Specific examples are hard to come by, but I've noticed the general trend that differentiates the "good" from the "barely usable"..

* Scalability. For example, a good interface will pop up a "search" box for finding a security group in Active Directory. A bad one will let me chose security groups from a list or a drop-down. Both look equally good when the developer is working in a test environment. The latter will crash when used in a million-object directory. Similarly, check out the DNS management dialog box in Windows, or some Oracle tools. Both will show you "all" objects up to some limit (e.g.: 5000), but then provide a filter option to allow you to narrow down the "search" to prevent the GUI from melting if you look at a database with 500K tables. Yes. It happens. A lot. More than you think. Really.
* Annotations. It's 2014 for Christ's sake! There is absolutely no reason not to include a general "note" or at least a "description" field with every. Single. Thing. Seriously. All of them. I'm not kidding. Look at VMware's vSphere interface as an example of this done reasonably well but not perfectly. They at least allow custom columns so you can tag things systematically. Better yet, newer versions of Microsoft's Group Policy allow annotations on every single setting.
* Versioning. For example, Citrix NetScaler keeps the last 'n' versions of its configuration automatically (5 by default I think). Why the fuck Cisco can't do the same with their 1KB but omfg-they're-ultra-critical-to-the-whole-goddamned-enterprise config files I just don't understand. Maybe they're trying to save precious bytes...
* Policy. Good examples are Cisco UCS Blades and, of course, Active Directory Group Policy. Settings should trickle down through hierarchies. I should never have to set the exact same setting five hundred times. Settings should set-and-unset themselves automatically based on the scenario, e.g.: replacing a blade should not involve having to reconfigure its BIOS settings by hand. A typical bad example is 99% of Linux, where every setting has to be either manually set or set via a script. A script is still manual, just faster. No! Smack yourself in the face! A script is NOT a replacement for a policy engine. Don't breathe in, ready to go on a rant about how great Linux is, and how easy it is to manage, because it's really not. Scripts are a "write only" management tool that result in impossible-to-reverse-engineer solutions that can only be replaced wholesale years down the track.
* Help. I'm not really a storage engineer, I just... dabble. However, I've set up labs with IBM and EMC kit, no problem. The one time I got asked to create a simple logical volume on a Hitachi array, I walked away backwards and refused to touch the stupid thing. It seriously had 10 pages of settings along the lines of "L3 Mode: 5/7?" I mean... wat? So sure, I press F1 for help like a naive fool. It helpfully informed me that the setting configures L3 Mode to either mode 5 or mode 7. I can press "OK" to accept the mode setting, or "Cancel" otherwise. I was enlightened. Meanwhile, the same dialog box on the EMC array basically asks for where, what size, and what RAID level.
* Behind the Scenes. Some GUIs have 1:1 mappings with some sort of underlying command-line or protocol. Consoles based on PowerShell such as most Microsoft and Citrix products come to mind, most Linux/Unix GUIs, and Database admin tools. The better ones will have a "tab" or a pop-up somewhere which shows the "script equivalent" of whatever you're doing in the GUI. This is very useful, particularly for beginners, and we're all beginners with every product at least once.

Really, GUI design is -- or should be -- a science, and not a trivial one! It integrates serious engineering constraints, business restrictions, project management priorities along with the fuzzy complexities of both individual psychology and the complex dynamics of interacting groups of people. It's done woefully wrong even by the largest corporations. In practice, it boils down to the developers not having administrator experience, or a realistic test environment. The best GUIs I've seen were usually those were the developers were working against production systems at scale. That's both rare, and by no means a guarantee...

It's also great if you have a mother-in-law on the other side of the world. The cost per-minute for calls from phone to phone (she just cannot seem to figure out Skype) is as good as any provider.

My wife talks for an hour and it's just a few cents. Or at least that's how it seems. Plus, we can do all kinds of other tricks with voice to text and other things.

I was about to get really pissed if this story was about Google pulling the Voice service.

MP3 player manufacturers used 'You Suffer' by Napalm Death encoded at 32kbps as their reference MP3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y...

In 1993 I'd just bought a Thinkpad 700 laptop with a 80 MB hard drive. The company I was working at sent me to help model test a new ship at the DTRC (the biggest US Navy tow tank). About my third day there, there were a bunch of washing machine-sized plastic and metal boxes piled up haphazardly near the entrance. I asked one of the DTRC employees who was helping us what they were.

