Or, more likely, that you didn't read the article, didn't spend more than about 10 seconds thinking about the issue at hand, and just posted the first knee-jerk reaction you thought up... then all the Slashdot readers who did the same modded you to +5, even though your post isn't "insightful" in any way.
I think the CD drive gives the Playstation the edge. And you didn't count that at all. But maybe you're right... in any case, it's not nearly as clearcut as the original poster.
Are we to the point yet on Slashdot where people will stop bringing up Microsoft BOB as an example of Microsoft's being bad? That one always cracks me up...
Oh, a cheap *home* program produced for maybe a year in 1993 happened to be bad, that'll convince me not to run Windows XP! Good argument, sir!
What's funny is that normally, the Slashdot crowd thinks that Microsoft software is always terrible and buggy and insecure and generally is going to cause the downfall of society.
However, when it comes to file browsing, they seem to think that Windows 95 was the golden standard by which all spatial file browsers should be measured, and say things like, "well, it should be obvious that spatial browsing is stupid because Windows 95 was so bad." And it will never occur to them that maybe the reason spatial browsing sucked in Windows 95 was because Microsoft screwed it up, not because the concept is flawed!
Of course I know the true reason: They're not going to admit that they've never used an Amiga or Macintosh pre-OS X, but they haven't and so they've never seen a good implementation of spatial browsing before.
As an OS X user, I say bring back the Finder in Mac OS 9.2.2. It was better than the OS X Finder is now in almost every single way, and I was a dozen times more efficient with it.
You make it sound as if you can't run scripts with a GUI file manager. But, uh, you're wrong-- you can. Even Windows Explorer has VBScript, even though I hear it's pretty clunky. Apple's OS X has AppleScript which has a nice record-and-playback feature you can use if you're not entirely sure how to type the script in, and Nautilus has the scripting feature discussed in this article.
maybe Microsoft will rise to the challenge and beat the competition out by producing a superior product that is worth paying for even in a market that's been leveled by OpenDocument?
Well, more accessible = better, right? So it looks like Microsoft's already got a head start.
And you could have bought an Xbox 360 at list price on launch day. For instance, my local Fred Meyer here in western Washington got 34 360s to sell, and they didn't have any kind of bundle or pre-order requirement that the Gamestops and Best Buys of the world did. If you were in line there at midnight, you'd have bought a 360 at list on launch day. In fact, I missed one at a local Target by only 5 minutes... damn me and my sleeping through the alarm.
However, that doesn't mean that Xbox 360 you just bought at list is *worth* list. You could have turned around and sold it at $550 or more easily. Your PS2 wasn't worth list after you bought it, it was worth quite a bit more... I saw the lines to get them on the news.
And, of course, you're ignoring all of my other points to instead refute a mostly pointless example. My main point is the same whether or not the example applies.
Why don't you just not buy it if you don't like it instead of whining about it on Slashdot? And guess what, if a lot of people agree with you and also don't buy it, then it won't be successful and publishers will go back to the old model! Amazing!
Give them a chance? OpenOffice has been around for ages, and they haven't gotten around to accessibility yet? Criminy, if they haven't done it in the last 5 years, why should any disable person believe they would in the next six months?
It's not, but it's a real weakness of the open source community.
Of course anybody can build a word processor with excellent accessibility support, but, uh... nobody in the open source community *has* done it. And since accessibility isn't one of those "fun" tasks in programming, it's very likely that nobody ever will-- at least not until some major corporation sponsors it and takes the helm.
Quality is dropping, yet for some reason demand is still high. I don't know if this is just a normal perception as one gets in his mid 30s or if this is a real trend or not, but it seems to be a common consensus that quality is not there as it once was.
It's called "nostalgia." It's an enemy of rational thought, which explains why it's usually so prevalent in Slashdot threads dealing with music/movies/video games. How many people remember Aliens compared to the number of people who remember Solarbabies? They came out the same year.
The quality is the same as it's always been. Which means, 90% of it is crap.
Hm. I've never seen a process/application that the task manager can't kill. Can you give some more details about what's happening exactly and what you're doing about it?
I'm not going to just call BS on this, I think you actually have a problem with Windows, however I'm willing to bet that your problem is not Microsoft's error, but the third party developer's whose product crashed.
