M$ thinks its OS & apps are important. They really aren't.
M$ gets away with closed source because its not "bet the farm," "screw this up and somebody gets killed," stuff. Its closed source because its trivial.
When businesses pay real money, like a mil down and $10k per seat with MIS & DBA support on top of that, they get the source code.
They sign non-disclosures and non-competition agreements out the wazoo but they get the source.
You don't even think of selling software at this level without the source. You'd be shown the door.
M$ doesn't even show up on the expenditure budget at this level.
The best thing to do with M$ & Bill Gates is laugh at him or maybe pity him in his delusion.
Nobody uses M$ products where there's any lives at stake or where there's any liability. Closed source is jack-off products for minor functionaries.
People who can turn off their machines and go home to their lives in distant cities, get home to their lives because the equipment that they use to get make the trip has nothing to do with M$, from the car they drive to the airport, to the traffic lights along the way, to the air traffic control system, to the airframes they ride in, to the program that figured out the mix of airplane food meal ingredients on their little plastic plate, to the program that controlled the refinery that made the plastic, to the one that controlled the extruder.
That's like buying a book to discover that it only opens within certain regions of the country.
Apart from being a stupid concept its just penalizing the mobile.
Don't need Qt's "painter" but ...
on
Qt for Mac
·
· Score: 3
I think if it comes with a set of PARTs and APIs that I can use in generating GUI code based on object models, I'll give it a spin.
All real-world systems I've worked on so far (government accounting, enterprise modeling, payroll/HR, loan, banking systems etc,) have weighed in at 700 to 1,200 window layouts and you don't maintain those "by hand" you regenerate the schema and GUI code when the underlying model changes.
Any system you "paint" is too expensive to maintain other than as an in-house product.
The solution is not to bury their heads in ths sand (it gets up their noses anyway,) but equip them to deal with it. And ourselves too.
If you sound like a homicidal maniac when you're having sex, maybe you're not doing it right.
Sex should be something to laugh with, not at. It should be a pleasure and pleasant to see and do.
If you like to occasionally sound like crazed buffaloes, go to a motel and wreck their sheets in private.
Otherwise what's the big secret? Mummy and daddy love each other. Deal with it. (That will usually get rolling eyeballs and sickers which don't sound like trauma to me.)
It harmful if they're coerced into participating against their will (or before some arbitrary age limit,) but I can't buy the argument just just surfing for free drivel and eye-candy is harmful.
Either the kid is too young and their eyes will glaze over at the boring crap (face it, if you're not interested, its boring crap,) or they'll get pissed off at this getting in the way of their pokemon web site.
If they're old enough to say "Hey dude, lets do some serious damage to my ol' man's MasterCard..." they're old enough to watch two people having sex. Its better than having them learn about where to buy guns.
Given America's love affair with the highway and the number of dents put into fenders every year, I wonder if they'll feature truly American recipes like "Sail Cat," "Armadillo pancake" and other ingredients from the flattened fauna that lies on the soft shoulder after meeting with the hard body panel...
They could host it "On the Road," and keep the production costs real low(-riser.)
Just thing that make you go "Mmm..."
(As long as they stick a sock in Shatner's mouth and threaten him with a phaser set on "calcinate" if he so much as hums.:-)
The needs of trustworthyness and verifiability will force the adoption of biometric verification for all data transmission. If you're doing commerce, you have to KNOW you can trust the source and the wire. Its business.
In some respects this is sad. You'll never again be able to put on masks when you're on the 'net. The phrase "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog." will become incomprehensible in a few years.
All communication will automatically be encrypted, signed and traceable from origin to destination. Spoofability will vanish. There will be no place to hide.
Paedophiles and criminals will have to loiter 'round the shadows at mall and the bus terminals like they did before 1995.
Sentences like and let us hack the hell out of their box scare the crap out of any corporate manager.
They're responsible for getting a product out the door according to their spec.s, not your's. To do that they have to retain control.
