Windows 8 productivity: Who moved my cheese? Oh, there it is. - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Windows8ProductivityWhoMovedMyCheeseOhThereItIs.aspx <comment><USER5> > Here's another __crazy idea __for shutting down your PC or Laptop - <USER2> > the Power Button __.

You can thank Windows for this. Back in the day when we went from DOS to Windows, this notion of a "proper shutdown" was introduced, and God forbid you press the power button, or bad things would happen.

I'm not positive Windows was the first to do this, but I think it's safe to say it was the one that started this habit for most people.

And now, it has became so engraved in our brain that it's nearly impossible to un-train. I to this day _never_ use the power button on any device to shut it down out of uncertainty that I don't know what will happen[1] if I do.

[1][http://www.aeropause.com/wordpress/archives/images/2008/11/a...](http://www.aeropause.com/wordpress/archives/images/2008/11/accf- resetti.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Was that an actual 'closes circuit when depressed' button or was it a switch? Either way, flipping a power switch unexpectedly is bad. Lots of video game consoles had power switches. You shouldn't flip the power switch on a modern computer either. But giving the power _button_ a press is safe in every single device I own or am aware of.

<comment><USER7> I think ATX changed from a switch to a button, and ACPI added OS support for intercepting it.

<comment><USER8> Before ACPI there was APM that allowed catching it as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > There's a bunch of folks who have said that you have to "swipe up" or "slide > away" from the Login or Lock screen to log in. Some websites have even > suggested you disable the lock screen. That is stupid and wrong _cough_ > NBCNews _cough_ and you shouldn't turn off the lock screen. Just press any > key. Or just start typing. Or click the mouse. Or ANYTHING. You don't have > to "swipe up" to log in just click or press anything.

What happened to affordances? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance>

All these people aren't stupid. They're coming up with these crazy ideas because they don't know what else to do.

One task of good design is to make it obvious what I _can_ do and how I can do it. No one likes to discover, 3 months later, that you could do a 3 finger pinch with a middle finger wiggle gesture to do what you wanted. I shouldn't have to sit there and try all the combos of what I can do.

<comment><USER10> In older versions of Windows 8, swiping up was indeed necessary. And, in fact, there was an affordance (of sorts) to let you know that that was what you were supposed to do: if you did anything that was not a swipe-up, the screen bounced up slightly, revealing a little bit of the login screen underneath. After seeing that, it was a little more obvious what to do.

Now, obviously that was still a pain in the ass and Microsoft wisely axed that requirement for mouse-based computers. Now I think things are much better -- yes, there is no affordance telling you what to do, but if you do literally _anything_, then you get what you wanted. That's not too bad.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's had the "do anything" behavior since the Consumer Preview back in February.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice to see someone thinking constructively about W8. Too many people have just been nit-picking, and I think failing to see what W8 represents: a radical first-step in a long-overdue next step in the evolution of computer UIs. People like us should be applauding Microsoft for their audacity, not obsessing over the details. Change is always complicated. W8 is just one step, one which Microsoft will continue to evolve. People complained when DOS was being replaced by Windows right?

It had to happen eventually. Windows 7 and OS X 10.8 are really nothing more than highly-polished iterations of the basic WIMP GUI. Apple has done nice work with iOS but seems loathe to rethink OS X beyond tossing in a few multitouch gestures. Enough has changed in computing technology, from processor power to network connectivity to interface technologies to the whole suite of activities people use computers for, that WIMP is really starting to show its age. And even more will change over the next 20 years - we should prepare ourselves for departures even more radical than W8. The WIMP desktop isn't the pinnacle for UI evolution. At least, let's hope it isn't! It is pretty clunky.

Microsoft, now in the weaker position to Apple, is the company to usher in that shift. We should be glad we have a Microsoft in 2012.

<comment><USER12> Do you mind pointing out what radical first step Windows 8 is taking. The metro interface stikes me as an adaptation of smart phone interfaces, and the desktop is a minor change to the old desktop system.

<comment><USER11> (apologies for the long response)

I see W8 as a reaction to a new world of computing: more powerful computers, a proliferation of device formats, ubiquitous connectivity, a dissolving desktop-cloud barrier, pervasive social/identity services, mass-consumer computing, mostly for a whole emerging range of novel, non-traditional computer tasks.

The WIMP desktop is a legacy product from the days of computers as workstations and computer-users as skilled specialists. The desktop is very static and rigid. Windows only move when clicked and dragged, only change size when their edges are pulled. The desktop can become as cluttered as you want with multiple windows and desktop folders and icons. This made sense in 1995, but now computers are far more powerful, and graphical display techniques are better too. W8 is fluid and dynamic where WIMP is sluggish and static. Tap or click on a tile and a whole new screen flips up, filling the screen. Even compared to iOS, Metro is far more dynamic, mainly due to its radically simpler design language. The basic fonts and block colours of Metro can squish and stretch and dynamically resize in a way which is largely impossible with the carefully detailed chrome of iOS.

This fluidity also extends to the way the tasks flow into one another in the OS. Talking mostly from my experience with WP7, it's remarkable how wall-less the OS can be. The way you can move from a messaging thread to your messagee's contact card, simply by tapping their name, and seeing all their latest social activity on Facebook, is great. Ideally, Metro is wall-less - the opposite of iOS's carefully segregated app ghettos. The platonic Metro ideal is that all the parts of the OS flow seamlessly together (it remains to be seen how successfully Microsoft can pull this off - also this quite different model may be difficult for developers used to iOS to get their heads around and take full advantage of).

Furthermore, visually the Metro frontend is clearly the cleanest and simplest consumer OS ever. It's a massive decluttering effort to display only relevant info, and much much easier to understand than any previous OS. And Microsoft is aiming to make this design language uniform across phones, tablets and PCs, and their web presence. It has the most common net identity services baked in - and the whole platform is tied together with Windows ID, and all your files and info synced seamlessly across all of your Windows devices with Skydrive. So, for example, if I made an account on a W8 PC, it would prepare all of my contacts from Facebook and my calendar appointments because it knows me from my Windows phone. The aim as I understand it is radical flexibility - you can shift seamlessly from device to device and the environment is consistent throughout - it just works. Also part of the idea with Metro is to dissolve the web/desktop barrier - instead of just accessing web services through a browser and some dedicated programs (IM, torrent clients etc) and perhaps some desktop widgets, the web is baked in to the skeleton of the OS. Which makes sense.

Not sure if I'm explaining this well... As I said, it remains to be seen whether Microsoft makes good on this potential. I'm just trying to articulate what I think Metro represents, what I sense is possible here. And trying to do so without just sounding like Microsoft PR :)

It seems like maybe a lot of people are offended by W8 because it's too simple and potentially interferes with the quite complex workflows I assume average HN readers do with their computers. But for the average user, I think W8 is going to be great. Computers need to be democratised further - right now, the vast majority have almost no idea how to use WIMP. It's just too complex. OS X is just as bad - in some ways even worse than W7! The value of W8 will be through hiding 95% of the compexity of computers from the average user, while preserving the technical backend for more advanced users. Normal users get a massively more approachable experience, allowing them to think less and spend more time doing the stuff they really want to with their computers. Advanced users can still go deeper (unlike Apple, which seems intent on locking down their entire system at the expense of advanced desktop users - and without giving any real gains in useability to justify it!)

People forget, I think, that Microsoft focuses a lot on useability. Metro is the result of a lot of hard work thinking how to make computers more useable. Apple focuses on products that wow people. But from my experience with the iPad, it seems Apple thinks less about useability than people might expect (non-resizable thumb keyboard, I'm looking at you...)

I think W8 is best seen as a transition product, making the first steps away from the old WIMP desktop. So yeah, right now, they haven't tinkered with the old desktop much. But a split is forming: between the simple easy-to-use frontend of the OS and the technical backend. Expect this split to become more coherent in W9.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for writing this. This is perhaps the best summary I have seen to date, and I too hope it's the start of something great.

<comment><USER11> You're very welcome. I hope it delivers too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's good to see an article that focuses on more than the usual changes people obsess about in Windows 8.

These "not bad" changes in Windows 8 also underscore a recurring problem with software: people are forced to choose between "take the good and the bad" or "nothing", they can't just take the "good". Software updates are too big and bundled when the reality is that a lot of components could sensibly be upgraded by themselves.

Changes in Task Manager for instance could have been folded into any version of Windows to date, and if a few programmers had access to the right source code I'm sure they could have added this at least to XP. Yet they _can't_ , and Microsoft _won't_ , and users of any version other than 8 are kept from a perfectly sensible improvement.

Rather than charging $200 for an "upgrade", sometimes I think it would make a lot more sense if you could pay Microsoft $10 for the "new system utilities package" (which would update your Windows XP Task Manager alone, and whatever else falls into that category). In other words, don't restrict access to the truly useful upgrades just because no one wants Metro.

<comment><USER15> Best idea I've heard to date regarding Windows 8. I would pay to get the Win8 desktop improvements on Windows 7: task manager, file transfer dialog, file explorer ribbon, etc.

<comment><USER16> Explorer Ribbon is an improvement?

<comment><USER17> You have your workflow, he/she has theirs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Windows 8 is the Digg of OS. Complete redesign for no purpose at all.

And the fact they HAD a start menu interface until the final release (it was in the beta/candidates) is just a bigger insult.