The OS *can* kill a userland program completely. I've had many weird and unusual crashes, both from stuff like nasty spyware, plain buggy apps (usually IBM or Siemens apps) and stuff I've written myself and screwed up with, and I've never failed to kill the program with the task manager.
Ok, but if we've established that a stable driver interface is good both for open source coders and for corporations looking into porting to Linux, uh, why *not* do it? Sounds like a win-win to me. And yet this bone-headed lack of a stable interface has persisted for years and years even after the problem has been made perfectly clear.
Saying they "must" do it is obviously wrong, but saying that not doing it is stupid is perfectly right, at least from my point of view.
historically speaking, it's actually been the *least* powerful system that has won out more often than not.
Not buying it. The only two generations I can think of where the least powerful system won out was the first generation where the Atari 2600 was demonstrably inferior to the ColecoVision and arguably inferior to the Intellivision and sold the most copies, and the latest generation where the inferior PS2 has sold the most. Other than that, the NES was more powerful than Sega's Master System and the Atari 7800, the SNES was more powerful than the Genesis, the PS1 was more powerful than the Nintendo 64.
The rest of us are talking about *list price*. The 360 sold for more than $400 in the first few months, and you can bet your ass the PS3 will sell for more than $600 in the first few months... that's the nature of the beast. It happened with the PS2 and original Xbox as well, remember? Or is your memory that short?
List price is the price that Microsoft/Sony says it should sell for. Stores can choose to sell it for whatever price they want in whatever bundles they want... that's how the free market works.
If you truly don't know the difference between list price and street price, you really shouldn't be commenting on this issue at all. Seriously. I don't expect Slashdot posters to have a PHD in economics or anything, but that's pretty damned basic.
Also, ignore Amazon. You can walk into a Costco or Best Buy right now this instant and get a 360 off-the-shelf for $400 no problem.
As I remarked to my wife the other day while we were watching "Sci-Fi Channel", can we ever invent a robot that Hollywood doesn't depict as trying to kill us?
Yes. Both "Batteries Not Included" and "Short Circuit."
"Batteries Not Included" had the bonus that they were *alien* robots, and they still didn't try to kill us.
BS. Stop posting this old favorite to get the guaranteed up-mod. Halo and Halo 2 were rated M with much less violence and tamer content, and that's ignoring nudity entirely.
The ESRB just screwed it up on this game, and now they have a good excuse to fix their error without making themselves look like idiots. That's all there is to it.
If the MPAA had an "out" like this, they'd probably be overjoyed... how the hell does Passions of the Christ get an R? Criminy, that should have been a "nobody see this ever."
Yeah. Halo and Halo 2 both got M, and they're MUCH less violent than Oblivion is, even ignoring the nudity issue.
The only news here is that the ESRB screwed up big-time and were trying to come up with a way of fixing their mistake without looking like morons and then, hey look, this mod came around just in time.
Note that MacOS Classic used to do what you suggest (keep the file type/creator as meta-data in the "resource fork" of the file, so the user never had to care about it) and actually abandoned that great system for compatibility with the Windows and Unix worlds. Shame.
The other advantage is that it differentiated a jpeg created with Photoshop from one created with Kodak iPhoto (or whatever), and so when you double-clicked it, the user would get the program they last edited it in. In Windows/Unix/OS X-land, you always get the default editor.
The Spectrum doesn't keep its OS on disk, that's a completely unfair comparison. A better comparison would be waking your laptop from sleep mode, then your Spectrum would be booting from ROM and loading the program and your laptop would be booting from RAM and loading the program, and I can guarantee that the laptop would whoop up. And that's forgetting that the laptop does about 50,000 more things than the Spectrum... hell, your Spectrum doesn't even have enough CPU power to run a single low-speed USB port, and the laptop can do a dozen with no hit.
WTH? Did you think this comment out? Are you saying that somebody starting a publishing company right now would start with WIndows 2.0, then upgrade to Windows-For-Workgroups, then Win 95, then Win 98, skip 2000, then go to XP, then XP SP2. That's quite a task, considering any computer off-the-shelf right now comes with XP2 pre-installed.
So I guess if I were starting a publishing company from scratch with Linux, I should start with Redhat 1.0, right? Then not have drivers for my software, so upgrade to Redhat 2.0, then 3.0, then 4.0, etc until I reach whatever the current Fedora is, right?
