
Wake me up when people start making consoles that stack again
The "Piston" is anything but new. IIRC, it was originally marketed as some sort of "alternate form-factor" "business" computer. I saw the literature for this thing (under a different name) about two years ago. At that time, the "selling point" was that it was a semi-modular, semi-single-board sort-of "industrial computer", where various "options" could be BTO-ed, and that had some sort of proprietary "multi-user-clustering" feature baked-into the OS and hardware, that would allow multiple KVMs to be hooked up to one of the "satellite" units, and then those would share actual computing resources in a "cluster hub" box. Seemed like kind of a good idea; but it ended up being no cheaper than using a bunch of generic PCs. The "Piston" looks exactly like one of the "satellite" boxes. I wish I could remember what it was called that time it failed...
I assume you're being snarky; since "MOV" is an ISO-approved multimedia container format that has existed since 1991. You might have heard of "MPEG-4"? That standard was created from the "MOV" format.
And since there are Free Players for most OSes you would be running in 2013, it is you that looks the fool, not me.
I think this is the key to Microsoft's failure with windows 8 (sadly they are not the only ones). The Start button was eliminated because MS metrics showed that people didn't use it that much, but it works perfectly for the times you do use it. It allows fairly rapid access to stuff you don't use often, and is out of the way the rest of the time. Desktop gadgets killed off because MS deemed them not important enough to fix, because most people don't use them.
If you alienate all your customers 5% at a time, eventually you will have them all covered.
Just who are these people who "Never use the Start Button"?
I use the Start button like a zillion times a day on my "work" Windows 7 laptop. Am I supposed to "pin" stuff to the Taskbar, put it in the "System Tray", or just leave a bunch of "Shortcuts" on the Desktop?
Blah. Much easier to "pin" them to the Start Menu. And the behavior is certainly not a holdover from my OS X usage; so I don't understand who runs Windows and doesn't use the Start button fairly often.
That's the thing I like the least about the Mac. Unless your are--ironically--in full screen mode, you are guaranteed to have a significant amount of wasted space, unless you are willing to hide your dock.
How so?
Most windows in OS X are resizable; so I'm not sure what you're problem is.
Heh, the irony being that what they should have taken from "users spend 95% of their time with one maximised app" was "we don't do a good enough job of supporting lots of windows of lots of different sizes". Mac users for example are perfectly happy with windows spread all over the place, and I can identify a few things (even in windows 7) that are the reason:
1) Less crufty window border stuff everywhere –maximising a window in windows is a good way of getting rid of all the extra padding they add around windows when they're not maximised.
2) Menu bar at the top, always –meaning that again, tons of screen real estate isn't taken up by duplicated menu bars if you have loads of windows open, and meaning that for those that do use the menus, that mousing to them is easier.
3) The "zoom" button making windows as big as they need to be, rather than simply full screening them, encouraging users to think "what can I get next to this".
...and don't forget "Exposé", which can quickly disambiguate a whole mess of overlapping windows.
Full Screen as an example. The metrics told them that users spent 95% of their time "in full screen". By this I think he meant maximized. This is why metro apps are full screen. This seemingly minor distinction between maximized and full screen apparently means nothing to Microsoft, but has a lot of implications for the user.
Not trying to Troll (honest!), but that's why when Apple saw the same "metric" and decided to create a similar feature in OS X (many months before Windows 8's debut), they let individual Apps, rather than the OS, decide whether they would offer a "Full Screen" (as opposed to "Maximized") mode. Then, they allowed the User (rather than the OS) decide at a whim whether they would use an App in "Full Screen", or not.
That's the difference between putting yourself in the Users' shoes, as opposed to forcing the User to submit to your (perhaps annoying) UI peccadillos.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, you didn't listen to your doctors warning about not consistently taking your meds.
Huh, huh.
Huh, huh huh.
Ha ha ha ha.
Haaaaaaaa HaaaaaaHaaaaaaHaaaaHaaa.
Hee heeeeeee haaaahaaahoooooooo....
Actually, obtaining a CFE certification is extremely difficult despite your highly suspect statements to the contrary. The requirements include: A bachelor's degree in accounting or criminal justice plus 2 years of professional fraud investigation experience as a prerequisite; Recommendations from other established CFE's; Twenty units of CPE required annually; Passage of a comprehensive exam on issues related to Law, Criminology, Investigations, and Accounting. Most applicants study for about a year to prep for the exam. CFE is one of the most recognized and respected international credentials for professional fraud analysts in the world, with official recognition of the certification in over 100 countries. For more info, the website of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners is www.acfe.com.
