Charlie Stross brought this idea up on his blog recently; what does a post work-for-pay world look like? What would you do if you had a home, food, and health care as a basic right?
Could we even get there with our current basic cultural value being that if you don't work, you have no value?
Well, Postgres can shine here if you can do a fair amount of processing inside of a stored procedure. The sproc takes care of lifting, the client can be (fairly) limited in the transformations it applies, and the network latency of repeatedly going to the DB is lessened.
I wrote a longer comment on another thread, but what this really makes me feel is that, instead of utilising a great design paired with WP7, there's just another indistinct me-too device to be drowned out by the iPhone.
It's sad, because the people who were behind the N9 really seemed like they understood what Apple was on about, how and why the iPhone was like it was.
Nokia may not have gotten all of it, but they were catching on, and with this release, I fear that spirit may have been lost.
Please pass on my remarks to the design team - I'm very impressed with their work, and I do wish that they continue their excellent designs.
I truly wish that Nokia had gone behind the N9 with everything it deserves. I feel it's the first time that Apple has actually been challenged in design, in integrity towards an ideal, in making something that exemplifies that internal drive.
After seeing the WP7, even knowing it was coming, I know that their lovely design work was cheapened by that release. It's still good design, but it lost something tangible and wonderful, that sense of being something different and better. By shipping WP7, it became something that exists secondary to another goal, instead of a goal unto itself. Cheapened, as though a device that exists not symbiotically with the software designed to run on it, but any random garbage that can be sold with it.
MeeGo Harmattan isn't as polished as iOS - it's got a lot of first-generation performance issues, definitely requires some babysitting to keep it running well, but it's miles ahead of Android.
It feels like the Harmattan team at Nokia really understood good UI and good design, and wanted to build a product around those ideals.
The N9 is also a really slick piece of hardware. Someone designed and loved this thing, and wanted it to be amazing. It doesn't have any weird bulges or outcroppings like all the Android handsets; the appearance of it is minimalist; even the camera module on the back looks like it fits the style. I always found the Android cameras to be just another annoying outcrop, never fitting with a cohesive design.
The N9, and Harmattan, have that cohesive design. It's a royal shame that it's the best phone no one will ever use...
I use an Android as the carrier I was on in Canada (Wind), like T-Mo, doesn't get the iPhone, and Android was the best smartphone available.
That said, I'm not a big fan of the phone I got (a Samsung Galaxy S), and Android's UI inconsistencies and lack of a culture of UI excellence really, really, really drive me up a wall. Going to switch to iOS as soon as the iPhone 5 comes out.
Interestingly, I find having that low-level access to be more restrictive. Suddenly, a thing that I just want to work (in this case, the music player) requires that I think about how I'm going to put files onto it, what the best way to synchronise those files is going to be, whether or not I have to mount it myself, if I ought to write scripts to manipulate it, the feeling that I need to write scripts to manipulate it, else why have all of these programming skills?
When really what I wanted to do was just listen to music while I'm walking around, and have a limited amount of worrying when it comes to getting music onto the device. (IE, it Just Works territory)
My behaviour is now circumscribed in other ways - my attention is split between things I really want to work on and this malaise of I ought to be crafting better tools to work with my music player.
"You can just set up rsync once!" is kind of a non-argument response to this - an Apple gadget, in this case, I set up nonce. Plug it in, it initializes, and syncs everything. Now I can listen to music where-ever I happen to be, and I don't have those circumscriptions to my attention.
If my Apple device annoys me sufficiently that I really want to have that level of control, there's a myriad of devices out there that automount as USB devices, that I could set up all sorts of nifty on-insert rules and script to high-heaven.
Personally, I much prefer glossy screens, both the glass-covered screen on my Macbook Pro as well as the polished LCD on my old Aspire netbook.
In general, the higher contrast and more vibrant colours are a net win, and I find my eyes less strained looking at the display.
Interesting article - I really liked the updated example at the very end, demonstrating a new pattern (for me) for handling exceptions that get thrown by wrapping the DB inserts in their own function.
Thank you! This was a great comment.