I know this isn't a valid argument for why the Surface didn't take off, but it really is the customer's fault for not wanting it.
I know what you mean here, but usually gargantuan investments in a product like this are protected from the "customer's fault" through focus groups. Proper market research can determine whether a certain set of capabilities are going to sell at price points above per-unit production costs.
The Ballmer-led Microsoft has been hardheaded about what customers should want and believes it can dictate what customers should buy as it could do where Microsoft was able to leverage its OS monopoly. Those days are over.
Like Sears, MS exploited an unique market position to enter many other markets.
This comparison is very accurate. If you spend much time on eBay or Craigslist, you're sure to see vintage products branded as Sears or Montgomery Wards. Crazy stuff that sometimes makes you scratch your head wondering why they ever thought it would be a lucrative product segment that they'd make any kind of money offering an in-house brand.
I once found an old snowmobile suit in a thrift store with a Montgomery Wards label. At the time, I wondered how many snowmobile suits were ever sold that Montgomery Wards felt they needed to get into the market. I guess they were playing hardball with the manufacturers at the time and cut a deal with one vendor to make MW-labelled suits and that positioned them to tell dictate pricing to the other venders lest they not be carried alongside the MW snomobile suits.
This is one of the most astute comments I have read about Ballmer's departure all day.
Continuing in this direction, I wonder if the timeliness of his announcement was based on the need to begin production of Surface 2.0. Board of directors wasn't willing to throw good $billions after bad. They got rid of the guy who was signing the checks for more Surface investment and are about to follow HP's example and bring in a CEO that will shut down tablet development and the mobile OS.
By no means am I agreeing with HP pulling plug on WebOS, but I do think Microsoft might be gearing up for more staggering losses than HP suffered if they continue with these products (Surface & WindowsRT). I expect to see WindowsRT open-sourced and tossed on the side of the road within weeks.
One of the frustrating things about custom ringtones in the iOS platform has been that for whatever reason, users weren't able to assign custom ringtones to the text notification until iOS 6. That had been a thorn in my toe for several years.
Thanks for the clarification on the Hague Convention. I remembered that wrong.
I didn't mention all the energy transfer stuff because I was trying to keep my response simple, but yeah, everything you're saying here is totally correct.
Not an expert on this but are not the bullets used for this sort of thing jacketed anyway?
In most states, game animals must be shot with an expanding bullet. Either soft point or hollow point. This is intended to increase the size of the wound channel and likelihood that the shot will be rapidly fatal.
In war, these bullets are banned by the Geneva convention. Wounds are hoped to be survivable by humans and the bullets are intended to poke a hole in enemy bodies that removes them from battle.
If these guys can't write great apps themselves, who is going to pay them for their valuable instruction? Very strange that they would pay for this slashvertisement knowing people would call them out on this.
I'm not one of these people who beat on the idea of capitalism but I do see it as a failing of the perception in that endless growth just isn't possible in the long term. Sadly it's endless growth that drives a majority of today's investors.
This is also the reason why manufacturing industries in America have shipped their jobs overseas. Once a company has reached its peak growth in sales, leadership is under pressure from investors to continue to demonstrate growing profits. So, they look around and quickly seize on their own labor force as ballast.
The American workers are / were thrown overboard to expand profit margins and satiate investors' demand for "growth".
Not responding to the parent post, but I think there is a valid argument that the operator of the site hosting Luka's videos is guilty of collaborating with the killer. He didn't plan the murder, but he is acting as an instrument of Magnotta by delivering the infamy that was Magnotta's goal.
The mature and humane response would have been to say, "Hey Luka. You killed a guy to become infamous. I'm not going to assist you in this goal by publishing this video of the crime you committed to become infamous. I'm going to hand it over to the cops." Instead, this website operator responded by helping Luka to achieve infamy.
It is a waste of money for developers to go on bug hunts.
Nonsense. The outside world can only fuzz against the product looking for a security vulnerability and they are only paid for security vulnerabilities.
