Top disappointing technologies(pcauthority.com.au)
pcauthority.com.au
Top disappointing technologies
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/145271,top-10-disappointing-technologies.aspx
4 comments
Don't bother reading the article. It's mostly crap, wrong or both. If you're still interested, here they are for you, without the garbage commentary
Honorable Mentions: Biometrics and Ubuntu
10. Virtual Reality
9. Alternative search engines
8. Voice recognition
7. Apple Lisa
6. 10GB Ethernet
5. FireWire
4. Bluetooth
3. Itanium
2. Zune
1. Windows Vista
Honorable Mentions: Biometrics and Ubuntu
10. Virtual Reality
9. Alternative search engines
8. Voice recognition
7. Apple Lisa
6. 10GB Ethernet
5. FireWire
4. Bluetooth
3. Itanium
2. Zune
1. Windows Vista
Woe unto you, HN reader, who decides to go through and read the article anyway.
Let me excerpt the Ubuntu bit: "Nearly five years after its release, Ubuntu remains popular amongst Linux users, but has yet to really pick up any sort of real momentum in the greater desktop OS market."
That's the main point of seven paragraphs, and the closest they ever come to identifying any problems with Ubuntu. Believe me, they exist -- I just switched from Vista while recovering from a hard drive failure, and I could talk your ear off despite it being a very solid OS.
The rest is self-absorbed content-free filler. (I do not need to know what you ate for lunch when reading the article. No really, that is not a joke, they go out of their way to tell you.)
Let me excerpt the Ubuntu bit: "Nearly five years after its release, Ubuntu remains popular amongst Linux users, but has yet to really pick up any sort of real momentum in the greater desktop OS market."
That's the main point of seven paragraphs, and the closest they ever come to identifying any problems with Ubuntu. Believe me, they exist -- I just switched from Vista while recovering from a hard drive failure, and I could talk your ear off despite it being a very solid OS.
The rest is self-absorbed content-free filler. (I do not need to know what you ate for lunch when reading the article. No really, that is not a joke, they go out of their way to tell you.)
>* I just switched from Vista while recovering from a hard drive failure, and I could talk your ear off despite it being a very solid OS.*
Go on. I'm curious what you dislike about it. I've been using it for so long i'm probably accustomed to the faults.
Go on. I'm curious what you dislike about it. I've been using it for so long i'm probably accustomed to the faults.
I have a folder on my desktop into which I've checked out a Netbeans project (my Rails app). I can see the folder on my desktop. I can see the Rails app with LS. Why can I not see the file Rails app by opening the folder on my desktop?
I am running Ubuntu from a USB drive. This required me to do a little hackery with my bootloader. (I used Wubi to install when my Windows install was failing because I couldn't burn CDs because I could only boot to safe mode. Then I migrated the Wubi install from the dying internal drive to the safe external drive. There is a tool and instructions for how to do this linked from the Wubi site, and it reported success, but no joy for me because the bootloaders were borked. I managed to fix it by running Wubi under my dying Windows drive again, making myself a bootable USB key, unplugging the hard drive to boot from the key, reattaching the hard drive, and editing my grub config files in vim.
2009: year of the consumer friendly Linux distribution.
Except, if I forget and leave any of my USB peripherals attached to the computer when I reboot, the ordering of the mounted USB drives gets thrown off and I get told the partition doesn't exist or something like that. sigh power down unplug unplug power up
I obviously can't program for Windows on the machine (I sell software which has to run on Windows or, bam, byebye 90% of my sales) but that isn't Ubuntu's fault. It is, however, mentionable as a source of friction to me.
In addition to my various Windows development environment tools, a lot of things I'm accustomed to Just Working now Just Don't Work. Full-screen Youtube videos? Nope -- I get a nice letterbox bordering the original. CD burner? Not operational yet. Firefox seems to have weird editing issues where every few sentences THERE IT GOES AGAIN my cursor gets moved up a few lines randomly while typing.
I've got a dual monitor setup (laptop and desktop monitor) and wanted to watch a movie on the big one -- one click of maximize while the flash movie (Amazon) was in the big monitor and, bam, it maximized to the smaller laptop screen.
My experience with Japanese support has made me once again thank God for being born speaking the same language as the majority of the world's OSS programmers. I don't know if it is just the Wubi version or the distro I grabbed or what, but it took three restarts before I actually got Japanese on the menus (with one line of instructions helpfully telling me what English I needed to click to accomplish that) downloaded and enabled.
The IME (input method editor) is inconsistent about where it lets you type and, well, am I allowed to say it is grossly inferior to MS's?
Example: "Please give my regards to Yasuda-san" (dirt common name in Japan) should be 安田さんによろしくお伝えください。 or something to that effect (there are acceptable variations for some of the words -- whether you would kanjify yoroshiku or kudasai is a matter of taste more than anything). Instead, the default behavior got me 安ださんによろしくお伝えください。 Please give my regards to an uncommon way to say "is cheap"? (It has since recovered and gets Yasuda right on the first try.)