W8 is actually usable once you add back in the start menu and have it go immediately to the desktop via a 3rd party program. Why microsoft didn't allow that option when they original did, is clear demonstration of them being obstinant.

Once again the lesson is - if you must change your product:

         1. change it gradually
         2. give an option for the old way

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't say for no purpose at all.

From my perspective there seems to be a very clear purpose: unifying the interface across platforms, which is one of the disadvantages they had when compared to Apple. With Windows 8, they will basically have the same UI for desktops, tablets and phones.

Even hotmail.com's look has been revamped into outlook.com; and not only that, but Microsoft went as far to even update their logo from 1987, to match their new tile approach.

Were all these changes necessary? Time will tell, but strategically it seems to make sense to unify the desktop experience (where they are dominant) to grow 2 of their new market segments: windows phone and tablet (surface).

<comment><USER18> Windows/Metro on mobile has terrible sales.

Why would they want to unify DOWN to that level?

It's crazy how much a lead Microsoft had with personal computers in the 80s and how far they've fallen. Once arm starts becoming powerful enough for desktops, Windows is pretty much done and the days of the wintel tax are over. We're almost there, give it about 3-4 years.

<comment><USER11> Did WP7 sell poorly because of its interface and styling - i.e. because the product itself was bad? Or did it sell poorly because iOS and Android are monoliths and MS was late to the smartphone game and - dare I say it - didn't put their full weight behind WP7 because maybe they had their eye on a more distant goal and maybe WP7 was just a warm-up for their full product-line revamp?

Do you really think Microsoft is so stupid that they would expect WP7 to become an instant runaway success against their competitors, without putting even a fraction of the necessary effort into pushing it? They're realistic about their products. How do you know that Microsoft didn't achieve all of its internal goals that it set for WP7? Visible market success is only one possible goal for a company as large as Microsoft, especially with a small and isolated product like WP7. And Microsoft has clearly been driving towards it Metro-revamp for a while now (Zune HD, WP7, W8). They're a big company after all and I'm sure they do analyse likely long-term trends in technology and make plans for how to navigate the future. WP7 is only one move in a long-term maneuver.

<comment><USER20> So true. I have a WP7 and love the hell out of it. I can't stand using my girlfriend's iPhone - it feels clunky and designed for an elementary school child. I have several friends and family that also love their WP7 dearly.

WP7 is a great OS. Unfortunately, it has been stigmatized and beat down because A) Microsoft B) Not Apple, and C) poor marketing/strategy

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been using Windows 8 for months (always upgrading to the latest version), and don't have any problems whatsoever. In fact, I'm certain the thing actually runs way faster than Win7.

This is because I've basically got everything configured like Windows 7 (I don't really use the Start screen), but the Win+(key) combination is what makes the difference.

Take a typical almost-every-day activity for instance: checking the weather report. On Win7 (unless you had things specially configured for this event), you'd have to go online via a browser, find a suitable website, and wait for results - quite possibly having to physically type in your location if the site couldn't get it automatically.

On Windows 8, I just press Windows + (the letters w e a) and the search instantly finds the Weather app - I've got it open in less than 0.3 seconds, and the app itself fetches the data in just a few seconds. This kind of stuff works straight out of the box, and wasn't possible on Win7. It shows that even desktop-only users like me can make at least >some< good use of the RT apps.

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure if you've tried OS X but it seems to me this feature is similar to the Dashboard which is a screen where widgets like weather, stock info etc are displayed. Activation is just a two finger swipe on the trackpad.

<comment><USER23> I can four-finger swipe, or move to my hot corner (or, more typically, F4) - what two finger swipe gets you dashboard?

(Note - I use Dashboard a dozens of times a day for one function - I have eleven international clocks running to help me keep track of what time it is when I'm IMing or SMSing one of my international colleagues.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The overall feeling of Windows has changed dramatically with 7 and now 8. Before it felt like a very enterprise and cold operating system. Now, it actually feels refreshing, futuristic, and dare I say hip? Great job to the Windows team for this amazing feat.

As for Windows 8 itself, I feel like the Task Manager alone is something worth upgrading for.

<comment><USER12> I had a very similar experience with Gnome3. After months of complaining about how they completely ruined the UI and all the other flames (enough to motivate me to switch to a tiling window manager), I logged into it to see what was going on, and it looked really cool, and seemed more productive than the old Gnome2.

I suspect I would have had a simmilar experience with Windows 8 if not for its horrid use of green, but that was an early developers preview, and I will be shocked if they haven't improved the cosmetics for the general release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm an avid Win+{Key} user, so I won't have problem adapting. My family, though ... I'm not so sure.

I'm a Windows developer, and I confess that I haven't tried Windows 8 yet. I'm usually eager to try new OS's and learn new things, but this time I'm not. I think it's a sense of dread about having to spent several hours learning an environment that just seems tedious.

<comment><USER26> I guess it's not really important. Many companies and consumers will stay for Windows 7 for a while and Windows 8 will enter the markets primarily via tablets. By the time Windows 8 SP1 or Windows 9 we'll see how that strategy worked out, and they'll probably tune the experience to make it an acceptable desktop operating system (either on real desktops or docked x86 tablets).

That said, I have used Windows 8 out of curiosity for some weeks (as a UNIX user since 1994), and I have to admit that I quite liked it. I didn't really use Metro, except for checking Facebook and Twitter every now and then. Of course, I am not a regular Windows user who has learnt usage patterns over the years, but I think there's also a lot of inertia.

<comment><USER27> Microsoft has a 90% desktop market share. How many new PC's are sold every year? Win8 sounds like a solid product so I think the adoption rate will be good. Is there really a really to ask for Win7 on a new PC after Win8 is released?

<comment><USER28> You've got a point.

I've been scouring the internet for an MSDN iso to go with the key. On certain ocean-theme based web sites I see people activating Windows 8 by the automated phone option. Assuming this is legitimate, is it a bug from Microsoft's side?

Strategically, since this represents a paradigm shift I can't help but have this sneaky suspicion that MS is going a bit lax on pirates. I mean, they _are_ trying your new PC OS, aren't they? Once you've got them converted, you can milk them in the future directly (when they buy Windows phones/tablets) or indirectly (when they recommend the entire Windows eco-system to their family/friends by bragging about how they got their copy and how awesome it is).

<comment><USER29> Why not just download the 90 day developer trial of the OS?

<comment><USER28> No. I have the key, but not the iso. As I understand from MS site there will be no way for me to convert it to a legit full copy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I love seeing useful keyboard shortcuts being added. I've always used various Window key shortcuts whenever I use Windows. I even use the context menu key. But I wish the Window key was more like the Cmd key in OS X. That is, I wish it was a modifier key that can be used in key combinations, and ideally have it be the primary modifier.

When you have 3 different modifier keys, this increases the number of key combinations exponentially vs 2. So take for example a cross platform IDE that is keyboard shortcut friendly, with lots of actions you can assign to keyboard shortcuts, like Eclipse. In the Windows version you only have shortcuts that can be a combination of Ctrl and Alt plus another key. With OS X (and Linux), you can have any combination of Ctrl, Alt, and Command plus another key, giving many more possibilities. I miss the lack of context menu key support in OS X, though.

As a UNIX/Emacs user, a side benefit of having Command as the primary modifier key in OS X, used for many of the typical actions, is that typical OS X keyboard shortcuts don't generally get in the way of UNIX/Emacs keyboard shortcuts, which use Ctrl and Alt as modifiers exclusively. I can use Emacs keyboard shortcuts right alongside OS X keyboard shortcuts in the same application (I'm accustomed to both; for example, I might paste with either Cmd-V or Ctrl-Y, depending on whether my right hand is on the home row or not). But I don't expect that most Windows users would benefit from that particular aspect. However, I think having an extra modifier key, available to applications, would benefit a good portion of Windows users.

<comment><USER31> > But I wish the Window key was more like the Cmd key in OS X. That is, I wish > it was a modifier key that can be used in key combinations, and ideally have > it be the primary modifier.

I disagree; the entire point of the Windows key is that it _isn't_ interpreted by applications. It provides instant keyboard-driven access to OS/shell functions (i.e. cross-application functions), and I love it.

Linux (really X Window and window managers, I suppose) could benefit from using that key in the same way; Ubuntu's Unity does so to a limited extent. Imagine having useful keyboard-driven system/window management that's guaranteed not to conflict with any of your applications. (If that already exists, someone please clue me in, I'm less familiar with Linux than I am with Windows.)

<comment><USER12> My experience with Linux is that the Windows key is used exclusively by window managers. Most of the mainstream window managers have windows-like keybindings, so they inherited the WM/app confilt from Windows.

If you explore some less mainstream WMs, you will see a completely diffent standard of key-binding, which uses the windows key in all of its commands.

For example, ALT+F4 would be WIN+SHIFT+C And ALT+TAB would be WIN+j

The only time I ran into a problem with an app conflicting with keybindings in this system was when I ran windows in a virtual machine, and my window manager kept thinking I was giving it commands when I used the windows key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Quoting from the article: "It's initially confusing but I have been using it every day all day since it was released and have got myself productive again." In other words, it's just like learning to use a _different_ OS!

<comment><USER11> So Microsoft should be condemned for, after 20 years or so of WIMP, trying something really new?

<comment><USER12> No, but they should follow the GNU/Linux model of desktop UIs: have them be a seperate program and allow the user to choose which one (s)he wants to log into, and allow the user to install one from a third party, as apposed to having it be an irreplacable part of the OS.

