"In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%."
So wait a minute. In 1980, the Federal Government was providing 70% of basic research funding. Meaning, 30% came from private industry.
Now, in 2012, the Federal Government is providing 57% of basic research funding. Meaning, 43% comes from private industry.
You're arguing that private industry isn't "filling in the game. But they're spending 13% MORE (proportionally) in 2011 than they were in 1980.
You seem to be arguing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the blurb we've been reading says. What am I missing?
Try to figure out why MS SQL Server, a great database system, has such a completely incompetent installer. (For that matter, VS's installer ain't nothing to write home about.)
The answer is that Microsoft products are extremely siloed. IE and VS might as well be in different universes. It's always been that way, and it's a little odd, but you can't argue with the results-- while Adobe's "consolidated" approach is turning all their products into the same warmed-over crap, Microsoft products live and die by their own merits.
Plus Internet Explorer 9 is kind of amazing. If you were talking about IE7, then, well, ok. But 9? They've completely turned that product around.
Look, I'm not saying "you're an idiot", I'm just saying sometimes things aren't as black-and-white as you seem to think. (Also the word "evil" is BADLY misused for things that are, at worse, annoyances.)
This worked just fine for TiVo
Bullshit. Tivo advertised the shit out of their product.
I always thought it was funny when people claimed PBS (here in the US) is ad-free television. Uh, what do you call the 4 minutes worth of "this program brought to you by Huge Corporation" at the beginning of every show was?
Seriously, kids get more McDonalds advertising watching shows on PBS than they would on any other channel.
One of the things that I have learnt to hate about all the recent MS Windows interfaces is how it tries to outsmart me. Not having used an option for a while? It'll hide it from you,
What year are you posting from? The last Microsoft product to do that was Office 2000. Fuck, man, you're talking about something Microsoft tried for about 3 years and rejected over a DECADE ago.
And I won't say anything about the "ribbons" interface, because there's not a single positive word I could say about it.
BeOS had windows with tab-like title bars, and any window could be added to a tab-set with any other window. (For example, you could create a tab set of your email and web browser, even though they were different apps.)
Any other implementation of tabs is completely half-assed. I can only assume the reason OS X/Windows haven't taken the idea is that someone holds a patent on it, or it's other legally grey.
But when you click in the edit pane and the ribbon disappears, the whole page scrolls up, and you're not clicking where you want to click. Moronic.
Liar. The Ribbon goes *over* your document, it doesn't push your document down.
I mean, maybe you were using some weird non-Microsoft psuedo-ribbon in an app developed by an idiot who didn't understand the concept. But your complaint doesn't apply to the actual Ribbon as used in actual Microsoft products.
Any lawyer, business or lay person who needs to appear in court and wants said e-mail submitted into evidence where they do not take electronic submissions.
Fucking shit, obviously SOME people need to print out emails. For those people, they need to find the new location of the Print button once and then they're golden. For the vast majority who don't, the screen real-estate previously dedicated to Print can be used for something they're more likely to need on a daily basis.
Do you really need me to describe how to not use Outlook? Here, I'll give you a simple list of steps:
Example, Outlook 2007 to print my e-mail was: click on print button in UI, hit print.
In Outlook 2010 it's realize there is no print button. Hmmm, file menu? Oh, no menus. Right, ribbon / tab file thingy - gahhh where did my e-mail go? Did I lose it? What e-mail are the choices I may be making apply to? Ok, deep breath. Where is anything? Oh, print in small print on the left. Ok, click that. Click print button? Didn't I already do that? Ok, click it. Now it prints out.
I'm guessing that's more due to Microsoft finally realizing, "what kind of idiot prints out emails, seriously??" and demoting the option. I could be wrong; maybe they're purposefully trying to make life difficult for you. But I doubt it.
I think the issue here is that for many users the new UIs don't offer any benefits they can see.
Then they don't have to use it. Nobody's holding a gun to their head.
That's all I'm saying: if you don't want to use the new UI, don't use it. Instead, what people are doing is using it, then spending hours griping about how different it is, which is stupid and helps nobody.
But it's not. The point is that the whole open source methodology doesn't gain you anything if people don't fairly evaluate the changes in a data-centric way.
