The question is how often you want to resend the packets. What happens if the connection is genuinely down for, say, five minutes? Do you keep resending packets until eternity? Do you just have the user redo everything up until the purchase screen? Depending on the intended target audience the latter might not be an acceptable answer.

For example, at my company we do most of our business with tech-unsavvy businesses. The people who make the buying decisions are usually impatient and capricious and very averse to entering their data more than once. Also, any problem is attributed to us, even if it's a network outage on their end. If their connection to us goes down they expect to continue the ordering process exactly where they left off or they will reconsider the entire deal. Some will take weeks to make room in their apparently ultra-busy schedules to go through our (phone-assisted) ordering process once. If there is a problem that they can't trivially recover from that means waiting for a few weeks more. "Just have them redo the last few steps" comes with an unspoken "and lose a few sales".

The problem is that you're facing (potential) customers. Just like in every customer-facing situation that means that you end up dealing with a number of people who don't want to bother actually having realistic expectations. Depending on your business, these potential customers may be expendable or they may be critical to your success. If the latter applies then you have to bend over backwards to allow behavior that we consider wrong but they consider logical.

You raise a good point. However, I would still silently disable the button for a short amout of time just to catch accidental double-clicks. A second should suffice.

The reason is that they are law enforcement agencies and you can't prove that you aren't a terrorist. Since anti-terror efforts supersede conventional law up to and including the constitution that means they have a perfect argument and you are suspicious for disagreeing.

Then again, the States are slipping. Germany does have a number of restrictions (mostly revolving around Nazis or causing violence) but we're utterly bewildered by the American concept of "free speech zones", which apparently allow for the selective exclusion of arbitrary viewpoints from an event. (That's probably not what the law says they do but that's how they seem to be used.)

Come on, guys! We're supposed to defend human dignity to the point of restricting freedom of speech and you're supposed to defend freedom of speech to the point of restricting human dignity. What's next, America requiring all blood in video games to be green? That's our wart, get your own!

You are assuming that identifying with a word means that one bases an overwhelming part of their personal identity on the things associated with that word. That's not neccessarily true.

I'm a slashdotter. I don't spend that much time on /., usually just browsing the RSS feed and its featured comments. That doesn't change the fact that I consider myself part of the local community.
I'm a web developer. The fact that I write programs in a shitty language for a living and read CSS Tricks doesn't mean I base my entire life around it; it just happens to be my job and I consider myself to be among that group.

Obviously, being part of a fandom to the point of adopting its moniker means that you spend some of your time and/or money on it. But that doesn't mean it has to be more than a regular hobby. I do consider myself a brony but currently the hobby takes up less of my spare time than re-watching ST:DS9 while I commute. (No, I don't consider myself a trekkie. It's just what I happen to watch at the time.)

I do have a literal handful of pony figurines but that's because the show has a clear relationship between merchandise bought and episodes produced: We buy more crap, they make more episodes. As for me, I only buy crap that's on-model. My love for the show doesn't go far enough to want those hideous brushable things on my shelves.

In the grand scheme of things being a brony doesn't consume that large a part of my life; it's just yet another hobby. Still, I am sufficiently involved in the community to understand its memes and customs and I think that does make me a brony. Not an extreme one but still I am a brony, just like I'm a slashdotter, a web developer, a gamer, a pen-and-paper roleplayer, a writer, a unix user and more things that don't dominate my life but influence me as a person in some way or another.


Note that this doesn't change the fact that there are hardcore bronies who fill every nook and cranny of their homes with pony memorabilia, endlessly proselytize and can't function without watching at least one episode per day. I'm just saying that you can self-identify as being a part of the brony community without being like that.

Obviously there are. Any large enough fanbase will generate porn and the FiM fanbase is large enough that its porn has its own little memes. That's fairly natural; I can remember shows as far back as ST:TOS showing well-understood examples of this. I'd say it doesn't say much about the bronies in particular but something about humans in general.

To always use 64-bit numbers, duh.

Sounds like a typical Shadowrun plot.

Step 1: The decker enters the building network and switches all coffee makers to decaf.
Step 2: Everyone in the building falls asleep. The security deckers are the first to go.
Step 3: The team enters unimpeded. No alarms are tripped and the run is going smoothly.
Step 4: The street sam decides that now would be a good time to settle an old score using an unsilenced SMG loaded with EX-explosive ammo. In front of a street-level window facing a busy street.
Step 5: One fight with Lone Star later the GM laments that the C.L.U.E. Foundation has shut its doors.

