Lotus did manage to shoot themselves in the foot quite nicely in dealing with Excel. They had the market, and they had a product that was easy to use, and FAST to use by someone who was trained in it.
I haven't used it for years (at least a decade), and I'm probably still faster through the backlash menus than I would be with a mouse.
They were in a position to beat out microsoft in the spreadsheet market, and probably HAD beaten them out, until Win95 came along... No one wanted to run DOS apps alongside Windows apps.
Lotus eventually came out with windows versions, but they were clunky to use, and bug-ridden. This was still before "Office" really existed, and Word was still at version 2.0, but Excel already was there, with a history on windows... It worked better on windows than Lotus did. End of story. Lotus 1-2-3 died because they couldn't produce a windows version that came even close to performing as stably and as usefully as the DOS versions did.
I was the IS lacky for a small accounting firm from DOS 5.0 through Windows95. I installed and supported Lotus 1-2-3 2.2 in the beginning, and when we started switching to the windows versions, productivity hit the floor. Accounts aren't geeks... They didn't learn the new interface well, and by the time they did, they had found stability problems.
They went from running 1-2-3 for MONTHS of uptime (just turn the monitor off and go home), to a reboot or two a day... Partly Win95, partly 1-2-3's fault.
Now they use Excel. It doesn't crash like those versions of 1-2-3 did, and that's why they switched, originally.
My point? MS was in a good position to start Excel very early and make it stable. Lotus had the marketshare. Lotus screwed up their products, MS won. MS probably didn't deliver any more "innovative" of a product, in fact I'm still not as fast in Excel as I was with Lotus on DOS, but it didn't crash, as they knew how to write better windows programs.
MS isn't entirely at fault for the end of Lotus 1-2-3...
IIS and DNS are not setup on a default install of any of Windows 2000 Server products
Default install of Windows? Anyone that does so is definitely asking for problems. I like to know what the hell is actually getting installed on my PC, although with Win2K I'm wondering how many no-ops it took to fill my \WINNT to 900 MBs, when all Cache and Temp folders are elsewhere.
Nevermind, I figured it out. I'm using a Macroslop operating system...
Really, Artisan is more appropriate than engineer. And, IANAL, but as someone with an engineering degree, as far as the law is concerned, while I do engineering work, I am not an Engineer. I don't have my Professional Engineering license. VERY important thing in the law. I cannot sit on the stand, and state that I am an Engineer, just that I do engineering work.
artisan \Ar"ti*san\ (?; 277), n. [F. artisan, fr. L. artitus skilled in arts, fr. ars, artis, art: cf. It. artigiano. See Art, n.] 1. One who professes and practices some liberal art; an artist. [Obs.]
2. One trained to manual dexterity in some mechanic art or trade; and handicraftsman; a mechanic.
Syn: Artificer; artist.
Usage: Artisan, Artist, Artificer. An artist is one who is skilled in some one of the fine arts; an artisan is one who exercises any mechanical employment. A portrait painter is an artist; a sign painter is an artisan, although he may have the taste and skill of an artist. The occupation of the former requires a fine taste and delicate manipulation; that of the latter demands only an ordinary degree of contrivance and imitative power. An artificer is one who requires power of contrivance and adaptation in the exercise of his profession. The word suggest neither the idea of mechanical conformity to rule which attaches to the term artisan, nor the ideas of refinement and of peculiar skill which belong to the term artist.
Or, they could simply expect that when the copyright expires (70-80 years?) that no-one will want to use a DVD anyway, so it doesn't matter. They'll have some other technology by then, and won't be caring if people are copying DVDs.
Aaron
I had the same problem as well, didn't go away until I switched KBs... Never did figure out the cause.
However, the char only showed up in the console once I had X11 going, so it didn't seem to do any damage, just cause the occaisional beep from the speaker.
Aaron
Microsoft's original "Natural keyboard" tilted back, not forward. I had one of those at my previous employer. Best KB I've used.
I'm currently using the v2.0 "improved" one, that will fit in a KB drawer, and tilts forward... @#$@%#. Needless to say, I left it flat. But I've managed to setup my office so I have minimal wrist bend.
Now if I could just cure my hunching over the desk..... And I even have a Herman Miller chair.
Aaron
I also dissagree. I also use different names, although they don't vary much.
I have several different names I use, in different forums. I'm one name in one group (this geek community), but another in one of the other forums I participate in (off-roading).
My "indentities" sometimes don't get along very well with each other. Not in the sense of multiple personalities, but in that I use different language/mindsets depending on where I'm at.
Examples are my parents, friends from work, friends from school, and my off-road buddies.
