tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80872944874499597452024-03-12T23:51:13.024-07:00angryartboyan anti-technical blog where a “born-again user” fights the notion that computers should be for geeks & programmers and need only benefit the 1% Wall Street addicts who run the industry... so, mostly just screaming into the abyss.dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.comBlogger34125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-86574039398853453562021-06-28T01:16:00.004-07:002021-06-28T01:24:06.146-07:00The Computer Industry is Full of INSANE PEOPLE<p>I hate blogger. It’s one of the worst interfaces ever. My personal blog, on my own website, uses Wordpress.</p><p>Guess what?</p><p>WordPress is absolute fucking garbage.</p><p>I hadn’t written a blog post with it since 2019. Almost exactly two years ago was the last time I bothered yelling into the void that is blogging. Today, I tried to write a new post. I was feeling lonely and semi-inspired to write prose of some kind... But then WordPress’ new editor happened to me.</p><p>BLOCKS? Are you fucking kidding me with this fucking insane BULLSHIT? How hard is it for you motherfuckers to understand the concept of TEXT EDITING?</p><p>I am almost entirely at a loss for words. What I got is incoherent rage and ... and... this:</p><p>WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE IN THIS MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLE INDUSTRY? YOU’RE FUCKING INSANE. YOU HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE HOW HUMAN BEINGS OPERATE. GET YOUR FUCKING HEADS OUT OF YOUR FUCKING ASSES AND STOP MAKING INSANE GARBAGE CLEARLY DESIGNED FOR YOUR OWN SOCIALLY INEPT GEEK-FUCKERY SELVES.</p><p>I looked this up on DDG and saw I’m not remotely the only person disgusted by this nonsense. A quick read of an article showed me the “classic editor” plugin... which 5 million+ people have installed. BECAUSE BLOCKS IS BULLSHIT, MOTHERFUCKERS.</p><p>Apple decided to ignore usability in design, back with the release of iOS 7. They haven’t improved much of anything since, and made everything more complex since. WordPress, on the other hand, somehow worked out how to SHOOT USABILITY IN THE BACK OF THE FUCKING HEAD and then parade it like an advancement. FUCKING FUCK THE MOTHERFUCKING FUCK OFF WITH THAT MOTHERFUCKING SHIT, YOU MOTHERFUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS.</p><p>On a scale of 1 to 100, I have NEGATIVE 10,000,000 units of patience left with this fucking illogical, inhuman, ignorant, and ludicrous industry. NOTHING works correctly. MOST things aren’t even designed sensibly.</p><p>AND WE ALL JUST HAVE TO FUCKING PUT UP WITH IT.</p>dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-12175727265233889562019-06-05T07:31:00.002-07:002019-06-05T07:31:35.731-07:00Apple’s 2019 Mac Pro Is For The 1% Only<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="auto" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleTallBody; font-size: 17px;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Open Letter to Apple executives:</span></div>
<div dir="auto" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleTallBody; font-size: 17px;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I’ve been waiting almost ten years for Apple to produce a Mac workstation that doesn’t suffer from irrationally compact design & thermal issues. It was with great excitement that I watched the announcement of the 2019 Mac Pro & Pro display... only to be left with Apple’s middle finger in my face when the pricing was announced. The <i>BASE model</i> pricing <i>starts</i> in <b>crazyland</b>.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Sorry, Tim, but I’m not part of your wealthy 1% segment. I don’t run a big business or work for Pixar. There’s <i>no way</i> I’ll <i>ever</i> own this new machine. The apologists on Apple forums say “<i>if you can’t afford it, then it’s not for you</i>”. Well, then: where <i>IS</i> the workstation <i>for the rest of us</i>??</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Apple’s other Macs are unacceptable for constant heavy workloads (don’t even get me started on the ridiculous “iMac Pro”), and many of us cannot justify spending money repeatedly on disposable computers (not to mention the environmental impact of such a business model).</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The Mac Pro <i>used </i>to start at $2500. Then it started at $3000. Your latest Mac Pro has jumped up to a starting price that’s TWICE the prior amount, for a <i>BASE model</i>. This is a ludicrous business decision, considering there is no other pricing/feature tier for this new equipment. These products are clearly aimed only at the 1%. They should be priced to sell <i>more</i> machines in a <i>wider</i> prosumer/workstation market; not priced <i>insanely high</i> to make up for <i>lower sales</i> in <i>the most narrow of all possible workstation markets</i>.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">In the past, I was willing to save longer and spend more just to buy Apple’s superior products, but the current product offerings are now egregiously expensive across the board (from iPhone to Mac). I’ve already had a Macbook Pro die due to bad thermal design. I cannot afford to buy a new disposable Mac every three years. I’ve been saving tax rebates since 2010, planning to buy a longer-lived Mac tower/workstation for music & digital art (hoping to find a way to make an income on art, as I struggle in poverty, on disability). I don’t even have <i>HALF</i> of what I’d need to buy your $12,000 workstation at its <i>BASE</i> configuration.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I abandoned your competitors back in 2009 because Apple’s products were <i>clearly</i> <i>superior</i>. With the current piles of iOS bugs, planned-obsolescence, and pathological obsession with thin design, Apple’s products are now merely “<i>less bad</i>”. I hate PCs & Windows (a lifetime as a tech person shows that they make me miserable), so I guess my only option now is to just stop using computers entirely after my [stop-gap, second-hand] iMac dies.</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Apple kicked the computer industry’s lazy ass from 2007 to 2012, making excellent products and reliable software for almost everyone. That Apple seems long gone. Today’s Apple has become a caricature of itself, justifying all the “<i>luxury products for rich people</i>” memes thrown at the company.</span></blockquote>
</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-18008939389613624702019-05-17T11:44:00.002-07:002019-05-17T11:45:22.917-07:00You don’t own your [smart] TV<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
You don’t own your [smart] TV. Why?<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/smart-tvs-are-dumb/581059/" target="_blank">Smart TVs Are Dumb</a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Earlier this month, Vizio’s chief technology officer, Bill Baxter, told <span style="box-sizing: inherit;">The Verge</span> that the reason his company can sell TVs so cheaply now is that it makes up the money by selling bits of data and access to your TV after you purchase it. Baxter called this “post-purchase monetization.” </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“This is a cutthroat industry,” he said. “It’s a 6-percent-margin industry, right? … The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV.” </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>This is why your TV was so cheap. But it also changes the relationship the TV makers have with their customers. Consumers are no longer their sole revenue stream, but one among several. CBS and Netflix are more important to their business success than you are.</i></blockquote>
I have nothing more to add to this article in commentary... Well, other than the fact that <i>I’ve been telling people, for years</i>, about what the computer industry has been doing to every other industry where computers and software have been introduced into products to add marginal consumer utility. EULAs are consumer abuse. Data-mining and consumers-as-cattle, to be sold to advertisers and other entities, is abuse. The current government loves this laissez-faire free-for-all ideology of capitalism. The democrats are just as owned by corporate America, too, so don’t expect that anything will improve just by voting for the <i>other</i> duopoly party.</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-3878582347472203832019-02-20T23:36:00.001-08:002019-02-20T23:40:20.723-08:00Advertising Industry Still Not Getting the Message<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Because of intrusive advertising on websites, a tool called the “ad blocker” was invented. MANY ad blockers exist. It is a VERY popular tool which can make the internet somewhat TOLERABLE again (but only somewhat).<br />
<br />
