ugh

I don’t want to say it’s doomed. Most of the people at Microsoft who decided to go that way are likely cleverer than me. I can only say that I don’t see their plan and I’m not sure whether they can be successful. (And also that I personally don’t like Windows 8 all that much, but that doesn’t say much.)

Exactly my point.

That format would be h.264. And nothing changes.

Switching to WebM is pointless if all other browsers still can get h.264. That way you can’t change anything.

Microsoft didn’t before this. But now they do. It’s a surprising and daring move.

Any key on the keyboard but you have to slide up (swipe, basically) with a mouse instead of just clicking? I get it that it makes sense on tablets as a lock screen, but on desktops? Ok, I’m going to call that a bug and ignore it. It’s easy to fix and no big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Even with that changed and the hotcorners indicated, the hodgepodge stays, though. The hotcorners are only the tip of the iceberg, what you notice immediately. (Or, rather, not at all, like me, who figured out to use the Windows key pretty quickly – but still after some confusion – but didn’t find the hotcorners for a long time after that. I can totally identify with the guy in the video. I wasn’t quite as helpless, but close and I’m young and grew up with that stuff.)

Windows 8 is leaky. Tablet paradigms leak into mouse and keyboard interfaces. It extremely confusing. There is no clean cut, no mode switch.

I understand the abstract principle behind it, but that does not help.

Two examples I noticed when fooling around with it. Nothing major, but they illustrate the problem very well. This is using a default and clean install of the consumer preview:

So you boot it up and are presented with a big image that displays the time and nothing else. Clicking just makes the image hop, you actually have to swipe upwards (with the mouse!) to be allowed to log in.

You see this PDF in the Explorer and double click it. A Metro app launches and removes all UI elements you just saw and are used to. There is no way to close it on screen, nowhere to click to get out of it. You have to know about the hot corners or keyboard shortcuts to get out of it. Even then: It’s a jarring transition between two completely different UI paradigms. That is no fun even if you know how to get out of it, even if you know that it’s supposed to be that way.

All of this would be fine if normal Windows apps were on their way out. If we all were to ditch our mice. If the Desktop were only there for compatibility reasons, to run those old apps no one is going to use in a year or two anyway. Only, even Microsoft doesn’t seem to be on that path. It looks like Office will not be a Metro app, for example.

I don’t want to see Windows 8 fail. Metro is incredibly cool for tablets and phones. (Windows 7 also was incredibly great – for Windows – as a desktop OS. It works really well.) It’s really awesome! But I’m not sure about the Metro and old Windows UI hodgepodge. I just can’t convince myself that touch interfaces work well with the mouse. It’s just not fun to swipe with a mouse. And interfaces which are fun to use with swipes and taps are not necessarily fun to use with a mouse. (The reverse is obviously also true.) All the Metro apps seem like incredibly cool tablet apps. I can see that I would have a lot of fun with them on my iPad. The Store is also cool and very well integrated. But with a mouse? In such a leaky environment? Where the mouse user is confronted with touch interfaces over and over?

What Microsoft is doing is incredibly brave. That alone deserves recognition. But I really can’t see it succeeding. Maybe I’m wrong.

Make?! Are you serious? It already is. Currently Firefox is just using Flash to play h.264 videos, not OS codecs. There is little practical difference between those two things.

This was always about booting h.264 from its position as the standard for publishing video on the web.

How was Google supposed to do that? Flash (still) doesn’t support WebM, so there wouldn’t be any fallback. Google surely isn’t arrogant enough to make YouTube videos not accessible to more than half of the browsers out there.

There was and still is no realistic way for Google to switch to WebM. Not exclusively. (Yes, they can also encode their videos in WebM but h.264 versions are always necessary.)

Bullying is a hard problem to solve, with and without Facebook. Parents always have little control, whether it's happening on Facebook or somewhere else.

Facebook has to provide its users (i.e. kids and their parents) with working tools that can prevent bullying. 'Report Abuse' links that work, for example. It should not be necessary for schools to have complete access to their students' accounts.

Schools should be able to do nothing. Parents should, obviously.

Steve Jobs regularily praised the people working for Apple, sometimes as a group, sometimes by name. Watch any Keynote to see that.

Network effects also favor Dropbox. Many Dropbox users I know don’t just use sharing features, they use Dropbox because of those sharing features. Those features are only useful if many other people are also using the same service.

I don’t understand what point you are trying to make.