I believe (weakly) that OS X treats window managers the same way Linux does.

<comment><USER33> > No, but they should follow the GNU/Linux model of desktop UIs

Not to completely dismiss this but … have you noticed how much extra burden this places on developers and how this is almost always cited as one of the reasons why the OSS desktop experience isn't as good as OS X? There are many parts of the desktop experience which require more than cursory integration and that becomes a much harder problem to make generic and plugable.

<comment><USER12> > There are many parts of the desktop experience which require more than > cursory integration and that becomes a much harder problem to make generic > and plugable.

Do you mind mentioning some examples. My desktop runs Awesome, but I make extensive use of Gnome widgets and programs. The fact that these work out of the box without issue, despite the fact that they were developed to be part of the Gnome desktop, seems to suggest that the standards work fine.

Besides, thinking back to when I used Windows, I cannot think of an application/desktop integration that does not work on Linux.

I always imagined that OS X had a "better" experience because it had teams of developers whose job it was to make it have a better experience for the user. Also, never liked the OS X experience, icons don't automatically un-clutter in folders, it is difficult to tell the difference between what is and isn't running, and I still cannot figure out how to reliably rename a file without using the terminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Good article -- more constructive than whining -- but none of this seems easy to learn (or remember) which is probably the problem.

<comment><USER35> If you use windows regularly it is easy to learn/remember. Win+E.xplorer Win+D.esktop Win+left move win left. Start there then learn a new one every few days, soon you'll be a power user ;)

<comment><USER36> I'm pretty sure podperson wasn't talking about himself. The main problem with Win8 seems to be that it's going to be difficult to learn for not so technically versed people, e.g. at least 80% of their userbase. And no, it's not true that they will just 'stay on win7'. a) They don't even know what version they're on anyway, b) they will just buy whatever is in store. I expect a _massive_ wave of complaints to store support and OEM support hotlines, possibly enough to give some traction to easy-to-use preinstalled linux distros.

<comment><USER12> From a usability standpoint, Windows 8 seems to be one of the easiest full desktop OSes I've seen, the windows key takes to to a large icon screen with all of your programs, and you click on the one you want to run. I think that some of the decisions made to accomplish that goal hurt productivity for more experienced users, and those experienced users experience that as a hard interface. I had the same reaction when I had to use windows 7 after years of a tiling window manager and the terminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> As someone who is spent the last 20 years of my life on a computer for a minimum of 10 hours a day, I can confirm that Windows 8 stumped me for 5 to 10 minutes while I tried to figure out how to invoke the login screen.

While I am so thrilled that this power user enjoyed his experience, mine was infuriating for the first two hours and made me feel stupid. Those with dramatically less patience and investment in personal computing will probably feel the same way.

<comment><USER38> Perhaps this is a good experience for all developers to have at one point or another. I'm sure the majority of everyday users feel like this _all the time_. It's good to gain some perspective once a decade.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is a classic example of solving the vendor's problem rather than the user's problem. A unified UI is scratching MS's itch. They have a problem with tablets eating away at their pie so they sacrifice usability because they don't want to have to write two different OSes, or rather two experiences. They already tried this when they brought the mouse to a phone, now they do the reverse.

</comment><comment><USER40> When I see this image from the article:

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live- Wr...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Writer/How-I- learned-to-stop-worry-and-learned-_1365A/image_22.png)

I have to ask myself, how can anyone think this: 1\. Looks good. 2\. Is ideal usage of screen real estate.

And even this:

[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live- Wr...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/content/binary/Windows-Live-Writer/How-I- learned-to-stop-worry-and-learned-_1365A/image_25.png)

Now you have a bunch of icons without text labels, how do you know what does what? Obviously the 3rd party apps are clear if you use them, but the main Windows apps aren't clear. For example, what is that purple icon next to the blue clouds? (And what are the blue clouds? Weather? or is the Sun weather?)

<comment><USER11> 1) Compared to a normal desktop, where most of your functional navigation is crammed into a small bar (which has pop-up cascading menus filled potentially with stacks of small application shortcuts, and lots of folders) a full screen of evenly-sized tiles with prominent identifying symbols seems okay to me. Maybe even an improvement, once you factor in live-tile info display. And certainly it seems far simpler to use - it only has one level of depth - <USER3> on anything and you're in an application.

2) Metro does look a little odd with such a tall screen. It makes more sense on a widescreen laptop or tablet display. Also he chose a pretty garish background.

3) Also remember most of these icons are legacy. Will look better when more of your apps are Metro-ised.

4) And of course Metro looks best - really only makes sense - when seen and used in motion. Metro is an extremely fluid, motion-heavy OS - <USER4> WIMP in comparison is as heavy and immobile as a pile of rocks.

5) Purple icon is maps. Blue clouds are skydrive (cloud service.) Sun is weather (once you've used the app once, local weather conditions are displayed on the tile.)

<comment><USER41> >> Compared to a normal desktop, where most of your functional navigation is crammed into a small bar

This is a taste thing. Myself, I'll take the crammed bar over the grid any day.

Even though I'm primarily a Mac user these days, I'm a Luddite when it comes to Windows - I still prefer the look and feel of Windows 2000 over its successors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm always surprised at how many of my non-techie friends struggle with keyboard shortcuts; it seems to be deeply counterintuitive to me, some of the contortions that people go through because, cognitively, they wont or can't devote space to the shortcuts. I have a sneaking suspicion that the sort of fearful respect with which they treat computers is the norm. Anything that makes using a computer simpler is IMHO a good thing; if it increases the utility f computers for the 99% at the cost of messing with the expectations of the 1%, well that seems like a reasonable trade off to make.

</comment><comment><USER43> Just installed Win 8 in Parallels on an rMBP and I have to be honest, I don't hate it as much as when I tried the preview release in a window on an iMac.

Some of the tips in this article are great and the more you dig, the more you find they actually HAVE improved a lot of things in the 'old' OS as well (this seems to get ignored/glossed over in alot of reviews, especially the negative ones).

So far, Metro/Win8 is just a toy without touch. I honestly can't see myself getting much work done here but it seems to keep out of the way enough.

Ultimately (for me), would I use Windows at all unless I had to for work? And would I replace OS X 10.8 with Win8 as my primary OS? Quite simply: hell no. You'll have to pry this rMBP out of my cold dead hands (not just because Retina is such a game changer visually - I still MUCH prefer the speed, power, efficiency, apps and overall experience of OS X. It's no competition IMO).

Whether Win8 is a winner on touch devices like Surface, time will tell. Metro/Win8 is nice enough but there are next to zero apps for it. I'm also still not convinced having the 'old desktop' on a tablet really is what people are going to want. Obviously it's a stopgap until Win8 takes off but is it really much of a selling point? Anyone who has done RDP or Citrix from an iPad can get an idea of what it's like (I've used it enough times to know): It's OK in a pinch, but shoot me if I had to use it to actually get serious work done.

Microsoft have definitely thrown a Hail Mary here, not long to find out if it will work...

<comment><USER44> > I'm also still not convinced having the 'old desktop' on a tablet really is > what people are going to want

Just a note that ARM tablets running WinRT will not have the desktop, except for few Microsoft programs, specifically office. So, we really don't need to worry too much about the old desktop on a tablet problem. For tablets like the surface pro, running Win8 x86, I don't see why using a mouse would be a big deal if you are power user-y enough to specifically get the not ARM version of the tablet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I really like the new Windows 8 Task Manager. It actually works as you would expect!

</comment><comment><USER46> I really didn't like idea of mixing metro with normal desktop style of work. Now, after two weeks of using it on work and at home, I can just say that it works great - metro doesn't interfere with desktop apps, I'm using them like i did on win7, and win8 is better with regular desktop style of work in every way!

Startup/shutdown speed is also totally awesome, even I basically don't power off my computer, never. So, now, when there's no much metro style apps, win8 as desktop OS works great, and in about one year when Store fills up, it'll be even better.

Other things I really like that are much improved over win7: HyperV inside OS, ISO Mount, multi-monitor support (taskbar, wallpapers), cloud integration, copy/delete/move dialogs with speed graph, task manager.

</comment><comment><USER47> So I guess windows 8 is fine for super-experts who know all the shortcuts, as well as for the completely new. But I expect both categories make up quite a small proportion of the userbase.

<comment><USER48> This seems a more common trend. Windows really was the exception, where they aimed to please neither professionals, nor "average consumers", but this mythical "poweruser".

They didnt exist, Microsoft created them. And that was not a good thing. Many of them had a beaten wife syndrome: they became experts because even doing mundane trivial tasks, like burning a cd, organising your documents, installing software, required "poweruser level skills". Now they are afraid of change. They worry, they have to relearn all they know. They prefer to stick to the man they already know. Sure, he may beat them, but after all these years they know where its going hurt, and what his triggers are. Who knows how much more another man will beat them?

Im glad Microsoft is cleaning ship, and i understand that the windows "power users" will need counseling. I dont like the walled garden future though. But wouldnt it be great if my mom buys a new pc and she was actually capable of doing things with it, like she can with her ipad, without needing the assistance of a power user?

So, there i stand: death to the poweruser. They have to either man up and get professional, or lounge in the casual area, but lets not have them keep things back. From people being scared of shortcuts or powerusers dismissing linux because they have nightmares of terminal commands. Grow a pair, or embrace the new usability for casual users.

