There is this thing called "mass production". I suggest you learn about it sometime, and the effect it has on price.
What that means is that a bunch of plastic, bicycle gears and chain, the equivalent of a few laptop batteries, a small electric motor and some electronics are only expensive because assembly lines haven't been set up, nor have the research costs been amortized.
You are comparing 34kg of vehicle to 600kg, and saying that the 34kg would be more expensive. Don't think so.
I know it's hot and humid there, but somehow Indians survive, work in fields, walk from place to place, all with the aid of whatever breeze is flowing at the time. And they've been there long enough for natural selection to weed out those who can't hack the heat.
In our lifetime, the choice may well end up being travel by bicycle or walking anyway.
At this stage of the petroleum game, it's a bit like making an engine that runs on seal oil.
They'd have much more energy independence putting their energy into aerodynamic human powered transport (velomobiles) with electric assist/regeneration to deal with hills/stops. They already get speeds of 37kph with 150Watts power output. If it is true that usually multiple people use cars in India, imagine what tandem velomobiles could do - you'd have the same frontal area, similar drag coefficient and multiples of the power plant.
With more research and popularity, the aerodynamics would only get better, meaning quicker transport.
"I think that 14% reflects the number of new PCs. I suspect that the number of people who have actually upgraded is miniscule and that is the difference between the stats for the first 11 months of XP and the first 11 months of Vista. Inevitably the number of Vista installations will trend upwards because it's hard to buy a PC with XP on it these days."
If that's the case, it doesn't bode well for future MS sales. They are stuck then on relying on malware (or low-reliability components, I suppose) to drive users to buy new machines, and them not getting fed up and defecting to linux or mac. From what I see of Linux and Mac these days, people aren't switching back to Microsoft in frustration like they used to.
"When Win2K came out every Win98SE lover bitched, then when XP came out every Win2K user bitched. It's a new day, bitch all you want then get over it."
When WinME, everyone who loved Win98 bitched... and today it is still the punchline to jokes about operating systems. MS has a monopoly, but it is not on producing a good or even well liked operating system every time they try their hands at it.
Really? Magazines make most of their money off advertising, and most of the time the advertising of worth is actually in the articles and what is talked about or not talked about, in what light. This writer has done two things: 1) Hyped a product of a company with deep pockets. ($$$) 2) Just trolled slashdot with his article, generating mucho circulation. ($$$)
This is why Don Knuth stopped using email in 1990. Before this he had 15 years of email interruptions, which were presumably disorientating:
"It's impossible to shut email off! You send a message to somebody, and they send it back saying "Thank you", and you say "OK, thanks for thanking me..."
Email is wonderful for some people, absolutely necessary for their job, and they can do their work better. I like to say that for people whose role is to be on top of things, electronic mail is great. But my role is to be on the bottom of things. I look at ideas and think about them carefully and try to write them up... I move slowly through things that people have done and try to organize the material. But I don't know what is happening this month."
So now some organization has deemed that this is the year the phenomenon has gone mainstream. It's kind of strange that they mention the problem as information overload when inbound communication overload is a more accurate description of that particular problem. Information overload is a problem too. It's easy to just keep researching, because the signal to noise ratio is so good that research becomes addictive and the amount of material is virtually endless.
Some people handle these things well, some people don't. The sort of people who didn't weren't all playing solitaire 20 years ago, a lot of them were workaholics. A workaholic is almost always a star employee, simply because he is addicted to the work. But the thing was, eventually researching something used to get boring because eventually the info that they were researching dried up and they moved on to actually solving their problems (if in an imperfect but still very good way).
Unfortunately now, in the process of doing your research the most efficient way, a workaholic is very tempted to develop web addiction, which turns an excellent worker into a poor worker.
If you call drug use cheating, I suggest you avoid watching professional sports. They are businesses competing to provide the conflicting goals of exciting, record setting athletics while giving the public the impression that anyone can be a professional athlete, all it takes is drive and discipline while the only sacrifice you'll make will be to your free time.
Maybe movies are more to your taste? I hear Blockbuster is renting The Mighty Ducks, and several wholesome, fun packed sequels for the whole family!
It's telling that all your examples are from decades ago.
But then again, simply capitalizing the term "White" is enough to get you marked Troll or Flamebait here, while a PC non-argument is enough to get you modded insightful. Yay slashdot.