Try coming up with sentences like: We have a plan to explore the limits capabilities of your system. We would like some information, collaboration and coordination (at least a corporate contact.)
We will inform you of any security deficiencies, report on the actual capacities of the system and make general comments and contributions to expand the potential uses and markets of your system.
That is far more likely to get you on-side as an unpaid resource rather regarded like something stuck to their corporate shoe.:-)
Now M$ will be competing against a team of the premier content producer (AOL's portal service with its millions of subscribers, [Oh and Time-Warner too,]:-) and the premier play-platform producer (Sony, which also happens to be a class outfit which produces everything from games to movies to...)
Why waste cash a PC and all those headaches when a PS2 will do just fine and will never crash?
Look for M$ to start spitting in every direction: "Open Source is a communist plot" and "Buy our X-Box against Japanese imperialism." (Strike that last one. It would cut into OS Sales.)
Cute, with M$ reputation of delivering too little too late, its going to be a battle of the bank accounts. Who's got deeper pockets and a stabler revenue stream?
Soil maintains a constant temperature. Several thousand feet of it give an enormous thermal mass.
Put server farms in played-out salt mines (they're already being used for document storage.) The holes, really BIG holes, are already there.
Its dry, secure as Hell (you'd literally have to tunnel through thousand foot thick firewalls,) and you can put a power generating station near the opening.
The bully must have leaned too hard, built a heavy (big) house of cards on this kid's imagination and had him convinced he was ruined and had brought shame on his family.
Unlike a American tough who would have told him to use the guilt trip ticket as a suppository, the kid, a respectful caring and curious Indian, used the ticket on a one way trip.
Somebody needs to find a new career before he fucks up again. Maybe as a prison gard?
Our weapon is to develop and support, "buy into" a more effective means of content distribution. Its all about money.
If a micro-pament or a subscription business model is used by a band for their music and they make enough to be comfortable and creative, they'd never have to sell-out and they'd be immune to pressure fron the RIAA.
In return, the RIAA and the music money machine would suck wind for funds. Its all about money.
No money and the media companies and their parasite, the RIAA, shrivel and die.
Don't go through 'em. Go around 'em. Don't use 'em. Lose 'em. Don't follow 'em. Leave 'em in your wake.
The original idea was that the WWW combined with the 'discovery power' of search engines would make the entire business model of advertising products seem like the "shouting in the wilderness" that it really is.
Unfortunately, search engines can't achieve more than of fraction of their potential because of the fluidity of language and the fact that the denotation and the connotation of a word don't begin to properly describe the intent with or extent to which a word is (mis)used.
The multifarious purposes to which a word is weilded about like a loose sword slashing at obscurity is only only slightly more effectively that the thousands of ads that clutter our sensory environment.
The only possible way to get rid of these pesky pop-ups (that are growing in size as well as in frequency,) is to build a cataloguing scheme and make the advantages plain and cheap to all web page creators register their web pages.
This is just like all publishers are curently applying for ISBNs and ISSNs and registering their material with the library of congress and other bodies. Its also very like every phone book in existence.
In the last millenium (I loved writing that,) France disposed of "dead-tree" phone-books and installed 25 million MiniTel devices instantly creating a large Telidon-like infrastructure and user base.
We could do the same thing here without having to install anywhere as many 'terminals' since we could make the service Web accessible.
The telcos publishing arms could pick up the cost of the devices and the indexing services and derive new revenue streams from people registering their sites and index pages into a well managed index base.
That would enable advertisers to NOT have to pay to shout at us. They would be indexed by product, location, etc. And information/content providers have samples of their labor available for perusal.
It would allow us as users to get rid of all the banners and other visual noise.
As for how users are supposed to support the content providers... Subscription and/or micro-payment services with user authentication services using bio-metric information.
Which will mean the end of the phrase "On the InterNet, nobody knows you're a dog."
What it does for the implementation of non-trivial project is very good (and any military project is non-trivial and specified to the n-th degree, which is why they cost so much up front and then disappear from the political radar during implementation.)