<comment><USER49> >Im glad Microsoft is cleaning ship, and i understand that the windows "power users" will need counseling.

I think the subtext of these posts is that time will tell if they're cleaning ship or just filling it with a whole new generation of powerusers around a system designed primarily for casual use. That's nothing to say if casual users find it useful either. Ultimately the whole casual/power user is sort of a false dichotomy. On a long enough curve, all users are powerusers for their case.

<comment><USER48> I agree that time will tell if they were able to clean the ship succesfully. But all the complaining about how radical the changes are for powerusers at least suggest they are honestly trying for once.

I like the curve analogy. It seems to suggest that good UI is like a partial ordering of usecases, where there is a clear relationship between complexity, position on the learning curve and popularity of the usecase.

From that perspective one might say the traditional windows desktop starts off its learning curve with too much complexity and puts system maintainance tasks too far down on the curve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Hadn't heard about Hyper-V support getting added. Goodbye VirtualBox.

</comment><comment><USER51> If you pander to people who are scared of change you will move forward so slowly you might as well stop. I feel that Microsoft haven't pushed hard enough for change. I'm tired of all the people complaining about change. I love Unity on Ubuntu. It took a little getting used to but it didn't stop my computer from being functional. I could do everything I could before just in a slightly different way. Change is awesome and all you bitches need to stop tripping on some old bullshit.

<comment><USER52> You in the minority of people who actually give a shit about the thing that sits in front of them in the office and find it interesting.

The rest of the planet just want it to work just how it always did and piss off at the end of the day so they can go home, cook dinner, dig holes in the garden, watch television, build LEGO with their kids and play golf.

Our job as software engineers is to SERVE those people unconditionally, make their lives less laborious and to reduce the burden of their jobs. After all what else is technology for?

Marketing driven change does nothing but enslave people further and demand more attention. Incremental changes and improvements are much more useful as they allow people to adapt slowly without having to deal with life-changing events every few years.

To hell with everyone who doesn't see it this way - you are doing a disservice to humanity.

<comment><USER53> That way there would no progress at all. When Windows 95 came out, there was a huge bunch of folks that wanted to stick to Windows 3.11 because Windows 95 was a big change. There was even an animation at boot-up that pointed to the Start button saying 'Click Here'. If we listened to those folks, we would not even have a task bar that no wants to switch from now.

Also, see the below:

The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse.' There is no evidence that people want to use these things. -- John Dvorak

<comment><USER52> But there has been precisely no progress.

It still takes just as long to manipulate your computer (possibly longer) and it's more complicated and more unpredictable too.

Progress now is considered to be adding more features which guide people through the mess in front of them.

Every new operating system release is a symptom of that.

<comment><USER12> That depends on how you define progress. If you are talking about efficiency of getting things done, then I would say the move to GUI/mouse based interfaces as the standard is a step in the wrong direction. As is the to a composting window manager. I'm not saying there are not uses where these systems are more efficient, but for most cases they are less efficient.

However, these are examples of improved usability for inexperienced users. For example, typing "cp -r important /mnt/thumbdrive" is more efficient than opening the file explorer, copying 'important', navigating to 'thumbdrive' and pasting (especially with tab completion), however it is far easier for a new user.

In the same way, it looks like Microsoft is again trading productivity for usability. Unfourtuantly, it is very difficult to avoid the trade-off, because productivity comes from the interface making commands as short as possible, and making the feedback contain as little non-content information as possible. Where as usability comes from making the input verbose/forgiving (which requires repetition) and the output needs to provide information on how to use the interface, which takes away from the ability to output content.

For example, vim is a highly productive editor, there is 1 line at the bottom for non-content information, and the input is short and (necessarily) cryptic. You also have gedit, another plain-text editor, however, instead of the cryptic key bindings, it has a slow and easy interface. So "ESC /foo/bar/g" becomes "(hand to mouse) Search>>Replace (hand to keyboard) foo (hand to mouse) (mouse move, click)(hand to keyboard) bar (hand to mouse) (mouse move, click) (mouse move, click)" Or, if you are good with key commands, geddit has "^H, foo TAB TAB bar TAB*7 enter ALT+F4", still slower then vim, and it takes up more precious space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> As someone who primarily runs Ubuntu Linux and Mountain Lion, the interfaces and screenshots in the article definitely look pretty neat. I haven't had a chance to install Windows 8, and I definitely don't like the ideas about restricting the platform more. However, from an interface perspective, am I alone in thinking that it could be a positive change? (Maybe I am jaded from going through the Ubuntu Gnome -> Unity transition)

</comment><comment><USER55> I haven't used Win8, so maybe I'm completely off-base here, but from the article it sounds like removal of the Start Menu has made it difficult to do a lot of things without either typing in commands or memorizing special key combinations (see, for example, the section called "Run Power User or Administrative Tools - WinKey+X is EVERYTHING").

So, how does anyone get anything done using Win8 on a tablet that doesn't have a keyboard?

<comment><USER56> Just out of curiosity, does anyone try to get things done with a tablet? With the exception of pen-based note taking and drawing, all the activities I do on a tablet are consumption based (reading, web browsing, etc.) and easy to accomplish using Windows 8's metro interface. With that in mind, I think the added keyboard shortcuts really help clean up the interface for tablet users while giving desktop and notebook users a fast way of getting things done.

But to answer your question, I think the real plan is that you don't try to do your work on a Windows 8 tablet without a keyboard. Instead, you get a lightweight, convertible Windows 8 tablet. That way, you can have your cake and eat it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I especially liked the "Disclaimer: I don't work for the Windows Team" line. Nowhere does he say anything about Microsoft proper, just the Windows Team.

Just wait, in 6 months, we'll see that Mr. Hanselman was paid for this pro- Metro blog post. By then, the positive spin will have made us all forget the past two months of anti-Metro postings.

</comment><comment><USER58> I really love the improvements in Windows 8 that have been made to the standard desktop applications.

It's just a shame that they bolted on Metro and then force feed it to you by making it your start menu. The metro interface is truly unintuitive. I feel more at home on in OS X than I do in Metro, and I hate OS X.

<comment><USER59> I wouldn't be surprised to see some pushback from "normal" Windows users that return new machines because they expected "windows" and got "some sort of tile OS".

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Thank God I'm using Linux now - and a tiling window manager...

I have been too long on the MS side. That's my only regret.

</comment><comment><USER61> Something weird or hard to catch in those screenshots. Can't put the finger where though

<comment><USER62> Glass isn't enabled?

<comment><USER63> Wasn't Aero removed altogether to make way for Metro?

<comment><USER64> I think you mean [+], the interface paradigm formerly know as Metro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> windows 8 is particularly bad on a 30 inch monitor when running its native metro apps in full screen with no ability to re-size anything.

this may work great for a 10 inch tablet screen but its a serious problem for any modern professional workstation/content creation setup.

i also had issues (explorer freezing) with my external USB3 drive even for simple things like copying files back and forth. it seems like with each iteration of Windows the basic file copy operation gets slower and slower. all this on hardware that's current. (win7 experience score 7.9)

i'd rather be focused on making cheese instead of figuring out who moved it where.

<comment><USER44> How likely are people using a professional workstation/content creation setup to use metro? Until their creation/development/productivity apps are developed and optimized for the type of machines they use (large monitors, etc..) as metro apps, they'll continue to use them in the desktop as they always have. I think the only time I really see the metro/start screen when I'm in windows 8 is when I'm developing metro apps, everything else I see in the desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Once in a while I will throw out a useless and nonconstructive comment:

Isn't it super cute to see these windows "power-users" at work? Pretending that their new OS is for anything other than their grandma checking their email? And look at all you "hackers" congratulating Microsoft for an improvement on the dumbest series of operating systems (per dollar spent on it) of the last two decades. Awww, the intellectual poverty is really adorable.</comment>


Susan Fowler's next act: Ending forced arbitration - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/4/18/17252032/susan-fowler-uber-forced-arbitration-labor-bill-california <comment><USER2> This seems like a good thing. Admittedly, before reading this I did not even realize companies could force employees into arbitration.

I'd be curious to hear a concrete argument saying this is a job killer. Would companies hire less employees if they could not settle with them in forced arbitration? Maybe. Seems weak, just like non-compete agreements - for which there's very little evidence of actual harm from not enforcing them (in California).

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, please.</comment>


Ask HN: Are these signs of a toxic company? - <AUTHOR> This is my first job, I have recently joined as a full-time developer a small software company working in a niche sector I like.
However, just around my 1st month I started noticing some things, and was wondering if these could be signs of a toxic place:
* The number of people working in sales is double the people working on the actual product.
* Many interns and temp workers for a company of this size.
* No coding styles, CI or tooling conventions are implemented (causing many issues).
* Internal conflicts between senior developers and managers that result in heated arguments and/or emails.
* I was given low-performance hardware (that makes my compiling/testing time twice as much as my actual coding time) due to budget.
* Marketing and sales people have (implicit and explicit) privileged treatment compared to developer teams.
On the other hand, most people are really nice and the team I have been assigned to has been really helpful getting me up to speed.
---
Am I reading too much into this, or are these signs of a sinking ship that I should abandon while I can?
I'm using a throwaway account for obvious reasons. <comment><USER2> I wouldn't say it's a toxic company or sinking ship, but from the three points below they don't seem to value engineering much. As it's your first job, so you probably don't have a ton of leverage -- though if you had other offers, I would consider re-opening conversations with them, and if you can find a new job pretty quickly, you can just leave this job off your resume in the future.