And people in the open source community don't. What they do instead is post "I hate this", and submit bugs that are basically "change this to exactly what it was one year ago".
There's also a huge misunderstanding of what usability development is *for*... it's not to make you more comfortable, or to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, or to invoke nostalgia, it's to make your work on the computer faster, more efficient, easier to learn, and less error-prone.
Do you want to know why the developers of these new open source UIs don't value input from the general public? Because 99.5% of that input is just complaining. There's so much "I hate this" noise that it's impossible to find the 0.5% with the brilliant ideas of how it can be improved.
So, in short, if you want to help UI developers get on with their jobs:
* If you're the type of person who hates change, stop downloading the new version with the changes! You'll be happy, the developers who won't have to listen to your griping will be happy, everybody's happy.
* If you feel you have genuinely useful input, before you submit it, do a little usability testing. Give the product to your brother, or mom, and ask them to complete the task. Do a quick and dirty survey on how many people support your idea over the default behavior. Then, when you have data to back up your assertion, go ahead and enter the bug. (And hey, be prepared to find out maybe your idea isn't so great after-all. That's ok too.)
* And if you get a clear "we're not going to do this" from the developers, then just walk away leave it be. You won't help the project by continually opening up the same bug over and over again.
The open source, anybody can contribute ideas, rapid release development methodology would be the perfect way to prototype new UI ideas and designs-- if the community weren't a bunch of whiny luddite complainers.
The perfect UI for 90% of all use cases has existed for decades. I think In The Beginning Was The Command Line should be required reading for all of those "Intro to Computer Literacy" classes they tend to require of college freshmen (or did about 6 years ago when I was still taking classes).
You're trolling us, right?
Computers today (I dunno, maybe you're writing that Slashdot message from 1986) do things like organize photos, edit videos, surf the web, serve as media centers, composing WYSIWYG documents-- all things the CLI is godawful at dealing with. That's maybe 99% of what people use their computers for.
For the other 1%? Sure the CLI's fine. But who gives a fuck? We want an interface for the 99%.
I particularly enjoyed the paragraph where he says he enjoys wines, but only particular wines, and he doesn't remember which ones so don't bother asking. But if you order wine, he might taste some and if he likes it he'll drink a glass.
Man. Either memorize a few wine names, or say "don't order wine." Guy has a magical ability to take something simple and make it hugely complex.
It's still bad that they wouldn't block Google results from the clickstream,
Well, that brings up the whole "once the data is served from Google to the user, who 'owns' it?" issue. Which is thorny. I'd argue that there's nothing wrong, morally or legally, with me searching for "foobar" and then telling you the top result was www.foobar2000.org. No matter the search engine. Your opinion might vary.
Anyway, no biggie. Like I said, that incident was very very misreported because: 1) Even the Google engineer didn't bother to figure out exactly what was going on (nor did he bother asking around his own company-- like I said, Google has used the same tactic in the past!) 2) The media can't report on anything that takes more than about 15 seconds to explain
Therefore, the only reason to track through the Toolbar is to take advantage of the results provided by other engines.
Duh?
The point of it is that if you go to Bob's Forums and search for "walnut", you might get a result that Bing would never have thought of on its own. So what it does is it takes that search string, the resulting page, and inserts it into its database so the next time someone goes to Bing and types in "Bob's Forums walnut", they're more likely to get that resulting page.
There's nothing wrong with that. That's the exact point of the toolbar, in fact.
The only thing even slightly shady about this is that Bing didn't disable this feature for Google.com, so if you do the search on Google, the term could appear in Bing the same way it does for Bob's Forums.
But Bing's toolbar didn't conduct the Google search. It didn't contact Google's servers. The text was copied from a user's computer, and that user had agreed, all legal-like, to send the data to Bing. Again: it wasn't doing anything wrong.
The engineer who made that complaint obviously didn't stop to think about how those results could get to Bing, even if Bing never queries Google. Instead he leaped to the conclusion that Bing was somehow stealing their database(?).
And to make things even worse, Google Toolbar, back in the day, used to do this exact same thing.