Yep, that’s where I looked.

Moral condemnation is possible outside of legal battlegrounds.

I didn’t find anything. There is just the license agreement in that place which doesn’t seem to make any reference to OSM.

Humans have different reactions. The way OSM is reacted is very much how I personally would react. That’s why it doesn’t seem the least bit fake or watered down to me.

I guess if you are angered easily you might not understand how OSM could react that way, but please understand that just because you personally wouldn’t react that way doesn’t make it fake, not human or PR speak.

Humans really react and talk that way. It’s perfectly normal.

I think their message is just right. I would reserve calling them thieving bastards only after they explicitly refuse to give credit.

What Apple did is shameful but I think what OSM is doing is most likely to promote their goals. Let others write the outraged articles.

OSM or Apple's maps? OSM has crazy amounts of accurate detail for all cities I know in Germany.

Apple's tiles have all the streets but not a lot of detail (probably by choice, nothing wrong with a sparser map, especially for the intended purpose) and the labels suck.

I don't know what's going on there. OSM does have lots of detail for Germany and the problems with OSM are more general ones with the consistency of label placement and such. No map breaking stuff.

Apple's tiles, however have more glaring mistakes (double labels, missing labels).

Then congratulations Apple, for making a not so great map even worse. I can't really judge map quality in the US, but in Germany it sucks. Cities show up twice or are missing completely, labels are often small, unreadable and ugly. There is no consistency in the placement of lables.

OSM has its fair share of inconsistencies but it's not that bad.

The map is ok for what it is: Just for presentation inside of iPhoto, not for browsing or finding your way. I really hope that Apple doesn't plan to use this anywhere else and hat they just didn't go with Google because they can't customize their maps any way they want.

(That missing credit is also shameful. I was looking everywhere inside of iPhoto but couldn't find it. Stuff like that sould at least be moderately easy to find.)

Of course it has become more expensive to ship bits. More people are finding more uses. Are you deluded or what? How disconnected from reality and how entitled can one be?

Apple has been using prettier tile sets in iMovie on OS X – but (just like in this case) only for presentation, never for browsing or when you actually want to use maps.

I don’t think this indicates anything.

(Also: Those tiles are fine for presentation purposes but not even close to what Google offers otherwise. The tiles for Germany are horrible. Some cities don’t show up at all, some show up twice. There is no consistency, no rhyme, no reason. And that’s only the fundamentals, not even whether I can comfortably search for Italian restaurants.)

Maybe they can’t give you an unlimited plan? Data is seriously expensive for the carriers.

Depends. I don’t care about it if it’s clearly stated just how much bandwidth you get. I’m not in the US but in Germany carriers will often tell you they have unlimited flatrate plans but also state that if you go above a certain bandwidth use you will be throttled to GPRS speeds. I have no problem with that. It depends on how clearly it’s communicated.

I can see how others may be misled by that marketing, though, so it’s no super great. No reason to get angry, just reason for concern. Some German carriers are much more upfront about that (they might say “1GB of data, throttled to GPRS speeds above that”) and I obviously prefer that kind of marketing. It’s less confusing and more honest.

But the other thing is quality. Viewing angles and color gamut tends to be horrible on laptops. Not so on the iPad.

I’m not really sure why you are angry at the carriers. Knowing about the limits and how much you need is kinda your job. I know that I need at least half a terabyte per month when I’m using my laptop and I know to always check how much bandwidth I can get from the carriers.

Your responsibility.

I’m extremely happy that Apple is picking battery life over thickness and weight. It shows that they have their priorities straight: battery life is by far the best features of the iPad’s hardware. As long as the weight and size don’t get too crazy (and they are still doing better than the first iPad) picking battery life is always the right choice.

I bet they were pissed after people were disappointed that they only got an iPhone 4S and no iPhone 5. Plus at some point you have to stop numbering. iPhone 23 doesn’t sound very appealing.

You don’t understand. I’m not talking about the price of the device (which is extremely attractive), I’m talking about the price of the data plan.

I’m not sure how it is in the US but in Germany you just get a second SIM card. Not a second data plan. That would be stupid. But LTE is extremely expensive and has little to no coverage. You wouldn’t get more speed, you would have to pay more first for a very limited benefit.

How so?

Are the prices attractive? What about coverage? Does it really matter for most users? LTE is certainly nice to have, but it doesn’t seem like a very practical or useful feature to me.