BTW, bluescreen of death can be one of two things: 1) Faulty hardware. No amount of OS reinstalling will fix this. 2) Crappy third-party drivers. Ditto, if you continue using the hardware with the bad drivers.
If you're using XP on reliable hardware using Microsoft-approved drivers, it doesn't bluescreen.
Come on, people, if you're going to bash Windows, try using a little sense about it, huh?
That's fine and all, but there's NO excuse for it not being in OpenOffice's help file with a nice little explanation like the one you just typed. I'm sure in Planet Weebo, or wherever Sun designed OpenOffice to fit, nobody has ever heard of or used Word or WordPerfect, but here in Planet Earth, you can assume that if people are familiar with a word processor at all, they'll be familiar with Word or WordPerfect. Or even ClarisWorks/AppleWorks. Your documentation should reflect that.
Unfortunately, Firefox seems to be going downhill. Look at the preferences dialog in Firefox 1.0 compared to the one in Firefox 1.5. Does *any* OS (except Mac Classic v. 6.0, which Firefox isn't even ported to) use that icon->tab thing? It basically translates into a tabbed interface with tabs within tabs... they just make the outer set of tabs look like icons. Ugh... ugly.
Note to developers, Firefox or otherwise: Tabs-within-tabs is almost always a terrible idea. Whenever you consider doing something like this, look at Tools:Settings in Microsoft Word 2003 and talk yourself out of it.
Of course, in addition to that, Firefox is still quite bad on OS X, although it's pretty good on Windows and... well, Linux doesn't seem to have GUI guidelines, so I guess it's fine there. It doesn't support the OS X spellchecker yet, which is a 'must-have' feature if they want to pull users from Safari, and the web controls still look Unix-y instead of OS X-y.
What the hell would Illiad know about professional graphics software features? His comic looks like it's drawn in freakin' Paint using a malfunctioning 10-year-old tablet.
I'm sorry, if it was (say) VGCats, or Penny-Arcade, or some comic that actually had some quality artwork attached to it, I might be convinced.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying the government runs FedEx now?
Or, more likely, that you didn't read the article, didn't spend more than about 10 seconds thinking about the issue at hand, and just posted the first knee-jerk reaction you thought up... then all the Slashdot readers who did the same modded you to +5, even though your post isn't "insightful" in any way.
I think the CD drive gives the Playstation the edge. And you didn't count that at all. But maybe you're right... in any case, it's not nearly as clearcut as the original poster.
Are we to the point yet on Slashdot where people will stop bringing up Microsoft BOB as an example of Microsoft's being bad? That one always cracks me up...
Oh, a cheap *home* program produced for maybe a year in 1993 happened to be bad, that'll convince me not to run Windows XP! Good argument, sir!
What's funny is that normally, the Slashdot crowd thinks that Microsoft software is always terrible and buggy and insecure and generally is going to cause the downfall of society.
However, when it comes to file browsing, they seem to think that Windows 95 was the golden standard by which all spatial file browsers should be measured, and say things like, "well, it should be obvious that spatial browsing is stupid because Windows 95 was so bad." And it will never occur to them that maybe the reason spatial browsing sucked in Windows 95 was because Microsoft screwed it up, not because the concept is flawed!
Of course I know the true reason: They're not going to admit that they've never used an Amiga or Macintosh pre-OS X, but they haven't and so they've never seen a good implementation of spatial browsing before.
As an OS X user, I say bring back the Finder in Mac OS 9.2.2. It was better than the OS X Finder is now in almost every single way, and I was a dozen times more efficient with it.
You make it sound as if you can't run scripts with a GUI file manager. But, uh, you're wrong-- you can. Even Windows Explorer has VBScript, even though I hear it's pretty clunky. Apple's OS X has AppleScript which has a nice record-and-playback feature you can use if you're not entirely sure how to type the script in, and Nautilus has the scripting feature discussed in this article.
maybe Microsoft will rise to the challenge and beat the competition out by producing a superior product that is worth paying for even in a market that's been leveled by OpenDocument?
Well, more accessible = better, right? So it looks like Microsoft's already got a head start.
