Real world, my ass. Yes, it takes applications time to load. Bring up a Microsoft Office product, and that load time is pretty long. But the interface comes up immediately (thanks, no doubt, to Microsoft's unique relationship with their OS).

My cell phone is an ancient, slow turd, but when I start it up, I can access the interface almost immediately, and the log on to the network is extremely fast. Only after that does it start doing things like preparing the indices of SMS and similar stuff.

"The cloud" may not be the answer in this case, but the problem is clear: there are two ways of loading a program. The easy way (for programmers) is to throw up a splash screen, load everything, and then give the user control (as in your Angry Birds example). The right way (for usability) is to get the interface up, and keep loading. It'll usually take the user a while to get "under speed" as well, so why not use that time to load up the bloat?
When someone in an office starts an application, that person wants to work on that application. Two minutes to load, every day, across a whole industry amount to more than enough billable hours to pay for optimization. Applying patches and updates at startup (or asking, "Do you want to start now, or wait 15 minutes while I patch in some completely unintelligible and probably irrelevant upgrade?") is also, in most cases, wrong. It's like telling someone at the McD's drive-thru: "Would you like to wait 15 minutes so we can deliver the same food in a bag that is 5% less likely to tear open?"

3. That's not relevant here, as the post by the Adobe employee was about load times, not EULAs, and it was not a post that portrayed Adobe positively. Besides, Adobe Flash's startup EULAs are worse.

4. If it's fast enough, you won't need a splash, or you won't care. MS Office has splash screens, but I only see them briefly. Photoshop, on the other hand, does nothing for about a minute, then writes over the middle of screen (might even steal the focus) a splash that lasts another minute. I am not impressed.

There's a lot of improvement that has to be done in interface terms, and saying "that's the way programs are" misses the point and affirms what need not be affirmed. Certainly, there are conceivable instances when long, bloated load times are required, but I suspect they're far fewer than the number of programs that are written for the benefit of programmers, and not for the users. Otherwise, why would my tools keep interrupting me?

They gave it a registry hive? I see they're porting all the best parts of Windows.

Microsoft has never been a "cool brand". The last time anyone got excited about Microsoft's entry into hardware was when they provided BASIC for the Amiga (and maybe the Atari ST). For most non-tech people, Windows on a phone evokes images of something complicated that you swear at, fear intrusions from, and get the nerd-in-law to fix. For tech people, it calls up a bloated mass of interruption and failure that grows at cancerous rates until planned obsolescence makes it unusable six months from now.

So WP could be the coolest, slickest thing on the planet, but the Microsoft AND Windows branding is just lethal. I mean, an outstanding Windows product has always been praised by "Well, it's not as bad as the last version", clear back to the birth of the brand thirty years ago.

I still use my 2007 N800.

My understanding is that the problem with measuring conductivity on materials heated in a diamond-anvil cell is that you have a central spot that is extremely hot, and then a steep temperature gradient to the rest of the material. Measuring conductivity on a diamond-anvil cell often results in simply measuring the circuit formed in these surrounding boundary areas. It's a pity people are still breaking diamonds with these things rather than thinking about the ramifications the test setup has for their measurements.

Here's the thing:
Mike posted it to his blog, as a professional with a large following. From previous experience (cf. Dickwolves), he knew what the reaction would be. Hell, he even ended his initial post with the guy's full contact details.

So he basically told the internet: "Here's this asshole, have at him," knowing full well that people would engage in illegal harassment of Mr. Christoforo. And those are details you could probably convince a jury in a tort trial of.

If Mr. Christoforo weren't such an idiot, he'd have lawyers in contact with PA, working out a settlement. The Avenger folks should be working something out too, preferably (for both parties) on friendly terms.

Yes, big douchebag Mr. Christoforo, but what Mike did doesn't strike me as blameless, ethical, or even legal.

If I remember the story correctly, the ""cargo cult" part of formula corrected a problem that hadn't existed since the war, and its purpose had escaped institutional memory. Then a transcription error of the formula made that part ridiculously high, and an innocuous change somewhere else caused an interaction problem.

So, yeah, I used the term "cargo cult". Nobody new what it was, or why it was breaking.

But of course, It's been fifteen years since I read the story.

