Coming primarily from BlackBerry development, I think this "platform fragmentation" is going to be a real challenge. While the general application architecture is neat, if the device hardware is tweaked for different devices this is going to make it increasingly difficult to develop for.
Until the BlackBerry JDE included pre-compiler directives, it was a nightmare to support different device hardware. To make matters worse, some hardware API calls (eg: GPS unit) were disabled by certain carriers even if the device supported it. Of course, the advent of the BB Storm brought a whole new world of hurt with a rotating screen not to mention all the new calls you needed to make for the keyboard to appear / disappear whenever needed.
Since nothing is backward compatible, a BB app compiled for the Storm with JDE 4.7 won't run on a 4.6 device. So the result? You end up with a different JAD file for each operating system version. Don't even get me started on having to sign your apps for the privilege of using "protected" system API calls. Everything runs fine until you get the program onto a real device where the privileged calls are rejected by the BB os and of course the universe of signed API calls changed from release to release as well.
Google may already be on the road to this El Dorado, I think they are going to need to define a reference platform that all Android powered devices must support. If they don't tackle this now, manufacturers will create variants on the core phone concept and the application marketplace will begin to fracture. The idea that you can build a Midlet and bring it from one device to another hasn't been successful, the display metrics of these phones are too varying and the capabilities of the hardware are diverse -- establish a minimal platform requirement for your applications (ala: iPhone) and this problem goes away.
I agree -- more significantly, Microsoft has no ability to maintain parity between platform versions of MS Office. While I tried running MS Office on my Mac, the lack of support for VBA Macros made it almost impossible to use with documents my colleagues were sending me. Fortunately, OpenOffice has excellent support in this regard and after navigating the security settings I was able to run the same macros my Windows counterparts are running.
Microsoft is seriously missing the boat here, I gather they are going to "fix" this in a subsequent release of Office but the damage is already done. I've got OO installed now and don't really see any reason to go back.
With all that said, my observation on the parent story is the same as before - these patent infringement cases in regards to software are bogus. Computer programs should be treated according to copyright law, it is simply too easy for more than one person to dream up the same idea and create a computer application for that.
I agree. Totally pointless dribble, it would have some merit if actual failed IT projects were scrutinized in multiple companies and then a hypothesis gathered from there.
If you take a read of the whitepaper, this is really just a sales pitch for SIP ("Simple Iterative Partitions"). You would think someone training clients in SIP would have a few real metrics on failed IT project costs.
I don't recall any promises that Office would be rewritten in.NET...
There were some empty promises about this when.NET first came out. They have since baked in C# code into MS Office but it remains MFC/C++ at the core.
It will be interesting to see how this will work out with Silverlight 3 out-of-browser applications (since those are portable at least between Windows and OS X, and hopefully, eventually, Moonlight will get there as well).
That will be interesting actually, I thought WPF might help abstract that out but unfortunately it appears MS only implemented a sub-set of this for Silverlight.
So --- once your app runs into any other WPF DirectX code the ride is going to get rather bumpy on a Mac.
Of course, even once you get past the GDI layer issues you'll have problems with higher level subsystems like video and audio. This is as much Apple's fault as it is Microsoft's - it sure would be nice if everyone could agree on some standards here.
Something that hasn't been mentioned is how little today's college graduates will know about modems. I think this goes hand-in-hand with using analog tape recorders to store program data, this was quite common in the early 1980's and together with my 300 baud modem it really helped to demystify storage and electronic communications for me.
Go ahead and shop for a new PC with a modem in. Good luck. Everything has a network board in it now, with the exception of FAX machines the modem has quickly been relegated to attics and basements everywhere. Tape drives aren't doing much better these days, it seems direct to disk is getting to be the cheapest route.