Well, Windows Me had some good ideas but the 9x line was completely outdated at that point. People might have actually sucked it up but the contemporary Windows 2000 was so utterly superior that people noticed how horrible 9x was. In fact, 2k came out half a year earlier so poeple had already tried and liked the NT kernel before the Me brob was dropped. I switched to 2k (with a pure gaming PC) in mid-2000 and never looked back as 2k was just that good. In fact the incredibly long-lived XP started out as 2k in worse, only really hitting its stride with SP1.

Vista brought a lot of new things that didn't quite work right initally (and some, like UAC, still don't work right in Win 7). And it had compatibility issues that in this day and age just shouldn't happen anymore. And it was horribly late, which made the compatibility issues even more unforgivable. It probably worked better with enough patches but, well, by that time Windows 7 was out and nobody bothered with Vista anymore.

As for Office: People use Office 2007? To this date I know nobody who actually uses the Office XML formats; if you exchange documents with someone they always come in Office 97 .doc/.xls files. Either OOXML isn't Office 2007/2010's default format or people are dutifully selecting the older format whenever they save or people simply aren't using Office versions that default to OOXML. Either way it's safe to assume that Office 2007/2010 isn't dominating the market.

As for Windows 8: They decided not to differentiate between tablet users and desktop users. This has lead to amusing/sad things like marketing the fact that you can have two applications on the screen at the same time as a killer feature. Desktop users had multiple windows since Windows 1.0 and as a desktop feature that's so bad that I felt compelled to use the term "comically unimpressive" for the first time in my life. In addition to the unwanted new user interface comes the fact that Windows 7 is turning out like Windows XP - it's "good enough" for now and most people are seeing Windows 8 like they saw HD-DVD/BluRay at launch: An unneccessarily expensive minor upgrade without any compelling features*.


* Yes, I know that a lot of people will disagree with me but hey, many people only bought HDTVs because you don't get any other TV sets these days. DVDs are still going well. In fact I still buy them despite the fact that I appreciate high-resolution shows and movies. For most people HD video is less impressive than it's expensive even these days.

That was not the central message of Voyager. The central message of Voyager was that a cup of coffee is worth approximately 150 human lives. At least if your name is Kathryn Janeway.

The main issue is the price. If you tinker enough that shelling out a thousand bucks or more just for the ability to build custom parts then you're a) fairly well-off and b) using a lot of custom parts. Most casual tinkerers can't justify that kind of budget so at most they might pool their money and get one communal 3D printer. But even then they might not need custom 3D parts often enough to make the investment worthwhile - often enough off-the-shelf parts also work, just not quite as well. And they'd probably still be cehaper even if you factor out the cost of the printer.

If high-resolution 3D printers with a reasonable printing area came down to 100-200 bucks you might see a lot of casual tinkerers use them. But at the current princes it simply doesn't make sense to buy one as opposed to just doing without custom parts or getting the parts done as a one-off in a machine shop if you really do need them.

I think Metro falls into the same category as Ion or Ratpoison: Some people are extremely efficient using it but others are completely baffled by how it's supposed to work... and the latter are in the majority. Microsoft added some rather unusual gestures to the whole thing (plus gesture-centric UIs are uncommon in desktop-land), which doesn't help. It's certainly a usable and intuitive UI - on a tablet. On the desktop it's so different that most people have to relearn everything, yet Microsoft didn't make it easy enough for them to do so. It's no wonder that Metro flopped.

A more Unity-like approach might have worked better - or even a Metro that seamlessly coexists with the desktop and retains a menu-structured launcher, with a permanently-open desktop tile as the centerpiece with the ability to open additional tiles as needed. A bit like running a traditional desktop environment inside a tiling one. You could add multiple pages (accessible through, say, Windows-1 through Windows-0), each of which can contain an arbitrary constellation of tiles. Need another desktop? Open another desktop tile. Need a desktop and a stock ticker app? Open two tiles and do it. Want to go back to your mail client? You have it open in a desktop tile on page 4. Basically (to use OS X parlance) it's as if Spaces and Dashboard had had offspring. Allow users to tell certain programs to always open on a certain page and you've got a reasonably familiar, reasonably discoverable yet immensely customizable user interface that (sans desktop tiles and using gestures to switch between pages) translates well to tablets.