Bug hunts reveal architecture missteps that will break the product during upgrades or other usage. Internal developers are aware of the architecture, so they are more able to focus on searching and finding both security vulnerabilities as well as general bugs. A testing matrix cannot predict all the things that can possibly be impacted by an upgrade, so QA is not going to find every bug. And it gets really ugly when a company releases a patch and then immediately has to release a second one to fix the things the previous patch broke.
It's amazing our customers still find the product useful enough to pay for it.
It's like a big building made of dried shit. It sort of works in some conditions. You know what happens if it rains a bit, but if you remove all the shitty bits there's not much building left... And to rebuild the building from scratch would take years.
Wow. Aren't you worried that by posting this online that you might get fired from your position on the Microsoft SQL Server dev team?
EA doesn't own Scrabble. They've licensed it from Hasbro and are now responsible for the Facebook and mobile phone releases. The previous Facebook version was developed by Gamehouse. I wouldn't say either Gamehouse or EA have done good jobs with their releases. If they had, there would be no market for Words with Friends. That entire game is successful because of Scrabble fans who hate the versions made by Gamehouse and EA.
Oh, you're right. They are dying. Circuit City was proof of that.
Not sure if Microsoft is paying for floorspace. More likely they're providing sales staff working on the Microsoft payroll who were trained by Microsoft trainers. Commission is probably not paid on their sales, either... Best Buy keeps the commission that they would have otherwise paid to their own hourly sales associate.
Uhhh.. Actually Dell's purpose in promoting this as a console alternative is because they're having a real hard time selling desktop computers as just computers.
As EA has done with so many properties it contracts for, they completely devalued the game of Scrabble with their horrible port. With that example as a predictor of what they'll do with the Star Wars property, we can look forward to seeing a third party's massive success marketing "Laser Swords with Friends" across FaceBook and iOS.
More to the point of challenging forensics is the lack of any rifling leaving marks on a slug to match it to its source weapon.
I doubt the melting-down of a weapon would befuddle investigators any more than when traditional guns are thrown into rivers, lakes, and oceans. When it's gone, it's gone, be it plastic or steel.
Supporting everything said above regarding the need to fire Ballmer, I'd like to point out one other thing that doesn't frequently get mentioned...
Look at the CEO's of Microsoft's competitors. They're geniuses. They're people who got to where they're at because they made a whole scaffolding of great decisions. They established themselves as distinctly really smart people and earned their ways into positions of leadership.
How did Steve Ballmer get into this crowd? He was roommates with Bill Gates.
Are they also upset that they invented the Tablet PC in 2002 and then Apple ate their lunch eight years later by actually delivering it in an appealing form factor that people actually wanted ?
I'm not sure how you're sourcing this, but this is actually a very accurate depiction of Microsoft's deluded perspective. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was working as a consultant on some projects with Microsoft and was flying to Redmond frequently. I asked him if the people he was working with were feeling disillusioned about where they've been heading and their prospects against the competition. He related that they were proud that their company had already invented the tablet several years ago.
Internally, they must be bragging about that as a morale-booster or something in the face of pretty daunting prospects for what they're working on now.
Roblimo is trying, but failing as a video producer. He goes onsite to Texas locales without any preparation, research, etc. and spontaneously attempts to conjure up questions to ask people about the event.
Most of what he asks the people could be found on any flyer about the event. Better questions would have been:
1. Is a pinball renaissance afoot?
2. Why wasn't the kid from Kaine's Arcade invited?
The question is: will doing the DB in hardware even help with anything?
Oracle is quick to mention the benefit of hardware encryption they've implemented that's transparent to the applications accessing the data. This is pretty huge because just about every SaaS I've ever worked on has been cobbled together without encryption in the original design and then later on when it was determined to be a valuable feature, the challenge of implementing it in the existing code base was gargantuan. Transparent encryption / decryption is a wonderful solution, and having it accelerated by the hardware would be tits.
To cut a long story short, the reason you hate Windows it seems is because you know absolutely nothing about it.
