Tastes differ. Personally, I like Adam Carolla a lot better than Stern. He has some bits that are unfunny time-fillers, and he's usually not coherent for the first half-hour of the show, but generally I laugh a lot more at the Adam Carolla show than I ever did for Stern.
He's not saying that wireless is a bad idea, he's saying that the Zune's specific implementation of wireless is clunky for sharing music. It's like people are incapable of reading anything with any degree of subtlety anymore... very strange.
If you want a good indication of the popularity of the iPod, look at all the audio/home theater products that are specifically named and designed to steal away some of Apple's leftover marketing.
Just this morning I was looking at a HD Radio called the "I-sonic" by Polk Audio. The array of stuff named "i-whatever" is incredible, and the only reason there isn't a thousand products named "something-Pod" is because of trademark violations.
You've listed all the positives of the hardware, but there are some very big questions remaining:
1) Will Sony allow non-Sony code to run on the console? They don't on the PSP. Why would that policy be different for the PS3?
2) If they want to continue PPC Linux development, and want to use a console, why aren't they using the Xbox 360 which shares almost all of the features above, except has CPUs that are much closer to the CPUs inside Apple computers, and has been out for a full year already?
I think what they should do is either dissolve into another distro project (the fewer distros, the better, IMO), or port YellowDog to Intel and specialize in having a distro for Apple hardware.
I agree. Part of me says, "well, that kind of makes sense seeing as they want to stay together as a group and keep doing work..." but a bigger part of me says, "why not just make the next release the last release, and concentrate their talents into some other distro?
Or, even better, make a distro that still concentrates on Apple hardware, but Intel hardware instead of PPC hardware?
Either way, moving to PS3 strikes me as a dead-end. It's been a full year and change, and nobody's figured out how to run custom code on Xbox 360 yet... what makes them think PS3 will be any easier? (For that matter, Xbox 360 has PPC CPUs also and is cheaper, why not try for that goal?)
Wow! Good thing there are experts like you on the scene, Mystery Stevenson, who know every single detail and design of the ISS better than the American and Russian agencies that built and launched it. You'd think after all these years that NASA would start hiring smart people instead of just grabbing random joes from the unemployment line and entrusting them with millions of dollars worth of space hardware on the first day.
One final thing to consider is that most people don't configure their desktop environment any more than once, (or as you pointed out) if at all.
Thus going back to the ORIGINAL point of this debate, that since most people don't do any kind of configuration, the defaults need to be as sane/beautiful as possible. The very small minority who care about CPU/memory usage will tweak it to be more efficient (just like they do in Windows now with RegEdit, as you noted), and the large majority will be happy with KDE by default.
I disagree. I've never seen an application with a "beginner" mode that was even half-decent. Remember Apple's terrible "Simple Finder" option in OS 9? Did *anybody* on Earth end up using it? The "Easy" mode in Azureus is so horribly-implemented, I almost thought it was some kind of terrible joke. Or what about "Personalized Menus" in Office 2000? Another horrible implementation of that idea.
What KDE needs to do is to collect data on which of those options are actually *used* (I'm guessing that the vast majority of those options have been touched by less than 100 people), and remove all the others. Then when they have the number of options down to a reasonable level, they can actually start applying some QA to the environment and hunt down pesky bugs.
There are two rules of interface design that KDE really needs to figure out:
1) The vast majority of people never change the defaults. Why do you think people here on Slashdot always complain about Auto-Format in Word, even though you can turn it off easily in the Options dialog? Because they don't change the defaults, even when they annoy them.
2) The more options there are, the more intimidated the user will be. It's never a good idea for the computer to make a user feel dumb, but when you see an option entitled, "Treat ctrl as alt if Mouse 3 is held down for over 14 seconds", that's exactly what you do.
(Once again, Slashdot treats a click of the Submit button in Safari as a click of the Preview button. FIX THIS BUG PLEASE!)
I can guarantee I'd be happier running Vista. I'm running OS X right now. Last time I tried KDE, I took one look at the preferences window and ran away screaming. There's no way every single one of those 40,000 different options are all actually used by people, and it's impossible to QA a product with that many different combinations of settings. (Not that the open source community usually gives a crap about quality, but either way.)