I'm fairly straight-laced around my parents, don't swear, etc, because they don't like that. When around people I work with, I can talk about highly techinical subjects (embedded programming, etc.). When people from school, it's likely to be cars/societal issues/algorithms. However, when I'm off-roading, I can't be that technical, I'm just out having fun with friends, and probably drinking afterwards.
3 to 4 very different sides to my personality. I use different personas in person with these groups. So I do the same here, on-line, within those same groups and others.
When wearing one persona, I don't need to worry about the other
My intent was not to flame all CSs, just those I had to deal with in my classes.
GMI is a small engineering school, now called "kettering university". Was once General Motors Institute. Caters heavily to Mechanical Engineering (go figure), but the ECE department is actually pretty good. Slightly centered on industrial automation and cars, but moving away from that and towards more high-tech uses of electronics/computers.
I went there for the co-op program. Nice idea, being able to co-op from my freshman year on, but would I do it again? only for the friends. Take your money to MIT/Cal/Stanford instead. Much cooler toys/labs to play with elsewhere.
I used Nachos at GMI. It was ok, but the prof murdered the class unbeleivably....
C++, btw, made the class usefull. I, being a CE, and thankfully not a CS student, actually knew C/C++ from my other classes, and didn't have to come up to speed on it they way all the poor CS students did from their hellish experiences with Modula-2.
I took java, and that was painfull, not the language so much as that I was coding in 4 hours, start/finish what they would spend 2 weeks on... The CS people were pretty pitiful. But then, the CS program was even worse.
End of story: We used nachos, it was kinda cool, but if you're going into CS, go elsewhere. If you're going into CE, then it's a decent place.
If I remember Phys III correctly, the boom is because as you approach the speed of sound, the sound wave stack on top of each other, creating a VERY high pressure zone (all the pressurizations and rarifications of the waves start adding up), basically a standing wave directly in front of you that keeps amplifying itself. After to pass the speed of sound, you pass by the wave, and it propagates like a normal (although massive) sound wave. Creating a sonic boom when that wave passes by. Once you go supersonic, things act different, and I won't try to dreg that up from memory. But I do think that as she slows back down, she's going to get a hell of a kick in the ass when that wave catches back up with her.
I did something like that to an alarm clock that died, and left me late for class.... Was a great stress-releiver to occasionally stomp on the bits and pieces later that week as I worked on a class project that wasn't going well...
I've programmed in java, and other than the nicely done threading model, don't see much of a reason to use it over C++. I'm not trying to start a flame-war with this, but am curious as to why Java is the language of choice for this.
Is Java better for this? I don't see why it would be...
Re:Price-Performance of "iCubes" and other Macs
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And Athlons and PIIIs have that wonderfull, deep pipeline that gets trashed on every interrupt or cache miss... And cache misses are 10%, so you spend a lot of time rebuilding that deep pipe-line.
A deep pipeline scales the Mhz ladder better, but it takes more Mhz to do the same amount of work... And so long as you are spending all of your time in the same loop, acessing sequential data, without any interrupts, then you're fine.
There are a lot of uses for Alphas running NT. They're called workstations. Office is bloatware that still doesn't need an Alpha to run. However, I have seen Industrial Automation software packages that make dual Xenon (or whatever they are called, Xeon?) boxes cry.
When you're receiving 10,000 numbers a second from a control system, logging some of them to disk, running alarming algorithms on others, and presenting others on the screen graphically, you can get enough going on that you need more horsepower than a desktop computer, but you don't want the kind of hardware you get when you buy a SERVER. Just a box that can crunch a LOT of data, and deal with a decent amount of I/O, at the same time.
Logging/Trending is a HUGE pain, when the user of the workstation decides to view 300MB worth of data... That tends to slow things down for a bit.
Ok. This is the product used to monitor it, the i.LON. It's a router capable of serving HTTP that routes data from our networks (LonWorks) to IP. Also serves data from LonWorks networks via http. Not an enterprise-class web-server, obviously, but good for this sort of thing.
The house is in Capitola, CA. It's address is: www.cybermanor.com/capitola. Hit the link for Remote Control. Go to just www.cybermanor.com for more information on the entire system.
I also came across this press release from last week (had a major trade show, with LOTS of releases). How a school in florida is using it to stop prankster students from screwing with the thermostats in the rooms.
Well, actually, it has caught on, just not in our lovely country. I work at Echelon (No, not the CIA, and deal with this stuff day in and out).
Pretty cool technology, there's several different network types, powerline only being one. Powerline is difficult... But you're right about the rail transit systems.
The twisted-pair (not ethernet) network transceivers are MUCH more popular (and faster), but they are much more limited in noisy environments. The TP systems are used heavily in HVAC and other commercial building controls (like lighting).