Or at least used to be. At age 67, his speed, reflexes and joints would be a lot worse for wear than most men under age 35. His strength would be inferior to a young, trained fighters of similar size. He'd probably still administer an asswhooping to most untrained young people, especially if he knows how to grapple.
"The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing."
Do you really think that Bush (or Clinton, for that matter, or any president) actually believes in God (as opposed to just saying so), particularly a God as specified in the Bible?
"Contrast the product structure of "Linux" with more successful FOSS projects like Firefox and OpenOffice, and learn the lesson well..."
What lesson is that? That it's better to be an application rather than an operating system?
Adoption of linux does not depend on whether someone on/. discusses "linux" as opposed to "Ubuntu" or "Mandriva" or anything else.
It depends on whether there exists a base of people installing and maintaining a distro with a linux kernal, those people managing the transition in an intelligent way (e.g. getting them accustomed to the applications they will be using rather than 10 new applications all at once, etc), and everything working well enough that they don't get pissed off and go back to XP or Vista.
That's got to be at least an order of magnitude harder than getting someone to download firefox and doubleclick a file, especially when they understand most of the idioms already (address bar, etc).
My experience has been that Ubuntu does almost everything I want, everything I need, and has a very newb friendly web forum. It is improving at a very rapid rate, and there is a new Long Term Service release coming out in a few months. I expect that there are many people like myself who have held back from installing Gutsy on friends' machines so that they can install Hardy, with the expectation that it will be more stable, somewhat more featureful, and "just work" for a long time (i.e. low maintenance).
It is gaining one user at a time, and retaining more of them than any other linux distro I have seen. And that is what progress looks like. Back when the home computer market was dominated by the C64 and the Amiga, the change to MS and IBM compatibles was not overnight. It involved lots of informal and unpaid training, command line hacking, and experienced users telling the newbs to RTFM (nevermind that they didn't even know where to get the manuals from). Yet, the change still happened somehow.
Most people referred to the new IBM compatible computers running MS DOS as an operating system as "PCs" or "IBM compatibles", yet this widespread confusion in nomenclature did not stop adoption.
Really? I think you can only leverage the thin client model so far before the synergies dry up and you reach fundamental architectural limitations. As the envelope is stretched from web 2.0 to web 2.1 and expanded to breaking point with web 2.1 service pack 1, we may see a resurgence in peer to peer abstracted database solutions enmeshed in a pastiche of performant but robust virtualization layers.
In other words, take the consulting model of highly topical verbose lexicon, and apply it to a popular internet forum to dampen the signal to noise ratio. Think of the possibilities!
Ubuntu -> vim (not hard to learn, powerful, featureful, fits in relatively small installed size) Gentoo or Suse -> emacs (lots of time spent whirring supposedly doing stuff for minimal extra benefit over vim) Mac -> nano (easy to learn, that's about it) Windows -> notepad.exe (easy to learn, very limited) or word.exe (a good vector for viruses)
"And that sums up, in one efficient sentence, why Linux will not be easily adopted by the masses anytime soon."
It doesn't have to. All it has to do is be adopted by the next tier of users down from professional programmers, but above the masses - people who are capable of installing an operating system and providing their own support. Such people are all power users, as a rule, but might also be gamers, small business owners needing to cut costs, school kids who play chess during their lunch break.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, there were always the kids who knew how to get pirated games, apps, or operating systems, be it for c64 or the PC. If you weren't family or a close friend and you asked them "My computer is broken! Will you come over and help me figure it out?" or "How do I pir8 teh gamez?", they weren't particularly helpful either. It didn't stop MS being adopted everywhere. It won't stop something like Ubuntu being adopted everywhere, either.
Slashdot Mirror
"at three times the price."
There is this thing called "mass production". I suggest you learn about it sometime, and the effect it has on price.
What that means is that a bunch of plastic, bicycle gears and chain, the equivalent of a few laptop batteries, a small electric motor and some electronics are only expensive because assembly lines haven't been set up, nor have the research costs been amortized.
You are comparing 34kg of vehicle to 600kg, and saying that the 34kg would be more expensive. Don't think so.
I know it's hot and humid there, but somehow Indians survive, work in fields, walk from place to place, all with the aid of whatever breeze is flowing at the time. And they've been there long enough for natural selection to weed out those who can't hack the heat.
In our lifetime, the choice may well end up being travel by bicycle or walking anyway.