Of course the problem is: 1) Google "does no evil" so obviously if they say Bing is stealing, Bing must be stealing 2) Explaining what's really going on takes longer than the average media soundbyte
Streaming-only Netflix was cheap, ridiculously cheap-- it simply wasn't sustainable. I mean, at this point, the content available on Netflix rivals the content from your local cable provider, and good luck getting that for less than $40 a month. Even a single MMO like WOW costs more per month, and do you think the entertainment value of 1 month of WOW equals 1 month of Netflix? It's still ridiculously cheap, now it's just within the realm of reality.
Their mistake was not realizing that as they added more titles to streaming, the value of streaming increases, and their price needed to increase correspondingly. Instead, they waited until late in the game, and slammed users with a huge price increase all at once. I think a gradual increase, with emphasis on how much more valuable the service had become (or perhaps a "grandfather clause" to let existing customers keep their lower-priced service) would have been a much better move.
Pay for someone searching "hey I want to see if my buddy John who went to my high school signed up?" You're literally saying Facebook should be fined by the Government if one of their users attempts to see if someone they used to know is on the service?
They could still pull-out if they used their huge lead in Europe and Asia to fund increased North America development, to get their products in-line with competitors.
They show... little desire to do that. Instead, they're using their healthy financials in Europe and Asia to mask the soaking they're taking in NA, and even worse, they don't seem to realize that those regions will convert to Android or iOS for the exact same reasons Americans have. Just... in another year or two.
They have the same problem Sony did during Playstation 3 development, a HUGE corporate ego masking real weaknesses in their product.
At the time Cortez entered Tenochtitlan, it had a population greater than that of any European city at the time, and was possibly the most populous city on the planet.
There's a lot of misinformation about native pre-Columbus native societies, one of them being that they were universally hunter-gatherers who lived "in harmony" with nature. Not true. They cut down forests, they slashed and burned, they caused the extinction of numerous species in both North and South America.
Slashdot Mirror
So wait a minute. In 1980, the Federal Government was providing 70% of basic research funding. Meaning, 30% came from private industry.
Now, in 2012, the Federal Government is providing 57% of basic research funding. Meaning, 43% comes from private industry.
You're arguing that private industry isn't "filling in the game. But they're spending 13% MORE (proportionally) in 2011 than they were in 1980.
You seem to be arguing the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the blurb we've been reading says. What am I missing?
Try to figure out why MS SQL Server, a great database system, has such a completely incompetent installer. (For that matter, VS's installer ain't nothing to write home about.)
The answer is that Microsoft products are extremely siloed. IE and VS might as well be in different universes. It's always been that way, and it's a little odd, but you can't argue with the results-- while Adobe's "consolidated" approach is turning all their products into the same warmed-over crap, Microsoft products live and die by their own merits.
Plus Internet Explorer 9 is kind of amazing. If you were talking about IE7, then, well, ok. But 9? They've completely turned that product around.
And that doesn't count as advertising... how?
Look, I'm not saying "you're an idiot", I'm just saying sometimes things aren't as black-and-white as you seem to think. (Also the word "evil" is BADLY misused for things that are, at worse, annoyances.)
Bullshit. Tivo advertised the shit out of their product.
I always thought it was funny when people claimed PBS (here in the US) is ad-free television. Uh, what do you call the 4 minutes worth of "this program brought to you by Huge Corporation" at the beginning of every show was?
Seriously, kids get more McDonalds advertising watching shows on PBS than they would on any other channel.
Ok. Devil's advocate. Say I invent a new product. I think it could really help a lot of people out, if only they knew it existed-- how do I tell them?
What year are you posting from? The last Microsoft product to do that was Office 2000. Fuck, man, you're talking about something Microsoft tried for about 3 years and rejected over a DECADE ago.
You've never even used it. Don't bullshit us.
BeOS had windows with tab-like title bars, and any window could be added to a tab-set with any other window. (For example, you could create a tab set of your email and web browser, even though they were different apps.)
Any other implementation of tabs is completely half-assed. I can only assume the reason OS X/Windows haven't taken the idea is that someone holds a patent on it, or it's other legally grey.
Liar. The Ribbon goes *over* your document, it doesn't push your document down.