Speaking strictly from a Windows development perspective, I think.NET has improved the experience somewhat compared to other kludgy frameworks (MFC / ATL). Assuming you don't plan on any cross platform deployments, you can implement your application within.NET using all of the capabilities of the operating system in an object oriented fashion. It's quick - it's easy - and C# is close enough to C/C++ that anyone with a programming background can pick it up.
Where Microsoft missed the mark is on the promise that their own applications would migrate to.NET. For example, Microsoft Office would get re-written as a.NET application. Ironically, I think it's because of the lack of cross platform capability that.NET was unable to meet this need. Microsoft has a number of key software products that need to run on both Mac and Windows. While native C/C++ can be easily ported, without a compatible CLR moving to Mac isn't that easy.
Had they been able to meet the portability objective (which they never promised), I think.NET could have been much more prevalent. For now, it will continue to be a second-best development environment for Windows computers (with C/C++ being the primary).
It seems that most of what Google Wave has to offer is already available in other venues... but if they can converge on truly real-time collaboration that uses chat together with a shared desktop / application, Google might be on to something. Don't forget the Google Voice project, the consolidation of these two platforms (conference calling with call recording and Google Wave discussions + real-time application sharing) could be a real GoToMyPC killer-app.
Microsoft has come pretty close with Shared View but it's tricky to get installed and it isn't cross platform. Not to mention, MS doesn't offer any telephony support (although Skype does work pretty well).
Obviously, there are commercial alternatives (GoTo Meeting, WebEx, etc.) and even some almost-there open source tools (DimDim) but they are either expensive or feature-limited. If it stays as-is, it's going to have a tough time growing much beyond a Twitter clone.
What about the ~120 minute upgrade with 70GB of data? That seems pretty long to me... 2 hours.
I'm not sure what that means, is the computer offline for 2 hours while the upgrade installs? Or maybe it's the total amount of time to install and finish re-indexing your content, in which case the core install is much shorter and the computer is already running while re-indexing of content completes.
The upgrade is a pretty realistic scenario as there are going to be quite a few Vista users standing in line for Windows 7. With the advent of DRM, I'm not sure how successful even power users are going to be at getting the clean installs to work - an upgrade sure would be easier.
I've had a similar experience on Ubuntu as well -- I've upgrade from 6.10 to the current stable release 9.04 with a variety of issues on the way. Generally it is possible to recover but you need to be familiar with the command prompt to manually initiate the completion and/or reconfiguration of your environment.
Of course, a commercial operating system like Windows should be able to accomplish an upgrade -- particularly when a majority of your users running the existing platform (Vista) want an upgrade. I'm not sure on the 650GB storage thing, assuming this is your user documents & settings and not your external storage (where you might have music and videos) then I can't imagine it's that much of an issue.
This is an important observation -- we have quite a few discs that simply cannot be copied as a result.
My best success has been with VLC, although DVDFab works fairly well also. Unfortunately, there are a few discs that we can't even *play* in the DVD-ROM drive on any computer. This level of "protection" is starting to border on ridiculous. While our new $74 DVD player seems to play them fine the media center PC is now a virtual brick when it comes these discs.
I can't believe we had to buy a separate player just to watch certain movies. Be wary of the movies you backup, if it's a Sony disc you might want to think twice before you even bother to purchase it.
Why bother with a real store? Microsoft is primarily a software company, they should be looking at ways to maximize the sales of software.
If you're going to steal something from Apple, maybe looking at the App Store would be a good starting point. Imagine if Vista had an Add/Remove Programs link that would actually show you new programs you could install just like the App Store.
The current Microsoft store is missing way too much, and most of the software is far too expensive. Consumers won't be buying $150 copies of MS Office anytime soon. Why not offer MS Word for $25?
More importantly, take advantage of _software_ and integrate this with MS Windows. Let me shop for programs from within my os, similar to Ubuntu's Add/Remove application, but with a hook into your MS Live ID where you can include billing information.
Heck, if you do it right you can ditch the MSDN downloads for enterprise users and have the billing info in the MS AppStore connected to the corporate account.