At this stage of the petroleum game, it's a bit like making an engine that runs on seal oil.
They'd have much more energy independence putting their energy into aerodynamic human powered transport (velomobiles) with electric assist/regeneration to deal with hills/stops. They already get speeds of 37kph with 150Watts power output. If it is true that usually multiple people use cars in India, imagine what tandem velomobiles could do - you'd have the same frontal area, similar drag coefficient and multiples of the power plant.
With more research and popularity, the aerodynamics would only get better, meaning quicker transport.
http://www.velomobiel.nl/uk/velomobiel2_uk.htm
"I think that 14% reflects the number of new PCs. I suspect that the number of people who have actually upgraded is miniscule and that is the difference between the stats for the first 11 months of XP and the first 11 months of Vista. Inevitably the number of Vista installations will trend upwards because it's hard to buy a PC with XP on it these days."
If that's the case, it doesn't bode well for future MS sales. They are stuck then on relying on malware (or low-reliability components, I suppose) to drive users to buy new machines, and them not getting fed up and defecting to linux or mac. From what I see of Linux and Mac these days, people aren't switching back to Microsoft in frustration like they used to.
"When Win2K came out every Win98SE lover bitched, then when XP came out every Win2K user bitched. It's a new day, bitch all you want then get over it."
When WinME, everyone who loved Win98 bitched... and today it is still the punchline to jokes about operating systems. MS has a monopoly, but it is not on producing a good or even well liked operating system every time they try their hands at it.
your comment would be considered insightful... in 2005.
NO!!! You've destroyed my only way of keeping games off my work laptop! Must... avert... eyes.
Next thing you know, there will be Apple stores popping up in truck stops, gyms and bath houses.
"I can't believe this writer still has a job."
Really? Magazines make most of their money off advertising, and most of the time the advertising of worth is actually in the articles and what is talked about or not talked about, in what light. This writer has done two things:
1) Hyped a product of a company with deep pockets. ($$$)
2) Just trolled slashdot with his article, generating mucho circulation. ($$$)
He'll go far.
This is why Don Knuth stopped using email in 1990. Before this he had 15 years of email interruptions, which were presumably disorientating:
"It's impossible to shut email off! You send a message to somebody, and they send it back saying "Thank you", and you say "OK, thanks for thanking me..."
Email is wonderful for some people, absolutely necessary for their job, and they can do their work better. I like to say that for people whose role is to be on top of things, electronic mail is great. But my role is to be on the bottom of things. I look at ideas and think about them carefully and try to write them up... I move slowly through things that people have done and try to organize the material. But I don't know what is happening this month."
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
http://tex.loria.fr/historique/interviews/knuth-clb1993.html
So now some organization has deemed that this is the year the phenomenon has gone mainstream. It's kind of strange that they mention the problem as information overload when inbound communication overload is a more accurate description of that particular problem. Information overload is a problem too. It's easy to just keep researching, because the signal to noise ratio is so good that research becomes addictive and the amount of material is virtually endless.
Some people handle these things well, some people don't. The sort of people who didn't weren't all playing solitaire 20 years ago, a lot of them were workaholics. A workaholic is almost always a star employee, simply because he is addicted to the work. But the thing was, eventually researching something used to get boring because eventually the info that they were researching dried up and they moved on to actually solving their problems (if in an imperfect but still very good way).
Unfortunately now, in the process of doing your research the most efficient way, a workaholic is very tempted to develop web addiction, which turns an excellent worker into a poor worker.
"So what the MI needs to find, and soon, is some other revenue stream."
I hear Mickie D's is hiring burger flippers...
If you call drug use cheating, I suggest you avoid watching professional sports. They are businesses competing to provide the conflicting goals of exciting, record setting athletics while giving the public the impression that anyone can be a professional athlete, all it takes is drive and discipline while the only sacrifice you'll make will be to your free time.
Maybe movies are more to your taste? I hear Blockbuster is renting The Mighty Ducks, and several wholesome, fun packed sequels for the whole family!
It's telling that all your examples are from decades ago.
But then again, simply capitalizing the term "White" is enough to get you marked Troll or Flamebait here, while a PC non-argument is enough to get you modded insightful. Yay slashdot.
Or at least used to be. At age 67, his speed, reflexes and joints would be a lot worse for wear than most men under age 35. His strength would be inferior to a young, trained fighters of similar size. He'd probably still administer an asswhooping to most untrained young people, especially if he knows how to grapple.