And then there’s this shit:<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf4AcDOFxZ-ke3L2seHnzg5t5AML_8P9S96_1CClXpP_NXO1fDbYH2CgUX7j4a5GuvzTo0i0LDNNssoYiD2LkaWCy-A0oh6Lkc2VE-ITdnyI8UzRRJmUXIoK-OIjtPmTufU6b6giVZv0iX/s1600/C0D86706-2BAA-4EFF-8F92-BF31173D9DD8.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1377" data-original-width="1600" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf4AcDOFxZ-ke3L2seHnzg5t5AML_8P9S96_1CClXpP_NXO1fDbYH2CgUX7j4a5GuvzTo0i0LDNNssoYiD2LkaWCy-A0oh6Lkc2VE-ITdnyI8UzRRJmUXIoK-OIjtPmTufU6b6giVZv0iX/s320/C0D86706-2BAA-4EFF-8F92-BF31173D9DD8.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Intrusive begging to turn off ad blockers are the response to blocking intrusive advertising.<br />
<br />
It’s not just that websites are begging us, and criticizing us, for daring to attempt to claw back some sense of control over our web experience. There is a cottage industry of web tools designed to be sold to and plugged into these websites to do this intrusive nagging (and you who market these tools: you’re a very special kind of scum; like the inventors of pyramid schemes, or high level Activision executives).<br />
<br />
Look at that oh so cute artwork. Bored Panda sees itself being starved by the weird demon creature (your ad blocker; but really: YOU) gobbling up their ... what? Food? No, their <i>ad revenue</i>. They’re telling you that <i>you the user</i> are a selfish, piggish monster, stealing from this poor, starving, cute, harmless, scrappy little website. Look at that piggy nose and that tiny panda unable to fend for itself...<br />
<br />
That’s not how I’m reading it. I read it as this rude, obnoxious demon called “a paid surrogate for advertising” slobbing its way, unwelcome, into my web experience.<br />
<br />
It would be one thing if Bored Panda had truly great, original, content. It doesn’t. Most of what is posted there is culled from existing stories around the web, re-spun with bad formatting and nary a proofread, and (weirdly) quite a lot of anti-vegan hit pieces. Seriously, what is their problem with vegans? Are vegans the last acceptable target for mockery when you’re struggling to be progressive and inclusive? Is it some kind of pressure-release valve for the bigotry they’re suppressing?<br />
<br />
Dear websites living on advertising: This is your own goddamned fault. <a href="https://angryartboy.blogspot.com/2017/11/advertising-industrys-self-inflicted.html" target="_blank">We’ve told you this before</a>. We turn off our blockers and you literally <a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbes-site-after-begging-you-turn-off-adblocker-serves-up-steaming-pile-malware-ads.shtml" target="_blank">serve up a steaming pile of malware ads</a>.<br />
<br />
Now, <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/as7lu5/you_thought_websites_making_you_turnoff_ad/" target="_blank">you’re even telling people off for wanting privacy</a>.<br />
<br />
Advertizing is on every goddamned surface and it’s never enough. Online stores who’s primary business is to SELL THEIR GOODS have third-party advertizing on their sites (Amazon, NewEgg, etc). Even subscription services are still serving up ads (are you enjoying paying to watch commercials on Hulu?).<br />
<br />
Any revenue losses you’re seeing are <i>YOUR OWN FUCKING FAULTS</i>. Don’t point the finger at the people who’ve decided to rebel against you. If you want to make money selling online content, create a truly ad-free experience for subscribers only (instead of double dipping like most of you will do, “because capitalism”).<br />
<br />
<a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%E2%80%9Cno+i+will+NOT+turn+off+my+ad+blocker%E2%80%9D" target="_blank">No, I will NOT turn off my ad blocker.</a></div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-8874725099308062332019-02-20T22:55:00.001-08:002019-02-20T22:55:14.628-08:00Wall Street is Gleefully Destroying American Economics...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
... but if you’re wealthy (or a temporarily-embarrassed millionaire ... often a Libertarian), you don’t give a shit. Your kind believes in the myths and the religion that is laissez-faire, utterly uncontrolled, compulsory capitalism. The rest of you are the choir. So this content basically will do nothing at all.<br />
<br />
For anyone who gives the slightest of fucks, here’s just <i>one</i> industry that is gleefully wrecking lives just so its billionaire executives and “investors” can continue their sociopathic quest to have ALL the money (and you can bet it’s part of the computer industry if it’s posted on this blog):<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/fOmjIpvl0cg/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fOmjIpvl0cg?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
<br />
Because someone needs to point this shit out. Repeatedly. Loudly. Thank goodness for Jim fucking Sterling, son.</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-5335420545729676442019-02-20T15:59:00.000-08:002019-02-20T15:59:45.401-08:00Amazon Sells Fake Products That Can Harm Your Computer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
There are multiple products being sold through Amazon described as a “FireWire Female to USB Male adapter”, or “USB 2.0 to FireWire adapter”, etc.<br />
<br />
<b>DO NOT BUY THESE THINGS!</b><br />
<br />
FireWire and USB are <i>entirely different buses</i> with <i>entirely different data and electrical formats</i>. You cannot just make a plug to push one into the other. An item like this <b>can damage</b> the FireWire and USB electronics on equipment interconnected by these so-called adapters! And, looking at the reviews posted by the unfortunate scammed customers, this has already happened to people!<br />
<br />
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U7DJ3XU/<br />
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008XYG4KA/<br />
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VRN2OTY/ <— this one is actually fulfilled by Amazon.<br />
<br />
...and more...<br />
<br />
Actual customer reviews indicate (in the tens to hundreds of reports) that these <i>don’t</i> work. Of course they don’t. They <i>can’t possibly work</i>. Some customers are informed enough to realize these are garbage items. The positive reviews are a mix of people who blame themselves or their devices for the product’s failure (because we have a culture that makes non-tech people feel stupid and ignorant, which is how the computer industry insulates itself from accountability), and obvious fake reviews. By the way: Amazon has no system to deal with fake reviews. “Verified customer” can be bypassed by sending gift codes to people in the cottage industry of review sellers (this exists).<br />
<br />
Yes, Amazon have been informed. They have a track record in regard to counterfeit products which is... unimpressive. No doubt, due to the fact that you can indeed conduct electricity between the two ends of this “adapter”, they will conclude it is not “fake”. Bravo, Chinese scammers.<br />
<br />
Are you irritated by my “click bait” headline? It’s really not clickbait. Those <i>are</i> fake products. Yeah, the Amazon “marketplace” sellers are selling and fulfilling many of these items (not all; see above), but what’s the difference to consumers? When you go to Amazon.com (NOT eBay.com) to buy something, and you’re not a savvy & experienced web denizen, and you buy scam and/or counterfeit products, <i>the subtle difference in seller details is meaningless</i> to you.<br />
<br />
It’s not like we need more examples of why laissez-faire capitalism is horrible, but here you go; yet another one. <i>We need regulation</i>. More importantly: We need regulation to <i>actually be fucking enforced</i>. If you’re one of those “tax is theft” and “regulation is bad” libertarians, you really need to grow up. Meet reality; it’s a lot different from your theories.</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-60277430261514791022018-11-23T04:15:00.002-08:002018-11-23T04:15:34.939-08:00The Bullshit Web, because pathological capitalism ruins everything<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It’s almost as if I picked the title... This is a great article about how the internet is mostly a bunch of wasted bandwidth, because: marketing.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>[...]At the time, a few of my friends were getting cable internet. It was remarkable seeing the same pages load in just a few seconds, and I remember thinking about the kinds of the possibilities that would open up as the web kept getting faster. And faster it got, of course. When I moved into my own apartment several years ago, I got to pick my plan and chose a massive fifty megabit per second broadband connection, which I have since upgraded. So, with an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the bullshit web.</i></blockquote>
Read here: <a href="https://pxlnv.com/blog/bullshit-web/" target="_blank">The Bullshit Web</a></div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-49024642040047065022018-11-23T03:59:00.003-08:002018-11-23T03:59:43.853-08:00Software Disenchantment<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