Aside from the complexity of all these different versions of Windows, what about the problems with supporting your software on them?
First you have to determine if it's 64-bit or 32-bit -- after you get past that you need to determine which edition is running specifically.
If it's Home Basic then only 5 SMB connections are allowed but if it's Home Premium then it's 10 connections. Maybe that's not your problem, if your app is CPU intensive then the user won't have a second CPU without Business edition.
Of course, if you're doing any multilingual work you will need to be on Enterprise or Ultimate.
Do you need your application to use a web server for anything? What about sending a fax or scanning something? Better figure out which version of Windows you need and detect on install before you run into trouble.
Rather than have such a complex lineup, with such stringent upgrade paths, MS would do better to have an app store level functionality where you could simply install the additional programs you need.
Are you running low on SMB access? Spend $10 and get another 10 connections! Do you need to scan something, spend $25 and get the Windows scanner support.
This is a point-to-point bandwidth measuring tool based on ICMP. It works fairly well and doesn't require you to saturate the network to establish thruput.
It's also nice because you can use bing to measure the speed between two arbitrary hosts. In other words, Server A and Desktop A or Server A and Desktop B.
With that said, if you do observe a potential issue based on your bing results then you will want to try a method like Shawn suggests here (ie; saturate the pipe and see what results from that).
As an aside, if you can use iSCSI or NFS for your network file solution the performance over something like CIFS is notable -- especially on slower networks.
My only experience with HDCP has been entirely negative. Until about a year ago, my ATI Radeon video board had beautiful DVI output that worked with my first-generation HDCP-enabled Samsung monitor.
Without even thinking, last year I upgraded to a much beefier Nvidia board. Unfortunately, once it is coupled with my HDCP enabled monitor the result is a blank screen.
It's completely useless to me.
What I can't understand is this happens by just attempting to boot my computer and run any kind of graphical interface (Windows or X11). Is this the kind of "protection" that HDCP is suppose to offer?
Do I have time to figure this out? No. To be honest, at this point I have no interest in upgrading my graphic hardware ever again and will simply live with the resolution I can get out of my DVI->VGA adapter.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft didn't instigate this action and in fact they wanted to work with Russian authorities to resolve this in an amicable fashion:
This is a real problem - how do you enforce copyright and intellectual property rights when the victim may have no idea they are in violation?
I know quite a few people who have been bitten by Windows Genuine Advantage. They purchased computers from a vendor who in fact sold them illegal copies at full market price. So they have effectively paid for an XP license but the copy they were sold is illegal.
Maybe we need to treat PC vendors like pharmacists? You must be licensed in the state where you want to sell a computer. Every computer sold must have your name or company name on it, and if you are caught selling a computer without a license it is a $1M fine.
Why not stop making it free? Ask for a credit card when signing up and then charge per-email sent.
Not only will this deter spammers because of the cost, it will be easier to spot clusters of hijacked accounts because the card numbers will either be stolen or all have the same number on them.
Use the $0.01 you make on each email to help recoup your costs.
I can't agree more! It seems like every other movie we rent ends up skipping, freezing or otherwise drowning in a pool of damaged data. The media has caused no end of frustration to our movie watching, the same can be said of any previous media (VHS included!).
Let's get away from the media. If Sony really wanted to be advancing the state-of-the-art they would take all the movie studios they own and publish these libraries online.
We also need set-top boxes for all this stuff to work, but it's almost a chicken & egg problem. Maybe Apple has the right idea, although I really hope we get some standards in electronic distribution before too many vendors get involved.
An interesting extension of the multi-touch, although it tends to make more sense on something like Surface or the iPod Touch where keyboard input isn't possible.
I'm not sure how practical this configuration would be. Desktop computers and laptops currently rely on the keyboard and mouse input paradigm, while it may be possible to learn another skill (touching your screen) this will be even more time consuming than moving between the keyboard and the mouse.