The same is true for every major development effort from payroll systems, (would you want your payroll calculated by some if-fy procedure,) to diagnostic expert systems (it takes a major earth-quake to shut down some "million dollar an hour" production lines.)
When developping a 'mission critical, bet-the-farm product which will sell for real money (say a million $ down and $ 5k per seat,) you have to prove that it has been spec.'ed out to the n-th degree and how far along the implementation from design to 'finished' product you are, and what your strategy for getting there is. Extreme programming is part of that strategy.
Clients who spend real money are not buying "'shirk'-wrapped" fluff cobbled together in a slap-dash way.
While I am a firm believer in not coding alone, in tag-team development and constant review, 'extreme' practices don't insure completeness.
Design is essential to insure the viability of the development effort and documentation is essential to insure the survivability of the implementation.
Who insures that objects with state transitions are able to negotiate transitions forwards and backwards (or that they can''t when they shouldn't?)
The designer has to be able to do a complete job of writing specifications based not merely on what the existing customer base asks for, but on what the objects involved reveal as posibilities.
The clients will come back and ask for those very features when they see the system in operation.
I thought Maxwell wrote the laws on magnetism...
on
Magnet Patent Suits
·
· Score: 2
Can a utility restrict how the electrons they generate will be used? Can an iron mine sue a manufacturer for using sheet steel in their product?
The Yahoo article said "patent violations." It didn't say which ones...
but Lucent's page wasn't able to utter a phase through my web browser.
All my dialog boxes eventually catch my attention by speaking the message if I'm not paying attention. Even more important with OS X since I can be concentrating on some other task.
Text to speech is cute, not very difficult and not computationally demanding.
Speech to text is a very different kettle of fish.
When that didn't work, many of us aren't American anyway, they attacked our credibility.
But if you have the source code you can defend yourself so you don't have to be towed back to port because the clock management software (the clock for Christ's sake,) has a bug and divides by zero.
And as a bazillion scrips kiddies can tell you, its easy to repeatedly crack OSes that evolves as slowly as Microsoft's. You don't need source code. In fact you don't want the source code because the writer's intent keeps getting in the way of seeing what the code really does.
And, by the way, NOBODY who spends serious money on software (like a million for a package and a couple of grand per seat on maintenance for one mission critical system,) buys it without getting ALL of the source code. Of course we make them sign non-competition and non-disclosure agreements out the wazoo.
Microsoft has been selling a pig in a poke for years now because they don't sell anything important. Office apps. Bid deal... And when that market gets saturated, they're broke.
Now the bag is unravelling and their business model is proving to be mushroom fertilizer. For years they made money selling something that was only "almost good-enough."
Well it IS now only just good enough so they're sucking wind trying to hype crap. Nobody I know's buying it. If the OEMs weren't bundling it, nobody would bother buying anything beyond Windows '95 with service packs to fix some bugs.
FUD doesn't work if you can't show something scary. All M$ can show is a bunch of Unix and Linux systems working and not cratering the bottom line.
If you don't have direct line of sight, you'll never get a signal through (there are a lot of phone cells in NYC.)
Even at that, there is so much echo and shadowing, you can't get a clean signal through without such a performance degradation that its useless. (Its okay for voice quality but that's it.)
In a big city like NYC, Tokyo etc. you're either using cable for your TV signal or you don't watch it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, M$ is writing its own death warrant.
.NET strategy will require that their customers move off of the x86 platform and leave M$ behind.
.NET. And slice M$'s throat while you're at it.
Trust-worthy security is based on biometric authentication. That needs large chunks of processing and 64-bit architectures are barely enough.
M$ exists on x86 (32-bit) platforms ONLY. They are a one-trick OS pony. Unix & Linux are on all larger machines and available at a lower TCO.
Biometric security requirements of M$'s own
God speed
M$ thinks its OS & apps are important. They really aren't.
M$ gets away with closed source because its not "bet the farm," "screw this up and somebody gets killed," stuff. Its closed source because its trivial.