We need WAY MORE developers to scream these very same statements to the computer industry...<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same. Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how much inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough.”</i></blockquote>
Another good bit:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Programs can’t work for years without reboots anymore. Sometimes even days are too much to ask. Random stuff happens and nobody knows why. What’s worse, nobody has time to stop and figure out what happened. Why bother if you can always buy your way out of it. Spin another AWS instance. Restart process. Drop and restore the whole database. Write a watchdog that will restart your broken app every 20 minutes. Include same resources multiple times, zip and ship. Move fast, don’t fix.</i></blockquote>
<br />
Read the whole thing here: <a href="http://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/" target="_blank">Software Disenchantment</a></div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-74695945910824222032018-07-10T07:05:00.003-07:002018-07-10T07:05:55.333-07:00Sci-fi: Stop with the damned holographs already<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Just a brief note to every science fiction writer, director, producer, etc.: Holographs, as seen infuriatingly often in today's TV and film, are NOT POSSIBLE. Even the "hard science" series The Expanse has these damned things.<br />
<br />
There is no basis in physics to suspend imagery (animated or still) in mid-air. None. Zero. Nada. All you're doing is making your "science fiction" into "techno-fantasy". It's magic, not science.<br />
<br />
STOP IT.</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-69477069573951251412018-05-30T07:20:00.001-07:002018-05-30T07:20:15.447-07:00Does anyone actually test their product any more?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The subject here could easily be Apple again, but what triggered my tech anger most recently was imdb this time (er... and WordPress' piece of shit iOS app). Has anyone at imdb ever bothered to try writing a review on their own website, via Safari on iOS? I'm pretty sure they haven't. Wouldn't it be nice if they had some kind of feedback system that didn't require users to create yet another internet account on yet another 3rd-party website just to make a comment (that will be ignored by imdb) on a user forum about site problems?<br />
<br />
I keep seeing shit like that... utterly broken websites and software features (and countless mistakes and typos in "news" articles) that just beg the question "did anyone actually check this before publishing it??"<br />
<br />
Then there are the walls that these entities build between themselves and the outside world. The walls of callous disregard and arrogant isolation between themselves and the human beings actually using their broken products, ensuring as little interaction with said users as possible.<br />
<br />
Go ahead, try contacting a human being at Google, or imdb, of Facebook, or a dozen dozen other tech entities...<br />
<br />
Expertise is dead, and QA has been murdered as a way to avoid it being pointed out.<br />
<br />
Taking one step further: customer service is nonexistent, especially on "free services". These companies hate interacting with their product (that's you). Even the users of paid products are treated like non-entities by most of these companies.<br />
<br />
Congratulations tech industry. You've made an art out of antisocial behavior and successfully convinced most of the world (and all of the USA) that you should be excused from the most basic of expectations about your product. The tech business is the ultimate demonstration of unregulated, unaccountable business. No wonder there are so many libertarians in tech news comment forums...</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-21699414581048224802017-11-21T15:35:00.001-08:002017-11-21T15:35:34.646-08:00Advertising Industry's Self-Inflicted Injuries<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Back in 2016, I reacted to an article on Apple Insider. They were reporting advertising companies complaints against ad blocking... i guess this is a good place to share my response.<br />
<br />
Yet another sob story from the "capitalists" (specifically marketing warfare people) that saw a medium, invaded it, corrupted and hijacked it, and utterly ruined that medium for everyone but themselves. The Internet has gone from being an incredibly useful information utility, to being an incredibly slow, convoluted, obfuscated disaster of distraction and wasted bandwidth (and time).<br />
<br />
Let me clarify: ad blocking tools are an invention to service a necessity. Stimulus - response. <br />
<br />
Clarification of clarification: They did it to themselves!<br />
<br />
If this leads to new pay sites with quality, curated content, and ads that aren't a burden to the reader and their Internet devices, then maybe we can finally move into some kind of maturity for this medium, after the unregulated free-for-all that went from "great free content for everyone" to "horrible and near useless for everyone but ad impression counters".<br />
<br />
While we're at it, let's do the same with software and instill some damned warranty laws (in the USA there's nothing at all). Computers have been a Wild West of unrestrained abuse. While the corporations were busy complaining about intellectual property theft by their own customers, they were doing everything in their power to avoid having any and all accountability for their own products or behaviors. Capitalism has, historically and contemporaneously, repeatedly shown that it requires regulation in order to restrict it from limitless abuse of customers, employees, the environment, and markets themselves. There's no self-regulation. Ultimately, the people and/or their governments have to step in and say "actually, that's not ethical".<br />
<br />
The irony here is how capitalists abuse and destroy the system and then have the audacity to tell us that WE are "morally reprehensible" by attempting to take back a little of the sanity they destroyed.<br />
<br />
No, advertising industry, I wont disable my ad blocker. Your fault.</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-90674542662403180012017-04-16T22:05:00.002-07:002017-04-16T22:05:07.622-07:00CSS is hell<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-2456237035026774422017-04-05T11:21:00.002-07:002017-04-06T07:38:54.011-07:00holy shit, Apple got the message (Mac Pro)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
While this means I am absolutely waiting <b>ANOTHER </b>1.5 years (!!) for a new pro machine, at least <a href="http://appleinsider.com/articles/17/04/04/all-new-mac-pro-with-modular-design-apple-branded-pro-displays-coming-in-2018" target="_blank">Apple has woken the everloving fuck up and acknowledged the problem with the Mac Pro situation</a>. Maybe this will slow the defection from Mac to PC and they'll stop bleeding from their self-inflicted wound...<br />
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dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-24810022551916234622017-04-03T21:53:00.004-07:002017-04-03T22:15:51.519-07:00Password Rules Sanity: It's actually not hard<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
This is one of the best tech articles by a tech person I've read in a very long time... Because the author is brutal about the stupidity of password rules. Go read it: <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/password-rules-are-bullshit/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: small;">Password Rules Are Bullshit</span></a>
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dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-82950451735056871642017-01-02T08:45:00.002-08:002017-01-02T08:45:30.514-08:00Blogger is absolute garbage on mobileAnd Google doesn't care.<br>
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(viewing blogs is generally fine; it's the creation and editing of blogs that is miserable on mobile)dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-84802751662020898782017-01-02T08:42:00.000-08:002017-01-02T08:42:12.771-08:00You're never getting FiOS...I'm pretty sure nothing has changed since this article came out...<br>
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<a href="http://gizmodo.com/after-billions-in-subsidies-the-final-verizon-fios-map-1682854728">After Billions in Subsidies, the Final Verizon FiOS Map is Abysmal</a><br>
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The USA's Internet infrastructure is lousy, when we consider consumer access to it. How many ISPs do you have in your area? More than two? More than one? What are your speeds and prices? The following video is pretty much how it is:<br>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilMx7k7mso">