Maybe some kiosk applications and the tablet edition of Vista will be viable, I just don't see how this can be deployed to the desktop in a practical fashion.
Actually, read your EULA carefully -- Microsoft doesn't take the blame at all when the software doesn't work correctly. For a fee they will certainly _support_ the software, which is not something you're going to get with a "free" download of Linux.
Per the original posters observations, there are certainly new things you will need to learn but I agree particularly that Office 2007 is a fairly large hurdle. The UI is rather spiffy, but the ribbon-bar metaphore is entirely new.
I think the Vista Do-Over should extend to IE and MS Office 2007. Give users the option to run everything in "classic" mode where you get the feature improvements in the new products with the exact same look & feel of Windows XP/2000. Enterprise customers can't afford to retrain everyone, at least XP could look a lot like Windows 95/98/2000 so it was easy to assimilate.
Incidentally, I am aware that Vista includes a "classic" UI mode; unfortuantely, a variety of new navigational widgets (the file bar in Explorer for example) make this mode somewhat ineffective. While you can make the ribbon-bar behave like a menu bar and use the Alt key to bring up a menu in IE7, this doesn't have the same affect.
A paper receipt has very limited value -- even if a recount of the paper could be semi-automated it would most likely introduce enough errors in the recount that there would always be a discrepancy.
Focus on building the protocol standards for e-voting and force vendors to comply with these standards. In a standard voting scheme, multiple electronic vote counters can be used to record the same vote and a total count can be requested between two or more systems when the electronic voting is complete.
If the total counts don't match, we can assume either the vote is wrong or one of the vendors has a software defect.
Remove the proprietary nature of electronic voting systems and you will also remove the chance that a single interest can control the election.
I have to agree -- service is your differentiator. In fact, in a corporate setting I would suggest considering giving away your software and selling maintainence. Customers must buy a minimum annual subscription level (eg: 3 years) at which point they can choose to renew if they have found this product useful.
Maintainence also has the advantage that you can establish a licensed install base for consumption of your application. There are different costs associated with 10 users, 50 users, 100 users, etc. With a product that requires a server, it's certainly acceptable to track the number of users connecting.
The key here is to trust your users, and from my experience in a corporate setting the support aspect is far more valuable. Some level of flexibility is needed and since most companies want to be legal then by validating their usage on a yearly basis you can keep them on the right track.
This doesn't make any sense -- so I should be forced to pay my ISP more money to help deal with unwanted email?
Here's another idea, let's make all junk mail free and we'll raise the price of postage to cover the cost.
This is absurd. Spam is killing email, out of 100+ emails a day there might be 5 valid email messages in my personal inbox. While my spam filters do a pretty good job, they don't catch everything and will occasionally move valid email to my Spam box.
The crux of the problem is the sender has no obligation to pay for the cost of delivering an electronic message. I'm not saying Goodmail is the way to go, but some kind of pay-per-message system would address this concern. These systems don't even need to run for-profit, as long as there is an intrinsic cost to send the message it's okay if the proceeds are simply shared with the recipient.
I also agree with Ballmer, but for different reasons. In this case, the observation about the perceived market value of Google is the real issue. They have a P/E ratio nearly double the sector average and are trading at more than x80 free cash flow.
While they may not have any debt, they are only borderline cash-flow positive and their stock value has played a major role in making that happen. It is nice to see that total revenue is increasing year over year, but this is not yet translating into any real growth.
They are not nearly as diversified as Microsoft, nor do they have the same kind of sustainable business model. Google has so far missed the mark in terms of building a business, they have some "cute" technologies but nothing that can't be easily replicated and improved upon.
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Coming primarily from BlackBerry development, I think this "platform fragmentation" is going to be a real challenge. While the general application architecture is neat, if the device hardware is tweaked for different devices this is going to make it increasingly difficult to develop for.
