Comment Mod this up (Score 1) 217
As above.
As above.
Just to point something out.
In the case of climate change, the debate gets tinged with a touch of disdain for wet science.
Nerds like absolutes. They like believing they know better. The like to think that the wet sciences are lesser than engineering and physics.
And climate change, for better or worse, has this
Let's face it. There's almost no point arguing climate change with some people; too many underlying beliefs would have to change.
We need to incentivise actions, corporate and personal, that improve our planet's chances of surviving our collective stupidity so that we can drag the deniers along for the ride. Hectoring simply isn't working now, and is unlikely to work in the future.
FWIW, I'd be wary of calling a beer treated with Clarity Ferm "gluten free" unless you did a proper analysis on each and every batch of beer. When you're dealing with allergens that can cause anaphylaxis, I'd be terrified of making someone ill. "Reduced gluten" is probably a better phrase.
What I'd like to know is
Most of the coverage of this story is reporting the "Happy happy joy joy!" aspects (cure heart disease! reverse aging! improving mental agility!), but a few outlets are reporting that there's also a risk for cancer.
Background from a UI designer at MS: http://www.reddit.com/r/micros...
Metro was designed for, paraphrasing pwnies, your mom so she could watch her favourite cat videos without getting bogged down in the OS. So
But what kills me is how hard it is to just use one UI or the other, even after significant tweaking. Win8, as far as I can tell, always defaults to Metro apps, even if launched from the desktop and there's an equivalent (or more powerful) desktop app available. Many settings are only found in Metro. File associations, even for file types that casual users are unlikely to use, like
The flip side, of course, is that if you want to do something other than media consumption you get bumped into the desktop. Somehow, I think it's telling that Office 365 is not a suite of applications for Metro. And that most of the apps in the store seem more
For my part, I got so pissed off at Metro on my desktop PC that I installed Start8 and another app that opens Metro apps in a desktop window so that, if Windows decides once again that a 22", full screen, four function calculator is really what I need when I'm trying to double-check some math for an email
And, hell, if I want to kick back and surf or play a stupid game, I'm going to grab a tablet or smart phone
And
On the other hand, I do like the idea of MS finally adding some new functionality to the desktop. Even if I'm unlikely to give 2 shits about live tiles in the start menu (seriously, given how much MS knows about me from 20+ years' worth of product registrations, configurations, IP addresses, and that MSDN sub a few years ago, you'd figure they could get at least the country right for the default locations for the weather, sports and news apps -- I deleted them because I couldn't be bothered to configure them).
And yet
It's kinda' weird, ya' know?
Here's some insight into why Metro is the way it is and why it's the default UI for Win8: http://www.reddit.com/r/techno...
Metro exists, specifically, for the segment of the population that (mostly) single tasks and doesn't want to get bogged down in the nitty gritty of the OS. They don't want multiple desktops or have 10+ windows open; they want to, in the words of pwnies, do nothing more intensive than watch cat videos. It appears to be a deliberate move by MS that most of the included apps suck for "power users" (Mail and Calendar get singled out) and that Office 365 is meant to run in Classic. And, apparently, it's why Metro is Win8's default UI; so-called power users can figure out how to nuke Metro and work more or less solely in classic desktop. Casual users would, apparently, never find Metro if the default UI were classic -- or, at least, they'd never use it since it's unfamiliar. And familiarity's a big deal when it comes to UI design. Think about it for a moment; it's apparently straight-forward make an app that returns the classic UI -- MS must have made it very, very easy to do so from the OS-side of things.
That's why, in large, part MS has been flouting colours! and customization! and Bing integration! in its marketing -- they're trying very, very hard to get media consumers to use Metro and like it.