The First Honest Cable Company</a>dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-7925877976104903932016-12-21T02:55:00.000-08:002016-12-21T03:11:58.725-08:00The iPhone May Have Killed AppleI'm glad to see there continues to be critical examination of Apple's foolish behavior around its Mac line...
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<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-20/how-apple-alienated-mac-loyalists">How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists</a><br><br>
Apple has obsessed over the iOS products because of a lucky strike of success (yes, the original design had a lot to do with it, but they've since disposed of that, so...). Apple's only loyalty is to shareholders, and the iPhone and iPad has been very good for Apple's primary stock owners. So the logic seems to have been to make more of the same and cut funds spent on anything else (except for some ludicrous car project, another fad project, due to Google obsessing over the pathological technology of self-driving cars).<br><br>
Some day the iPhone will no longer be the killer income generator that it has been. Things like phones and watches are fad products. Fads are irrational and unreliable. Someone comes out with something that creates a new fad, regardless of its true value and the old fad ends. Consumers move on abruptly.
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It's the core users, the loyalists, the professionals and content creators, that are the consumers Apple should be serving (again, if Apple actually cared to serve customers, rather than Wall Street). If Apple disposes of the Mac in pursuit of capitalism's religious delusion of perpetual profit growth, they will discover their core user base has moved on, once they are done shitting on them and are once again requiring them to keep Apple alive.
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The iPhone brought Apple to dominance, but it also seems to be Apple's eventual downfall. Hopefully, some new leadership will take over at Apple before the company suffers too much.dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-52594597594225223792016-11-02T16:29:00.000-07:002016-11-02T16:33:26.829-07:00Apple now run by "tonerheads"?<div class="embed-wrapper" data-url="youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe width="480" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_1rXqD6M614" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><p>No new Mac Pro announcement, lackluster and overly expensive MacBook Pro upgrade, no displays from Apple for Apple machines... Yeah... Not feeling it, Apple.</p>dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-13575438448656236252016-09-01T19:16:00.001-07:002016-09-01T19:20:59.109-07:00The Fall of the Designer: The Fad of Laziness and Ignorance Prevails<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I just read a fantastic series of articles that, unfortunately, showed me that things are even worse than I realized with regard to the business of design. Instead of summarizing it here, I'm just going to point you to the original content. It's in multiple parts and I recommend all of them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• <span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); color: black; font-size: small; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/4/7/fall-of-the-designer-part-i-fashionable-nonsense" target="_blank">Fall of the Designer Part I: Fashionable Nonsense</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• <span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); color: black; font-size: small; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/4/14/fall-of-the-designer-part-ii-pixel-pushers" target="_blank">Fall of the Designer Part II: Pixel Pushers</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• <span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); color: black; font-size: small; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.elischiff.com/2015/4/21/fall-of-the-designer-part-iii-responsive-design" target="_blank">Fall of the Designer Part III: Conformist Responsive Design</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• <span style="color: black; font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/4/28/fall-of-the-designer-part-iv-credible-threats" target="_blank">Fall of the Designer Part IV: Credible Threats</a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">• <span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); color: black; font-size: small; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.elischiff.com/blog/2015/5/5/fall-of-the-designer-part-v-self-flagellation" target="_blank">Fall of the Designer Part V: Self-flagellation</a></span></span></div>
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dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-20933596015310615892016-07-20T08:04:00.003-07:002017-04-07T15:59:13.527-07:00Apple's continued success, despite lousy product design<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">"</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0);"><a href="http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/16/07/19/apple-brand-power-climbing-holds-lead-over-all-tech-firms-survey-finds" target="_blank">Apple brand power climbing, holds lead over all tech firms, survey finds</a>"</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Surveys and articles like this continue to make it look like focusing on low-effort consumer product (even to the detriment of content creator markets) and ugly, research-defying design is working out <i>just fine</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Maybe myself and my fellow "believers in actual UI research" really are just a tiny minority, doomed to suffer the tyranny of fads and apathy (rather than everyone getting the benefits of informed design). If the majority doesn't give a damn about readability and functional elegance, then no serious loss of money to companies still pushing hard-to-read, flaky, flat junk that requires less investment to produce.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Did the industry wean people off quality design, or would consumers have embraced iOS 7 just as strongly in 2007 as they embraced iOS 1?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Back to design as a visual thing... We have the cult of "geek chic". These are the tech people who support technology because it's new, not because it's actually great. These are the people that pursue change, for the sake of change, as if a new presentation is equal to a revolution. The easiest way to promote a technology as new is to change its appearance. Very little engineering required for a quick bump in consumer attention. Microsoft has made an art out of changing the package design and offering the same product with little functional improvement (over a couple of decades, actual improvement is certainly notable, but not as much as it would appear on the surface).</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Trying to explain the irrationality of it is like trying to explain the placebo effect to people who are unwilling to learn the reasoning and process for the scientific method, while they swear that homeopathy has made them feel better. Yet, tech people... supposed to be more scientific... Aargh. Myths!!</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Fads don't stay new, but belief is very difficult to shake. The human brain seems wired to reject data that contradicts belief. So the decades of data rot away in boxes while the fads cycle on. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The weaning notion has historical precedent: the computer industry has a long history of forcing difficult-to-use gadgetry onto a populous by there being no alternative to clunky tools to do new things (however painfully). The society adapts and becomes normalized to bugs, EULAs, and generally terrible design because not having the tool is more undesirable than the discomfort of actually using it. The businesses and people who get a leg up over their competitors who refuse bad design speaks volumes in capitalism: "use this crap or perish". </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 2007, the iPhone was the alternative to the miserable, yet standard, computer industry junk. Mac OS was, at the time, not taking the industry by storm, but was continuing to slowly erode the Microsoft dominance of the 90s. Along came iPhone, shocking the world into realizing tech sucked, because this new, easy-to-use (and beautifully designed) OS and hardware made the Internet a truly accessible resource for all (who could afford to buy one; interestingly, a huge number of people found a way to afford one). No geek cred was required.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now that the competitors have caught up (mostly by aping Apple's researched design choices), there's no further need to continue to cater to ease of use; the pushing and shoving can resume. With Apple's design language now seemingly adopted (surface features only) by everyone (even used to create "geek chic" glitter on non-technology product marketing), Apple apparently wanted to differentiate itself again.