Well, assessing your list of requirements, other than the "reccomendations" (which I assume she got), I personally know she has had all of that and more for several years (she's sixty, and also plays a mean guitar...).
It was HER assessment that the CFE cert. was (if I understand her correctly) kinda like being a MENSA member. Not really much of a "guarantee" that the CFE was actually good at spotting FRAUD, which can take sooooo many different forms...
As I said, her words, not mine. I know she can walk the walk. I personally can barely balance my own checkbook (not really, but...). Actually, I write ERP software for a living right now. It has "accounting" stuff in it, but it doesn't take too long before I feel a little uncomfortable, hoping I've got that part perfectly right for all scenarios...
I don't know about you, but even $500 extra per month is not "nothing".
LESS THAN $500 per month. That includes everything down to $0.
--Jeremy
Your point being...?
Encryption is slow.
Not with a Macbook Pro running OS X 10.7 Lion (or later) it isn't. It offers "Filevault 2" nearly instantaneous (insignificant performance hit) whole-disk encryption that is standards-compliant, quite robust, and completely and utterly transparent to the user.
Also, unless you are dual-booting with Bootcamp, even running a windows or Linux VM under Parallels or Fusion should afford the "drive container" the same encryption.
And if you are running Bootcamp, Windows Vista and 7 (and presumably 8) also offer whole-drive protection (I think it's called "Bitlocker"?) that would work for that partition as well, although I have no idea regarding performance, and since MacBooks don't have TPM chips, the "verification" routine is a little more clunky for Bitlocker, but still available.
Considering the cost of the alternative ($10k penalty (or more)), that $1100 MacBook Pro looks like a pretty damned good deal.
It takes far more than coding to make a game. The graphics need drawing, backgrounds and objects. The sounds need creating. The levels need designing. They all need testing and refining.
Angry Birds is far more sophisticated than you imagine. There ARE similar flash games available on line, such as one with a castles theme. But they aren't as enjoyable. They spent time to perfectly balance the mechanics and level design in Angry Birds. Angry Birds success wasn't a fluke. They didn't just market it well so that lots of people bought it... people played it incessantly, which shows how well it had been crafted.
I've created clones of 1980s games in less than a month. But an original game like Angry Birds, no that's far more work than that.
While I agree that there is more to creating an enjoyable game, please don't try to compare Angry Birds' development efforts for some of the major-motion-picture efforts of your typical FPS.
Angry Birds was successful because it was "accessible" to anyone. Not because it was particularly a "good" game. And certainly not because of massive development efforts.
Was it called NComputing? My last employer tried it as a way to cheat on Microsoft licensing costs before we switched half the business to web apps running in Ubuntu.
No. Doesn't look the same. The product I'm thinking of looked EXACTLY like the "Piston", even the "ports" side.
The possibility remains that I'm conflating two different products. But I DEFINITELY recognize that "form factor".
And they are getting paid on a hell of a lot more than 1-in-6 downloads.
With your obvious tenuous grasp on the business world, it's actually frightening that you tout yourself as being a "Certified Fraud Examiner".
But from what I understand from a friend of mine that took the course and has the cert. herself, that whole "certification" is a joke, and nothing more than a fraudulent, money-making scam itself.
Hmmm forgot about the iPad... another 100M there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad
Still 40B/350M = 114
Still 114 is a pretty big number.
Actually, it's about right.
I remember that SJ (IIRC) said in a WWDC keynote that the average iOS User has about 100 Apps on their device.
PayPal is 5% + $0.05 if you're selling a $1 app. That's ten cents, a third of what Apple is charging. If your app is $20 then its 2.5% + $0.30, which is eighty cents. Compare that to the six dollars Apple will gouge you for. If this is what PayPal is offering to anyone with a bank account then I'm sure you can get a better deal if you look for it.
You're either a con or a liar, or both.
All PayPal is doing for their "cut" is providing only one of the services that Apple provides with the App Store. And they make money on every single transaction. When a user downloads a FREE App, Apple's costs aren't "free" for that transaction. They hosted the app, provided marketing, product placement, distribution, and other services, but they didn't make a dime off the download.
PayPal (and every other "payment processor") doesn't have to contend with any of that.
the microphone on a phone is made for the frequency range of the human voice which is 85Hz to 225Hz,
You're an idiot. Go back to school.
The fundamental frequency of the human voice (in speech) may very well only extend to 225 Hz (that figure is for a female speaking voice, IIRC, the male "fundamental" is about 125 Hz, typically), but the harmonics and other "consonant" sounds extend up over 3 kHz. The microphone in the iPhone/iPad goes well above that. Otherwise, you couldn't understand the speech in a phone conversation, because all the other side would hear would be "vowel sounds".