"Hard drives."
Bemused, I asked what their capacity was.
"Oh, about 10 MB."
"Damn, how old are they?"
"1970s, maybe 1960s.
"So you guys just shoved them in the warehouse and are finally getting around to throwing them away now?"
"Oh no, we were still using them up until yesterday. The budget requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."

Still, it makes me wonder if modern hard drives could last ~20 years in a research/industrial environment.

That's a decade or two out of date. Maybe more. Here's this weekend's list of sex and fetish events in SF. There's a nostalgia tour for tourists of SF's sex history, and a screening of porn films from a Berlin festival. Yawn.

However, the idea that the WinRT / Modern App platform needs to go away in a future Windows version is also misguided. What you refer to as "Metro" fills a useful function that isn't otherwise served on Windows, which is enabling touch screen use, and it does a very nice job of that.

If that were all it did, I wouldn't have a problem with it. But the only way to sell a Metro app is through Microsoft's Store. And they take a 30% cut of anything sold in the store (introductory 20% deals notwithstanding).

Metro apps are Microsoft's attempt to convert the Windows software market into an iOS App Store-like walled garden, where Microsoft is the gatekeeper who collects a 30% toll on everything sold. As long as that remains true, it needs to go away.

And no Google's Play store is not the same. Google doesn't restrict app installation to the Play store. Toggle one setting ("allow installation from unknown sources") and you can install anything you want. You can install apps bought from other stores (Amazon being the most notable alternative). You can side-load apps via USB, microSD card, or cloud storage. Heck, you can download an app over any website.

Imagine if you wanted an Apple computer you had to buy it through Best Buy or Radio Shack, and dealing with their personnel. The companies that do business this way are maddening.

Questionable analogy. Apple's laptops are actually made by Quanta. Almost no laptop manufacturer actually makes their own laptops. The vast majority are made by a handful of Taiwanese ODMs (original design manufacturers) who do both the design and manufacturing (as opposed to an OEM who only does the manufacturing). In essence, Apple, HP, Dell, etc are the "dealers" who handle sales and aftermarket service. Quanta, Wistron, Compal, Pegatron are the "automakers."

The fact is that technology may not have driven the purchase price of a car down that much, but it HAS driven the cost of transportation down significantly, while at the same time dramatically increasing reliability, comfort, and safety

I don't think this is supportable by evidence. Cars, including total cost of ownership and operation, are more expensive than ever. Mostly because people are willing (and able) to spend for it. Our entire culture and civilization is designed around subisidizing the hidden costs of transportation, to the point where it's buried into everything we buy or make or sell.

1909 cost of a Model T Touring edition = $850, inflation adjusted 2012 dollars, $23,394.41.

The problem with this comparison is there is rough equivalence in value between a 1908 car and a modern car. There was no such thing as commuting. There was were no highways. There were no paved roads. No auto shops, nothing. It was the wild west. There is no equivalence of value. People in the early days of television used TV much as it is today. There is arguably more value now because of many choices, but the uses and how it fits into a value tree decision are essentially the same. There are also a few new users (i.e. as a general purpose digital display) which add value that was not useful in 1950 since there we not other sources other than broadcast for content. But I think either way, the comparison is useful.

VW is notorious for selling its old models in foreign countries.
The original VW Beetle was manufactured in Mexico until 2003.
The VW Bus is finally getting canceled in Brazil (and that's being fought).
The 2nd gen VW Passat was sold in China for almost 30 years until it was updated.

Yes, this is exactly right. It cannot be done in the US because of increasing regulatory burden, and the availability of cheap credit (which I will get to in a minute). The examples you give support my position. In Mexico, increasing standards are what also finally killed it, and led to major revisions in three different model years. The Beetle in Mexico, despite rising standards and material costs, was reduced in price several times over it's production run, and it is likely that if new standards had not have been added, it would have continued to drop in price. See http://www.csmonitor.com/1990/... for example.

a. it's never cheaper to buy a new car.

This is absurdly wrong. You can argue that it's not a better value, but it can be frequently less money, especially short-term, to buy a new car. And it's often easier. If you are facing a large repair bill and have even mediocre credit, you can almost always buy an entirely new car for less money out of pocket than fixing your old car. And with special terms and whatnot, you can appear to save monthly as well (except that the term and therefore costs long-term are very expensive). Cheap credit, predicated on financing, makes it attractive to buy cars over unreasonably long terms, continuing the ability of car makers to hide the costs behind a seemingly low monthly payment.

b. One of those regulatory agencies crash tested a 1959 Chevy Bel Air with a 2009 Malibu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
This video speaks for itself.

