291–300 of 369 posts
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No; the last great Windows was XP. 7 started the regression in earnest, especially in the GUI.
XP was just an ugly skin on top of the magnificent Windows 2000.
"My decade-old and very well-travelled Toyota Land Cruiser finally died, and I hoped my new-ish ebike could replace it." How that article sounds. I don't care how fancy they make them, iPads are just unserious computing devices for real work.
Almost always stated by nerds who are unable to fathom people do things with devices they don’t.
I know people running their entire business from iPads. Last I looked running a business is real work.
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No; the last great Windows was XP. 7 started the regression in earnest, especially in the GUI.
The GUI in 7 was so much better than anything before or since.
They also started obscuring the color-scheme editor, the eventual removal of which was a major blunder. By the time people finally realized that inverse color schemes are dumb, the color-scheme editor was gone and they had to wait for Microsoft and everyone else to implement hard-coded "dark mode" all over the place.
From Windows 3.1 through XP, I had simply created a "dark mode" color scheme at the system level; all properly-written applications inherited the system color scheme in Windows. Such an obvious, useful mechanism that Microsoft "forgot" and Apple to this day has never learned.
Even '90s Unix GUIs let you set up a color scheme, if I remember correctly.
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Just because it's commonplace doesn't make it any less hostile to users. The tradeoff argument is legitimate, but it would be easy enough to have a yolo-mode button somewhere that voids the warranty and unshackles the user. This is why I prefer Android. Google is evil, sure, but at least they don't treat me like a child. If I want to take one of their devices and shoot myself in the foot with it, that's fine with the…
> Just because it's commonplace doesn't make it any less hostile to users. Sure, game consoles are user-hostile. They're also great for playing games, and they tend to "just work" with less configuration and customization than a typical gaming PC. Less configuration tends to mean fewer problems and easier tech support, but the primary business reason game consoles are locked town is to make it harder to play unlicens…
By all means have a some kind of verified/sealed mode and refuse to support anything that's not in that mode--but there are negative consequences to normalizing a lack of control over the technology that people interact with.
Take the crowd strike incident for instance. Millions of people unable to do jobs that they're relied upon to do, and we can't even hold them accountable for that because it turns out they were never in control of their tools in the first place--locked out of the section necessary to carry out the repair.
You wouldn't tolerate a screwdriver that refused to be used to pry open a paint can. I don't see how it should be any different with a phone. I want to be able to rely on users of tools--not vendors of tools--to do things, and I can't. Not because the people are authentically incompetent, but because some vendor has made a dumb decision about what they're now not allowed to do.
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> If you're an artist who draws, I think they're serious computing devices. An artist who draws might consider iPads to be serious drawing devices.
That's high praise since it's basically what Apple was going for with the iPad, getting out of your way to let you focus on the task at hand.
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I dunno why anybody thinks a computer with a 10 core CPU, 10 core GPU, 16GB of RAM and a TB or two of storage is "an e-bike". None of the machines I do the work that pays my salary exceed those specs. Apart from the 16GB of RAM none of my work machines meet any of the other specs. If Apple would let me plug a couple of HDMI screens and a keyboard and mouse into a iPad, and let me run macOS (or even Linux) on it, it'd…
Why don't you just get a MacBook Air then? Or a Mini?
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Recycle
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Redundant consumption is not a virtue.
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They ARE terrible. They used to be very good at it. Microsoft advanced GUIs more through the '90s than anyone else. Tidy, efficient, and still innovative. Windows 95 through XP pretty much nailed down most of what a GUI needs. Microsoft has since abandoned essential practices that make GUIs work, in addition to abandoning taste and organization. Windows is a sorry shitshow of defective design and defective function.…
Pretty much everything Microsoft did in the 90s with GUIs was just playing catch up with Apple. My first job in 1990, we had a load of PCs running DOS, and one Mac with a GUI and which also played sound and could read laserdisks (as I recall). Changing the error sound to "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" never got old. Windows 95 just about got to feature parity with the Mac 5 years later. It was really ni…
Where MS actually did groundbreaking UI/UX work was in the 00s, ironically for most things not Windows - Media Center, Xbox 360, Zune/WP.
And of course they had to ruin it with botched product management and their bulldozing Metro/UWP everywhere strategy. The Windows 8.1 UX on a tablet was actually pretty good. Too bad it a) sucked on everything else, b) app integration was spotty due to relegating Win32 to second class.
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Man. I thought you were joking, then I read the article. Yeah, I will never spend so much on an iPad. It's not even the same OS. I don't know why anyone would think an ebike compares to a Land Cruiser.
I dunno why anybody thinks a computer with a 10 core CPU, 10 core GPU, 16GB of RAM and a TB or two of storage is "an e-bike". None of the machines I do the work that pays my salary exceed those specs. Apart from the 16GB of RAM none of my work machines meet any of the other specs. If Apple would let me plug a couple of HDMI screens and a keyboard and mouse into a iPad, and let me run macOS (or even Linux) on it, it'd…