When businesses pay real money, like a mil down and $10k per seat with MIS & DBA support on top of that, they get the source code.
They sign non-disclosures and non-competition agreements out the wazoo but they get the source.
You don't even think of selling software at this level without the source. You'd be shown the door.
M$ doesn't even show up on the expenditure budget at this level.
The best thing to do with M$ & Bill Gates is laugh at him or maybe pity him in his delusion.
Nobody uses M$ products where there's any lives at stake or where there's any liability. Closed source is jack-off products for minor functionaries.
People who can turn off their machines and go home to their lives in distant cities, get home to their lives because the equipment that they use to get make the trip has nothing to do with M$, from the car they drive to the airport, to the traffic lights along the way, to the air traffic control system, to the airframes they ride in, to the program that figured out the mix of airplane food meal ingredients on their little plastic plate, to the program that controlled the refinery that made the plastic, to the one that controlled the extruder.
Anywhere that matters, M$ AIN'T there.
but sniff my crotch and I'll bitch-slap your sorry face.
That's like buying a book to discover that it only opens within certain regions of the country.
Apart from being a stupid concept its just penalizing the mobile.
I think if it comes with a set of PARTs and APIs that I can use in generating GUI code based on object models, I'll give it a spin.
All real-world systems I've worked on so far (government accounting, enterprise modeling, payroll/HR, loan, banking systems etc,) have weighed in at 700 to 1,200 window layouts and you don't maintain those "by hand" you regenerate the schema and GUI code when the underlying model changes.
Any system you "paint" is too expensive to maintain other than as an in-house product.
The solution is not to bury their heads in ths sand (it gets up their noses anyway,) but equip them to deal with it. And ourselves too.
If you sound like a homicidal maniac when you're having sex, maybe you're not doing it right.
Sex should be something to laugh with, not at. It should be a pleasure and pleasant to see and do.
If you like to occasionally sound like crazed buffaloes, go to a motel and wreck their sheets in private.
Otherwise what's the big secret? Mummy and daddy love each other. Deal with it. (That will usually get rolling eyeballs and sickers which don't sound like trauma to me.)
It harmful if they're coerced into participating against their will (or before some arbitrary age limit,) but I can't buy the argument just just surfing for free drivel and eye-candy is harmful.
Either the kid is too young and their eyes will glaze over at the boring crap (face it, if you're not interested, its boring crap,) or they'll get pissed off at this getting in the way of their pokemon web site.
If they're old enough to say "Hey dude, lets do some serious damage to my ol' man's MasterCard..." they're old enough to watch two people having sex. Its better than having them learn about where to buy guns.
Hmm... Or should that be "Ummm?"
:-)
Given America's love affair with the highway and the number of dents put into fenders every year, I wonder if they'll feature truly American recipes like "Sail Cat," "Armadillo pancake" and other ingredients from the flattened fauna that lies on the soft shoulder after meeting with the hard body panel...
They could host it "On the Road," and keep the production costs real low(-riser.)
Just thing that make you go "Mmm..."
(As long as they stick a sock in Shatner's mouth and threaten him with a phaser set on "calcinate" if he so much as hums.
Anonymity on the 'net is a thing of the past.
The needs of trustworthyness and verifiability will force the adoption of biometric verification for all data transmission. If you're doing commerce, you have to KNOW you can trust the source and the wire. Its business.
In some respects this is sad. You'll never again be able to put on masks when you're on the 'net. The phrase "On the internet nobody knows you're a dog." will become incomprehensible in a few years.
All communication will automatically be encrypted, signed and traceable from origin to destination. Spoofability will vanish. There will be no place to hide.
Paedophiles and criminals will have to loiter 'round the shadows at mall and the bus terminals like they did before 1995.
I'm not going to miss it.
I vote with my wallet.
/. :-)
I turned off the TV set years ago until something worth watching came on. Its in a back room now gathering dust.
I almost never listen to the radio (Its sounds like an elevator with ads.)