Until the BlackBerry JDE included pre-compiler directives, it was a nightmare to support different device hardware. To make matters worse, some hardware API calls (eg: GPS unit) were disabled by certain carriers even if the device supported it. Of course, the advent of the BB Storm brought a whole new world of hurt with a rotating screen not to mention all the new calls you needed to make for the keyboard to appear / disappear whenever needed.
Since nothing is backward compatible, a BB app compiled for the Storm with JDE 4.7 won't run on a 4.6 device. So the result? You end up with a different JAD file for each operating system version. Don't even get me started on having to sign your apps for the privilege of using "protected" system API calls. Everything runs fine until you get the program onto a real device where the privileged calls are rejected by the BB os and of course the universe of signed API calls changed from release to release as well.
Google may already be on the road to this El Dorado, I think they are going to need to define a reference platform that all Android powered devices must support. If they don't tackle this now, manufacturers will create variants on the core phone concept and the application marketplace will begin to fracture. The idea that you can build a Midlet and bring it from one device to another hasn't been successful, the display metrics of these phones are too varying and the capabilities of the hardware are diverse -- establish a minimal platform requirement for your applications (ala: iPhone) and this problem goes away.
I agree -- more significantly, Microsoft has no ability to maintain parity between platform versions of MS Office. While I tried running MS Office on my Mac, the lack of support for VBA Macros made it almost impossible to use with documents my colleagues were sending me. Fortunately, OpenOffice has excellent support in this regard and after navigating the security settings I was able to run the same macros my Windows counterparts are running.
Microsoft is seriously missing the boat here, I gather they are going to "fix" this in a subsequent release of Office but the damage is already done. I've got OO installed now and don't really see any reason to go back.
With all that said, my observation on the parent story is the same as before - these patent infringement cases in regards to software are bogus. Computer programs should be treated according to copyright law, it is simply too easy for more than one person to dream up the same idea and create a computer application for that.
I agree. Totally pointless dribble, it would have some merit if actual failed IT projects were scrutinized in multiple companies and then a hypothesis gathered from there.
If you take a read of the whitepaper, this is really just a sales pitch for SIP ("Simple Iterative Partitions"). You would think someone training clients in SIP would have a few real metrics on failed IT project costs.
Ah yes, the ever elusive 34 bit Office...
Obviously, that should have been "32 bit".
I don't recall any promises that Office would be rewritten in .NET...
There were some empty promises about this when .NET first came out. They have since baked in C# code into MS Office but it remains MFC/C++ at the core.
It will be interesting to see how this will work out with Silverlight 3 out-of-browser applications (since those are portable at least between Windows and OS X, and hopefully, eventually, Moonlight will get there as well).
That will be interesting actually, I thought WPF might help abstract that out but unfortunately it appears MS only implemented a sub-set of this for Silverlight.
So --- once your app runs into any other WPF DirectX code the ride is going to get rather bumpy on a Mac.
Of course, even once you get past the GDI layer issues you'll have problems with higher level subsystems like video and audio. This is as much Apple's fault as it is Microsoft's - it sure would be nice if everyone could agree on some standards here.
Actually, I think there would have been a good ROI for re-writing Office in .NET.
Migrating to 64 bit Windows would have been a lot easier. The only thing you need to retool is the CLR, otherwise the application remains the same.
And yes, I know you can run a 34 bit MS Office on a 64 bit Windows but it's sub-optimal for a number of reasons.
Something that hasn't been mentioned is how little today's college graduates will know about modems. I think this goes hand-in-hand with using analog tape recorders to store program data, this was quite common in the early 1980's and together with my 300 baud modem it really helped to demystify storage and electronic communications for me.
Go ahead and shop for a new PC with a modem in. Good luck. Everything has a network board in it now, with the exception of FAX machines the modem has quickly been relegated to attics and basements everywhere. Tape drives aren't doing much better these days, it seems direct to disk is getting to be the cheapest route.