What about Microsoft Games? Microsoft Hardware? Microsoft Software for Macintosh?
Even assuming that Office and Windows are going to crap, there's still a LOT in Microsoft to excite a new programmer. Microsoft Games is basically ruling the industry at the moment, Microsoft's Macintosh software is great, and their hardware is always top-notch. Microsoft is bigger than just Windows and Office.
Isn't the 20% growth rate we already have enough for you? You want MORE Californians coming up here and clogging up our freeways?
*ahem* Yes you are right the weather is terrible and all the people here are really rude and there are not any hot chicks! PLEASE STAY IN CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS!
"crippling" software by not allowing you to send blank messages and waste the other person's time and energy? Sounds like a positive change to me. I don't give a crap what you did on your BBS in 1983, don't put random whitespace in conversations with me. Just think of it like an automatic "jerk-filter".
And for all the people who think this is new in OS X, no. The "maximize" button has always done that in Mac OS. The entire point of a windowing system is lost if a single window takes up the entire screen, and Apple's well-aware of that. I think the Maximize function in Windows is more intended to make DOS users more comfortable.
I'm running the current OS X, and I have two monitors. One is a 20" 1680x1050 and the second is a 19" 1280x1024. When I drag windows from the 20" to the 19", the window frame noticeably changes size, as do the fonts. As far as I can tell, there's no adjustments being made at all... the pixels are just being copied over verbatim.
If you're correct and this feature does exist, where in the Preferences do I set my DPI? Because frankly the menus and window titles (and tooltips, and various other OS-controlled bits of text) on the 20" monitor are bordering on "too small to read" for me, and I'd really like to bump up the size but I've never found a way to. It's nice that you can use Command-+ to up the size in Safari, but that doesn't work in most other applications.
You don't know what the operation was. Maybe it was copy files A, B, C from folder D and E into folder F. Then copy D into folder F. Then copy A, B into a new folder, and name it "G".
Can you do something like that in 29.3 seconds? It would take 29.3 seconds just to understand the instructions.
Are we talking about widget sets or APIs? I'm a little confused. Oh well.
I mean, OS X has just one widget set, but both the Carbon and Cocoa APIs make use of it. So you're also arguing that OS X only has one "toolkit" by that reasoning.
(Once again, Slashdot's bug where the Submit button will do a Preview in the Safari browser rears its ugly head. What the hell do you have to do to get bugs fixed around here?)
Criminy, stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Some accountant at Quadcomm went to the CEO and said, "why are we spending $X a year on an email client that only nets $(X/2) in revenue?" And the CEO said, "uh... I dunno." So they dropped it.
That's all there is to it. This way they can spend a few months (with their current developers) modifying Thunderbird to somewhat resemble Eudora a little bit, then wash their hands of the whole thing.
Uh, wrong. Both YouTube and Google Video put up content within minutes of the upload. Probably the only lag time is the time it takes to encode the video into whatever codec that Flash player uses. It's also not true that people don't put "cool videos to show to their friends" on Google Video. Here's one of my uploads: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-754112759 2508664155&hl=en -- use the "From This User" link to find all of them. You'll see that all of them (except one movie trailer) were entirely impulsive and most of them were uploaded to answer the question, "where did that joke come from?"
So does Safari, which is the default browser on his "Apple key" computer there. Meaning he actually has to go out of his way to not have a spell-checker available. Not expending a lot of effort on perfect spelling and grammar is one thing, but not doing the bare minimum can only be due to spite.
Slashdot Mirror
Tastes differ. Personally, I like Adam Carolla a lot better than Stern. He has some bits that are unfunny time-fillers, and he's usually not coherent for the first half-hour of the show, but generally I laugh a lot more at the Adam Carolla show than I ever did for Stern.
He's not saying that wireless is a bad idea, he's saying that the Zune's specific implementation of wireless is clunky for sharing music. It's like people are incapable of reading anything with any degree of subtlety anymore... very strange.