Or, you know, just take a capable tablet interface that will confuse most desktop users and a capable desktop interface that will frustrate most tablet users and bundle them together.

Well, initially XP was 2k in bad. They fixed that with XP SP1 and by SP2 it had enough staying power to compete with the next two Windows versions.

Then we got Vista, which was bloated as all hell, had more compatibility issues than early XP and gave us joys like UAC, which is kind of like gksudo or OS X's admin password dialog except that it takes ten seconds to load, tosses up a modal dialog that blocks the entire desktop and occasionally makes the modal dialog appear to be on top of the other windows while actually placing it behind them, leaving it (and the application that triggered UAC) unclickable until you bring it to the front. On the plus side, ctrl-alt-del became much more powerful, capable of breaking out of misbehaving programs that would've prevented access to the Task Manager in earlier versions of Windows.

Windows 7 is essentially what Vista should have been at launch. Many of the worse kinks have been ironed out and you can now change the network setup (such as reordering NICs) without rebooting, which is very welcome. Few complaints here except for UAC still taking ages to load. Privilege escalation is not a trivial task in Windows-land, it seems. It's certainly not as easy as "verify user password, confirm that user is in appropriate group, become root". Oh, and Windows 7 revamped the VFS, making it a bit convoluted. Still, it's a fairly solid release.

Windows 8 assumes that everyone uses a desktop with a touchscreen monitor. If you don't use that configuration parts of the UI won't work particularly well. The Metro UI (or however they call it this week) is built around touchscreen gestures while the desktop mode still assumes that you have a mouse and can perform precise clicks with at least three buttons. Oh, and no start menu; you're expected to use Metro instead. There's a reason why they're talking about adding a start menu and a "boot to desktop" option to the next Windows.


As you can see, Windows release quality got really spotty after Windows XP. It's no longer a question of how big an improvement the next version is; these days you consider how long you can possibly last with your current setup because half of the new versions are severely unappealing. Of course it doesn't help that Windows seems to have run out of killer features as far as the ohme user is concerned. Vista gave us window tiling, 7 gave us "now with 80% less horribleness" and 8 gave us a user interface that virtually no computer on Earth is really compatible with... and the killer feature for 9 seems to be "we removed Windows 8's killer feature".
Sure, there's new DirectX versions but many people don't even care to do the research neccessary to notice the difference between DX 10, 11 and 11.1.

Well, between Episode One, Star Trek: Enterprise and Stargate Universe we've seen three big sci-fi franchises turn to crap without recovering. We could've had a new one but of course they had to axe Firefly after the first season. I don't expect any new quality programming anytime soon.

Well, perhaps whatever they do with Trek next will be entertaining... as long as J.J. Abrams isn't involved; everything that man touches turns into non-stop lens flares. Seriously; Star Trek was as bad with pointless lens flares as Battlefield Earth was with Dutch angles. And Battlefield was actually less ugly than Trek.


STAR WARS
Episode PSD: Attack of the Lens Flares

With the DEATH STAR destroyed again,
peace has come over the galaxy. However,
a new threat has arisen: LENS FLARES
have begun popping up everywhere, almost
as if THE DIRECTOR had been playing
around with PHOTOSHOP during
POST-PROCESSING. With no one able to
see anything, the galaxy is descending into
chaos...

*the camera pans down to briefly reveal a planet just before then entire screen is covered in garish lens flares for the next ninety minutes*

Oh yes. As a web developer in a small company I occasionally end up doing tech support. It's really fun to troubleshoot a customer's Outlook troubles over the phone while simultaneously googling for information and making wild guesses about where they hid the account settings this time. Then you meet a customer with an ancient copy of Thunderbird and you immediately know where to navigate and what to check.

I will give credit where it's due. Microsoft are very good at IDEs and they make decent peripherals. The NT kernel is respectable, as are NTFS and CIFS. But one thing Microsoft really can't do is make a reasonable user interface or at least stick with what works - cf. their bizarre decision to make the file menu an unlabeled sphere in some variants of the ribbon UI.