"His dancing is without peer..."
I dunno, have you ever seen a Cowboys fan have an epileptic fit?
1116 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2011
Let's apply that logic to other companies.
What does MS still sell that they had in '97? Windows 95 is gone, Office has been updated many many times, etc etc etc. GM has dropped Saturn, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac, and all the other vehicles have been redesigned/replaced/updated. McDonald's is still making Grade E But Edible Burgers, but that's not an innovation-driven business.
If you take any company in a competitive business which involves engineering and innovation and design, then they have all changed a lot since '97.
Yeah, I'd forgotten about Cutler. Thanks for the reminder.
I do remember pinging a fresh out-of-the-carton NT box when we were setting up servers for a new project and spending more than a minute wondering why I kept finding some BSD server when we had no BSD servers, only Solaris, AIX, and the new NT box.
On top of everything that's been posted, who, pray tell, is going to find a way to access that diary?
Say what you want of Jeremy Clarkson, he was right when he said that the first thing left-wing dictators do is restrict movement. So there's the electric car. Then they want to control all the power. And if the government controlling the electric grid doesn't fall under there, I'll eat my cat. And now with GPS and onboard diaries of trips and OnStar-like services, we see where this is leading.
That's it, I'm going to play Rush' "Red Barchetta" and look for an old Delorean.
Here's why no father worthy of the title will buy one. If your teenage daughter, out with friends, gets left behind and there's some creep ogling her, she'll call you in a panic. Your response? "Sorry, honey, we didn't plan for a rescue-from-rape call tonight, you'll have to deal with that University of Miami football player yourself, we have to save the planet ..."
Could we get this designed by people who have busy lives, rather than by engineers who've read about lives on wikipedia? We have kids who are active in school, both my wife and I work fulltime and part time, we have to run errands of an evening, we volunteer with local animal shelters, etc etc etc. The idea of planning or scheduling our lives around a car charge is ... mind-boggling.
This is one reason why hydrogen may win out: convenience. With electric cars, those long drives to visit relatives are NOT going to be feasible and we'll be forced to pay more, and spend more time, on public transportation.
Which, come to think of it, is what the watermelons probably want.
There is something in what you say, but a couple points. First, I don't think most people would call any version of Windows "great", unless most people are MCSEs or whatever they've renamed that useless certification to. Some are enough to be getting on with. 2K was good, particularly for its time, but when XP came out a LOT of people didn't see the point, and it was considered just a face-saving stopgap until Longhorn (*snicker*) could actually ship. Eventually people moved to XP, mostly because drivers became available and old machines were replaced with ones that shipped with XP and nothing else. Heck, even when XP finally shipped it was considered way behind the OS X of the time by a lot of people who weren't exactly Apple fans. I think people just got used to XP.
Vista was a dead dog (with apologies to dog lovers), and people hadn't gotten used to it before 7 came out. 7 is ... okay at best and still far behind OS X's Leopard/Snow Leopard, let alone Lion. Now MS seems to be attempting the iOS/OS X fusion that Apple has pulled off ... not perfectly, but surprisingly well if you think about what you'd have to do.
The thing is, Apple is like Louis Armstrong: they've learned what to leave out. MS doesn't know this.
"firstly everything has a place, Metro on the phone works, on a tablet will work, on a desktop... im not so sure but ill hold judgement until its out, from my early tests i find the mouse clumsy to use metro"
Well said. This is one place where Apple did well, the gestures in iOS could be incorporated where sensible for touchpads on laptops and their new touch-oriented "mouse". It's a "right tool for the job" approach. I don't know that MS has ever really gotten this with their interface, and making a big smoosh of Metro and desktop, without the thinking through that Apple did, probably won't work.
Woody Allen? Only if Steve shot a moose once. He put tied it to the hood of the car, and was driving home.
[Great, now I need to listen to that old Moose bit again.]
And there's law in New York about driving through the Holland Tunnel with a live moose strapped to your car on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and alternate Saturdays ...
"buying a phone to give them some status."
And how many geeks buy things to give them some status among other geeks?
I have an iPhone because it does all I need, it's been very reliable, does all I want very simply, and Apple's after-sale service has been second to none for the last few years. I would prefer not being on AT&T, but until I can convince my wife to move all of us to Sprint, that ain't happening no matter WHAT phone I buy.
"most people use holsters for their phones,"
Dude, I spent a week in Texas this last summer, and no one IN HOUSTON used a holster. And if Texans aren't using one, ... Holster are used for holding instruments for shooting snakes and lawyers, if you'll pardon the redundancy.
The only holster users I've known are those hardcore IT types who drone on and on and on about how some piece of hardware is completely superior because of one little spec, ignoring things like build quality, usability, living with it day to day, etc. They're the geek equivalent of Oakland Raider fans.
And don't forget domesticated horses for combat; that helped. The technology difference in 1000AD was appreciable. The Norse had a definite edge in sailing, metallurgy, etc. However, they didn't have enough of an edge to make a difference, given the disadvantages of being so far from their home bases. By 1492, that technological difference was HUGE, and Europe's diseases seem to have gotten nastier. (Or perhaps the colder-climate Vikings weren't carrying diseases as nasty as those to the south.)
I do like Eddie Izzard's take that if the Native Americans had reached Europe first, Europeans would have been sitting on mountains in a stupor from chocolate baked goods, while the Native American leader says "Don't worry, we have bakeries back home working 24/7 to keep them this way,"
But it has gotten so bad that some places in the US (Arkansas, Indiana, and at least one other state) have tried to make it against the law to go under the speed limit in the passing lane unless impeded from doing so (slow traffic ahead of you, construction, weather, etc). This was one thing where left and right, black and white, Democrat and Republican, libertarian and socialist, all agreed. In fact, I know one pacifist who was for imposing the death penalty for it, and no one called them crazy. (And keep in mind, she was a pacifist, so it's not like she'd fight you over it.) However, in at least one case the ACLU blocked it because people had the right to go under the speed limit in the passing lane.
I always thought that driving was a privilege, not a right. The ACLU lost the plot here.
But truck drivers are not driving their own trucks (usually) and because of the risks that such massive vehicles pose, they are subject to stricter monitoring and stricter licensing.
I can only thank the gods that people who don't care about cars, who tend to be the worst drivers, generally buy little crapwagons that fall apart after running over a nightcrawler, or drive a minivan, which has the acceleration and maneuverability of a warthog giving birth to octuplets. During the SUV craze it could get a bit hairy. (And I say that as someone who drives an SUV.)
Newspapers -- in so far as there still are newspapers -- have these things in readiness for a lot of well-known people, particularly those who are or have had health issues. It seems a bit morbid from the outside, but it makes a lot of sense. You give a more accurate, lengthy retrospective on someone, which is in fact a more respectful result.