* No coding styles, CI or tooling conventions are implemented (causing many issues).

* I was given low-performance hardware (that makes my compiling/testing time twice as much as my actual coding time) due to budget.

* Marketing and sales people have (implicit and explicit) privileged treatment compared to developer teams.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem is, whenever I try to introduce some tools that could solve an actual problem I get dismissed as I'm new, thus making solving these issues an almost impossible task for now.

<comment><USER2> Not sure what you're responding to -- my advice was to look elsewhere & reopen convos with other companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The 1st one (ratio of sales to development) is not a problem, assuming that the sales people aren't individually dead wood. Any reasonable sales organization rewards the good ones and purges the non-performers periodically.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not too familiar with these people as they're scattered over different offices. They seem competent though.

But in my mind (and i may be biased) I believe that you should invest in the team building the actual product before investing in the team selling it.

<comment><USER4> You're incorrect here, though well-meaning. :)

The ideal setup, from a company's perspective, is one engineer and as many sales people as it takes to sell the product.

 _How_ the product is made--and hence the team that makes it!--is of no consequence _provided the company can sell the product_.

The product doesn't even have to _work_ : you just need people willing to pay for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely get what you're meaning, but this is not very "comforting" for an engineer.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. :(

This should probably be on the short list of reasons we have so much burnout in our sector.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


You Can't Sell News by the Slice - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/opinion/10kinsley.html <comment><USER3> Related (micropayments):

"One of history's ironies is that hypertext - an embedded Web link that refers you to another page or site - had been invented by Ted Nelson in the early 1960s with the goal of enabling micropayments for content. He wanted to make sure that the people who created good stuff got rewarded for it. In his vision, all links on a page would facilitate the accrual of small, automatic payments for whatever content was accessed."

Source: [http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191-1,0...](http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1877191-1,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Micropayments for news will never happen. The thing with most news is that WE DON'T NEED TO KNOW IT. Think hard about this - has it made a difference that you know about some lady who got kidnapped? What has changed that you can read about the details of the Iraqi election?

You want to know this stuff only because you are aware of it - and you are aware of it only because you started reading the paper in the first place. If you never read a paper (because for example, you needed to pay to read it), then you'll not be interested in this news, and you won't see any need to pay for it.

People will pay for information, but they will not pay for news. People want to be aware of what is going on in general, and if this is available for free, they will use those sites.

The business of journalism is shrinking, and it will have to evolve fast. News will become more local, several cheap sources will be used to build a picture of a situation, and people will pay for more niche and more technical magazines (e.g Finance News).

These papers have a strong brand now, but those brands are decaying. They should work on making sure their brands are strongly available everywhere, so that when the reorganisation happens, they can still remain a recognizable name.

<comment><USER5> "If you never read a paper (because for example, you needed to pay to read it), then you'll not be interested in this news, and you won't see any need to pay for it."

Yet newspapers have been charging for quite some time, and people have been paying to read them, up until they found cheaper, faster, more complete sources.

You're digging yourself into a hole of ignorance if you are only following what you've become accustomed to follow.

Newspapers offer the accidental, and I bet many people enjoy them for that reason. You read things you didn't know would be interesting until you turned the page and there it was.

It's not that there is a cost, it's that despite the cost newspapers are still increasingly inferior to, say, Google News.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clay Shirky wrote about micropayments and free content a while back: <http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html>

Basically, he's saying that micropayments will not work because they introduce a transaction cost into the act of reading: you not only have to decide if you want to read (or skim) the article in question, you have to decide if it's worth x cents as well.

And that transaction cost kills the transaction before it happens, never mind the x cents that would have been transferred.

<comment><USER7> Yep... it's called the "penny gap," and it's what micropayment proselytes fail to account for. I've noticed something similar on the New York transit system -- when I have a prepaid MetroCard with limited rides, I think twice before taking any individual trip, but when I buy the unlimited-use monthly card, I feel much more free to consume the service even if the total price per month ends up roughly the same.

Yearly subscriptions to sites seem much better. I'd pay a subscription to the Times, though this certainly puts me in the minority. Heck, I'd pay a subscription to Hacker News, too.

<comment><USER8> But if that minority is big enough to sustain a business that delivers journalism of a certain quality? Oh, they had to move offices to another building, where the rent is less expensive...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The decline of the newspaper business is more a classic case of living in your own bubble long enough to lose the ability to adapt to changing realities than anything else.

In this case the internet is the catalyst for change; just like in the music industry and the movie industry. Shareholders should be demanding their respective CEO's have vast experience in the domain that threatens to defeat them, instead of continuing to twaddle along in a world that will die with the boomers.

I'd imagine 20-30% of this board would excel at the c-suite level of a newspaper. The rest of us would be more than adequate strategists and advisors. Why? Because we understand the nature of the medium that matters, not the medium that is already dead.

For example, my two cents worth:

What is it that local papers, including the Times (which is basically a local paper from a city many people enjoy reading about) do that the internet can not? Easy - they offer consistently _high quality_ and _in-depth_ analysis of current events. It's their editorial board that matters, really. They can't compete with timely news delivery. They can't compete with bloggers breaking stories. They _can_ deliver a broader and deeper explanation of what events mean to the lives of others. They _can_ provide opinions of well respected and well researched individuals.

If they were to truly leverage this strength, they would do the following:

1\. Shut down their physical production lines, immediately saving millions of dollars a year. Move to online only format.

2\. Move full time staff to consultant roles, and retain a small editorial staff of the highest quality.

3\. Focus less on news snippets, possibly partner with companies that can already do this better than they can - Google news anyone? Newsvine?

4\. Focus more on opinion, editorial and deeper feature stories that appeal beyond the 10 second sound bite. Attract readers with the higher quality that they can provide. (Again, there's a market in every local for this - <USER2> Guardian doesn't care about what city hall is doing in Buttfuck, Iowa, but the people living there sure do)

5\. Either sell ads or subscriptions for such content.

Does this mean they can't rake in the revenues that they once did? Certainly. Does it also mean, however, that they'll remain relevant for the foreseeable future? Of course. Most papers have already conquered the biggest challenge to doing this - building a strong brand-related audience of readers. They've already got the leg up on competitors, and they don't even realize it.

First one for each market to do this well wins.

<comment><USER10> What you are describing is already done as a news magazine. Take away the immediate snippets of news and focus on indepth stories? Well, now you are running another Time, NewsWeek, Economist, etc..

How are those businesses doing?

<comment><USER9> The problem is they didn't follow the first step.

And yes, that is what I'm suggesting, that newspapers evolve into daily news magazines, albeit online. I understand that there won't be enough room for all the existing brands in this space, especially with focuses that aren't local. Such is the harsh reality of the free market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every article expounding how you can't get people to pay for news content online should be required by law to explain how the Wall Street Journal's website has nearly 1 million paying members.

<comment><USER12> Journal readers have more disposable income than typical newspaper readers, and the WSJ is a valuable brand, so its subscribers are willing to pay extra (where "extra" means "more than zero") for the quality. There are other niche markets where this works: e.g., LWN.net is supported mostly by subscriptions.

But the history of _mass_ media publications charging for content, as Kinsley describes, is a history of one failure after another.

<comment><USER11> You don't think NYT is a valuable brand or his great reader demographics? I certainly wouldn't argue charging is right for every newspaper. At the risk of getting some Michael Dell-style egg on my face later, I'd say that most of them ought to just shut down now and give what little they can get via liquidation back to the investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I still think some people will pay for quality news reporting. Maybe not the crap that seems to pass for journalism in a lot of publications these days. If you provide people with well-researched information, give them access to people/places/things they couldn't otherwise reach, you will be providing some value which you can charge for.

If you are just doing lazy, surface level reporting on things that a horde of citizen-journalists are going to throw onto the web for free anyway, you might be screwed.

</comment><comment><USER14> A very forward-thinking exposition coming from a print source, but still telling in it's anachronisms: "...Or some Web site might mutate into a real Web newspaper."

A Real Web Newspaper? No. They will be much, much better than that.

<comment><USER15> Care to expound a bit?

(I'm not trying to be antagonistic, just interested.)

<comment><USER14> My point was just that it's still the mindset of those in the newspaper business that their goal is to create an "Web newspaper," which I find similar to wondering a few decades ago whether jet fighters could ever become "flying tanks."

I don't think consumers will find much value in a 'real' Web newspaper, because the web has so much more to offer. Real-time news, real-time sports scores, live video feeds, user interaction, the list goes on and on. Newspapers have always been an imperfect media outlet restricted by their medium and distribution. The Internet promises to alleviate many of these issues. This is why I believe it is quaint to hope that we will someday have "real Web newspapers."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ignoring the silly, uninformed arguments (i.e. newspaper readers "have never paid for the content"), this piece contains several classic arguments from the Bible of New Economy Bullshit:

1) The Bricks Are the Problem: _"In theory, a reader who stops paying for the physical paper but continues to read the content online is doing the publisher a favor."_

Mmhm. They said this about store-based retail, too. "Stores can operate more _efficiently_ on the web, and will take over because they don't need the bricks and mortar!" What happened? Well, for starters, we found out that people _like_ to shop in stores. We also found out that logistics, customer service and returns are always significant fixed costs, and the absence of bricks and mortar doesn't necessarily make them cheaper.