Speaking strictly from a Windows development perspective, I think .NET has improved the experience somewhat compared to other kludgy frameworks (MFC / ATL). Assuming you don't plan on any cross platform deployments, you can implement your application within .NET using all of the capabilities of the operating system in an object oriented fashion. It's quick - it's easy - and C# is close enough to C/C++ that anyone with a programming background can pick it up.
Where Microsoft missed the mark is on the promise that their own applications would migrate to .NET. For example, Microsoft Office would get re-written as a .NET application. Ironically, I think it's because of the lack of cross platform capability that .NET was unable to meet this need. Microsoft has a number of key software products that need to run on both Mac and Windows. While native C/C++ can be easily ported, without a compatible CLR moving to Mac isn't that easy.
Had they been able to meet the portability objective (which they never promised), I think .NET could have been much more prevalent. For now, it will continue to be a second-best development environment for Windows computers (with C/C++ being the primary).
It seems that most of what Google Wave has to offer is already available in other venues... but if they can converge on truly real-time collaboration that uses chat together with a shared desktop / application, Google might be on to something. Don't forget the Google Voice project, the consolidation of these two platforms (conference calling with call recording and Google Wave discussions + real-time application sharing) could be a real GoToMyPC killer-app.
Microsoft has come pretty close with Shared View but it's tricky to get installed and it isn't cross platform. Not to mention, MS doesn't offer any telephony support (although Skype does work pretty well).
Obviously, there are commercial alternatives (GoTo Meeting, WebEx, etc.) and even some almost-there open source tools (DimDim) but they are either expensive or feature-limited. If it stays as-is, it's going to have a tough time growing much beyond a Twitter clone.
What about the ~120 minute upgrade with 70GB of data? That seems pretty long to me... 2 hours.
I'm not sure what that means, is the computer offline for 2 hours while the upgrade installs? Or maybe it's the total amount of time to install and finish re-indexing your content, in which case the core install is much shorter and the computer is already running while re-indexing of content completes.
The upgrade is a pretty realistic scenario as there are going to be quite a few Vista users standing in line for Windows 7. With the advent of DRM, I'm not sure how successful even power users are going to be at getting the clean installs to work - an upgrade sure would be easier.
I've had a similar experience on Ubuntu as well -- I've upgrade from 6.10 to the current stable release 9.04 with a variety of issues on the way. Generally it is possible to recover but you need to be familiar with the command prompt to manually initiate the completion and/or reconfiguration of your environment.
Of course, a commercial operating system like Windows should be able to accomplish an upgrade -- particularly when a majority of your users running the existing platform (Vista) want an upgrade. I'm not sure on the 650GB storage thing, assuming this is your user documents & settings and not your external storage (where you might have music and videos) then I can't imagine it's that much of an issue.
This is an important observation -- we have quite a few discs that simply cannot be copied as a result.
My best success has been with VLC, although DVDFab works fairly well also. Unfortunately, there are a few discs that we can't even *play* in the DVD-ROM drive on any computer. This level of "protection" is starting to border on ridiculous. While our new $74 DVD player seems to play them fine the media center PC is now a virtual brick when it comes these discs.
I can't believe we had to buy a separate player just to watch certain movies. Be wary of the movies you backup, if it's a Sony disc you might want to think twice before you even bother to purchase it.
Why bother with a real store? Microsoft is primarily a software company, they should be looking at ways to maximize the sales of software.
If you're going to steal something from Apple, maybe looking at the App Store would be a good starting point. Imagine if Vista had an Add/Remove Programs link that would actually show you new programs you could install just like the App Store.
The current Microsoft store is missing way too much, and most of the software is far too expensive. Consumers won't be buying $150 copies of MS Office anytime soon. Why not offer MS Word for $25?
More importantly, take advantage of _software_ and integrate this with MS Windows. Let me shop for programs from within my os, similar to Ubuntu's Add/Remove application, but with a hook into your MS Live ID where you can include billing information.