But there are some very large problems to this. Metro is designed around touch and keyboard shortcuts -- not mouse. If you're using a touch screen, Metro's not bad once you grok that swiping from the edges of the screen makes stuff happen. But, damn, good luck figuring out hot corners with a mouse (switching between open apps is not, in particular, very intuitive). Or alt-tabbing. Or "type to find program" (in Win7 / classic, Windows key then type). But
The funny thing is that, by so forcefully going after casual users MS has incurred the wrath of people who need their PCs for work. And those people? If they have to set up a new PC for granny, the first thing they do is install something like Start8. For whatever reason, MS's marketing people have focused on the improved casual user experience for Metro and made it seem like classic is being phased out (apparently, it isn't). And
MS has become a deeply weird and schizo company. They're supporting a handful of separate UIs (Office: ribbons; Win8: classic; Metro). It's been marketing its new OS as being a superior choice for media consumers who have either already switched to smart phones and tablets or, simply, don't want to change from something that works well enough. The only possible way Metro on a desktop makes any sense is if MS is using it as a Trojan horse to get people to consider using Windows phones and tablets. But, damn. That's kinda' crazy.
You can drive the price down with bulk buying and so forth, but you're paying a rather hefty premium for mediocre coffee that would otherwise retail for about $10 a pound.
I worked it out one time and our fancy-schmancy Jura that does about 4 cups a day has proven to be more economical than a Keurig, mostly because it can make a good cuppa out of $10 beans. Yeah, it took nearly two years, but we've had it for four. At this point, we can splurge on Blue Mountain beans and still be ahead of where we'd be with a Keurig or Nespresso.
For those who don't know, all in one espresso machines operate on the basic principal of "water container on one side of the machine, beans on the other, finished coffee out the middle, grounds dumped into a small container that takes about a minute to clean out once a week." In general, they make very good, but not mind-blowingly great, coffee. But
And yes, I know, a French press would be OMG cheaper and (possibly) make better coffee. But after 15 years of arguing over who makes the coffee, my wife and I figured that a mostly automated coffee maker would be cheaper counseling.
Early adopter here -- it came pre-installed on a notebook.
What I eventually realized is that MS is now supporting 3 separate UIs, all with quirks, and all with separate design philosophies.
The classic, window-based UI has been evolving over 15 years; it's straight-foraward, if cluttered. Start button; apps binned to the task bar; random crap on desktop; text-based menu bars; high contrast, colourful design elements.
Ribbons in Office. Similar to windows, but it replaced the menu bars with ribbons. More customizable than the menu bars, but my old eyes find the muted colours, grays on white, and small icons troublesome, especially in Outlook. Runs exclusively in classic UI.
Metro -- which actually comes in two flavours, touch and keyboard / mouse. The touch interface isn't bad, although I personally find it a pain to sort through open apps. But
But Metro with a keyboard and mouse? I know it can work
And, finally, my grousing aside, but if MS had released Win 8 with useful, clever, and outlandishly cool apps, we might not really be having this conversation. Instead, MS has my geographical location (Toronto, ON), but the installed apps gave me news, sports and weather for NYC (seriously, they got the country wrong?). Again, it's small -- but it would've been a nice touch if the apps tried to have a local flare because, frankly, I don't care about NYC. At all. The other apps? Music is interesting, especially since it includes free streaming (something of a big deal in Canada), but the interface blends local libraries with cloud streaming not-quite-seamlessly. The other apps, like mail and calendar, suck.
Win 8 is a deeply weird beast. It's fast. It's stable. And I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, especially if you're wedded to Office. The weird blending of multiple UIs is, plain and simple, goofy.
Looking back at my comments. What I think I would like is a small, tablet-sized second monitor for running Metro, connected to my desktop. I'd have whatever I'm doing on the classic desktop open, but could easily glance over and see Twitter updates, incoming e-mails -- a lot of things I use my iPhone for. Weird thing, that.
What's funny is how myopic many
What makes me shake my head is how lacking in empathy most of these posters are towards people who work in non-geek fields. The same suite of laws that protect software licenses like BSD and the GPL also protects artists. While it's OK for a software developer to put strings on software and how it gets distributed, it's bad for a musician to put similar strings on his work?
At the end of the day, Lowery's argument boils down to, "I did the work of making music. I assumed the risk (financial liability) of producing this piece of music, I paid for the engineer, I paid the factory to manufacture the CD. Why shouldn't I get paid for work I did? Why can't I control how it gets disseminated? How is it that there are cases where download sites make money from making my work available, without my permission?" And have a look at the last
Why is it OK to tell a software developer to lawyer up if he's getting screwed, but not OK to give the musician the same piece of advice? Again, it really is all about people getting paid for work they did AND having control over distribution.