I mean, maybe you were using some weird non-Microsoft psuedo-ribbon in an app developed by an idiot who didn't understand the concept. But your complaint doesn't apply to the actual Ribbon as used in actual Microsoft products.
Let me describe to you how to lose your job
1) Not use e-mail / calendaring set by management.
So either cope or quit. Man-up. Whining doesn't help anybody.
Any lawyer, business or lay person who needs to appear in court and wants said e-mail submitted into evidence where they do not take electronic submissions.
Fucking shit, obviously SOME people need to print out emails. For those people, they need to find the new location of the Print button once and then they're golden. For the vast majority who don't, the screen real-estate previously dedicated to Print can be used for something they're more likely to need on a daily basis.
Do you really need me to describe how to not use Outlook? Here, I'll give you a simple list of steps:
1)
How's that?
I don't want to actually reply except to point out that that is absolutely the WORST car analogy I've ever seen on this site.
Example, Outlook 2007 to print my e-mail was: click on print button in UI, hit print.
In Outlook 2010 it's realize there is no print button. Hmmm, file menu? Oh, no menus. Right, ribbon / tab file thingy - gahhh where did my e-mail go? Did I lose it? What e-mail are the choices I may be making apply to? Ok, deep breath. Where is anything? Oh, print in small print on the left. Ok, click that. Click print button? Didn't I already do that? Ok, click it. Now it prints out.
I'm guessing that's more due to Microsoft finally realizing, "what kind of idiot prints out emails, seriously??" and demoting the option. I could be wrong; maybe they're purposefully trying to make life difficult for you. But I doubt it.
I think the issue here is that for many users the new UIs don't offer any benefits they can see.
Then they don't have to use it. Nobody's holding a gun to their head.
That's all I'm saying: if you don't want to use the new UI, don't use it. Instead, what people are doing is using it, then spending hours griping about how different it is, which is stupid and helps nobody.
But it's not. The point is that the whole open source methodology doesn't gain you anything if people don't fairly evaluate the changes in a data-centric way.
And people in the open source community don't. What they do instead is post "I hate this", and submit bugs that are basically "change this to exactly what it was one year ago".
There's also a huge misunderstanding of what usability development is *for*... it's not to make you more comfortable, or to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, or to invoke nostalgia, it's to make your work on the computer faster, more efficient, easier to learn, and less error-prone.
Do you want to know why the developers of these new open source UIs don't value input from the general public? Because 99.5% of that input is just complaining. There's so much "I hate this" noise that it's impossible to find the 0.5% with the brilliant ideas of how it can be improved.
So, in short, if you want to help UI developers get on with their jobs:
* If you're the type of person who hates change, stop downloading the new version with the changes! You'll be happy, the developers who won't have to listen to your griping will be happy, everybody's happy.
* If you feel you have genuinely useful input, before you submit it, do a little usability testing. Give the product to your brother, or mom, and ask them to complete the task. Do a quick and dirty survey on how many people support your idea over the default behavior. Then, when you have data to back up your assertion, go ahead and enter the bug. (And hey, be prepared to find out maybe your idea isn't so great after-all. That's ok too.)
* And if you get a clear "we're not going to do this" from the developers, then just walk away leave it be. You won't help the project by continually opening up the same bug over and over again.
The open source, anybody can contribute ideas, rapid release development methodology would be the perfect way to prototype new UI ideas and designs-- if the community weren't a bunch of whiny luddite complainers.
The perfect UI for 90% of all use cases has existed for decades. I think In The Beginning Was The Command Line should be required reading for all of those "Intro to Computer Literacy" classes they tend to require of college freshmen (or did about 6 years ago when I was still taking classes).
You're trolling us, right?
Computers today (I dunno, maybe you're writing that Slashdot message from 1986) do things like organize photos, edit videos, surf the web, serve as media centers, composing WYSIWYG documents-- all things the CLI is godawful at dealing with. That's maybe 99% of what people use their computers for.
For the other 1%? Sure the CLI's fine. But who gives a fuck? We want an interface for the 99%.
I particularly enjoyed the paragraph where he says he enjoys wines, but only particular wines, and he doesn't remember which ones so don't bother asking. But if you order wine, he might taste some and if he likes it he'll drink a glass.