Finally, and feel free to laugh at me for this one: I spent five minutes looking for the button and couldn't find it so I Googled [where is the button in Ubuntu which I click to open a terminal window]. (I only ever use it through SSH, so that is not normally a problem for me.) I missed it my first three times through the Application menu. I fail at being a poweruser, what can I say ;)
I am running Ubuntu from a USB drive. This required me to do a little hackery with my bootloader. (I used Wubi to install when my Windows install was failing because I couldn't burn CDs because I could only boot to safe mode. Then I migrated the Wubi install from the dying internal drive to the safe external drive. There is a tool and instructions for how to do this linked from the Wubi site, and it reported success, but no joy for me because the bootloaders were borked. I managed to fix it by running Wubi under my dying Windows drive again, making myself a bootable USB key, unplugging the hard drive to boot from the key, reattaching the hard drive, and editing my grub config files in vim.
2009: year of the consumer friendly Linux distribution.
Except, if I forget and leave any of my USB peripherals attached to the computer when I reboot, the ordering of the mounted USB drives gets thrown off and I get told the partition doesn't exist or something like that. sigh power down unplug unplug power up
I obviously can't program for Windows on the machine (I sell software which has to run on Windows or, bam, byebye 90% of my sales) but that isn't Ubuntu's fault. It is, however, mentionable as a source of friction to me.
In addition to my various Windows development environment tools, a lot of things I'm accustomed to Just Working now Just Don't Work. Full-screen Youtube videos? Nope -- I get a nice letterbox bordering the original. CD burner? Not operational yet. Firefox seems to have weird editing issues where every few sentences THERE IT GOES AGAIN my cursor gets moved up a few lines randomly while typing.
I've got a dual monitor setup (laptop and desktop monitor) and wanted to watch a movie on the big one -- one click of maximize while the flash movie (Amazon) was in the big monitor and, bam, it maximized to the smaller laptop screen.
My experience with Japanese support has made me once again thank God for being born speaking the same language as the majority of the world's OSS programmers. I don't know if it is just the Wubi version or the distro I grabbed or what, but it took three restarts before I actually got Japanese on the menus (with one line of instructions helpfully telling me what English I needed to click to accomplish that) downloaded and enabled.
The IME (input method editor) is inconsistent about where it lets you type and, well, am I allowed to say it is grossly inferior to MS's?
Example: "Please give my regards to Yasuda-san" (dirt common name in Japan) should be 安田さんによろしくお伝えください。 or something to that effect (there are acceptable variations for some of the words -- whether you would kanjify yoroshiku or kudasai is a matter of taste more than anything). Instead, the default behavior got me 安ださんによろしくお伝えください。 Please give my regards to an uncommon way to say "is cheap"? (It has since recovered and gets Yasuda right on the first try.)
Finally, and feel free to laugh at me for this one: I spent five minutes looking for the button and couldn't find it so I Googled [where is the button in Ubuntu which I click to open a terminal window]. (I only ever use it through SSH, so that is not normally a problem for me.) I missed it my first three times through the Application menu. I fail at being a poweruser, what can I say ;)
It's also a typo-ridden mess. I stopped counting after 5. It still surprises me that people won't proofread before hitting "publish."
> Don't bother reading the article.
I suggest flagging it.
I suggest flagging it.
Myopic article. "Hey, I only use Google, so nobody else must be using something else." Yahoo has a marketshare of 10-20%, depending on who you ask [1][2][3]. I wish I had 10% market share in my market...
Furthermore, Yahoo has over 50% marketshare in Japan [4], Baidu is the dominant search engine in China [5][6], and none of the Western search engine get any foot in the door in South Korea [7]. Furthermore, these three countries combined have about 27% of all Internet users worldwide[8][9]
Research, it works.
[1] http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=4
[2] http://www.seoconsultants.com/search-engines/
[3] http://www.submitawebsite.com/blog/search-engine-stats.html
[4] http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2008/11/...
[5] http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-losing-market-shar...
[6] http://www.rockyfu.com/blog/china-search-engine-200809/
[7] http://www.altsearchengines.com/2009/04/25/korean-search-eng...
[8] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
[9] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm
Furthermore, Yahoo has over 50% marketshare in Japan [4], Baidu is the dominant search engine in China [5][6], and none of the Western search engine get any foot in the door in South Korea [7]. Furthermore, these three countries combined have about 27% of all Internet users worldwide[8][9]
Research, it works.
[1] http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=4
[2] http://www.seoconsultants.com/search-engines/
[3] http://www.submitawebsite.com/blog/search-engine-stats.html
[4] http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2008/11/...
[5] http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-losing-market-shar...
[6] http://www.rockyfu.com/blog/china-search-engine-200809/
[7] http://www.altsearchengines.com/2009/04/25/korean-search-eng...
[8] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
[9] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm
- Steve Jobs has had precious few 'misses' in the course of h1is career as an executive
Although he is very successful jobs had more then a few 'misses' in fact he has a history of many mistakes, he just kept going: Twiggy drive, apple III, lisa, lisa 2, NeXT (I suppose you could _rationalize_ this as a non-failure) along with some bad business decisions. If you read his life story its fascinating and inspiring that he ended up where he is today.
I was pretty taken aback, I can tell you. I didn't even know she knew what Ubuntu was. Turns out she was rebooting the machine into Ubuntu each time I "left" it on Vista for her when I went in to work. The reason? It's prettier(she is an Art major) and runs faster.
And tried installing the the 3G card on Ubuntu and guess what? Worked like a dream.