It is, IME, fair game to argue over the details (like how long copyright should be), but it should be a non-starter to argue that someone should have no control over, and chance to benefit from, their own work once it's in the wild.
FWIW, I think software developers are AWFULLY lucky that they have the choice to squirrel away their source code and only distribute binaries. That puts an absolute limit on how widely and easily bits of code can be moved.
This is what I've found:
I love reading novels on my kindle. I love the sharpness of the next. I love the ability to resize text. I love having a library in my hands. I love that my wife and I don't have to buy new bookshelves or drop off a bunch of books at Goodwill every six months.
I feel cheated when I come across an e-book that obviously hasn't been reviewed by a human familiar with English -- even mainstream(ish) books like Pratchett's latest, Snuff, had to be revised shortly after release due to some appallingly bad errors. I've been an avid reader for decades; I've seen typos and spelin' mistakes aplenty, but I've never had to slog through entire pages of gobbledygook with dead tree editions of works.
Reference books on my Kindle can be downright painful -- tables are usually inserted as lo-fi images that are often all-but-unreadable. Worse, if the corresponding page in the dead tree edition includes images and tables, on the same page, all hell breaks loose. Things get
But the real killer for me is indexes. I love them. The indexes on my reference books are usually rather dog-eared. I find them indispensable. But only once have I found an e-book, Bloodlands, that included a functional index (i.e., you select a term, you're taking to the correct "page"). Every other reference book I've purchased has an index that is simply a list of words. I freaking HATE that. That is bad design in that a feature you expect to be functional does NOTHING. We're talking Web 1.0 functionality here, people.
But
We all just have to, you know, get along.
Here's what I like about MS's AV software: it catches, more or less what other AV software does; it does so without being obtrusive; it's not a resource pig; it doesn't pester me for more $$$ to renew my subscription; it doesn't come up with BS pitches about my PC possibly being infected -- please buy some more software from us.
Norton? Yowza! It's tougher to get rid of than some rootkits, requiring (last time I did it) multiple reboots, multiple programs to uninstall, some hand-deleting, AND a third-party registry cleaner (which still missed a few entries). And the nagging and scare tactics? Pass.
But maybe, just maybe, third party vendors (*cough*Norton*cough*McAfee*) will pick up their game and stop expecting people to shell out $100 / year for bloated crapware.
But, seriously.
You want the premium features (keyboard, touch) on the cheapest models? Just cough up the extra $60 for the features you want and get over it. There's a reason Amazon has a range of products, from low end to high.
As for me? I'm getting my kids the cheap Kindles for Christmas. Cheap enough that I won't be crushed if they get stolen at school. And the lack of a keyboard? Just fine with me.
FWIW, I have a Kindle 3g -- I use the keyboard
I tried to love my Kindle for reference books, but
First: tables are wonky -- they tend to be images that render poorly on e-ink (FWIW, they also render poorly on a PC and iPhone, so I believe it's at least in part a problem with using heavily compressed images).
Second: the indexes in many reference books are non-functional -- the items are not clickable and, worse, don't have location or page number references.
Third: it's tough to flip back and forth in different sections (colour-coded tape flags are still miles better than Kindle's marks).
Fourth: annotating text sucks on a Kindle compared to paper and pen.
What is my Kindle good for? Novels (I actually prefer reading e-ink over dead tree). Connecting to 3g networks (for free) in foreign countries so I can check my e-mail before I buy a SIM for my phone. I can search references throughout my entire library at once. In a pinch, I
But for reference materials?
Pass
Except that all of Canada's cellphone providers suck.
Either their coverage sucks or their prices suck.
I was spoiled on a recent trip to Europe. With an unlocked iPhone: 5 pounds for a micro-sim in England. I loaded it with 40 pounds' worth of time for a 2ish week stay in Europe (UK + France)
Bonus: Vodaphone (UK provider) sent a text when I started to use data in France, informed me of the price, and sent a further text when I approached my data limit for the day (IME, a reasonably fair 2 pounds / 25 megs).
It was completely civilized.
In Canada?
Ugh. Not cvilized at all.
But, seriously, diesels work on compression alone and don't need spark plugs.
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.