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It did that by... Trashing everything it had already done, design-wise, and adopting a fad already in progress thanks to the competitors that Apple had recently seriously bloodied. From desperation and arrogance come bad decisions. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This isn't just about appearance; functional design is a critical part of design. Steve Jobs refused to take any blame for customers "holding it wrong", but the design was flawed and Apple gave free cases to correct the signal attenuation caused by ... holding the phone. Now the antennas are placed differently (but we still need cases; see below).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After Jobs, Apple made phones so large (and so thin) that one-handed operation is uncomfortable or even impossible for some people. Apple didn't give consumers a 4" option again until a few generations of awkward product. It was a purely MBA-expert-driven choice to sell larger phones, despite ergonomics showing that larger was not better. Stemming the media abuse (and consumer self-abuse to buy as large a phone as possible from google partners) by making a larger phone was sensible. Making it the only option was not. Oh there were options: too large and much too large.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Apple finally released a new 4" phone, after storms of criticism. "Surprise! 4-inch phones are selling well!" becomes the new news.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back to the software: Apple has soiled ease of use with lousy visual design. It irritates me to no end. However, it would be <i>tolerable</i> if the tools did what they are <i>supposed</i> to do, <i>reliably</i>. They don't.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Apple has introduced countless behavioral problems into the product lines, starting in the iOS 7 era (late 2013). There was apparently a lot of UI code that needed to be rewritten to change the UI so dramatically. We've not seen the end of that even today with the final revision of iOS 9.3 (July 2016). It's not just the visual glitches, and it's not just on iOS. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There have been several cases of feature regression in Mac software. Final Cut Pro being a well publicized case, I'll leave you to google to learn more about that. Less publicized was the damage done to iWork.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Getting iWork to run on iOS seems to have required totally new software. The apps on iOS are feature incomplete. Instead of making them have feature parity with the more mature and robust Mac OS versions, Apple chose the course of back-porting the iOS versions of iWork to the Mac. They now have feature parity, because the stronger offering on the Mac was crippled to match the iOS version. Could Apple not make them both just as functional as Mac OS iWork was in the '09 edition? Absolutely, but that requires developer attention (money). With a limited number of developers at Apple, any attention expended on iWork is less attention spent on getting the next iOS release onto the market, and the next iteration of pushing customers to buy a new device. iWork languishes. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Its dedicated users have either refused to upgrade (including avoiding upgrading their OS or computer) or abandoned it for Microsoft's Office suite (and some who did the latter have moved to Windows... or <i>back</i> to Windows). Apple's response? Promote Microsoft Office.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then there's iCloud. The iCloud feature bullet points are mounting, and a lot of those features are ideologically sound (shared clipboard being the best example to come from the WWDC 2016 announcements), but the execution is inconsistent and the results are unreliable. I continue to get duplicate Notes for no user-caused reason. Notes were one of the earliest features of iCloud synchronization, yet this still happens. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Worse is that my devices aren't all communicating equally with reminders. The alerts for To-Do lists items appear on all three of my supported devices, due to each device running the necessary service locally. Marking them as complete, however, is a different story. If I mark an item as complete on the iPhone, the iPad Pro shows it as overdue. The reverse also occurs. Which device has "the truth" is inconsistent, but it's usually the one where I made the change. The same goes for deleting items. I found that I can force the laggy device to go ask iCloud by entering the iCloud settings and viewing my account (it triggers a login request and the login forces a data synchronization).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We shouldn't be required to figure out workarounds. It should just work. That's Apple's old mantra. Workarounds are Microsoft territory. Didn't we Apple users become Apple users to avoid that crap? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why is it like this? Money. It costs less, and makes more profit, to move on to the next product ASAP, rather than make the existing one work correctly. The computer industry has successfully trained consumers to believe that bugs are an inevitable and unavoidable necessity of computing. This is a meme and a lie, not a fact. Properly executed, software can be made reliable enough that problems are very rare. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The most serious issue with this isn't in minor annoyances. It's in the back-end of iCloud. If these synch problems are never fully worked out, why do we trust Apple with our data in the first place?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Apple today has the corporate culture of most huge businesses: admit no failing. That was Steve Jobs' thing: admit to mistakes by blaming the engineers working for him (except he was apparently so married to the design of iPhone 4 that he chose to blame the customers instead; proof that he was no technology god). It was mostly in-house, but it always seemed to leak to the media (no such stories with Apple's current leadership; which begs the question: does Apple leadership pay attention to its products or are they just mindless consumers themselves?). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe the engineers were only following Jobs' lead. Maybe they "didn't get it". Either way, it was a pressure relief valve for avoiding getting stuck in the sunken cost fallacy (the current visual design of iOS). The poor Apple Newton finally got it mostly right at the end, but Jobs killed it because the damage had long been done and Apple was still losing face (and money, so the official story goes).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Who at Apple has the authority and the wisdom to do the same with the current design and execution trends?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is one of the oldest tricks in the book of capitalism: redesign the packaging, catch market attention again... until people get used to it and you have to do it again to illicit the same spike in attention, again. Repeat chorus. Psychological studies have already noted this as a side-effect in efficiency experiments in industry: so long as the subjects are aware of a change being made, they behave differently, because they think they should. Their changed behavior drops off after a while. That's when you should measure results, no earlier.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When people respond to new package design, the managers who demanded it say "see, I told you that new design was better". No. It is just different. In fact, it might be much worse, but if you're not going to stick around and do real studies, you'll be able to preserve your ignorance and ego.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So Apple changed the package design and the average consumer response was positive: "yay change!" The articles about the consequences of the design changes, written by educated experts in human interfacing, go ignored by Apple and Apple doubles down on the flat ugliness, bringing it to the Mac too.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It wouldn't be so bad if appearance was all there was to it, but major functionality deficits appeared with that new package design. It might not be a direct consequence. It might be coincidence that the visual design came at the same time as architectural changes that created all the problems. One way or another, the confluence sticks out as a concentrated failure of leadership.