2) Race to the Bottom: _"every English-language newspaper is in direct competition with every other. Millions of Americans get their news online from The Guardian, which is published in London. This competition, and not some kind of petulance or laziness or addled philosophy, is what keeps readers from shelling out for news."_

...and last I checked, the Guardian has the same problems as everyone else in the business. I guess the Utopian ideal here is that every newspaper on the planet gives their content away for free, until they all simultaneously combust in a cloud of bankruptcy lawyers and rainbows.

More seriously: the end-game here is not a world where we have the journalism quality of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, only online and free. The end-game is Gawker and TechCrunch. Sound like a fair trade?

3) Everything Is Different Now, Man: _"And the harsh truth is that the typical American newspaper is an anachronism. It is an artifact from a time when chopping down trees was essential to telling the news"_

This is not "harsh truth" -- this is 95% wishful thinking, 5% fact. The 5% fact is that there is another way to access media, that has both benefits and drawbacks. The other 95% is that the Silicon Valley, VC-for-everyone corporate culture has _infected_ media, and given it a business model as unsustainable and wasteful as a midnight candy bar delivery from Kozmo.com.

People still like to consume media on paper. It doesn't require electricity, can be done without the aid of a machine, and can be archived easily, by anyone. Granted, the _type_ of content served by traditional media is shifting, but that doesn't mean that newspapers and magazines don't have a future in the Brave New World of digital media.

More importantly, the internet _hasn't_ made it free to produce good content. We all like to dance around this critical fact, pretending that if we just spend enough money on viral loops and news aggregators, we'll be able to reproduce our current media offerings. But we conveniently neglect to notice that many of the interesting articles we read on Digg or news.google are _produced_ by reporters who are being paid by the old media. When it dies, so does the content that powers whizzy web-2.0 social media.

<comment><USER17> Gawker and TechCrunch are at one extreme, The Economist and The Atlantic are at the other.

Both of those extremes are easy to monetize... Now that I think about it, I'm not sure how financially stable Gawker and TechCrunch are.

But my point is:

Popular rags are cheap to produce and can live off ads.

Intelligent content, on the other hand, can find paying cosumers.

I think the problem with the NY Times and others like them, is that it's hard to find a sustainable business model for the middle ground that they are on.

-EDIT-

Yet a third way is a non profit news paper like The Irish Times, funded by a grant I believe.

I hear the Seattle PI is going into chapter 11, if I was stinking rich, I'd turn it into a non-profit.

<comment><USER18> I don't understand why most news sources aren't non-profit to begin with. The reason they struggle so much is that they're all trying to run a huge profit to pay off their shareholders.

There's no restriction in non-profits that they can't make money and pay people ridiculous wages. I mean IIRC Oxfam in the UK paid like £400,000 (probably near $800,000 at the time) for a marketing firm to do an advert. It's just the company doesn't get taxed, so long as all the 'surplus' goes back into improving the business, however all their workers can still earn an income and will still pay income taxes.

I mean imagine how many people would buy a newspaper subscription if you got a tax receipt from it!

<comment><USER8> This is so obvious it hurts. Another thing: why is the NYT for example unable to monetize it's huge traffic? I don't get this. There are people getting rich with a lot less traffic to their sites.

<comment><USER19> This is a really good question- I wonder the same thing about Facebook.

<comment><USER20> People don't click on the links.

When your looking at NYT or Facebook you are interested in their content when you using Google your looking for something. Put another way, how effective would advertising be when inserted in the middle of a phone conversation?

<comment><USER19> Inserting advertising into a phone conversation would ruin the experience (more so than an ad on a website). But it would probably be noticed!

You are probably right to an extent- but a lot of times people are browsing FB to waste time. If they are looking at the profile of some girl they like, and an ad shows up for the new album of one of the bands she likes- could that not potentially be an effective ad? (This could be a friend, who has a birthday coming up, and FB could suggest presents based on your friends preferences). I really think that FB just needs to adapt their ads better. I hope they get it figured out and prove everyone that thinks they aren't worth 15 billion wrong!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> After seeing Walter Isaacson on the Daily Show last night, I couldn't help yelling at the TV. The thing that I really wish someone had asked (and was alluded to in this op-ed) is this:

What do you do about the entire generation reaching adulthood who has _never_ had to pay for news?

<comment><USER22> You give them increasingly shitty news reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm seeing a lot of people making the judgmental mistake of thinking that news is simply read on paper because no one has established a sufficient way of accessing it online. I'm sorry but this is just a fallacy, until I can read my news at the kitchen table, on the sofa and on the toilet then newspaper still has a significant use.

I mean it's a quite dismal future, if everyone gets up in the morning and sits in front of a computer eating their cereal so they can read the news.

News, and likewise information, will become ever increasingly available. The first publicly available newspapers were government-published tablets posted in public places by Julius Caesar, the Chinese circulated news to court officials in the 8th century.

Eventually news will become more accessible through digital media, but this isn't going to happen anytime soon. Portable devices aren't ubiquitous enough yet and so news isn't freely available enough on digital media to take over the ultimately portable disposable newspaper. I can take a newspaper, read it at breakfast, on the toilet, on the bus, at work and then when I'm done with it I can discard it. Until I can do all the same, except discard it, with a digital device then the newspapers won't be destroyed, they'll merely recede.

Newspapers are going to suffer more from attrition than an assault. There's so many people who've read their news from a paper every morning, that's a habit that is largely unbreakable. You can't stop a 60 year old picking up a news paper. My father's in his 50's, has worked in IT since the beginning yet he still sits down with a newspaper. Newspapers won't die until their readership does. This gives the newspapers a long time to adapt to current technology and establish a brand amongst the younger age group in a fashion that allegories the elder age group.

The other assumption people make, is that news will become more refined and from local sources. This assumption is quite laughable, local sources are increasingly irrelevant. Yes it's good to get the news from your home town, however do you really think that matters anymore? I live in Canada, so why do I care about Obama in the US or Brown in the UK? Because they both affect me. I've been to a dozen countries and I know people from even more and this is becoming the norm in our current era of civilization. The whole notion of globalization dictates that we're going to begin caring about world events more and more as they increasingly affect us. Just look at the economic crisis, the US fudged the brownie, but it's affected nearly every country and person on the planet, so why wouldn't people be paying attention to news like that?</comment>


Turn-by-turntables: How drivers got from point A to point B in the early 1900s - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/01/turn-by-turntables-how-drivers-got-from-point-a-to-point-b-in-the-early-1900s/ <comment><USER2> After graduating from Ohio State, I moved out to Newport Beach, California for my first post-college job. The company arranged for help finding an apartment in the area, which includes 1.5 days of apartment-hunting, and generally getting used to the area.

My father & a friend helped me out by driving the bulk of my stuff out to California. The guide was happy to use her AAA of California membership to get a custom trip guide made. It wasn't as novel as the turntable, but it was very nice!

And of course, the first thing I did when I moved in was to go to a bookstore and buy the Thomas Guide covering Orange County.

[https://laist.com/2018/06/22/thomas_guide_maps_the_rise_and_...](https://laist.com/2018/06/22/thomas_guide_maps_the_rise_and_fall.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> Navigating in a car was a problem even when I started driving in the early 2000s, before GPS.

\- If you just had a map book you'd have to study it before a journey to get the likely placenames you'd see. This is surprisingly hard.

\- You'd probably forget to check one-way systems.

\- You could sort of guess where there'd be traffic, but for any major diversions you had to be very careful to follow the ad-hoc signs. Plus there's a high chance that you would decide you'd lost the way if the gap between signs was too long.

\- You really needed to know the major geographic placenames by heart. Even if you're not going to Manchester, you will need to know whether on your trip to Birmingham to follow the road to Manchester. Now picture driving in a foreign country.

\- Forget about estimating the time to get there. If it's a place you don't know your route will not be ideal.

\- Conveniences like the next petrol station off the road, forget it.

<comment><USER4> It's scary how lost I feel anywhere when I don't have my phone on me (in the sense of: how will I get where I need to go) even when I'm in a place where I speak the language and can read the signs.

It's scarier how this dependency did not exist at all before I got my first smartphone in 2009.

<comment> matt-attack Makes me think we need to have a national leave your phone at home day.

<comment><USER5> So you mean a day where we all just stay home?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The map being physically connected to the odometer, albeit by a long cable, seems like a good idea but this feels like an early example of how hardware engineering and software engineering (in this case, UX) are quite separate skill sets!

It's a cute idea but an unnecessary (and literal) coupling of the measurement function with the route information.

There's a reason that numerical odometers with dual absolute / trip delta readings caught on — far more flexible.

</comment><comment><USER7> This reminded me of something similar: [https://gajitz.com/scrolling-down-the- highway-vintage-1927-a...](https://gajitz.com/scrolling-down-the-highway- vintage-1927-analog-gps/)

It's a watch-like, wrist device called the "Plus Four Wristlet Route Indicator", and it dates back to 1927.

<comment><USER8> When I was a little kid I wanted a computer so bad that I was even thinking to build a box with some sort of changing "screen" that'd be a roll of paper with some images attached to it. Turns out I wasn't that crazy.