And you could have bought an Xbox 360 at list price on launch day. For instance, my local Fred Meyer here in western Washington got 34 360s to sell, and they didn't have any kind of bundle or pre-order requirement that the Gamestops and Best Buys of the world did. If you were in line there at midnight, you'd have bought a 360 at list on launch day. In fact, I missed one at a local Target by only 5 minutes... damn me and my sleeping through the alarm.
However, that doesn't mean that Xbox 360 you just bought at list is *worth* list. You could have turned around and sold it at $550 or more easily. Your PS2 wasn't worth list after you bought it, it was worth quite a bit more... I saw the lines to get them on the news.
And, of course, you're ignoring all of my other points to instead refute a mostly pointless example. My main point is the same whether or not the example applies.
Why don't you just not buy it if you don't like it instead of whining about it on Slashdot? And guess what, if a lot of people agree with you and also don't buy it, then it won't be successful and publishers will go back to the old model! Amazing!
Give them a chance? OpenOffice has been around for ages, and they haven't gotten around to accessibility yet? Criminy, if they haven't done it in the last 5 years, why should any disable person believe they would in the next six months?
It's not, but it's a real weakness of the open source community.
Of course anybody can build a word processor with excellent accessibility support, but, uh... nobody in the open source community *has* done it. And since accessibility isn't one of those "fun" tasks in programming, it's very likely that nobody ever will-- at least not until some major corporation sponsors it and takes the helm.
Quality is dropping, yet for some reason demand is still high. I don't know if this is just a normal perception as one gets in his mid 30s or if this is a real trend or not, but it seems to be a common consensus that quality is not there as it once was.
It's called "nostalgia." It's an enemy of rational thought, which explains why it's usually so prevalent in Slashdot threads dealing with music/movies/video games. How many people remember Aliens compared to the number of people who remember Solarbabies? They came out the same year.
The quality is the same as it's always been. Which means, 90% of it is crap.
Hm. I've never seen a process/application that the task manager can't kill. Can you give some more details about what's happening exactly and what you're doing about it?
I'm not going to just call BS on this, I think you actually have a problem with Windows, however I'm willing to bet that your problem is not Microsoft's error, but the third party developer's whose product crashed.
The OS *can* kill a userland program completely. I've had many weird and unusual crashes, both from stuff like nasty spyware, plain buggy apps (usually IBM or Siemens apps) and stuff I've written myself and screwed up with, and I've never failed to kill the program with the task manager.
Ok, but if we've established that a stable driver interface is good both for open source coders and for corporations looking into porting to Linux, uh, why *not* do it? Sounds like a win-win to me. And yet this bone-headed lack of a stable interface has persisted for years and years even after the problem has been made perfectly clear.
Saying they "must" do it is obviously wrong, but saying that not doing it is stupid is perfectly right, at least from my point of view.
historically speaking, it's actually been the *least* powerful system that has won out more often than not.
Not buying it. The only two generations I can think of where the least powerful system won out was the first generation where the Atari 2600 was demonstrably inferior to the ColecoVision and arguably inferior to the Intellivision and sold the most copies, and the latest generation where the inferior PS2 has sold the most. Other than that, the NES was more powerful than Sega's Master System and the Atari 7800, the SNES was more powerful than the Genesis, the PS1 was more powerful than the Nintendo 64.
FUD indeed.
The rest of us are talking about *list price*. The 360 sold for more than $400 in the first few months, and you can bet your ass the PS3 will sell for more than $600 in the first few months... that's the nature of the beast. It happened with the PS2 and original Xbox as well, remember? Or is your memory that short?
List price is the price that Microsoft/Sony says it should sell for. Stores can choose to sell it for whatever price they want in whatever bundles they want... that's how the free market works.
If you truly don't know the difference between list price and street price, you really shouldn't be commenting on this issue at all. Seriously. I don't expect Slashdot posters to have a PHD in economics or anything, but that's pretty damned basic.
Also, ignore Amazon. You can walk into a Costco or Best Buy right now this instant and get a 360 off-the-shelf for $400 no problem.
As I remarked to my wife the other day while we were watching "Sci-Fi Channel", can we ever invent a robot that Hollywood doesn't depict as trying to kill us?
Yes. Both "Batteries Not Included" and "Short Circuit."
"Batteries Not Included" had the bonus that they were *alien* robots, and they still didn't try to kill us.