I think that's the point I'm making here. Without 'knowing' windows is to hate it. Your assertion is that once I would have learned all of Redmond's idiosyncrasies embedded in their UI decisions, then my 'hate' will melt away. An enlightened UI design does not require such a trial by fire.
Slashdot Mirror
I know what you mean here, but usually gargantuan investments in a product like this are protected from the "customer's fault" through focus groups. Proper market research can determine whether a certain set of capabilities are going to sell at price points above per-unit production costs.
Ballmer has been ignoring these tools since before he laughed at the iPhone as being the most expensive phone on the market. He continued to ignore competitive market research when he doubted developers would write apps for the iPhone while Apple took a 30% cut of app sales.
The Ballmer-led Microsoft has been hardheaded about what customers should want and believes it can dictate what customers should buy as it could do where Microsoft was able to leverage its OS monopoly. Those days are over.
This comparison is very accurate. If you spend much time on eBay or Craigslist, you're sure to see vintage products branded as Sears or Montgomery Wards. Crazy stuff that sometimes makes you scratch your head wondering why they ever thought it would be a lucrative product segment that they'd make any kind of money offering an in-house brand.
I once found an old snowmobile suit in a thrift store with a Montgomery Wards label. At the time, I wondered how many snowmobile suits were ever sold that Montgomery Wards felt they needed to get into the market. I guess they were playing hardball with the manufacturers at the time and cut a deal with one vendor to make MW-labelled suits and that positioned them to tell dictate pricing to the other venders lest they not be carried alongside the MW snomobile suits.
This is one of the most astute comments I have read about Ballmer's departure all day.
Continuing in this direction, I wonder if the timeliness of his announcement was based on the need to begin production of Surface 2.0. Board of directors wasn't willing to throw good $billions after bad. They got rid of the guy who was signing the checks for more Surface investment and are about to follow HP's example and bring in a CEO that will shut down tablet development and the mobile OS.
By no means am I agreeing with HP pulling plug on WebOS, but I do think Microsoft might be gearing up for more staggering losses than HP suffered if they continue with these products (Surface & WindowsRT). I expect to see WindowsRT open-sourced and tossed on the side of the road within weeks.
One of the frustrating things about custom ringtones in the iOS platform has been that for whatever reason, users weren't able to assign custom ringtones to the text notification until iOS 6. That had been a thorn in my toe for several years.
OP should check http://www.nagios.org/ now. It's up.
Thanks for the clarification on the Hague Convention. I remembered that wrong.
I didn't mention all the energy transfer stuff because I was trying to keep my response simple, but yeah, everything you're saying here is totally correct.
In most states, game animals must be shot with an expanding bullet. Either soft point or hollow point. This is intended to increase the size of the wound channel and likelihood that the shot will be rapidly fatal.
In war, these bullets are banned by the Geneva convention. Wounds are hoped to be survivable by humans and the bullets are intended to poke a hole in enemy bodies that removes them from battle.
If these guys can't write great apps themselves, who is going to pay them for their valuable instruction? Very strange that they would pay for this slashvertisement knowing people would call them out on this.
This is also the reason why manufacturing industries in America have shipped their jobs overseas. Once a company has reached its peak growth in sales, leadership is under pressure from investors to continue to demonstrate growing profits. So, they look around and quickly seize on their own labor force as ballast.
The American workers are / were thrown overboard to expand profit margins and satiate investors' demand for "growth".
Coincidentally Luka Magnotta had previously been accused of killing kittens on video and posting it to this type of site, if not the same site.
Not responding to the parent post, but I think there is a valid argument that the operator of the site hosting Luka's videos is guilty of collaborating with the killer. He didn't plan the murder, but he is acting as an instrument of Magnotta by delivering the infamy that was Magnotta's goal.
The mature and humane response would have been to say, "Hey Luka. You killed a guy to become infamous. I'm not going to assist you in this goal by publishing this video of the crime you committed to become infamous. I'm going to hand it over to the cops." Instead, this website operator responded by helping Luka to achieve infamy.
Nonsense. The outside world can only fuzz against the product looking for a security vulnerability and they are only paid for security vulnerabilities.