Heck, if you do it right you can ditch the MSDN downloads for enterprise users and have the billing info in the MS AppStore connected to the corporate account.
Aside from the complexity of all these different versions of Windows, what about the problems with supporting your software on them?
First you have to determine if it's 64-bit or 32-bit -- after you get past that you need to determine which edition is running specifically.
If it's Home Basic then only 5 SMB connections are allowed but if it's Home Premium then it's 10 connections. Maybe that's not your problem, if your app is CPU intensive then the user won't have a second CPU without Business edition.
Of course, if you're doing any multilingual work you will need to be on Enterprise or Ultimate.
Do you need your application to use a web server for anything? What about sending a fax or scanning something? Better figure out which version of Windows you need and detect on install before you run into trouble.
Rather than have such a complex lineup, with such stringent upgrade paths, MS would do better to have an app store level functionality where you could simply install the additional programs you need.
Are you running low on SMB access? Spend $10 and get another 10 connections! Do you need to scan something, spend $25 and get the Windows scanner support.
Or you could just run bing:
http://fgouget.free.fr/bing/bing_src-readme.shtml
This is a point-to-point bandwidth measuring tool based on ICMP. It works fairly well and doesn't require you to saturate the network to establish thruput.
It's also nice because you can use bing to measure the speed between two arbitrary hosts. In other words, Server A and Desktop A or Server A and Desktop B.
With that said, if you do observe a potential issue based on your bing results then you will want to try a method like Shawn suggests here (ie; saturate the pipe and see what results from that).
As an aside, if you can use iSCSI or NFS for your network file solution the performance over something like CIFS is notable -- especially on slower networks.
My only experience with HDCP has been entirely negative. Until about a year ago, my ATI Radeon video board had beautiful DVI output that worked with my first-generation HDCP-enabled Samsung monitor.
Without even thinking, last year I upgraded to a much beefier Nvidia board. Unfortunately, once it is coupled with my HDCP enabled monitor the result is a blank screen.
It's completely useless to me.
What I can't understand is this happens by just attempting to boot my computer and run any kind of graphical interface (Windows or X11). Is this the kind of "protection" that HDCP is suppose to offer?
Do I have time to figure this out? No. To be honest, at this point I have no interest in upgrading my graphic hardware ever again and will simply live with the resolution I can get out of my DVI->VGA adapter.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft didn't instigate this action and in fact they wanted to work with Russian authorities to resolve this in an amicable fashion:
http://www.microsoft.com/rus/news/issues/2007/02/news_20070207.mspx
This is a real problem - how do you enforce copyright and intellectual property rights when the victim may have no idea they are in violation?
I know quite a few people who have been bitten by Windows Genuine Advantage. They purchased computers from a vendor who in fact sold them illegal copies at full market price. So they have effectively paid for an XP license but the copy they were sold is illegal.
Maybe we need to treat PC vendors like pharmacists? You must be licensed in the state where you want to sell a computer. Every computer sold must have your name or company name on it, and if you are caught selling a computer without a license it is a $1M fine.
Why not stop making it free? Ask for a credit card when signing up and then charge per-email sent.
Not only will this deter spammers because of the cost, it will be easier to spot clusters of hijacked accounts because the card numbers will either be stolen or all have the same number on them.
Use the $0.01 you make on each email to help recoup your costs.
I can't agree more! It seems like every other movie we rent ends up skipping, freezing or otherwise drowning in a pool of damaged data. The media has caused no end of frustration to our movie watching, the same can be said of any previous media (VHS included!).
Let's get away from the media. If Sony really wanted to be advancing the state-of-the-art they would take all the movie studios they own and publish these libraries online.
We also need set-top boxes for all this stuff to work, but it's almost a chicken & egg problem. Maybe Apple has the right idea, although I really hope we get some standards in electronic distribution before too many vendors get involved.
An interesting extension of the multi-touch, although it tends to make more sense on something like Surface or the iPod Touch where keyboard input isn't possible.
