Comments on: What Apple, Microsoft and the Rest of Them Don’t Get

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 15:50:31 +0000

fardels, I agree they are not in the same category, for exactly the reason you cite, caveat below. The reason they are in the same blog post is because in my view Unity is a market drive, rather than function drive, innovatino

Caveat: The prompt for me writing this post was talk over on G+ about how Ubuntu is letting the development of their particular under the hoood GNU/Linux distribution (below the desktop) drift in ways that would be OK with Unity but not ok with other desktops. Thus the consideration of “pure debian” and this, as long as one is considering the GNU/Linux system first and desktop second, the consideration of Fedora or another system.

By: fardels bear

fardels bear — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 07:06:19 +0000

When Ubuntu switched to Unity, it took me approximately 30 seconds to go back to the Gnome desktop, which Ubuntu made possible through their Software Center. This is quite unlike Windows or Apple. So, please do not put Linux in the same category as the for-profit system.

By: fardels bear

fardels bear — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 07:06:17 +0000

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:24:41 +0000

There was an article about something similar.

http://edge.org/conversation/-39the-clothesline-paradox-39-

The idea being that until something is monitized, it doesn’t “count”.

It was like the question which works better, the free market or government? That is really a trick question, the answer depends on what is trying to be accomplished. The free market won’t provide anything for “free”, it will only provide things that make a profit. But then the free market doesn’t produce things the most efficient way, or the best way, it produces things the most profitable way.

Since the most profitable way is always through fraud, theft and deceit, that is what the free market eventually results in, unless there is enforceable regulations that prevent it.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:33:11 +0000

Did you try the direct approach? Read the document off the screen and transcribe it onto paper with a quill?

By: Paul Anderton

Paul Anderton — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 14:11:05 +0000

Very true. I can’t use word any more since the last big revamp. I’d argue, though, that some apps seem deliberately designed to not work properly with others. I needed a hard copy of a google doc, but the library’s windows system wouldn’t print from google. So I forwarded it to my yahoo account, where I received a useless link to the same google page. so I downloaded it to my phone and emailed it to my yahoo account. Of course, it wouldn’t open the file. Finally I had to forward that email back into google mail and print it from there. It would have been easier to screen print and cut it out with scissors.

By: Iain Robertson

Iain Robertson — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 12:37:18 +0000

My first Windows PC was an XP driven machine – I was quite happy with it and didn’t ‘Upgrade’ until the appearance of Windows 7, giving Vista a ‘body-swerve’. Happy with 7 as well, so I’ll give 8 a similar swerve… If Microsoft survive I may give Windows 9 a try….

By: yogi-one

yogi-one — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 07:14:45 +0000

How will you make any money if everything works?

No, really. Almost everything you buy you buy because it solves some problem; it fixes something that doesn’t work.

Any product has to fill a need to sell. If everything already worked perfectly, no one would ever need to sell anyone anything. (Now that might be a good thing, but I’m just sayin’)

So, it’s not that the software companies don’t understand that we do real-wprld stuff. It’s that they DO understand if everything worked, there would be no market, because everything is sold based on a need to fix some already existing problem. The moment all your plumbing works, your plumber is out of business. Hence the need to break some stuff.

By: Drivebyposter

Drivebyposter — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:50:59 +0000

Kaaleberg:
You have a kind of false dichotomy set up there. There isn’t an either/or situation where no one updates any technology ever vs.the way things are now.

Updates could just be less shitty. Fewer but better and more user friendly updates would be preferable to hundreds of updates with little or no noticeable changes and/or massive “you have to relearn everything” types of changes.

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 04:35:13 +0000

In a sense calling our current systems “toys” is not unreasonable. The field is constantly changing as new technologies are rolled out from the labs to the end users. This, of course, breaks things, but consider the alternative. We’d still be stuck with monospace type, floppy disks, tiny screens, and dial up BB access. No one, not even Steve Jobs, if he were still alive, knows what the technology is going to look like in twenty or fifty years when it matures and computers are no longer toys, but reliable tools.

There are only so many ways to manage this. You can defer updating your machines until you have a quiet period to deal with any side effects. You can keep an old machine or old bootable disk around so that if your new installation proves problematic, you can move back in time. You can keep nursing your old IBM PC Jr or Apple II or PDP-11/05 and not deal with all the red queen tsuris out there.