Primo Levi, "Chrome" in The Periodical Table describes a similar problem with a paint formula at his factory in the 1950s. Evidently, during the war, they had a QC problem, included some chemical to correct for that, and the formula became a cargo cult, long after anyone knew what it was for. Someone changes some other factor, and their batch of paint gets the consistency of liver. So our hero had to reverse-engineer the trade secrets of a previous generation, back when he was working in the lab at Auschwitz.

Human beings are social animals. It's natural for us to wish the best for our fellow beings. So, yes, I am not the target demographic for about anything, but that doesn't mean I don't give a damn about the well-being of those who are the target demographic. On the obverse, there's nothing less human than only caring about the target demographic. That's what companies do: Insurers target the rich and healthy, Pharmaceutical companies target the rich and chronically ill (as opposed to terminal), and Apple targets rich corporate tools who have ceased to care about anything but target demographics.

At 500 mph, the wing is going to be generating a lot of lift, and a huge pitching-up motion. The elevator trim will be pretty severely nose-down. If that tab cuts loose, the aircraft will pitch hard up, probably inducing loss of consciousness in the pilot; that might also explain the tail gear.

I'm sure he would have done everything possible to avoid hitting anyone on the ground, but he probably didn't have much say in the matter.

Someone else linked to an account of another case where a racing P-51 lost a left trim tab. In that case, the pilot came to at 7000 feet in a climb.

"Scientific" quantitative analysis is the Gay Cowboy Movie of historiography. One turns up every decade or so, it's inevitably hailed as a revolutionary breakthrough, then promptly forgotten.
The problem with historical data is that it's so far from random that the more sophisticated the analysis you subject them to, the more you end up analyzing artifacts of the selection criteria. This has been shown with every generation of quantitative data to be subjected to historical analysis. For example, let's say Google is teaming up with Harvard to digitize their library. Their library would have been built for the University's mission, which changed over the years. A Protestant Seminary will have less use for collection of nineteenth-century Catholic publications than somewhere else, and even less for those from the Jewish community. So a study of nineteenth-century book terms will reflect the world as skewed towards 19th-century WASPs. The democratization of universities after the 1950s changed considerably which books were bought and when. So, for example, the "finding" that 19th-century new tech terms took a century to enter common usage, while 20th-c tech came in 50 could also be explained by a selection bias: 19th-century universities (and then their libraries) were very different communities, with a much more conservative selection, then 20th-century ones. Or the problem could be the advent of cheap print; or even that the texts where such terms are commonly used were undated.

For that matter, selecting on a date (as they do for '1951') is following the selection bias: only dated texts are included, and, for copyrighted works, Google always includes the front matter.

It's a technique that has its utility, but the more you want to use the data to say something meaningful, the more the selection problems creep in, and the more useless it becomes.

It's management thinking that customers are big fat whales in need of opportunities to depense large and small sums of cash.

I thought it was "Do it right or wrong, but do it on time."

Any idea how much more Hydroelectric can Switzerland squeeze out?

Yeah, my PC speakers cost about $150. I listen to music on a set of Grado SR-80 cans that list at $90. If I need to travel, well I got as a gift a pair of Sennheiser PX-360s that run to slightly over a hundred bucks. I am an audiophile in the sense that I enjoy listening to music, and I listen to it on equipment that reproduces it to higher fidelity than the cheapest consumer stuff out there. Sure, I could spend more money, and get myself a proper DAC, a vacuum-tube headphone amp, some high-end headphones, and a totally sweet home theater, but as much as I would appreciate the results, that's not really an expense I can justify.

I can justify buying what I have, and most sensible audiophiles will see the logic in my choices.

Yet all my equipment together doesn't cost as much as a single "moderately-priced" Bose solution that puts out a horribly distorted sound. The reason why Bose's products are so successful is also why people who care about music dislike them: You hear the speakers, not the music. By punching up the bass and the highs, people hear things they don't normally hear in music, but what they hear sounds nothing like the original.

It's the audio equivalent of ketchup, only if ketchup cost four times the price of a decent cut of meat. Bose isn't the opposite of "Gold-plated Ethernet-cable Audiophiles", it's the gateway to that brand of Audiophilia. MIT's gonna make a lot of cash out of Amar's company. Good for them.

well, yeah, stupid teleological argument, but you ain't gonna but this one on the medieval universities. Arguing over the possible number of angels on the head of a pin is what academics should be doing. He's saying they should be busy figuring out how to apply the motion of the epicycle sphere of Mars to improving crop yields..