Why are you dissing Zuma?
Zune = new media player from Microsoft
Zuma = cool marble-based casual video game from Pop-Cap Games
Pretty big difference there.
If you want a good indication of the popularity of the iPod, look at all the audio/home theater products that are specifically named and designed to steal away some of Apple's leftover marketing.
Just this morning I was looking at a HD Radio called the "I-sonic" by Polk Audio. The array of stuff named "i-whatever" is incredible, and the only reason there isn't a thousand products named "something-Pod" is because of trademark violations.
You've listed all the positives of the hardware, but there are some very big questions remaining:
1) Will Sony allow non-Sony code to run on the console? They don't on the PSP. Why would that policy be different for the PS3?
2) If they want to continue PPC Linux development, and want to use a console, why aren't they using the Xbox 360 which shares almost all of the features above, except has CPUs that are much closer to the CPUs inside Apple computers, and has been out for a full year already?
I think what they should do is either dissolve into another distro project (the fewer distros, the better, IMO), or port YellowDog to Intel and specialize in having a distro for Apple hardware.
I agree. Part of me says, "well, that kind of makes sense seeing as they want to stay together as a group and keep doing work..." but a bigger part of me says, "why not just make the next release the last release, and concentrate their talents into some other distro?
Or, even better, make a distro that still concentrates on Apple hardware, but Intel hardware instead of PPC hardware?
Either way, moving to PS3 strikes me as a dead-end. It's been a full year and change, and nobody's figured out how to run custom code on Xbox 360 yet... what makes them think PS3 will be any easier? (For that matter, Xbox 360 has PPC CPUs also and is cheaper, why not try for that goal?)
Wow! Good thing there are experts like you on the scene, Mystery Stevenson, who know every single detail and design of the ISS better than the American and Russian agencies that built and launched it. You'd think after all these years that NASA would start hiring smart people instead of just grabbing random joes from the unemployment line and entrusting them with millions of dollars worth of space hardware on the first day.
One final thing to consider is that most people don't configure their desktop environment any more than once, (or as you pointed out) if at all.
Thus going back to the ORIGINAL point of this debate, that since most people don't do any kind of configuration, the defaults need to be as sane/beautiful as possible. The very small minority who care about CPU/memory usage will tweak it to be more efficient (just like they do in Windows now with RegEdit, as you noted), and the large majority will be happy with KDE by default.
I disagree. I've never seen an application with a "beginner" mode that was even half-decent. Remember Apple's terrible "Simple Finder" option in OS 9? Did *anybody* on Earth end up using it? The "Easy" mode in Azureus is so horribly-implemented, I almost thought it was some kind of terrible joke. Or what about "Personalized Menus" in Office 2000? Another horrible implementation of that idea.
What KDE needs to do is to collect data on which of those options are actually *used* (I'm guessing that the vast majority of those options have been touched by less than 100 people), and remove all the others. Then when they have the number of options down to a reasonable level, they can actually start applying some QA to the environment and hunt down pesky bugs.
There are two rules of interface design that KDE really needs to figure out:
1) The vast majority of people never change the defaults. Why do you think people here on Slashdot always complain about Auto-Format in Word, even though you can turn it off easily in the Options dialog? Because they don't change the defaults, even when they annoy them.
2) The more options there are, the more intimidated the user will be. It's never a good idea for the computer to make a user feel dumb, but when you see an option entitled, "Treat ctrl as alt if Mouse 3 is held down for over 14 seconds", that's exactly what you do.
(Once again, Slashdot treats a click of the Submit button in Safari as a click of the Preview button. FIX THIS BUG PLEASE!)
I can guarantee I'd be happier running Vista. I'm running OS X right now. Last time I tried KDE, I took one look at the preferences window and ran away screaming. There's no way every single one of those 40,000 different options are all actually used by people, and it's impossible to QA a product with that many different combinations of settings. (Not that the open source community usually gives a crap about quality, but either way.)
I guess you missed the part where he said "by default."
The offense is even worse if KDE is technically capable of better, and yet is set to look crummy by default. What are the developers thinking?