I stopped wasting time and money on ephemera. Instead I participate in
Sentences like and let us hack the hell out of their box scare the crap out of any corporate manager.
:-)
They're responsible for getting a product out the door according to their spec.s, not your's. To do that they have to retain control.
Try coming up with sentences like: We have a plan to explore the limits capabilities of your system. We would like some information, collaboration and coordination (at least a corporate contact.)
We will inform you of any security deficiencies, report on the actual capacities of the system and make general comments and contributions to expand the potential uses and markets of your system.
That is far more likely to get you on-side as an unpaid resource rather regarded like something stuck to their corporate shoe.
Now M$ will be competing against a team of the premier content producer (AOL's portal service with its millions of subscribers, [Oh and Time-Warner too,] :-) and the premier play-platform producer (Sony, which also happens to be a class outfit which produces everything from games to movies to...)
Why waste cash a PC and all those headaches when a PS2 will do just fine and will never crash?
Look for M$ to start spitting in every direction: "Open Source is a communist plot" and "Buy our X-Box against Japanese imperialism." (Strike that last one. It would cut into OS Sales.)
Cute, with M$ reputation of delivering too little too late, its going to be a battle of the bank accounts. Who's got deeper pockets and a stabler revenue stream?
No need to go that far out of town.
Soil maintains a constant temperature. Several thousand feet of it give an enormous thermal mass.
Put server farms in played-out salt mines (they're already being used for document storage.) The holes, really BIG holes, are already there.
Its dry, secure as Hell (you'd literally have to tunnel through thousand foot thick firewalls,) and you can put a power generating station near the opening.
got more of a reaction than he bargained for.
The bully must have leaned too hard, built a heavy (big) house of cards on this kid's imagination and had him convinced he was ruined and had brought shame on his family.
Unlike a American tough who would have told him to use the guilt trip ticket as a suppository, the kid, a respectful caring and curious Indian, used the ticket on a one way trip.
Somebody needs to find a new career before he fucks up again. Maybe as a prison gard?
Our weapon is to develop and support, "buy into" a more effective means of content distribution. Its all about money.
If a micro-pament or a subscription business model is used by a band for their music and they make enough to be comfortable and creative, they'd never have to sell-out and they'd be immune to pressure fron the RIAA.
In return, the RIAA and the music money machine would suck wind for funds. Its all about money.
No money and the media companies and their parasite, the RIAA, shrivel and die.
Don't go through 'em. Go around 'em. Don't use 'em. Lose 'em. Don't follow 'em. Leave 'em in your wake.
The original idea was that the WWW combined with the 'discovery power' of search engines would make the entire business model of advertising products seem like the "shouting in the wilderness" that it really is.
Unfortunately, search engines can't achieve more than of fraction of their potential because of the fluidity of language and the fact that the denotation and the connotation of a word don't begin to properly describe the intent with or extent to which a word is (mis)used.
The multifarious purposes to which a word is weilded about like a loose sword slashing at obscurity is only only slightly more effectively that the thousands of ads that clutter our sensory environment.
The only possible way to get rid of these pesky pop-ups (that are growing in size as well as in frequency,) is to build a cataloguing scheme and make the advantages plain and cheap to all web page creators register their web pages.
This is just like all publishers are curently applying for ISBNs and ISSNs and registering their material with the library of congress and other bodies. Its also very like every phone book in existence.
In the last millenium (I loved writing that,) France disposed of "dead-tree" phone-books and installed 25 million MiniTel devices instantly creating a large Telidon-like infrastructure and user base.
We could do the same thing here without having to install anywhere as many 'terminals' since we could make the service Web accessible.
The telcos publishing arms could pick up the cost of the devices and the indexing services and derive new revenue streams from people registering their sites and index pages into a well managed index base.
That would enable advertisers to NOT have to pay to shout at us. They would be indexed by product, location, etc. And information/content providers have samples of their labor available for perusal.
It would allow us as users to get rid of all the banners and other visual noise.