<comment><USER9> Ha, I did the same. Built little casings in LEGOs. Good times

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Kari from Mythbusters built a replica of this, and another version that uses scrolls, on the netflix show White Rabbit Project (S01E09). It actually worked better than I thought it would.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've always thought it would be cool to have a printed out minimum spanning tree starting from my house (or work) with miles marked out on it. You wouldn't need OSM or google maps then!

<comment><USER12> Something like this:

[https://www.wanhala.net/post/156592370293/all-roads-lead- to-...](https://www.wanhala.net/post/156592370293/all-roads-lead-to-my-home)

?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not completely related ro tnis article, however there are some good arguments thst road infrastructure played key role in human development. Imagine trying to get from somewhere in Poland to England through forests, swamps and fields... Trade and knowledge sharing went through the roof once people started building roads and connecting towns and cities.

</comment><comment><USER13> Have to give some love to TripTiks, from AAA - the precursor to printed directions from the computer:

[https://magazine.northeast.aaa.com/daily/travel/road- trips/p...](https://magazine.northeast.aaa.com/daily/travel/road-trips/paper- maps-triptiks-still/)

</comment><comment><USER14> A modern form of this is the Dakar roadbook for the Dakar off-road rally: [https://www.dakar.com/en/espace- ccr/navigation/roadbook](https://www.dakar.com/en/espace- ccr/navigation/roadbook)

</comment><comment><USER15> That's pretty ingenious.

</comment><comment><USER16> This page somehow crashes my Firefox.

<comment><USER17> Works fine on my Lynx</comment></comment>


The Plan 9 Effect or why you should not fix it if it isn't broken - <AUTHOR> http://www.di.unipi.it/~nids/docs/the_plan-9_effect.html <comment><USER2> One of the messages of the article is to identify if there is a market. I must have read this a thousand times so far in my life. It's as if so many product failures and millions of developer-hours could have been saved if we followed this advice and thought really really hard about the market. It's so simple and we're morons for not embracing this wisdom.

The problem is _you just don 't know_. You might create a new market where none existed or completely take over a very crowded market, or (much more likely) fail regardless of what your marketing research told you.

How does the author explain the huge success of the original UNIX? It violates everything he says. Certainly Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson weren't thinking about the size of the market for a new OS. UNIX was incompatible was everything that existed at the time and AT&T could have used an existing OS for everything they needed done.

Facebook is another good example of _you just don 't know_. Probably there were a thousand other equally smart Zuckerbergs trying to create a social whatever in 2004. One succeeded and 999 failed. Was it because Zuckerberg was thinking hard about the market and the others weren't? Many of the factors you don't understand, don't control, can't predict, and can't even explain more than a decade later.

<comment><USER3> >How does the author explain the huge success of the original UNIX? It violates everything he says.

The original Unix was not created as some sort of grand solve-the- world's-problems vision. It happened because some people on project like that, Multics, said, "fuck it, let's spend a month building something simple that we can actually use." Market 1: themselves.

From there, they found other people with needs and they solved them. Market 2 was another department that needed a word processor; they made one. Then more Bell Labs departments needed an OS for their shiny new computers, so that was market 3.

So yes, the history of Unix very much fits with the "find a market and solve their problems" notion. It's true that they weren't thinking strategically about long-term world domination. But that's sort of the point of the "identify a market" notion: vast, airy thoughts about strategy often lead to product that nobody uses. Whereas focusing solving very specific needs of actual users (that is, your chosen market) is frequently a path to success.

It's basically the same deal with Facebook. Facemash was just Zuckerberg fucking around. When he found that it had real resonance for people, he tried something more ambitious in the space. But he didn't say, "I'm going to totally change the way humans interact by creating a technological marvel." He didn't spend millions of dollars or years building amazing infrastructure. He made a small, basic product for a single school. Only when he had proof that he had product-market fit did he worry about scaling up. And he got that product-market fit by paying attention to the market, his fellow students.

<comment><USER4> MVP and shipping. Then add value adding features and review customer fedback.

<comment><USER3> Yes. I think both also proceeded by making major inroads into very small markets before expanding. Facebook in particular didn't get their first users by launching something adequate for a lot of people. They launched something that was a home run for a small group. Then they went school by school, dominating each as they went.

The truth is that each adopter makes their own decision; the more you can make something that's stellar for one person, the better a base you have to expand from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The first one is not to try to fix things that are not broken or better, if > you want to fix them, only fix the broken pieces and do not try to fix what > is clunky but it does, somehow, work as it is intended to. For instance, > UTF-8 is a wonderful idea and you need to do that but you can implement that > in libraries or subsystems in such a way that you can use it in other > operating systems more than create an operating system all around an > encoding system.

I disagree 100%. The Plan9 use of Unicode and UTF8 was visionary.

Character set handling was seriously broken on all Unixen in the 1980s. One major problem was the range of character sets available on most hosts which constrained the type of character data applications could handle easily. Another was the plethora of competing, overlapping encodings like EUC-JIS and SJIS or the myriad of ISO-8859 encodings. This required constant mapping (or rather partial mapping) between different layers of the stack with attendant hits on usability, configuration problems, data corruption, etc.

Unicode with UTF-8 storage encoding almost completely solves these problems, the more so as software up and down the stack adopts the same conventions. At least on the projects I worked on then in the DBMS industry we would have gladly taken the hit to upgrade.

[edit] corrected typo

<comment><USER6> The article almost makes it sound like UTF-8 was a Plan9 invention.

I also don't understand why using UTF-8 was a bad idea. If I start a new OS from scratch, I would have to be brain-damaged to not use UTF-8 as the sole encoding (and other encodings being treated as second class citizens).

I can understand the issue with taking the file abstraction to perfection. If by doing that you are incompatible to most of the software there is, you're going to have a hard time getting developers to develop for your OS. This could be somewhat alleviated with a ioctl compatibility library for the time being.

<comment><USER7> Character indexing in UTF-8 is O(n). That's not enough to kill the awesome parts of it, though.

<comment><USER8> Is there a list of alternatives with various tradfoffs mentioned?

<comment><USER7> UTF-32 is kinda-sorta O(1), but not really if you want to get what a user logically claims to a character.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reading the article it's tempting to say sometimes it borders on ridiculousness :) .

> No one, in the Unix world, ever complained about the Unix's missed promise > about file abstraction.

The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. I'll skip rants about how it's related to file abstractions :) .

Being fully aware how the same things could look very different from different angles, I'd still maintain the "not broken - don't fix" approach has been countered then and now.

<comment><USER10> > The whole world, sans programmers, keeps moaning on complexity of computers, > and Unix, and how hard it is to learn all those arcane commands and > abstractions and why things can't be just plain and simple. I'll skip rants > about how it's related to file abstractions :) .

There are a lot of things about Plan 9 that really aren't that good in 2016. The compiler, for example, lacks a modern optimization pipeline and generates code that is unacceptably slow by modern standards. The windowing system is not a compositing window manager; it's a '90s design through and through and cannot perform as well as solutions like Wayland (that are arguably simpler). The browser doesn't support dynamic changes and would have to be rearchitected to support anything more than simple pages with acceptable performance.

None of this is meant to bash the great work that the Plan 9 team did while at Bell Labs/Lucent, mind you. With the team they had they did a really great job, and they're all top-notch developers. I only want to counter the notion that Plan 9 is all around a technically better OS than the ones we use today. It isn't.

As sad as it sounds, most complexity exists for a reason. There is a good amount of cruft that could be dropped if not for backwards compatibility, but when e.g. compilers are concerned, you depend on that complexity for performance.

<comment><USER11> > The windowing system is not a compositing window manager

8½ perhaps wasn't, but Rio is a compositing window manager.

<comment><USER10> Not in the modern sense of compositing GPU buffers.

<comment><USER12> Since when does the window manager have to use the gpu to be considered a compositing window manager?

<comment><USER10> This has devolved into a fairly pointless semantic debate. What I'm saying is that rio is not built around compositing hardware surfaces, like all modern windowing systems (DWM, Mac CGS, Wayland) are. A windowing system that is not architected this way will always have inferior performance, and retrofitting the proper design onto an existing one based on memory buffers and drawing commands is difficult to do (see all the problems with XCOMPOSITE).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/about.html](http://plan9.bell- labs.com/plan9/about.html)

"Introduction

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a research system..."

It does not seem that it was ever meant to compete with or replace commercialized operating systems. The direct output of research is not something you sell - but it does give the world better things which can be industrialized.

<comment><USER14> > It does not seem that it was ever meant to compete with or replace > commercialized operating systems.

UNIX was also a research system. The following paragraph from the article would also by applicable:

"One of the major problems with Plan-9 was that AT&T and the people behind Unix, while they were incredible scientists and programmers, they were not used to create commercial software and AT&T has never been in the software business. (...) They used software and they used to produce internal software to run their high end network appliances but they never created software to be sold to someone else and it never was major source of revenue (...). This just means that they never had a sense of what could have been needed into the outside world."

If anything, this problem was relatively less important for Plan 9 given that they already had some experience in creating research systems that would become mainstream.

Edit: By the way, saying that "AT&T used software and they used to produce internal software to run their high end network appliances" seems a bit of an understatement. Quoting wikipedia: "Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the operating systems Unix, Plan 9, Inferno, and the programming languages C, C++, and S. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories."

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure that I follow your argument. Are you saying that because a similar research project was successfully commercialized Plan-9 should be judged akin?