You are arguing that increased costs somehow are good for people because it puts them in safer cars. There is no argument that a 1959 Bel Air is not as safe as a 2009 Malibu, however, that is not the only piece of the equation. Why shouldn't the government (not insurance companies by the way) force every company to make a car as safe as a top of the line German built car?

Now you're just arguing with a straw man.
We're talking about the cheapest car of 1970 and the two cheapest cars of 2014

Yes, but the 2014 cars have many, many, many upgrades that are just plain flashy. People lived before air conditioning. People lived before automatic transmissions, CD players, airbags, LATCH, TPMS, etc.

I think you are right, but it was not focused on like bundling. Bundling was the charge that the DOJ thought they had MS nailed on, and it was their best chance at victory.

That's maybe the biggest question here. The US hands over control of the internet. Ok. Fine. Sounds good on paper. But who gets control? And please don't say "nobody". Like it or not, certain things need to be policied by some entity. The two things that immediately spring into the mind are domain name control and IP address assignation. Pretty much anything where "globally unique" is a key feature will have to have some kind of controlling entity.

And the very LAST thing I could possibly see as beneficial is if that control was handed to certain entities that would all too eagerly take control of it. Namely corporations with an interest in controlling those resources. Can you imagine what it would be like if a for-profit organization takes over certain aspects of the net? Especially the "globally unique" ones? If you thought domain name turf wars have been problematic, you ain't seen nothing yet.

I'm certainly not someone who thinks it's a perfect solution to hand the control of an important resource to a single country. Far from it. If anything, handing it to the EU sounds sensible, considering how much infighting is going on there and how much bickering, the chance that they could use it against the rest of the world is sufficiently small. Ok, I'm kidding. But I guess it is easy to understand how it's hard to find a good governing body for something like this. Who should take over?

The UN? Please. Take a look at how much success they had with world peace and world hunger and ponder how much more important those two things are compared to the internet. Then consider how much success they'd have policying and governing the internet.

A multi-national consortium? Where's the difference to the UN?

The EU? As I said, considering how much in-fighting and bickering is going on there, it probably carries the lowest risk of anything bad happening. But also the lowest chance of ANYTHING happening when something needs to be done. Plus the highest chance that it will eventually be sold off to the highest bidding corporation.

Decentralize it? Good idea on paper, that was essentially the basic idea behind the internet, but it has deviated from that a long while ago. It's very unlikely that this can still fly. Most likely we'll be running into severe problems before long. Especially when certain countries decide it's a good idea to do a few things differently so they can more easily avoid doubleplusungood ideas to reach the plebs.

Who should take control? I can't really think of many good alternatives, but I'm eager to hear suggestions.

We'd be better off if I just rewrote this entire application.

How many times have we witnessed this? We know how it goes down. That shitty application has two decades worth of bug fixes and business process embedded in it. Some of the business process might look like bugs or random side effects. An effort will be launched to rewrite it, and it will fail miserably, well over budget and several years late.

If the team is unfortunate enough to actually manage to create a working executable, they will find that it doesn't offer half the functionality of the old application and does not deliver the correct results half the time. So the team will start hurriedly patching code, accumulating rushed bug fix after bug fix until the entire thing is an unmaintainable quiltwork of patches and side effects. At which point the company will decide that the new application is awful and attempt to rewrite it. It's just the circle of life...

Bwahaha! A few years back, they had a contest to rename The Gimp. I can't help but notice that it's still called The Gimp. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to shoehorn an acronym for "GOATFUCKER," but petered out at 4 or 5 letters. You know if I'd managed to pull it off, that's what they would have renamed it to...

Out of 48 officers feloniously killed in 2012, 8 were at traffic stops. That's 16.7%,, surpassing coronary artery disease as a cause of death. Is it unreasonable to worry when you feel chest pain?

Yes, millions of traffic stops happen with no problem, but that's not any comfort when a lone officer's at one that starts to go badly. There's also thousands of things that cause chest pain that aren't heart attacks.

You obviously don't work for the company that I do. The meatloaf-peeler vendors have persuaded our management that meatloaf peeling is an important capability these days, and any company that hasn't adopted this new approach to meatloaf consumption is doomed to quick obsolescence. So, whether our jobs need it or not, we are all being supplied with the top-selling meatloaf peeler, and other brands are banned from our desks.

But don't worry, your bosses will see the light soon, and a new MS meatloaf peeler will be installed on your desk, too.