Steven Sinofsky, who oversees Windows 7 development, has really committed to keeping us in the loop on the new Engineering Windows 7 blog. In today's post, "Measuring the Scale of a Release," he discusses whether or not Windows 7 will be a "major" or "minor" release. It's a pretty good piece that really makes some good points. Read on for our perspective.
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Member since:2005-07-28
PROPOSAL TO OSNEWS ADMINS:
Can we have a MTBMPR (Mean Time Between Mac Pricing Row) stat on the front page? It would be interesting to track how many days we can go between those debates.
Other proposals:
MTBLF (Mean Time Between License Furores) - the amount of time between a discussion of what "free" means, BSD vs GPL style
MTBORMS (Mean Time Between Opinions on Richard Stallman) - self explanatory
MTBUBCBOT (Mean Time Between Ubuntu Bashing Comments By Old Timers)
MTBBGPP (Mean Time Between Bad Gentoo Politics Posts)
MTBFUDA (Mean Time Between FUD accusations)
MTBLIAACNDD (Mean Time Between Linux Is All About Choice Not Dilution Discussions)
MTBILRFTDA (Mean Time Between Is Linux Ready For The Desktop Articles)
I would also like to propose support for system-wide XML-style entity declarations to save space on the OSNews.com hard drives. For example:
&yougetwhatyoupayforwithamac; and &macsareforrichkids;
&rmsisaneccentricvisionary; and &rmsisagnuzealotonewindowsreleasefromsarinsubwaybombing;
&gplfreeasinfreedomsuckitfreebsdfreedomtohordedouchebags; &gpliscommunistswhathatecapitalism;
And so forth. This way, these debates could be had much quicker and it's not as if the text is anything but static anyway.
Just a...modest...proposal.
Edited 2008-08-22 21:19 UTC
Member since:2006-02-05
voted you up for that.
I would say signal to noise is already at least as bad as slashdot or digg. The reason I come to this site at all any more is down to one mac guy, 3 linux guys, and one microsoft gal, which is pretty sad cause it used to be a hell of alot better then this.
Im about ready to call it quits, and am actively looking for somewhere with people with more intelligent things to say then a rehash of one of those seven things.
Member since:2005-07-06
Except I wasn't talking about Apple or Macs. I was talking about the general problem of perceived value and the futility of pricing items purely on their practical merits. Sure it applies to computers, but only in as much as it applies to everything one can acquire for a price where there are two or more interchangeable choices.
"The Verge has learned that HTC's Chief Product Officer, Kouji Kodera, left the company last week. Kodera was responsible for HTC's overall product strategy, which makes the departure especially notable on the heels of the global launch of the make-or-break One. It's not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession." I really hope HTC pulls it together.
"It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian 'sid' at the time of the Debian 'wheezy' release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release." Important note: 75% of Debian packages are supported bu Debian GNU/Hurd. Impressive.
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Member since:
2005-07-06
That entirely depends. Even if two items are more or less of the same basic quality, one may be worth money to a person for all kinds of intangible reasons. A lot of people care about aesthetics and design for example and are willing to pay for things to look nice while it's being functional. Then there are things like clever industrial and usability design that makes the item more easy/fun/effective to use, many people happily pay extra for that. There are even more abstract concepts like certain items simply make the owner happy and content for reasons he cannot quite articulate. Hard to explain, but for many worth paying for.
Of course trying to explain any of these abstracts to a person with purely practical and utilitarian concerns is more or less impossible. So suffice to say if you don't get it you don't get it, but that doesn't make the other person stupid, they just value things differently from you.