As for how users are supposed to support the content providers... Subscription and/or micro-payment services with user authentication services using bio-metric information.
Which will mean the end of the phrase "On the InterNet, nobody knows you're a dog."
Only "probe" the site under their supervision while they are present.
Thank them for coming and tell them they can call your reps if they ever feel the need for security.
What it does for the implementation of non-trivial project is very good (and any military project is non-trivial and specified to the n-th degree, which is why they cost so much up front and then disappear from the political radar during implementation.)
The same is true for every major development effort from payroll systems, (would you want your payroll calculated by some if-fy procedure,) to diagnostic expert systems (it takes a major earth-quake to shut down some "million dollar an hour" production lines.)
When developping a 'mission critical, bet-the-farm product which will sell for real money (say a million $ down and $ 5k per seat,) you have to prove that it has been spec.'ed out to the n-th degree and how far along the implementation from design to 'finished' product you are, and what your strategy for getting there is. Extreme programming is part of that strategy.
Clients who spend real money are not buying "'shirk'-wrapped" fluff cobbled together in a slap-dash way.
While I am a firm believer in not coding alone, in tag-team development and constant review, 'extreme' practices don't insure completeness.
Design is essential to insure the viability of the development effort and documentation is essential to insure the survivability of the implementation.
Who insures that objects with state transitions are able to negotiate transitions forwards and backwards (or that they can''t when they shouldn't?)
The designer has to be able to do a complete job of writing specifications based not merely on what the existing customer base asks for, but on what the objects involved reveal as posibilities.
The clients will come back and ask for those very features when they see the system in operation.
Can a utility restrict how the electrons they generate will be used? Can an iron mine sue a manufacturer for using sheet steel in their product?
The Yahoo article said "patent violations." It didn't say which ones...
Is this patent crap just going too far, or what?
but Lucent's page wasn't able to utter a phase through my web browser.
All my dialog boxes eventually catch my attention by speaking the message if I'm not paying attention. Even more important with OS X since I can be concentrating on some other task.
Text to speech is cute, not very difficult and not computationally demanding.
Speech to text is a very different kettle of fish.
When that didn't work, many of us aren't American anyway, they attacked our credibility.
But if you have the source code you can defend yourself so you don't have to be towed back to port because the clock management software (the clock for Christ's sake,) has a bug and divides by zero.
And as a bazillion scrips kiddies can tell you, its easy to repeatedly crack OSes that evolves as slowly as Microsoft's. You don't need source code. In fact you don't want the source code because the writer's intent keeps getting in the way of seeing what the code really does.
And, by the way, NOBODY who spends serious money on software (like a million for a package and a couple of grand per seat on maintenance for one mission critical system,) buys it without getting ALL of the source code. Of course we make them sign non-competition and non-disclosure agreements out the wazoo.
Microsoft has been selling a pig in a poke for years now because they don't sell anything important. Office apps. Bid deal... And when that market gets saturated, they're broke.
Now the bag is unravelling and their business model is proving to be mushroom fertilizer. For years they made money selling something that was only "almost good-enough."
Well it IS now only just good enough so they're sucking wind trying to hype crap. Nobody I know's buying it. If the OEMs weren't bundling it, nobody would bother buying anything beyond Windows '95 with service packs to fix some bugs.
FUD doesn't work if you can't show something scary. All M$ can show is a bunch of Unix and Linux systems working and not cratering the bottom line.
The greedier and more visibly desperate M$ gets, the better the alternatives look.
If you've got a lot of legacy hardware, Linux is the way to go. If not OS X may be your best bet.
If you don't have direct line of sight, you'll never get a signal through (there are a lot of phone cells in NYC.)
Even at that, there is so much echo and shadowing, you can't get a clean signal through without such a performance degradation that its useless. (Its okay for voice quality but that's it.)
In a big city like NYC, Tokyo etc. you're either using cable for your TV signal or you don't watch it.
If you want to degrade performance... Who needs another little box on the LAN? (with incomplete software yet.)