I'm not sure how practical this configuration would be. Desktop computers and laptops currently rely on the keyboard and mouse input paradigm, while it may be possible to learn another skill (touching your screen) this will be even more time consuming than moving between the keyboard and the mouse.
Maybe some kiosk applications and the tablet edition of Vista will be viable, I just don't see how this can be deployed to the desktop in a practical fashion.
Actually, read your EULA carefully -- Microsoft doesn't take the blame at all when the software doesn't work correctly. For a fee they will certainly _support_ the software, which is not something you're going to get with a "free" download of Linux.
Per the original posters observations, there are certainly new things you will need to learn but I agree particularly that Office 2007 is a fairly large hurdle. The UI is rather spiffy, but the ribbon-bar metaphore is entirely new.
I think the Vista Do-Over should extend to IE and MS Office 2007. Give users the option to run everything in "classic" mode where you get the feature improvements in the new products with the exact same look & feel of Windows XP/2000. Enterprise customers can't afford to retrain everyone, at least XP could look a lot like Windows 95/98/2000 so it was easy to assimilate.
Incidentally, I am aware that Vista includes a "classic" UI mode; unfortuantely, a variety of new navigational widgets (the file bar in Explorer for example) make this mode somewhat ineffective. While you can make the ribbon-bar behave like a menu bar and use the Alt key to bring up a menu in IE7, this doesn't have the same affect.
A paper receipt has very limited value -- even if a recount of the paper could be semi-automated it would most likely introduce enough errors in the recount that there would always be a discrepancy.
Focus on building the protocol standards for e-voting and force vendors to comply with these standards. In a standard voting scheme, multiple electronic vote counters can be used to record the same vote and a total count can be requested between two or more systems when the electronic voting is complete.
If the total counts don't match, we can assume either the vote is wrong or one of the vendors has a software defect.
Remove the proprietary nature of electronic voting systems and you will also remove the chance that a single interest can control the election.
I have to agree -- service is your differentiator. In fact, in a corporate setting I would suggest considering giving away your software and selling maintainence. Customers must buy a minimum annual subscription level (eg: 3 years) at which point they can choose to renew if they have found this product useful.
Maintainence also has the advantage that you can establish a licensed install base for consumption of your application. There are different costs associated with 10 users, 50 users, 100 users, etc. With a product that requires a server, it's certainly acceptable to track the number of users connecting.
The key here is to trust your users, and from my experience in a corporate setting the support aspect is far more valuable. Some level of flexibility is needed and since most companies want to be legal then by validating their usage on a yearly basis you can keep them on the right track.
This doesn't make any sense -- so I should be forced to pay my ISP more money to help deal with unwanted email?
Here's another idea, let's make all junk mail free and we'll raise the price of postage to cover the cost.
This is absurd. Spam is killing email, out of 100+ emails a day there might be 5 valid email messages in my personal inbox. While my spam filters do a pretty good job, they don't catch everything and will occasionally move valid email to my Spam box.
The crux of the problem is the sender has no obligation to pay for the cost of delivering an electronic message. I'm not saying Goodmail is the way to go, but some kind of pay-per-message system would address this concern. These systems don't even need to run for-profit, as long as there is an intrinsic cost to send the message it's okay if the proceeds are simply shared with the recipient.
I also agree with Ballmer, but for different reasons. In this case, the observation about the perceived market value of Google is the real issue. They have a P/E ratio nearly double the sector average and are trading at more than x80 free cash flow.
While they may not have any debt, they are only borderline cash-flow positive and their stock value has played a major role in making that happen. It is nice to see that total revenue is increasing year over year, but this is not yet translating into any real growth.
They are not nearly as diversified as Microsoft, nor do they have the same kind of sustainable business model. Google has so far missed the mark in terms of building a business, they have some "cute" technologies but nothing that can't be easily replicated and improved upon.