What about Microsoft Games? Microsoft Hardware? Microsoft Software for Macintosh?
Even assuming that Office and Windows are going to crap, there's still a LOT in Microsoft to excite a new programmer. Microsoft Games is basically ruling the industry at the moment, Microsoft's Macintosh software is great, and their hardware is always top-notch. Microsoft is bigger than just Windows and Office.
Isn't the 20% growth rate we already have enough for you? You want MORE Californians coming up here and clogging up our freeways?
*ahem* Yes you are right the weather is terrible and all the people here are really rude and there are not any hot chicks! PLEASE STAY IN CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS!
Dude, relax. It's a joke from an episode of Seinfeld.
Maybe it's because your displays are both Apple branded? Mine are Dells. Weird.
"crippling" software by not allowing you to send blank messages and waste the other person's time and energy? Sounds like a positive change to me. I don't give a crap what you did on your BBS in 1983, don't put random whitespace in conversations with me. Just think of it like an automatic "jerk-filter".
And for all the people who think this is new in OS X, no. The "maximize" button has always done that in Mac OS. The entire point of a windowing system is lost if a single window takes up the entire screen, and Apple's well-aware of that. I think the Maximize function in Windows is more intended to make DOS users more comfortable.
Uh... huh? Are you sure about this?
I'm running the current OS X, and I have two monitors. One is a 20" 1680x1050 and the second is a 19" 1280x1024. When I drag windows from the 20" to the 19", the window frame noticeably changes size, as do the fonts. As far as I can tell, there's no adjustments being made at all... the pixels are just being copied over verbatim.
If you're correct and this feature does exist, where in the Preferences do I set my DPI? Because frankly the menus and window titles (and tooltips, and various other OS-controlled bits of text) on the 20" monitor are bordering on "too small to read" for me, and I'd really like to bump up the size but I've never found a way to. It's nice that you can use Command-+ to up the size in Safari, but that doesn't work in most other applications.
You don't know what the operation was. Maybe it was copy files A, B, C from folder D and E into folder F. Then copy D into folder F. Then copy A, B into a new folder, and name it "G".
Can you do something like that in 29.3 seconds? It would take 29.3 seconds just to understand the instructions.
Are we talking about widget sets or APIs? I'm a little confused. Oh well.
I mean, OS X has just one widget set, but both the Carbon and Cocoa APIs make use of it. So you're also arguing that OS X only has one "toolkit" by that reasoning.
(Once again, Slashdot's bug where the Submit button will do a Preview in the Safari browser rears its ugly head. What the hell do you have to do to get bugs fixed around here?)
With the addition of .net, Windows has at least two. More if you count MFC and 16-bit apps.
Criminy, stop drinking the Kool-Aid. Some accountant at Quadcomm went to the CEO and said, "why are we spending $X a year on an email client that only nets $(X/2) in revenue?" And the CEO said, "uh... I dunno." So they dropped it.
That's all there is to it. This way they can spend a few months (with their current developers) modifying Thunderbird to somewhat resemble Eudora a little bit, then wash their hands of the whole thing.
Uh, wrong. Both YouTube and Google Video put up content within minutes of the upload. Probably the only lag time is the time it takes to encode the video into whatever codec that Flash player uses. It's also not true that people don't put "cool videos to show to their friends" on Google Video. Here's one of my uploads: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-754112759 2508664155&hl=en -- use the "From This User" link to find all of them. You'll see that all of them (except one movie trailer) were entirely impulsive and most of them were uploaded to answer the question, "where did that joke come from?"
In short, you're wrong.
There's ThinkOffice which has feature-parity (or damned close to it) to Excel 97 at least. Given, it's not even close to Excel 2003 levels yet.
There's also Mariner Calc, which I haven't personally used (ThinkOffice is cheaper), but it looks pretty good from screenshots.
So does Safari, which is the default browser on his "Apple key" computer there. Meaning he actually has to go out of his way to not have a spell-checker available. Not expending a lot of effort on perfect spelling and grammar is one thing, but not doing the bare minimum can only be due to spite.