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I wonder: how long will it take for hipster geeks to get over their 2013-era boredom with detailed visual design, and get bored with the current obsession of flat, low contrast, featureless dullness? (they call this "clean", because every irrational fad needs a marketing term, just like music equipment fetishists use the term "warmth" to justify analog equipment and valves)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To call research-backed quality design "dated" is irrational and is an uneducated opinion; all such people care about is a sense of newness; a "fresh image". The seemingly logic-oriented technology geek community has many members subscribing to this illogical judgment.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hipster tech geeks. What an historically ironic concept.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This happens in all places of human occupation. My focus here is on the computer tech industry. It results in me talking about this behavior from that context. An automotive designer or a kitchen appliance designer might scream about the same problem in their own industries. A medical professional might scream about fad diets and unproven drugs getting undue credibility (and they do).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lording over all of the designers and scientists are the same people, though: the business administration "experts" (who are apparently just "mindless consumers" themselves). So long as the few at the top are prosperous, the rest of us will have no choice but to stay the course. Supporting current business trends are what keeps people employed (though, at lower wages, and with less demand for actual training and knowledge, because cheap employment is an obsession with MBA "experts" and shareholders, no matter how destructive to their society these obsessions are).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eventually, something disrupts the status quo. Apple itself is an impressive historical example. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Twice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We're waiting, Apple. Do you no longer have the people and leadership with the vision? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe someone else does. They just have to wait until the status quo becomes "old enough" (and painful enough) to upset it by moving a large portion of the market to something comparably more cozy and pretty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Until then, society will just continue along as if there's no dissenting opinion worth merit. Just like environmentalists have been screaming about our destruction of delicate natural support systems for ages... </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wow, human beings are stupid. </span></div>
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dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-17901449515660216862016-07-12T16:20:00.001-07:002016-09-01T19:04:31.116-07:00OS "upgrades" degrade performance<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Planned obsolescence. It's not a myth or a conspiracy theory. It is the basis upon which the computer industry makes money each fiscal year by selling you the same product repeatedly. Oh yes, many other industries do the same, but I'm going to talk about the one that is most relevant to me.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Each year, computer makers try to sell you the same thing you bought last year, <span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">with marginal increases in memory and CPU speeds. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Marginal change? What happened to that racing progress and Moore's law? </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's over. It's getting very hard to produce the kinds of gains seen through the 80s and 90s. Physics is a bitch. Well, not a bitch. It's just nature, and the way we build counting machines is running into physical limits.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So what incentive is there to buy merely marginally improved computers? To accommodate the bloating of software; most notably, the operating systems.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Have you noticed that Apple now provides their operating system upgrades for free? How nice of them. Then again, they sell hardware. It's in their best interest to pack in new features that inspire new hardware purchases. It is also in their best interests to make some of those features be available only to owners of new hardware. They're in business to make money, okay, fair enough. So we can just choose to stop buying new hardware for a while if we're strapped for cash, right?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, maybe. If you don't want the new features of the new OS versions that might slow down your existing hardware. But maybe they've promised you a bug fix that isn't going to be put in the existing version because they're working on the latest version. Maybe your existing laptop will die from heat-related materials fatigue.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Apple's previous generation Mac Pro became well regarded for being upgradable and providing many years of use without replacement. If certain components failed, they were often easily replaced or even upgraded with 3rd party product. Notice that doesn't happen any more?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Monolithic construction with glued-in batteries, soldered on memory and CPUs... Portability and design elegance explains it to a degree, but the obsession with thinness has become seemingly pathological at Apple. Disposable computers are not environmentally friendly, regardless of how many toxic materials you remove from their manufacture (and the elimination of lead worked for computer manufacturers because now consumers have to replace laptops dying from heat-related materials fatigue far sooner than ever before, and they won't be paying out to consumers for this design flaw).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What about the average consumer that never cared about modular, "upgradable" computers anyway? (and honestly, upgrading was never what it was cracked up to be; by the time you desired to improve CPU or memory, the rest of the market had abandoned your architecture and you were forced to buy a new system anyway). How does the industry incentivize the average consumer to buy their phone or laptop again when they're plenty content with what they already have? (contrary to popular geek opinion, it's not the end consumers screaming for features; it's mostly just the geeks and professionals, which currently make up a tiny fraction of Apple's customer base)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Giving them something for free! "Ooo free upgrade!"</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Making the OS free and convincing the user they're getting more functionality and convenience from that free OS upgrade gains emotional kudos from the user.</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> Letting them experience creeping performance losses over time, where the change is more of a slippery slope kind of thing, rather than a sudden shock, makes it much easier to inspire buying "a faster one" in a year or two. Otherwise, people would mostly just keep using what they have and Apple would only make rapid repeat product sales to the people that can't manage to keep a piece of glass intact longer than six months at a time.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Each new version of iOS is slower than its predecessor. Don't believe me? Go watch the video: </span><a href="http://bgr.com/2016/02/16/apple-ios-9-vs-ios-6-performance/" style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">http://bgr.com/2016/02/16/apple-ios-9-vs-ios-6-performance/</a></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The only reason I'm typing this on an iPhone 6s is because the number of apps (and websites) usable on my iPhone 4 with iOS 6 was approaching zero. Apple does not maintain Safari like an app on older iOS versions like they used to do with Safari on older Mac OS versions (another thing they've done to shorten the life of Mac OS versions is to stop supporting Safari on them). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Internet is no longer about HTML. Now it's about bloated pages with unnecessary scripting and popup advertising. Not only are web developers requiring features that Apple doesn't add to old versions of Safari, their pages are just plain bloated, so an old device with new feature support wasn't the answer either (no third party browser).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">iOS 7 would've degraded the usability of the phone beyond my tolerance threshold (and its an ugly mess; even uglier without translucency on older phones). I still use my iPhone 4 as a music player and for various abandoned apps. Every time I use it, I marvel at the beauty of the GUI design in iOS 6, which is utterly gone from iOS as of version 7. But this isn't about the ugliness of iOS 7-9. I've plenty of other posts about that. This is about performance and "upgrading". Each version of the OS is slower than its predecessor. This is fact.