BS. Stop posting this old favorite to get the guaranteed up-mod. Halo and Halo 2 were rated M with much less violence and tamer content, and that's ignoring nudity entirely.
The ESRB just screwed it up on this game, and now they have a good excuse to fix their error without making themselves look like idiots. That's all there is to it.
If the MPAA had an "out" like this, they'd probably be overjoyed... how the hell does Passions of the Christ get an R? Criminy, that should have been a "nobody see this ever."
Yeah. Halo and Halo 2 both got M, and they're MUCH less violent than Oblivion is, even ignoring the nudity issue.
The only news here is that the ESRB screwed up big-time and were trying to come up with a way of fixing their mistake without looking like morons and then, hey look, this mod came around just in time.
Apple tried that with "Simple Finder" mode in OS 8.5 and OS 9. I don't think anybody on earth turned it on.
Note that MacOS Classic used to do what you suggest (keep the file type/creator as meta-data in the "resource fork" of the file, so the user never had to care about it) and actually abandoned that great system for compatibility with the Windows and Unix worlds. Shame.
The other advantage is that it differentiated a jpeg created with Photoshop from one created with Kodak iPhoto (or whatever), and so when you double-clicked it, the user would get the program they last edited it in. In Windows/Unix/OS X-land, you always get the default editor.
The Spectrum doesn't keep its OS on disk, that's a completely unfair comparison. A better comparison would be waking your laptop from sleep mode, then your Spectrum would be booting from ROM and loading the program and your laptop would be booting from RAM and loading the program, and I can guarantee that the laptop would whoop up. And that's forgetting that the laptop does about 50,000 more things than the Spectrum... hell, your Spectrum doesn't even have enough CPU power to run a single low-speed USB port, and the laptop can do a dozen with no hit.
WTH? Did you think this comment out? Are you saying that somebody starting a publishing company right now would start with WIndows 2.0, then upgrade to Windows-For-Workgroups, then Win 95, then Win 98, skip 2000, then go to XP, then XP SP2. That's quite a task, considering any computer off-the-shelf right now comes with XP2 pre-installed.
So I guess if I were starting a publishing company from scratch with Linux, I should start with Redhat 1.0, right? Then not have drivers for my software, so upgrade to Redhat 2.0, then 3.0, then 4.0, etc until I reach whatever the current Fedora is, right?
BTW, bluescreen of death can be one of two things:
1) Faulty hardware. No amount of OS reinstalling will fix this.
2) Crappy third-party drivers. Ditto, if you continue using the hardware with the bad drivers.
If you're using XP on reliable hardware using Microsoft-approved drivers, it doesn't bluescreen.
Come on, people, if you're going to bash Windows, try using a little sense about it, huh?
That's fine and all, but there's NO excuse for it not being in OpenOffice's help file with a nice little explanation like the one you just typed. I'm sure in Planet Weebo, or wherever Sun designed OpenOffice to fit, nobody has ever heard of or used Word or WordPerfect, but here in Planet Earth, you can assume that if people are familiar with a word processor at all, they'll be familiar with Word or WordPerfect. Or even ClarisWorks/AppleWorks. Your documentation should reflect that.
Unfortunately, Firefox seems to be going downhill. Look at the preferences dialog in Firefox 1.0 compared to the one in Firefox 1.5. Does *any* OS (except Mac Classic v. 6.0, which Firefox isn't even ported to) use that icon->tab thing? It basically translates into a tabbed interface with tabs within tabs... they just make the outer set of tabs look like icons. Ugh... ugly.
... well, Linux doesn't seem to have GUI guidelines, so I guess it's fine there. It doesn't support the OS X spellchecker yet, which is a 'must-have' feature if they want to pull users from Safari, and the web controls still look Unix-y instead of OS X-y.
Note to developers, Firefox or otherwise: Tabs-within-tabs is almost always a terrible idea. Whenever you consider doing something like this, look at Tools:Settings in Microsoft Word 2003 and talk yourself out of it.
Of course, in addition to that, Firefox is still quite bad on OS X, although it's pretty good on Windows and
What the hell would Illiad know about professional graphics software features? His comic looks like it's drawn in freakin' Paint using a malfunctioning 10-year-old tablet.
I'm sorry, if it was (say) VGCats, or Penny-Arcade, or some comic that actually had some quality artwork attached to it, I might be convinced.