And, it's easily proven: Just take your typical cellphone and record some music with the microphone. Do you understand the lyrics? 3 kHz upper limit. Do you hear the cymbals? 20 kHz+ upper limit (although the phone probably tops out at about 10 kHz or so).
As a (I suppose) musician, you should be well aware that the condenser microphones that are used in most inexpensive phones and other devices have an excellent frequency response, particularly in the upper regions. That's why condenser mics. are the favorite for mic-ing snare drums, drum kit "overheads", and acoustic guitar.
I can't stand technically-ignorant musicians, who then spout their (non)-wisdom as if they were some sort of "expert", just because they can play a Pentatonic scale and some "Power Chords" with some fluency.
I sure hope your sound man is smarter than you, or I pity your audiences...
Generates $7 Billion For Developers
and $3 billion for Apple at 30cents out of every dollar. Quite a tidy sum for the gatekeeper, is it any wonder that Microsoft would like to wall their own garden?
That "gatekeeper" is also providing:
Hosting and Bandwidth
Advertising
Marketing
Placement in a wildly successful "one-stop-shopping" online "store", with a frickin' BUTTON to said store on EVERY iOS device, creating a somewhat "captive" audience of millions and millions of users, the vast majority of which WHO WILL BE LOOKING EXACTLY ONE PLACE FOR APPS.
Credit Card Processing
Payment Collection
Distribution
It's not 1999 anymore, there are a gazillion infrastructure-as-a-service companies out there with the most prominent being Amazon. You can host a static site and downloads from S3 for twelve cents a gig. Servers are available by the hour from dozens of vendors and monthly from dozens more for prices similar to what people pay for their personal phone service. With proper automation (Chef/Puppet/CFEngine/etc...) you can spin things up in minutes. If you don't want to DIY you can go anywhere from AppEngine/Heroku style hosting all the way to vendors that will take care of everything. All for a lot less than Apple no-competition gouging.
And how, pray tell, is anyone going to even know you exist? The internet is big. Really big.
You really are an idiot. The App Store (with its "captive" audience) is the greatest software marketing tool since, well, forever.
This would particularly be interesting if you take off the outliers. Remove Angry Birds, and any other really big hit apps and then see what it looks like for the masses of developers.
The "masses of developers" haven't put the work in to developing their app that the Angry Birds programmers did.
OMG!
If Angry Birds took more than a month to code, something is seriously wrong. It looks like a frickin' Flash game, fercrissakes.
Some guy here linked to this survey
The only real lesson I got from there is "don't quit your day job". 34% of Apple dev's and 44% of Android devs make less than $500 per app per month, and 95% make $2-3k per app per month on average (and, if general distribution didn't change much since 2011, the profits distribution is reeeeeeeal skewed towards the top) with $22-27k to make it, so if you're lucky you'll break even in 7-8 months.
I don't know about you, but even $500 extra per month is not "nothing". And if you're the typical iOS developer, that is doing this in their "spare time", there is not really a concept of "breaking even", unless you "pay yourself" for sitting around watching TV, playing games, etc.
So, although most iOS devs. won't be able to "quit their day job", I wonder how many would argue that it hasn't contributed significantly to their personal "bottom line"?
you need to be a publisher with big pockets
Why?
As a developer for the App Store, you don't have to pay for:
Hosting and Bandwidth
Advertising
Marketing
Placement in a wildly successful "one-stop-shopping" online "store", with a frickin' BUTTON to said store on EVERY iOS device, creating a somewhat "captive" audience of millions and millions of users, the vast majority of which WHO WILL BE LOOKING EXACTLY ONE PLACE FOR APPS.
Credit Card Processing
Payment Collection
Distribution
BEFORE you even have the first sale.
In every other business model, you have already had to shell-out of your pockets for those costs, and the costs keep on comin' regardless of whether you sell zero copies, or a million copies, of your application.
So, it looks like it is the "conventional" software distribution model that requires "big pockets" going in.
2 Billion $ devided by 1000's of developers is not much income per dev. I'd rather see an average breakdown per dev or full breakdown.
But, what ever the figure, it's more money than they would have had otherwise.
mjwx is right - it's a rube's game to develop for iPhone. It's certainly not something you can design a major company around.
Maybe not a "major company"; but it can sure put a smile on the face of many small, independent developers. Which, BTW, should fit in nicely with the /. crowd.
So, $7 billion made from 40 billion downloads equals $1 for every 5.7 downloads. Ouch indeed.
That downloads figure includes all the free apps as well.