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Geeks will come pouring from the cracks of the Internet to justify this and proclaim me ignorant of basic geek cred knowledge. "There are hundreds of new features!" they'll shout. Yes, indeed, this is true. But who asked for those features and why do they have to cause degradation in places where they're not in use? Why does it make sense to consume CPU cycles (and battery) doing things that many users might never desire, to support features not being currently called to task? Why, for example, is the keyboard slower, app loading slower, etc., when the user is not calling on all those "hundreds of new features"? Poor software architecture, I propose, is the answer. Laziness, lack of skill or time isn't really the core problem, though. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Throughout my decades dealing with the computer industry, I've observed many tech geeks and developers promoting tolerance for bloating of software by declaring "buy a new computer!" Not all developers. There are plenty of programmers that are appalled by this, just as I'm not the only person screaming about flat design being horrible bullshit. But the excuses are out there in play and are very much the majority. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Your computer is older than god; buy a new one and stop bitching about the software that developers are making for you!"</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is entrenched dogma and it benefits the hardware makers. Why spend the time and money to optimize code in your own software when its degrading performance benefits your business by inspiring users to buy newer hardware from you?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The same performance degradation can be found in Mac OS. Snow Leopard boots within a few seconds on my MacBook Pro 5,5 (mid-2009). Mavericks booting is in a metric of minutes. The same difference can be seen with application startups and usage of Safari, and there's considerable latency and spinning beach ball activity on various tasks in Mavericks (yes, I upgraded the RAM to 8GB already). I'm okay with it when I've not used Snow Leopard for a while, but when I'm switching back to Mavericks from Snow Leopard, it's egregious. Mavericks is a decent OS all the same, and was what Lion and Mountain Lion failed to be. Hell, we even LOST features in Lion (Rosetta), so Lion should've been a speed boost, right? Ha ha ha... But still, the overall experience has suffered. Has the gain compensated for the loss? It doesn't feel that way, especially when the loss of Rosetta, and the acquisition of Logic 9 bugs with Mavericks keeps me in Snow Leopard most days. I'm not a Luddite. I'm just poor. If I had endless cash, I'd upgrade all the software and hardware that keeps me on Snow Leopard when I'm working on audio projects.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm pretty sure the features leading to this slowdown are related to iOS integration. Those are the major differences between promoted features of the two systems (the iOS integration stuff really started at Lion, but Lion and Mountain Lion were unfinished versions of Mavericks, IMO). El Capitan, which is less dramatically different in feature changes, isn't noticeably slower than Mavericks (but El Capitan's Safari bugs and ugliness keep me away).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's an end point not under my control. Mac OS Sierra looks like a useful, if underwhelming, addition of features, some of which interest me (shared clipboards). I won't be seeing it any time soon, though. Sierra has left my MacBook Pro 5,5 in the dust. I will not be able to upgrade. Whatever Apple added to it has either finally made even Apple embarrassed at the performance degradation... or they just want to stop supporting the hardware. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fair enough. The supposed benefit of limited hardware support is greater reliability and stability. However, the problem isn't the lack of support. It's the fact that a claimed supported system is severely degraded by "upgraded" software, and that it's progressively worse version after version. That's just performance, and not even including the PLETHORA of bugs and glitches. If they claim support of a machine, the performance should be equivalent. At the very least, there should be a warning supplied prior to the moment of upgrade that informs the user of this potentially undesirable result of an "upgrade", giving them informed consent before committing to an irreversible act. There is no such warning. Worse, Apple supplies propaganda to users of old systems that claim the opposite. My Mavericks system regularly gets unwanted popups declaring that I can "improve the performance of [my] computer" by upgrading to El Capitan. I've run El Capitan on this machine. That statement is a lie.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll fully admit, El Capitan runs well under the circumstances. Mavericks is running on an internal drive but my El Capitan test volume was an external USB2 drive. It ran rather well considering. But the Safari bugs were unacceptable. The loss of hardware support was unacceptable and there's no warning of this potential. It's left up to the user, some being more equipped to deal with this than others. Certainly the end users aren't. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What hardware losses? El Capitan added System Integrity Protection. SIP a good idea and I support it. However, it has the consequence of disabling many 3rd party drivers on many people's systems, and many developers of such hardware chose not to update their drivers (because they too wish to sell me the same thing a second, third, fourth time, despite the hardware in question still operating perfectly well with the supported drivers on the supported OS, which is itself another case of planned obsolescence). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The bloating of software cannot go on indefinitely. Moore's law has an end point and we've been standing very close to it for some time. CPU speeds have barely increased at all in many years. More memory is still forthcoming and will always be welcome (frankly, we ought to have solid state flat storage for all uses, not the continued separation of long term, short term, and virtual storage, but the tech still isn't quite there yet and it takes many software engineers seemingly forever to realize when an age-old "that's the way it's done" design needs to be swept aside... like shared libraries...). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More memory, however, will not solve the problem of wasted CPU cycles on activities the user knows nothing of (nor should they be expected to know). This results in serious slowdowns for, what amounts to, no good reason (from the perspective of the user). Perception and experience is what matters here, not technical excuses. However logical the explanations, they're just justifications for bad tool design that is serving an unethical capitalist gravy train. Capitalism should be an economy; a system of exchange. It should not be an antisocial institution that slowly destroys everything around itself (such as society) while consuming all available resources to make a few people super wealthy.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">How many cores can we cram into a CPU package before power usage and heat put a crimp on that line of "improvement"? With the way software is terribly optimized, and where multi threading is still not pervasively being utilized (and some tasks cannot be broken into threads to begin with), it seems to me that the constant bloat has an inevitable end point. Nothing is perpetual (and perpetual growth is usually cancer). </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At some point the industry will have to get off the gravy train and start optimizing code and offering fewer new features. They will have to find some other inspiration for selling the same thing to their customers again. In fact, the best feature I can imagine being offered right now is "optimized for speed and efficiency, with less storage space and memory consumption". </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Remember the last time Apple marketed that at us and it meant something?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That was Snow Leopard. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You know, the OS that made Mac OS a serious contender and resulted in many people ditching Windows (and their Windows software investment) to move to the Apple platform, alongside their amazing new iPhones with beautiful and <i><b>intuitive</b></i> GUI. Rumor has it that Snow Leopard was a nice bonus from optimizing Mac OS X enough to run it on the hardware that would become the iPhone. The birth of the iPhone may have given us the most efficient Mac OS ever. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's too bad that the rest of the iOS legacy is the abandonment of said optimization and maybe even the destruction of Mac OS itself.</span></div>