Bug hunts reveal architecture missteps that will break the product during upgrades or other usage. Internal developers are aware of the architecture, so they are more able to focus on searching and finding both security vulnerabilities as well as general bugs. A testing matrix cannot predict all the things that can possibly be impacted by an upgrade, so QA is not going to find every bug. And it gets really ugly when a company releases a patch and then immediately has to release a second one to fix the things the previous patch broke.
Wow. Aren't you worried that by posting this online that you might get fired from your position on the Microsoft SQL Server dev team?
Seriously. Who cares about this guy's rant?!?!? Yes, this is the tired meme of the internet giving voice to annoying people.
Deal with it or avoid the internet.
EA doesn't own Scrabble. They've licensed it from Hasbro and are now responsible for the Facebook and mobile phone releases. The previous Facebook version was developed by Gamehouse. I wouldn't say either Gamehouse or EA have done good jobs with their releases. If they had, there would be no market for Words with Friends. That entire game is successful because of Scrabble fans who hate the versions made by Gamehouse and EA.
Oh, you're right. They are dying. Circuit City was proof of that.
Not sure if Microsoft is paying for floorspace. More likely they're providing sales staff working on the Microsoft payroll who were trained by Microsoft trainers. Commission is probably not paid on their sales, either... Best Buy keeps the commission that they would have otherwise paid to their own hourly sales associate.
Uhhh.. Actually Dell's purpose in promoting this as a console alternative is because they're having a real hard time selling desktop computers as just computers.
This guy gets it.
As EA has done with so many properties it contracts for, they completely devalued the game of Scrabble with their horrible port. With that example as a predictor of what they'll do with the Star Wars property, we can look forward to seeing a third party's massive success marketing "Laser Swords with Friends" across FaceBook and iOS.
More to the point of challenging forensics is the lack of any rifling leaving marks on a slug to match it to its source weapon.
I doubt the melting-down of a weapon would befuddle investigators any more than when traditional guns are thrown into rivers, lakes, and oceans. When it's gone, it's gone, be it plastic or steel.
Well, corporations are people, so a criminal charge against the ESEA should be forthcoming.
Supporting everything said above regarding the need to fire Ballmer, I'd like to point out one other thing that doesn't frequently get mentioned...
Look at the CEO's of Microsoft's competitors. They're geniuses. They're people who got to where they're at because they made a whole scaffolding of great decisions. They established themselves as distinctly really smart people and earned their ways into positions of leadership.
How did Steve Ballmer get into this crowd? He was roommates with Bill Gates.
I'm not sure how you're sourcing this, but this is actually a very accurate depiction of Microsoft's deluded perspective. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was working as a consultant on some projects with Microsoft and was flying to Redmond frequently. I asked him if the people he was working with were feeling disillusioned about where they've been heading and their prospects against the competition. He related that they were proud that their company had already invented the tablet several years ago.
Internally, they must be bragging about that as a morale-booster or something in the face of pretty daunting prospects for what they're working on now.
Seth
Roblimo is trying, but failing as a video producer. He goes onsite to Texas locales without any preparation, research, etc. and spontaneously attempts to conjure up questions to ask people about the event.
Most of what he asks the people could be found on any flyer about the event. Better questions would have been:
1. Is a pinball renaissance afoot? 2. Why wasn't the kid from Kaine's Arcade invited?
Seth
Oracle is quick to mention the benefit of hardware encryption they've implemented that's transparent to the applications accessing the data. This is pretty huge because just about every SaaS I've ever worked on has been cobbled together without encryption in the original design and then later on when it was determined to be a valuable feature, the challenge of implementing it in the existing code base was gargantuan. Transparent encryption / decryption is a wonderful solution, and having it accelerated by the hardware would be tits.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/options/advanced-security/index-099011.html
seth
I think that's the point I'm making here. Without 'knowing' windows is to hate it. Your assertion is that once I would have learned all of Redmond's idiosyncrasies embedded in their UI decisions, then my 'hate' will melt away. An enlightened UI design does not require such a trial by fire.
Seth