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A few nights ago I was watching The Closer — one of my very favorite shows — and during a crucial scene in which the Major Crimes squad is closing in on tracking down two suspects, one officer after another comes into the Chief’s office to deliver a new piece of information. One member of the squad, Lt. Tao, is the tech geek of the group. His bit of information was that he’d located the address of the suspects and had a picture of the location on his phone.
On your PHONE? Someone asked with far, far too much emphasis.
Yes, on his phone. Tao proceeds to flip the screen up and, oh, look at that, a T-Mobile G1. If I wasn’t aware that this phone was called a G1, a shot of the back of it revealed G1 in huge white letters on the back of the screen. (I don’t think that exists in actual, real-life models of said phone. I could be wrong.)
There is some more waving the phone around. Chief Johnson wants to see this picture of the address (provided by Google Maps/Google Street View) for herself. She grabs at the phone, but Tao says, “Let me e-mail it to you.”
I think at this point someone actually exclaimed, again far too emphatically: E-MAIL!?
Yes, show, we get it. The G1 is a marvel. You can see maps on it and it can send e-mail. Woo.
I don’t usually mind product placement. I don’t know if most people even register the model of the laptops and other computer equipment TV people use. I do, usually because I find it funny or I’m scoffing. But man, this was a bit beyond.
So anyway, just so you know, the fake LAPD Major Crimes Squad prefers the T-Mobile G1 for finding pictures of suspects’ houses. And E-MAIL!?
I shall not be buying an Amazon Kindle because I don’t need a device that’s controlled by outside parties. Also, DRM sucks.
I shall not be buying an iPhone because I dislike paying gobs of money for crappy service. I’ll pay a pittance for my crappy service, thank you.
I shall not be buying this Kingston $900 flash drive… yet. When it’s $100 I’m all over that.
Okay, I needed a third thing and that’s all I got.
Found this article via the SammyNetbook blog about a large percentage of netbook owners who find themselves unhappy with their purchase. Jez wonders if this is because people don’t understand that netbooks don’t make great laptop replacements. or, I should say, primary laptop replacements. I’m sure if we polled the dissatisfied we’d find that they were slightly to massively ignorant about what netbooks are for and can do.
When I bought my first netbook I wanted to use it for very specific tasks and it fulfilled its function perfectly. I sometimes tax my NC10 a bit more than I should, but that’s more because I end up doing too much at once instead of concentrating on my most important tasks. Still, I’ve never found myself unhappy.
One could say that I’m an over-informed consumer, so of course I’m not going to be disappointed. Still, every consumer should be informed. They should know how netbooks differ from notebooks, their limitations, and which netbook will give them the best experience. However, I know this is not often the way consumers approach buying electronics.
I wonder what the return rate is on laptops in general…?
A couple of days ago Brad at Liliputing talked about how netbooks are a better platform for touchscreens than regular laptops. I agree that the future of touch is probably going to be pioneered by netbooks, but that future won’t be exciting until software makers step up their game.
I don’t know if it’s an issue on the hardware or software side, but I suspect it’s more software side, especially considering the capabilities we’ve seen in touchscreen smartphones like the the iPod. Every time I’ve ever used a touch notebook I’ve found it nice, but limited. Yes, I can hand write text into documents, but I haven’t seen a program that allows me to draw on or create notes in the margin of documents like I can with a pen and paper. This may exist and I’ve missed it, but I feel like something of that nature should come standard with every touchscreen computer. It’s a basic need from my perspective.
Beyond that, I’ve not been bown away with any touch software ideas or concepts. Why bother having a touchcreen at all if it just means that you can write in small, yellow boxes that have to be cleared periodically, anyway?
Before touch can blow up on any laptop format, someone has to make touchscreens worth having. The iPhone did, and it rode on the coattails of other smartphones and PDAs that tentatively pushed the touch envelope before it came along. For once I feel like Apple’s insistence on controlling both software and hardware was the right move.
I just saw a commercial for the iPhone 3G S that “does some pretty incredible things.” Things like Copying and Pasting. WOW. Where has this technology been all of my life? Oh wait, on every computer I’ve had since I was 10…
Apple, please.
I realize that copy/paste is a new feature on the iPhone, but it’s not an “incredible” thing, it’s a thing that should have been included in the original iPhone. It’s not a complicated process, it’s a basic process. You can’t make people forget that it’s a basic function of most computers and smart phones by producing commercials like this. It will only make you look silly.
How about a commercial that says: Finally, we’ve added copy/paste to the iPhone since we knew you wanted it!
I’m sure the next commercial will be: The new iPhone will wow you with it’s ability to call any number in the U.S.! Wowee!
The iPhone and the iPod Touch are NOT netbooks and they also cannot compete with netbooks yet. Sure, if you made them with 9-ich screens you could maybe make a case for it. But right now, you just sound like crazy people with all your talk of “junky hardware” and “cramped keyboards”. Your insistence that an iPhone can do everything a netbook can do is just plain silly. I can’t write a novel on an iPhone — well, not without driving myself crazy and posibly going blind — I can write a novel on my NC10. And I am.
Really, now. Every quarter you just make me lose confidence in your sanity over there.
I love open source and free software, I really do. I dream of a world in which I no longer have to deal with the likes of Microsoft Office and instead blissfully use OpenOffice all the live long day. Heck, if I could leave behind the Microsoft OS completely forever and ever, I would. I long to ditch Photoshop for a fully-featured and free open source replacement every time I see the price tag.