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dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-4730048121007986742016-07-12T13:29:00.004-07:002016-07-12T13:59:50.155-07:00iOS has become abysmal (bug video demonstrations)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Here is a playlist of <a href="https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVQFi5tAhOgeBCheLWnovZExMXFRhQnu-" target="_blank">iOS 9 bugs</a> that someone put together (thank you). I've reported some myself. Many months and iOS versions ago. Apple does nothing. iOS 7 broke so much stuff in iOS that the bug list never gets shrunken. The developers can't catch up while driven to add new features (many seemingly designed by marketing, so Apple can announce new versions every 9 months).<br />
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iOS 2-6 sold me on this device family, and iOS 7-9 have made me wish droid wasn't a total pile. So long as apple knows droid is worse, iOS can continue to become more bloated and buggy without losing much market share.<br />
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Share price is all that matters to the "masters of business administration" management and leadership at Apple. The board of directors is not there for the customer. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for a while, but I'm now fairly certain Tim Cook is not capable of being the kind of CEO that Jobs was. They're different people, surely, and I like Cook's public social politics, but Apple needs a strong visionary (hell, this whole fucking nightmare industry needs a strong visionary, and one that's not a fucking geek), not just a supply chain management genius. Jobs was an arrogant and abusive ass, but he also had a very strong and solid vision for the computer industry, with the forceful personality required to bully the board of directors and major shareholders into allowing the company to focus on product quality, where form resulted from function, rather than the current hipster Jony Ive flat/thin minimalist trend bullshit of function being sacrificed for form.<br />
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The look of the software is bad but the behavior is far worse. I can excuse bad visual style for something that works very well. I cannot excuse iOS today. Just try editing text on iOS on pages like blogger or many forums. If you cannot even rely on text selection working correctly on websites, why would you trust your data to be cared for by iCloud?<br />
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<a href="https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVQFi5tAhOgeBCheLWnovZExMXFRhQnu-">https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVQFi5tAhOgeBCheLWnovZExMXFRhQnu-</a><br />
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Edit: the bugs in the videos that I encounter most are the Safari page previews being wrong (same for task switching previews, which is not shown in the video) and the swipe-up control panel and swipe-down notification screen spontaneously failing to operate when the appropriate edges of the screen are swiped up or down.</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-23947679018310086882016-02-02T09:05:00.001-08:002016-02-02T09:05:09.469-08:00Why software sucks (and is there anything you can do about it??)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
If I was still into buying books that are merely tomes of rants or piles of salient facts that I <i>already</i> know, and therefore have only purchased them to throw at other people, I would buy this book:<br />
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<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=xGClBYqZHcoC&pg=PA160&lpg=PA160&dq=all+3d+software+sucks+-print&source=bl&ots=bvZBzfuDKB&sig=OSfiTsY7mJje-ZzZen4AzA74JSo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjYzLWyvNnKAhXIw4MKHTMSBRk4ChDoAQgfMAA#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">"Why software sucks, and what you can do about it"</a><br />
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The thing is, books like this aren't aimed at the people that need to learn these very important facts. The geeks that are writing code won't read it, would scoff at it in their ignorance (calling the author ignorant, because they don't know what they don't know and he <i>does</i>) and simply reject its lessons. This is why programmers need managers. Programmers come in all different flavors, some of which are even indistinguishable from regular human beings (meaning, they agree with my assessment of how horrific computers are). The problem is that the most extreme programmers, the ones that do incredible DSP code and 3D modeling/rendering packages, generally don't fit into that group (and are usually the ones responsible for the horrors, though marketing has a lot to do with this too). These kinds of programmers make neat tools with shitty GUIs and antagonistic user experiences. They also make for lousy support and service personnel.<br />
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The solution is to basically put project managers over these programmers. This is why commercial/proprietary software tends to have better user experience design and support, compared to the awfulness that is open source (because open source projects are composed of programmers beholden to no one, who do the work because they enjoy it, not because it pays their living wages). So if any of you readers (because I'm sure at least one person other than me has accidentally read something here) are project managers for software products, you should already understand everything in this book, and your only real excuse for shitty product is upper management and the marketing team wrecking all your great efforts...<br />
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Read any number of Google Books' excerpted pages from this book and you will learn multiple salient facts about why computers are shit... unless you're a programmer that thinks everyone thinks like you (or should think like you). Step one in correcting your distorted perspective is admitting you have this distorted perspective.</div>
dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-45767200557388115022016-01-21T13:14:00.001-08:002016-07-12T13:33:27.772-07:00Another great rant about Apple destroying design<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>"Minimalism in software is achieved by simplifying feature sets, not stripping away pixels. In software, affordances are everything. And all affordances are made of pixels. It’s not minimalism to rip away the very things your users need. It’s sadism.</i><i>THE DIRECTION OF IOS 7, 8 AND 9 IS SIMPLY WRONG.</i><i>This is not an aesthetic argument. It’s wrong based on 40+ years of computer-human interaction research. It’s wrong based on 30+ years of Apple HIG."</i></blockquote>
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Go read "<a href="http://cheerfulsw.com/2015/destroying-apples-legacy/">Destroying Apple’s Legacy...</a>"<br />
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PS: Hey Apple: WTF does text selection on websites suck unbelievable amounts of ass in iOS??</div>
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dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8087294487449959745.post-10397363873920418502015-12-26T06:02:00.001-08:002015-12-26T06:02:33.253-08:00When will today's web designers learn what toggling is?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
If, while I'm on your website, I click a script-controlled object pretending to be a menu, and it pops up another element pretending to be an open menu, it should go away again on another click. That's called "toggling" a state. It should NOT cover the entire page, obstructing other content forever until I finally reload the whole damned web page just to get rid of it. This is especially important when your elements pretending to be menus are opened by a mere mouse_over event, rather than a mouse_down event on a trigger object.<div>
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As a related point: your so-called "responsive design" might want to be responsive to the fact that I might be using a touch interface, rather than a mouse, and STOP with the useless rollover effects and, more importantly, dispense with the requirement of a rollover event as a trigger for functionality!<br /><div>
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Please insert $50.</div>
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dysamoriahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10297987530825303618noreply@blogger.com0