Man. Either memorize a few wine names, or say "don't order wine." Guy has a magical ability to take something simple and make it hugely complex.
It's still bad that they wouldn't block Google results from the clickstream,
Well, that brings up the whole "once the data is served from Google to the user, who 'owns' it?" issue. Which is thorny. I'd argue that there's nothing wrong, morally or legally, with me searching for "foobar" and then telling you the top result was www.foobar2000.org. No matter the search engine. Your opinion might vary.
Anyway, no biggie. Like I said, that incident was very very misreported because:
1) Even the Google engineer didn't bother to figure out exactly what was going on (nor did he bother asking around his own company-- like I said, Google has used the same tactic in the past!)
2) The media can't report on anything that takes more than about 15 seconds to explain
Therefore, the only reason to track through the Toolbar is to take advantage of the results provided by other engines.
Duh?
The point of it is that if you go to Bob's Forums and search for "walnut", you might get a result that Bing would never have thought of on its own. So what it does is it takes that search string, the resulting page, and inserts it into its database so the next time someone goes to Bing and types in "Bob's Forums walnut", they're more likely to get that resulting page.
There's nothing wrong with that. That's the exact point of the toolbar, in fact.
The only thing even slightly shady about this is that Bing didn't disable this feature for Google.com, so if you do the search on Google, the term could appear in Bing the same way it does for Bob's Forums.
But Bing's toolbar didn't conduct the Google search. It didn't contact Google's servers. The text was copied from a user's computer, and that user had agreed, all legal-like, to send the data to Bing. Again: it wasn't doing anything wrong.
The engineer who made that complaint obviously didn't stop to think about how those results could get to Bing, even if Bing never queries Google. Instead he leaped to the conclusion that Bing was somehow stealing their database(?).
And to make things even worse, Google Toolbar, back in the day, used to do this exact same thing.
Of course the problem is:
1) Google "does no evil" so obviously if they say Bing is stealing, Bing must be stealing
2) Explaining what's really going on takes longer than the average media soundbyte
Except in April, they said they'd have the email client in 60 days: http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/15/rim-playbook-email-client-very-very-soon-3g-model-this-summe/
Streaming-only Netflix was cheap, ridiculously cheap-- it simply wasn't sustainable. I mean, at this point, the content available on Netflix rivals the content from your local cable provider, and good luck getting that for less than $40 a month. Even a single MMO like WOW costs more per month, and do you think the entertainment value of 1 month of WOW equals 1 month of Netflix? It's still ridiculously cheap, now it's just within the realm of reality.
Their mistake was not realizing that as they added more titles to streaming, the value of streaming increases, and their price needed to increase correspondingly. Instead, they waited until late in the game, and slammed users with a huge price increase all at once. I think a gradual increase, with emphasis on how much more valuable the service had become (or perhaps a "grandfather clause" to let existing customers keep their lower-priced service) would have been a much better move.
Are you implying that that icon was... funny? And not, say, the oldest, least funny, joke ever made?
Pay for someone searching "hey I want to see if my buddy John who went to my high school signed up?" You're literally saying Facebook should be fined by the Government if one of their users attempts to see if someone they used to know is on the service?
Are... are you serious? I can't even tell.
What if science fiction is really a recipe for mock duck?!?
They could still pull-out if they used their huge lead in Europe and Asia to fund increased North America development, to get their products in-line with competitors.
They show... little desire to do that. Instead, they're using their healthy financials in Europe and Asia to mask the soaking they're taking in NA, and even worse, they don't seem to realize that those regions will convert to Android or iOS for the exact same reasons Americans have. Just... in another year or two.
They have the same problem Sony did during Playstation 3 development, a HUGE corporate ego masking real weaknesses in their product.
At the time Cortez entered Tenochtitlan, it had a population greater than that of any European city at the time, and was possibly the most populous city on the planet.
There's a lot of misinformation about native pre-Columbus native societies, one of them being that they were universally hunter-gatherers who lived "in harmony" with nature. Not true. They cut down forests, they slashed and burned, they caused the extinction of numerous species in both North and South America.