Even if you accept that, UNIX was not developed to what it became by AT&T. Let arguments about how they managed licensing UNIX vs how Plan-9 was licenced commense!

<comment><USER14> I'm not trying to argue with what you said, but pointing at the weakness of the article's conclusions. As another commenter just wrote "How does the author explain the huge success of the original UNIX? It violates everything he says."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting to look at QNX's implemention of POSIX. In QNX, the POSIX library mostly makes calls for interprocess communication, using MsgSend and MsgRecv. That's the real underlying primitive. Not files. MsgSend works like a remote procedure call - you send data and wait for a reply. (There's a timeout mechanism available, and you can time out anything that blocks. Real-time OS, remember.)

QNX lets you make anything look like a file, by writing what QNX calls a "resource manager". This takes over a subtree of the pathname space, and the library turns create, open, close, read, write, and ioctl calls into the appropriate MsgSend calls. That's how you write a file system under QNX as a user process. But there's no reason to turn things into files unnecessarily. Displays are not files, for example.

QNX has what looks like a Berkeley sockets interface, but "send" and "recv" call the same thing as "write" and "read". You can use read and write on a socket. I think you can use "send" and "recv" on a file system, too.

If you're going to have one primitive, MsgSend and MsgRecv are a better choice than files. But it's easy to get that wrong. Mach botched it, and for decades, microkernels had a bad rep.

<comment><USER16> QnX is one of the under-appreciated gems in the OS landscape. I still hope that RIM will entirely open-source it and I'd happily contribute a good sized chunk of money towards a ransom.

<comment><USER15> It was open source for a while under Harmon, and free for non commercial use. I wish I'd downloaded it all back then. I'd like to see a QNX-like OS in Rust.

<comment><USER16> > I wish I'd downloaded it all back then.

IIRC there were some license issues.

> I'd like to see a QNX-like OS in Rust.

Hm... now that would be an interesting 'side project'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > I am quite sure that you do not know what Plan-9 is and that, probably, you > never have heard of it too.

Right off the bat with a failed assumption. Of course I know what Plan 9 is, I've used it lots. Why make this assumption? Just say "most people" and you've already hedged your bets.

<comment><USER18> If you already know you aren't the target for someone's writing, and you could figure out what it meant anyway, why bother complaining about it? It's a rhetorical device, not a declaration of fact. Read like a human, not a computer, and you might enjoy life a lot more.

<comment><USER19> Oh please, it's a poor use of rhetoric, and calling that out doesn't mean that you are somehow a robotic emotionless monster.

<comment><USER3> I think hyperbole is a fine use of rhetoric. And I think "read like a human, not a computer" is not talking about a computer's lack of emotion, but its need for precision and order. In contrast to human adaptability.

<comment><USER18> Thank you, that is what I intended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >Moreover, in Plan-9, many of the "good old things" were removed and a lot of incompatibility was introduced in the system with respect to the other Unixes. This prevented many different companies to even start thinking of porting their applications to Plan-9.

This is fundamentally why plan9 didn't take off. It was too different and not better enough.

Platform technology marketing is being on the right side of a nuanced dichotomy:

1\. You need to be different enough to be noticed and given attention 2\. And better in the eye of the user (which implies familiar)

For example, OSX was a great success among hacker types for this very reason: It was different yet familiar (Most UNIX-y stuff just worked on OSX thanks to its FreeBSD lineage).

Another example is Go: It's different enough from the previous generation of server-side languages to command attention, but its syntax was very much in the C language tradition (And it articulated its "betterness" well, such as performance gain over Python/Ruby and ease of use over C/C++/Java).

Fundamentally, Plan9 was way too different from the incumbent without any clear advantage.

<comment><USER21> I find your point 1 and 2 to be very insightful. It strikes me as why react native is doing so well on it's platform technology marketing. Different enough: mostly javascript and a consistent mental model for ios, android, and perhaps web. Better in the eye of the user: More shared code, faster tooling and workflow due to compile speed improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Another view is plan9 didn't become popular because it was not freely available. If it had been "freed" prior to when 386bsd was first released, history might've been different. I knew about it much before 386bsd came out and would've jumped at the chance to use it....

</comment><comment><USER23> Let's say for the sake of alternatives, that Plan 9 was released to the public in 1995 under the MIT license. I think at least one of the BSDs would have used the C compiler, but I think it would have been bigger than that.

</comment><comment><USER24> Seems to be saying that Plan 9 introduced one thing now on most unix-like systems (/proc) and another thing now on most systems period (UTF-8). However Plan 9 was a total failure and a waste of time and teaches us not to solve problems if they aren't a big deal. ?

<comment><USER25> Yes. Those two (and a few more) good things about it that solved real problems were adopted.

Most others, including its central premise about everything actually being a file, were not (adopted or successful), and turned out they weren't a big deal.

If from one product with 1 central premise and 10 new features the world only adopts 2 of those features, I'd still call it a "total failure" market-and- adoption wise, and a waste of time for those building it.

They could have built those 2 features independently anyway.

<comment><USER26> Plan 9 was not a product though. You seem to be arguing against the concept of research in the software world.

<comment><USER25> It was packaged into a product called Inferno later on.

And it was only "research" because AT&T (or Lucent at the time?) couldn't sell it.

<comment><USER27> Inferno isn't Plan 9. Written by the same people, yes, but it's a different OS running on a virtual machine rather than x86, different programming language, etc. The main commonality is 9P, which enables some other similarities such as Acme, synthetic filesystems, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not "was" but "is".

Just because _you_ don't use it doesn't mean _we_ don't. Pop by the #plan9 irc channel on Freenode some time, or lurk in #9front as see the daily commits.

<comment><USER29> 9front has _brilliant_ propaganda.

If I could get texlive, a graphical browser and an rdp client running under it I could live there after I retire. Until then it remains something of a toy system _for me_ (others may disagree). I'd be delighted to hear from those using it for actually creating stuff.

<comment><USER30> I know that [kertex]([http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html](http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html)) works on plan9, if there are parts missing between kertex and texlive, Thierry (the creator of kertex) could probably give you some pointers on getting those working too.

<comment><USER29> Main issue would be TizK for diagrams. I might try building it under a fresh slackware (I noticed a slackbuild script) and see what I get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's _still_ beautiful. Damn this world of network effects.

<comment><USER32> We should have a group of people dedicated in catering to beauty whether or not it manages to create a large market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So never simplify anything? Let everything become more and more complicated with band aid fixes until no one has any idea how the hell the whole thing works or any clue why things happen. Sell people a faster horse, because that's what we've really wanted all along? Is that the moral of this?

<comment><USER34> Don't try to fix things. Just pile more garbage on top of it until it sort of works. Sounds like modern programming

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It was a research OS. That by itself renders the entire article moot. It's akin to someone writing an article about how Minix "lost" vs. Linux- it's apples and oranges. You can't call something a failure if it was never intended to be the thing you claim it failed at being.

<comment><USER35> Some of the people behind Plan 9 lobbied AT&T's management very hard for years to get permission to open-source it, which they obtained in 2002. (Lucent Public License 1.02 satifies the Open Source Definition and the Debian Free Software Guidelines.)

Some of the people posting to the Plan 9 mailing list at that time from plan9.bell-labs.com addresses certainly hoped that Plan 9 would catch on.

In the 1990s Rob Pike tried to persuade one of the major browser vendors to support Plan 9.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yeah. The compatability problem, or why Windows is still crazy after all these years. Build it close to right the first time: the world won't give you a second chance.

I really like Plan9's ideas, but its community gravitates to catv.org, which is full of assholes who believe that if it hasn't been blessed by Murray Hill, it has no merit, no matter what the real world has to say.

I'm going to get crucified for this, aren't I?

<comment><USER27> cat-v is full of assholes, yes, and most of the Plan 9 community retains what I call "a sad devotion to an ancient religion"\--anything written at Bell Labs is holy writ, anything written outside is suspect and probably tainted, must purge the heretics.

However, most of your objections down-thread are "People are used to X/Y/Z, it is literally impossible to change them now."

<comment><USER7> Some of them are, but replacing image formats with PS is just a Bad Idea. And non-csp concurrency is necessary, like it or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm sure the guy who thinks it's spelled "Plan-9" has some very insightful things to say. Maybe it's time for me to blog about Ruby/On/Rails, the latest web-dev hotness.

</comment><comment><USER36> With such conclusions you are not going any further than PDP-11 assembly language.

</comment><comment><USER37> You need to structure your brilliance to focus it in one direction.

</comment><comment><USER38> Assuming ignorance out of your audience is a great way to make people close your website's tab before reading anything else.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't think the assumption of brilliance is warranted. Plan 9 was facing an uphill battle due to the lack of conformity, sure. But it wasn't a brilliant system, it was pretty bad. If it had been brilliant, maybe it would have won that battle. But I don't think it is far to say brilliance fails without conformity based on a single example whose brilliance is very debatable.</comment>


What people are saying on Facebook about Google+. - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/search.php?q=google%2B&init=quick&type=eposts

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something: I just see a bunch of people's profiles in a search results listing. Do I need to actually have a Facebook account to see what's relevant?

<comment><USER3> Yes you need to log in to be able to see anything else than profiles. I could only see profile before I realized I wasn't logged in. Once logged in though, the search for "Google+" was now showing anything related to Google+, it was almost only status like "Go to google maps, Type directions from X to Y, Look at step X, Laugh!" that people spammed.</comment></comment>