Actually the publishers are digging their own grave.
By creating a goldmine of DRM locked content, they create an incentive for hackers to crack the DRM schemes, and hence unlock all that content.
"Are they also going around campaigning for the return of the slide rule?"
Slide rule? Luxury. Real engineers memorize lookup tables.
"Get off my lawn!"
"The thought of one such mentally ill leader having access to the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world is... disturbing."
Do you really think that Bush (or Clinton, for that matter, or any president) actually believes in God (as opposed to just saying so), particularly a God as specified in the Bible?
"with massive bandwidth, why connect to a centralized online service instead of just connecting to your home computer?"
Because then Google can't be readin yur documents, sellin yur marketing info, and catchin' yur terrist activities.
"Contrast the product structure of "Linux" with more successful FOSS projects like Firefox and OpenOffice, and learn the lesson well..."
/. discusses "linux" as opposed to "Ubuntu" or "Mandriva" or anything else.
What lesson is that? That it's better to be an application rather than an operating system?
Adoption of linux does not depend on whether someone on
It depends on whether there exists a base of people installing and maintaining a distro with a linux kernal, those people managing the transition in an intelligent way (e.g. getting them accustomed to the applications they will be using rather than 10 new applications all at once, etc), and everything working well enough that they don't get pissed off and go back to XP or Vista.
That's got to be at least an order of magnitude harder than getting someone to download firefox and doubleclick a file, especially when they understand most of the idioms already (address bar, etc).
My experience has been that Ubuntu does almost everything I want, everything I need, and has a very newb friendly web forum. It is improving at a very rapid rate, and there is a new Long Term Service release coming out in a few months. I expect that there are many people like myself who have held back from installing Gutsy on friends' machines so that they can install Hardy, with the expectation that it will be more stable, somewhat more featureful, and "just work" for a long time (i.e. low maintenance).
It is gaining one user at a time, and retaining more of them than any other linux distro I have seen. And that is what progress looks like. Back when the home computer market was dominated by the C64 and the Amiga, the change to MS and IBM compatibles was not overnight. It involved lots of informal and unpaid training, command line hacking, and experienced users telling the newbs to RTFM (nevermind that they didn't even know where to get the manuals from). Yet, the change still happened somehow.
Most people referred to the new IBM compatible computers running MS DOS as an operating system as "PCs" or "IBM compatibles", yet this widespread confusion in nomenclature did not stop adoption.
Really? I think you can only leverage the thin client model so far before the synergies dry up and you reach fundamental architectural limitations. As the envelope is stretched from web 2.0 to web 2.1 and expanded to breaking point with web 2.1 service pack 1, we may see a resurgence in peer to peer abstracted database solutions enmeshed in a pastiche of performant but robust virtualization layers.
In other words, take the consulting model of highly topical verbose lexicon, and apply it to a popular internet forum to dampen the signal to noise ratio. Think of the possibilities!
Ah, so to use a text editor analogy...
Ubuntu -> vim (not hard to learn, powerful, featureful, fits in relatively small installed size)
Gentoo or Suse -> emacs (lots of time spent whirring supposedly doing stuff for minimal extra benefit over vim)
Mac -> nano (easy to learn, that's about it)
Windows -> notepad.exe (easy to learn, very limited) or word.exe (a good vector for viruses)
flame on!
By that logic, I suppose in 2016 the word of the day will be phail.
Hint: Viper mode is not actually vi, or vim. You need to get out of Emacs first.
Yeah, I know I shouldn't reply seriously to an obvious troll.
"And that sums up, in one efficient sentence, why Linux will not be easily adopted by the masses anytime soon."
It doesn't have to. All it has to do is be adopted by the next tier of users down from professional programmers, but above the masses - people who are capable of installing an operating system and providing their own support. Such people are all power users, as a rule, but might also be gamers, small business owners needing to cut costs, school kids who play chess during their lunch break.
Back in the 80s and early 90s, there were always the kids who knew how to get pirated games, apps, or operating systems, be it for c64 or the PC. If you weren't family or a close friend and you asked them "My computer is broken! Will you come over and help me figure it out?" or "How do I pir8 teh gamez?", they weren't particularly helpful either. It didn't stop MS being adopted everywhere. It won't stop something like Ubuntu being adopted everywhere, either.