However, I feel that these blissful days are a long way away. Because even though programs like the OpenOffice suite and GIMP emulate the non-free programs in broadstrokes, it’s always some small, seemingly marginal function that’s missing or doesn’t work as well that puts me right off. I find myself even angrier, because I want to shake the open source community and scream “Why do you tempt me with a brave new world and then smack me in the face?!”
For example: OpenOffice Writer. In many ways the parallel of MS Word. I can create and format documents just the same in both programs as far as I know. When I’m doing basic to intermediate tasks, Writer serves me well.
But then.
I want to do something that is really easy to do in MS Word: find paragraph marks and replace them with two sequential paragraph marks, thereby inserting a line between every paragraph. This is especially useful when posting things to blogging software. In plain text mode, two line breaks means insert a p tag.
In MS Word, it’s very easy and quick to do this. You click Find & Replace and, if you don’t know the code for “paragraph mark” by heart (it’s ^p) then you click More>> and you’ll see a dropdown for special characters — paragraph marks, tabs, em dashes, a whole long list. If you want to insert two breaks, you put ^p in find and ^p^p in replace. Simple, easy.
Not so with OpenOffice. Not only is there no helpful dropdown in the Find & Replace window, the method for doing the operation I described above is completely counter-intuitive and flawed. After over an hour searching I was able to learn a bit about Regular Expressions and how they applied to the Find & Replace process. In order to get something approximating the simple process of finding one paragraph break and replacing it with two, I had to look through 7 web pages and I still did not find a method that produced completely satisfactory results.
And forget about doing my other oft-used Find & Replace maneuver: find all text formatted a certain way (ex: italicized) and put certain text or characters on either side of said formatted text (like HTML code). This is another fairly simple process in MS Word. I spent 3 hours trying to find a way to do this in OpenOffice one day. I gave up.
Another aspect of OpenOffice that bugs a lot of users (though not so much me) is the inability to have a “normal” page view. Not the Print Layout or the Web Layout, just straight text all the way down with a little dotted line indicating the page break. MS Word has this and OpenOffice users have been clamoring for it since 2001, apparently. And yet there is no satisfaction. Sad.
This kind of thing means that I can never use OpenOffice as my primary office suite. I will continue to need Word. I don’t want to need Word! And I should not need to take a course in programming in order to do really simple tasks.
I could spend another 1000 words talking about the problems I have with GIMP over Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro 6. I feel like every intermediate or advanced function of GIMP takes more steps or requires more hunting than is necessary for an image program. And having the tool menu in a separate window from the window with the image is maddening. Every time I have to use GIMP to do something as simple as crop then resize an image my blood pressure rises.
Take those frustrations with individual programs and apply them to a whole operating system – yeah, I’m looking at you, Linux. As Laptop Magazine commenter Gary Reaves so elegantly put it:
How would you like to own a toaster that requires you to design a timing circuit switch every time you want a piece of toast? Try marketing that to consumers. That’s basically what Linux Distros are all about…
Most problems don’t quite reach the timing circuit design level of complication. Still, any time a simple function or feature isn’t there or requires a lot of work and research to do, users are going to be unhappy. Heck, even non-free/open source software and operating systems run into this problem. Windows Vista, anyone? How about Office 2007? (That travesty of an office suite has kept me using Office XP for almost a decade now.) But Microsoft is the dominant force here. They can afford to pull crap like this (somewhat).
If open source software wants to play with the big boys, the programmers need to step up their game. It’s not the broad strokes of functionality that are going to make or break you with consumers, it’s the little things.
I recently had to switch web hosts, something I really, really hate doing. It’s usually a hassle and things usually go wrong and, most importantly, I hate feeling like I made a dumb choice of hosts to begin with.
I was in this same position last year. I’d been with one host (American Web Hosting) for several years. I’d been happy with them for a lot of those years. But in that last 12 months I was with them there was a slew of problems. My site would go down randomly, my email wouldn’t work, the server I was on got blacklisted so my email wouldn’t even get to the folks I tried to contact. It was a mess. Plus, I was tired of having little space, limited sub-domains, and no ability for add-on domains at a non-crazy price.
When I went looking for a new host I did some research. I looked at rating sites and asked friends for advice. Many people suggested Dreamhost, but I kept seeing so many others having issues with them. One host kept popping up with high ratings: Lunarpages. Lots of space (unlimited!) lots of bandwidth (more unlimited!), as many sub-domains as I wanted and add-on domains included. For a not bad price, either. I signed up, paid a full year in advance, and was generally happy.
Then about 3 months ago something weird happened — I got an email from Lunarpages saying they’d disabled one of my scripts (actually the index.php file on a WordPress blog I had), claiming that it was taking up too much CPU on the server. Like 85%. The day before I’d installed a new plugin and I figured that must have triggered something odd. I disabled the plugin and asked to have my index page restored — it took them 2 days to do so.
A couple of weeks later I recommended Lunarpages to someone. They Googled and found this page right away: Lunarpages sucks.
Oh crap.
I was alarmed because the situation described on that page matched what I’d gone through, just my scale was smaller. I started to worry because If LP was just making up this stuff about my index page actually causing some problem in order to upsell me and continue to do so until I bought a way expensive package, I was not down with that. But as I was still half convinced that the plugin had been the real culprit I decided to stay on with LP.
Big. Mistake.
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I thought it might be a good idea to have a WordPress-driven website to house my clips and resume and stuff. But once you start in with WP you just end up with a blog no matter what you do.
I’ve set up dozens of WP blogs in the past few years and I am happy to say it does get easier with time. But there are still things that trip me up every time. And WordPress 2.7 is detrmined to make things slightly more complicated than they need to be.
Also: plugins. When plugins break it makes the baby Jesus cry, people.
