When a company gets a lot of market, they want to differentiate their products so people stop using the standard and gets locked into their "standard slightly modified".
No no no, It is not an MP3 player(anyone could make an MP3 player), is an Ipod.
No no no, It is not email, email is an standard and we don't want to have to compete with other companies on a levered field, it is the facebook messaging event.
As usual they will make it very easy for people to get in, not so easy to get out.
"I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea."
I feel scared about that, everything you said(later will come audio and video) in a very specific context and frame, like 10 years ago, could be used against you by other people. Bad things could happen when you can't control it(friends of friends could see that)like you could control on gmail.
"I feel scared about that, everything you said(later will come audio and video) in a very specific context and frame, like 10 years ago, could be used against you by other people."
It seems you don't have a girlfriend... ;-)
Having dispatched of that softie: IMHO, too much history is a bad thing. Sometimes one _needs_ to forget stuff from the past before one can move on.
A prime example of too much history is the Middle East, more specifically, Israel-Palestine.
I agree. Maybe we need a hierarchical system that is dynamic. We need to organize information and in the real world we are constrained, but with computers we are not.
E.g if I need to organize my books, I could move it only to a given position, not another one, I could add labels to my books like "history", or "Initials of the author", but I could only group one way, like all my science papers on one place, if I want to group all the books that talk about sex, or crime, I will have to destroy the other group.
With computers you could create multiple directories trees with links instead of data, so I don't need to multiply the data each new tree. The tech is there(inodes).
Imagine if you study countries according to their population, so you create a hierarchy "most populated", "less populated", "no populated at all", then inside most populated you have "the most populated", "the less populated", and so on.
Then you could have another directory according to the extension in squared kilometers. Another according to their capital coordinates, and so on.
And they control the medium too. If Craig gets the answers right they just can cut this part of the film. They could manufacture whatever they want just editing and putting answers out of context.
The modern version of Cardinal Richelieu:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Linux is getting better each year, Android is getting better each year.
But MS is getting better each year too, like Apple.
The main difference is that MS and Apple improve he overall user experience while Linux and Android center themselves on geeks. Witch is great, for geeks, but not as good for other people.
On Linux I can easily record any sound-video a program plays-displays , I can't do it on windows or Mac because of DRM. It's great for me, normal people don't care.
People care about being able to easily classify their weeding photos using face recognition tech like iphoto does. Linux could do it in complex( and more powerful) ways that my mom can't use.
Sorry, you say MS is getting better? No. I would gladly go back to Windows XP over 7. The only thing I like about 7 is the taskbar, everything else just gets in the way or annoys me. Why MS feel like shuffling around everything in the control panel every release I will never understand.
Of course you have been trained, but what about the fun factor? I mean people love to fit, insert things into other things and feel they fit. Kids feel good when they insert a cube block inside the square hole.
USB cables and Apple batteries design are very good in this regard. No need to look at symbols. It gives you instant sensitive feedback. I'm highly kinesthetic so that is brilliant design for me and a lot of people. Like blind people.
USB plugs/sockets are awful. Sure, you can't insert them the wrong way round, but visually it's hard to see which way round is the right way without trial and error. The position of the USB symbol is supposed to help, and does to some extent.
USB plugs should either work successfully inserted both ways round (like this battery system), or be asymmetrical (and even with asymmetrical plugs, things can get annoying when you cant get a clear look at a socket - eg SCART + the backs of AV equipment)
"You make a good point but as I thought on it for a while I came up with this question: Do kids want to be the same kind of adults as their parents?"
My opinion is yes:
They want cars and motorcycles, and houses, and be respected, find friends, find love. The tools they use are just that, means for getting a goal.
I have been teacher too,in general I love kids, and I think is not kids wanting to change, is adults "hating change", halting grow when they get in their comfort zones once grown up.
He is not.If you think he is the misinformed person is you.
You can inform yourself.Search for DRDOS.Search for windows trademark issues,lindows, you know what? they were an entire line of windows branded products before MS, MS destroyed them all, you can search what happened to them.
Windows is a generic word, it can't never be trademarked(unless you are rich to get over the law), that applies to "word", "powerpoint", "project", "excel", "exchange". A word in the English dictionary just can't be trademarked, by law.
Maybe you were a kid then, but there was a time when "word" was not the most used word processor, it was "WordPerfect", and people used Lotus123 instead of "excel". What did MS did? They made windows but didn't let WordPerfect and Lotus123 people(and everybody else, like compiler builders) use the windows API, so MS had a 4 year period of advantage. Once they did, the high level exposed API was slower than what MS used.
I'm tired too. When people don't know they don't know what they don't know.
Well, not quite. Lindows certainly wasn't around before MS. According to Wikipedia the company was founded in 2001.
Edit: On further reading, Microsoft didn't manage to force them to change over in court - they just paid $20 million and Lindows changed over. Hardly "destroyed" them.
Windows is an English word, however that doesn't mean it doesn't enjoy some trademark protection in an arrangement like "Microsoft Windows". The protection is not as significant as it would be on an invented word (like, say, "Microsoft") but it's still there if you come up with something that's judged to be similar enough to cause confusion.
Similarly, try founding an IT company called Apple and see how far you get - that's an English word too.
He is taking a position as "non-engineer" and stated its goals as clear as water: He considers engineers superfluous(ludicrously overstaffed) but will consider himself indispensable. He tries to justify his position to "making their work-week 20 hours"(and later fire them as they are not necessary, because they only work 20 hours!!)
He is making generalizations, and as such he is right and wrong at the same time.
I could sense the engineers fear to lost their job, and his eagerness to justify it.It is a bloodless war, a power war in the company.He want more power(and money, look!, I got rid of those unnecessary people, I'm worth a lot) and less power and responsibility for the others.
Engineers are people, some are smart, some not. They could look at code and marvel themselves if it is good quality, like a experienced painter when he sees a master piece, or will love to modify it if it is trash, like it uses to be because "there is no time" for making it right.
He is being emotional thinking as the engineers are for protecting their selves.
I think he is not proposing anything substantially new. Collecting data before formulating your hypothesis is the norm, not the exception.
First you see an object fall and them you wonder why. The same applies to birds flying, wood afloat, fire, atmospheric pressure... we observe(collect data) first, we make assumptions and look for more data later.
BUT, never underestimate the power of a GooglePlex for gathering and analysing data(like generic one). Never before we had used it, and so we could see things we never did before.
You know what happened when a man without studies created a miscroscope. The "scientist" of the time said that he didn't knew Latin, so he could not be called scientist, and that the microscope will only work for seeing the same things we already know bigger.
I like to change the defaults. When you use to read green on black instead of black over white, or change the font size you realize that the designer only though in one size, and one colour.
PDFs are perfect at only one layout, and font size. At different ones it is just horrible. It doesn't work right on an iphone-android small screen.
When designers choose fonts, it only works at one size, at different ones, areas seems different with the same font.
No no no, It is not an MP3 player(anyone could make an MP3 player), is an Ipod.
No no no, It is not email, email is an standard and we don't want to have to compete with other companies on a levered field, it is the facebook messaging event.
As usual they will make it very easy for people to get in, not so easy to get out.
"I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight." That's a really cool idea."
I feel scared about that, everything you said(later will come audio and video) in a very specific context and frame, like 10 years ago, could be used against you by other people. Bad things could happen when you can't control it(friends of friends could see that)like you could control on gmail.