Window-based task management is "Windows", App-based task management is "Metro".
We spent the last 25 years of computer history teaching both the users and the computers how to multitask, only for the most recent user designers to try their damnedest to take it away from us.
App-based task management is also pre-CS5 Photoshop on OSX. Programs which have multiple windows per document need those windows brought to the front together.
This fact is why newspapers are dead, and online content continues to blossom. In the information age, there's absolutely no excuse for the content they produce to cost $1500/year per subscription.
In fact, that's where we hit the real problem: the kind of content that is covered with advertisements is usually not very good content to begin with.
This is especially true of content aggregators and meta sites such as Reddit and to some extent, this website. The content isn't even theirs: they are simply hosting a discussion forum about the content. A new-agey one instead of the old BB sites, but it's nonetheless exactly the same.
What content providers should be learning is that people are willing to pay for good content. Quality absolutely matters. The 90s and 00s were all about quantity, but now we're up to the rafters with disposable content. Look at the shows with the best ratings today: Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. Exceptional content quality, heavily pirated because the content creators have failed to adapt to new media distribution. The fact that I can torrent GoT more easily than I can view it from HBO is tragic.
There absolutely is a reason why it's expensive. In fact, I could easily make a case that as a society we'd be better off if more money was invested in creating quality content.
Believe it or not, the subscription costs usually only cover the delivery and printing fees. Historically, subscription revenue has never been a real profit center because it's always been the best interest of a publication to build a larger circulation to increase ad rates.
Now, the internet has brought certain efficiencies to what it costs to distribute content. But it hasn't necessarily impacted what it costs to create quality content. With ad rates being lower online than they are in really any other medium, ad revenue isn't supporting the creation of quality content like it used to.
While Game of Thrones exists on a no commercial network, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and many more of your favorite cable television shows rely on both ad revenue and subscription revenue to exist. HBO has a cost north of $15 per month depending on your cable network, whereas AMC (which runs commercials) costs about 27 cents in your bundled cable package which is about 2% of the cost of HBO. That's a colossal difference and yes, advertisers, are subsidizing that dramatic cost differential.
I'm trying to learn more about this issue. Could you elaborate on the evidence for people willing to pay for good content? I know almost no one who pays for TV a la carte through iTunes or Amazon.
I also don't understand why Game of Thrones supports your argument. Of course the shows that are pirated the most will be the ones that are (1) popular and (2) expensive or hard to access. And of course if those shows were cheaper they'd be pirated less. But I don't see how that relates to the idea that people are willing to pay for good content. My roommates pirate GoT, but I am skeptical they'd pay even if it was available for $4.99 an episode.
I have a Netflix connection and I am in Finland. 98% of the time, when I search for a movie/documentary/series on Netflix, it's unavailable for streaming (mostly because the content for Netflix Finland is far less than that for US). Then, I have to head over to PirateBay to get the stuff. It's the fastest way. I could order a DVD from Amazon UK or Germany, but then it would take at least a week.
As long as content producers and distributors fail to find a faster way to distribute their offerings, I think piracy will continue and grow.
Startup idea: A for pay private tracker with deals with the media industry.
You could track seeds, peers, etc, and pay the media companies a license per peer (whatever). Could probably get a good picture of piracy of each piece of content as well.
Oh man. I'd pay $20 an episode if they had readily available. Even $50 if it had subtitles. I hate waiting, even a hour to download and crossing my fingers the quality is good.
> I know almost no one who pays for TV a la carte through iTunes or Amazon.
You now know of me. I spend around $50/month downloading content from Amazon, be it music or tv. I would buy Game of Thrones as it came out if I could, but I can't.
Absence of evidence isn't the evidence of absence. Especially if you've done no investigation.
>I am skeptical they'd pay even if it was available for $4.99 an episode.
$5 might be a bit steep for some, $2-3 is just about perfect. But honestly I'd still pay $5 for content created at this level, if not just to encourage the people creating this quality of content to keep doing it.
Your skepticism is powered by your lack of knowledge and research. Do the work, then come back and comment.
Actually, this is an issue I'm trying to research and understand better which is why I asked you my questions. Sorry if I offended you.
One thing I did try to find before asking you was data on the size of the a la carte TV/movie market. Anecdotally I know no one who buys TV shows (probably because I'm poor and tech savvy), but I thought I might be able to find comprehensive data to change my beliefs. Unfortunately my Google Fu was not good enough to find anything. I thought you might have a source you could share with me.
(To be honest, I think your response was rude and I feel a little hurt. But it's ok.)
Edit: In hindsight, some of the fault was mine. Of course there are people willing to pay at every price (that is the idea behind a demand curve). I guess what I'm really getting at is what are the best estimates of the shape of the demand curve. Would HBO make more money if they made GoT more accessible/cheaper? Is there evidence that a $2-$3 price point would be better than $5 price point? What are the price elasticities of demand? I guess I kind of wrapped up those more subtle questions into the question of people being willing to pay for content.
Game of Thrones is available on both iTunes and Amazon Instant Video for $2.99 SD / $3.99 HD per episode. I'm not sure if that counts as "failing to adapt to new media distribution".
Infinite scrolling like this works pretty well if you want to do scrolling for, say, search results.
It's all around horrible for something like Twitter, IMO.
The problem with Twitter is that it's conversational, and it's showing the newest part of the conversation at the top. So instead of having a nice conversation history:
Hi!
Hello to you good sir.
How are you doing today.
I'm fine.
You get:
I'm fine.
How are you today?
Hello to you good sir.
Hi!
...and you lose the navigation state, so it's impossible to tell where you were at last on Twitter except by memory.
Twitter already fixed this in iOS (you always apparead where you left so you read everything in order), is just taking them a while to fix it in the browser.
This is non-news for most hackers, but is actually surprising to people outside of the industry. The atlantic has a wide readership. A lot of people are having trouble finding any work. They'd be surprised that some people would find 30 job offers irritating.
Whole program optimization is really the killer feature for static linking today. It's possible with dynamic linking, but a static compiler can really go to town shedding weight since lots of libraries have common code structures (see every sufficiently complex C library and its own implementations of various data structures).
> you most certainly do not "cut down on file load time."
Surely you must be joking eekee.
I know SSDs have made us all forget, but Disks (you know, those spinning piles of rust that most of us still have in computers to permanently store our bits on) are incredibly, painfully slow. Average times for any action on a disk are in milliseconds. That's millions of computational cycles.
I'm sure someone could invent a system where the dynamic linking process is slower than loading a static executable from a disk, but I've yet to find it. I'm also certain that our assumption that dynamic linking is always the way to go will be more and more challenged by the speed of SSDs, which are becoming much closer to RAM in speeds every day. But for today... no way.
> Sigh, another string library. And this is the reason why I prefer C++ over C. You don't end up writing another string library for the 300th time.
You say that, and yet every C++ project I've ever touched in my life has had its own string class with various levels of horror attached. My favorite was the one that stored everything internally as 32-bit characters to be Unicode safe, and was never used in a codebase that had to deal with Unicode.
> I find it humorous that Tiger Direct and Newegg are promoting Bitcoin mining with GPUS.
Why wouldn't they? They both sell GPUs and have a large backlog of them. Somebody who isn't knowledgeable enough about the topic and wants to get in on the latest fad is likely to see that ad and jump on it.
If I sold video cards for a living I'd be pushing them just as hard as I could too. "Bitcoin mining, OpenCL, desktop virtualization, they can do it all, come buy your video cards from me and not the other guy!"
We spent the last 25 years of computer history teaching both the users and the computers how to multitask, only for the most recent user designers to try their damnedest to take it away from us.