If we divide that 7 Billion over the 5 Million registered developer accounts they have made in the entire time that the store has been running (5 years) they've made $1400 each. That's not even enough to pay for the 5x$99 fees and $1500 for the Mac needed to do development.
That would be pretty disingenuous given developer registration is free and that the app store currently has around 775,000 apps, your numbers make no sense. Even if you made the obviously false assumption that every app was paid or supported by iAds it still works out to an average of around $9000 per app.
Not to mention the "$1500 Mac" "Requirement" is nearly 300% inflated. Mac minis are great for development, and start at $600. And that doesn't even count the developers that already had an Intel Mac for other development (like all those Linux devs. who have MacBooks, for example).
In other words, the GP needs to stop lying through his teeth.
Seven Beeeel-Yon dollars is a way significant figure, any way you slice it.
Wake me up when people start making consoles that stack again
The "Piston" is anything but new. IIRC, it was originally marketed as some sort of "alternate form-factor" "business" computer. I saw the literature for this thing (under a different name) about two years ago. At that time, the "selling point" was that it was a semi-modular, semi-single-board sort-of "industrial computer", where various "options" could be BTO-ed, and that had some sort of proprietary "multi-user-clustering" feature baked-into the OS and hardware, that would allow multiple KVMs to be hooked up to one of the "satellite" units, and then those would share actual computing resources in a "cluster hub" box. Seemed like kind of a good idea; but it ended up being no cheaper than using a bunch of generic PCs. The "Piston" looks exactly like one of the "satellite" boxes. I wish I could remember what it was called that time it failed...
WTF is a mov file? Got a real link?
I assume you're being snarky; since "MOV" is an ISO-approved multimedia container format that has existed since 1991. You might have heard of "MPEG-4"? That standard was created from the "MOV" format.
And since there are Free Players for most OSes you would be running in 2013, it is you that looks the fool, not me.
>And what about the remaining 5% of the time?
I think this is the key to Microsoft's failure with windows 8 (sadly they are not the only ones). The Start button was eliminated because MS metrics showed that people didn't use it that much, but it works perfectly for the times you do use it. It allows fairly rapid access to stuff you don't use often, and is out of the way the rest of the time. Desktop gadgets killed off because MS deemed them not important enough to fix, because most people don't use them.
If you alienate all your customers 5% at a time, eventually you will have them all covered.
Just who are these people who "Never use the Start Button"?
I use the Start button like a zillion times a day on my "work" Windows 7 laptop. Am I supposed to "pin" stuff to the Taskbar, put it in the "System Tray", or just leave a bunch of "Shortcuts" on the Desktop?
Blah. Much easier to "pin" them to the Start Menu. And the behavior is certainly not a holdover from my OS X usage; so I don't understand who runs Windows and doesn't use the Start button fairly often.
That's the thing I like the least about the Mac. Unless your are--ironically--in full screen mode, you are guaranteed to have a significant amount of wasted space, unless you are willing to hide your dock.
How so?
Most windows in OS X are resizable; so I'm not sure what you're problem is.
Heh, the irony being that what they should have taken from "users spend 95% of their time with one maximised app" was "we don't do a good enough job of supporting lots of windows of lots of different sizes". Mac users for example are perfectly happy with windows spread all over the place, and I can identify a few things (even in windows 7) that are the reason:
1) Less crufty window border stuff everywhere –maximising a window in windows is a good way of getting rid of all the extra padding they add around windows when they're not maximised. 2) Menu bar at the top, always –meaning that again, tons of screen real estate isn't taken up by duplicated menu bars if you have loads of windows open, and meaning that for those that do use the menus, that mousing to them is easier. 3) The "zoom" button making windows as big as they need to be, rather than simply full screening them, encouraging users to think "what can I get next to this".
...and don't forget "Exposé", which can quickly disambiguate a whole mess of overlapping windows.
Full Screen as an example. The metrics told them that users spent 95% of their time "in full screen". By this I think he meant maximized. This is why metro apps are full screen. This seemingly minor distinction between maximized and full screen apparently means nothing to Microsoft, but has a lot of implications for the user.
Not trying to Troll (honest!), but that's why when Apple saw the same "metric" and decided to create a similar feature in OS X (many months before Windows 8's debut), they let individual Apps, rather than the OS, decide whether they would offer a "Full Screen" (as opposed to "Maximized") mode. Then, they allowed the User (rather than the OS) decide at a whim whether they would use an App in "Full Screen", or not.
That's the difference between putting yourself in the Users' shoes, as opposed to forcing the User to submit to your (perhaps annoying) UI peccadillos.
Maybe you need to clean your sphincter
That's ok. Your mother has that job licked.