There is a person who own's a house in CA that they rent-out, that they remotely monitor/control via the 'net. When no-one is renting out the house, you can view the different rooms via the web. Very cool.
Reply to this (on slashdot) if you're interested in more info on things, and I'll e-mail back.
What amazes me is the number of people that have been snowed by Intel's marketing hype over clock-rates.
Who gives a shit how fast the clock is? It doesn't matter!
What actually matters is the amount of time to get the processing done. The PPC does a VERY good job of crunching data, especially vector/FP data, in few clock cycles. This keeps the clock-rates, and therefore the power consumption down.
If you took a G4, clocked it at 1GHz, it would crush the x86 processors. But it's not designed to run at those speeds, so it crushes them anyway, at 500Mhz.
I grew up in one of the big one-horse towns in the States... Flint, MI. Several decades ago, it was a very properous town. Now, after the giant Union/Corp. war between the UAW and GM, it's a hell-hole.
The UAW continually raised labor prices in the area, until GM decided to leave... Then the UAW would strike to stop GM from leaving... A lot of the jobs went to the South (not mexico), where there was a lower cost of living.
Why was there a lower cost of living? Because not everyone had cushy UAW jobs. Those in the Flint area who didn't work in a UAW shop (side-industries, mostly) got raped every time the UAW got their cost-of-living adjustment. Prices rose to match, exactly. Why? Because when 80% (guesstimate) of the people just got a 5% raise, you can afford to raise your prices 5%...
In the end, the UAW lost... They killed the town because GM just wanted to make a higher-quality product, using more technological methods than un-skilled labor.
The saddest thing was watching all these people graduating from high-school, beleiving that there was a job in the GM shops waiting for them, that because their parents, and their parent's parents worked their, that they were entitled to a job there.
Sorry, I got an Engineering degree, and am now somewhat comfortable, not as much as I'd like, but I'm not going to complain...
So how is this at all on-topic? I've watched first-hand people whining that $60,000/year with full benefits/401K wasn't enough... For a 40 hour/week job in an area where everyone can easily afford a _HOUSE_, a new truck every year (GM Option 1 Discount already applied to advertised prices), and those toys needed to go spend a week in the fall deer hunting...
Unions? That's ok, I don't want them. My skills are in demand. If they weren't, I'd acquire those that were.
I once saw a wonderfull report that a study had determined that while playing violet video games, their heart-rates and blood-pressure increased...
Yep, games are evil, and make 6-year-olds shoot each other...
Although, I noticed that when I start getting up on levels in Tetris or Columns, my heart was screaming-fast, and pounding hard... I'm sure my blood-pressure was quite-high, too.
Yep, damn games are causing kids to get into games and kill each other over who gets to sell crack on which corner...
ICQ has a wonderfull privacy feature. I make myself invisible to all but two people, who rarely come online, but when online, I want to be able to chat with. The rest all think that I'm disconnected. Very nice.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Lotus did manage to shoot themselves in the foot quite nicely in dealing with Excel. They had the market, and they had a product that was easy to use, and FAST to use by someone who was trained in it.
I haven't used it for years (at least a decade), and I'm probably still faster through the backlash menus than I would be with a mouse.
They were in a position to beat out microsoft in the spreadsheet market, and probably HAD beaten them out, until Win95 came along... No one wanted to run DOS apps alongside Windows apps.
Lotus eventually came out with windows versions, but they were clunky to use, and bug-ridden. This was still before "Office" really existed, and Word was still at version 2.0, but Excel already was there, with a history on windows... It worked better on windows than Lotus did. End of story. Lotus 1-2-3 died because they couldn't produce a windows version that came even close to performing as stably and as usefully as the DOS versions did.
I was the IS lacky for a small accounting firm from DOS 5.0 through Windows95. I installed and supported Lotus 1-2-3 2.2 in the beginning, and when we started switching to the windows versions, productivity hit the floor. Accounts aren't geeks... They didn't learn the new interface well, and by the time they did, they had found stability problems.
They went from running 1-2-3 for MONTHS of uptime (just turn the monitor off and go home), to a reboot or two a day... Partly Win95, partly 1-2-3's fault.
Now they use Excel. It doesn't crash like those versions of 1-2-3 did, and that's why they switched, originally.
My point? MS was in a good position to start Excel very early and make it stable. Lotus had the marketshare. Lotus screwed up their products, MS won. MS probably didn't deliver any more "innovative" of a product, in fact I'm still not as fast in Excel as I was with Lotus on DOS, but it didn't crash, as they knew how to write better windows programs.
MS isn't entirely at fault for the end of Lotus 1-2-3...
And the shareholders let two of the companies die, and pick one to live... Won't happen immediately, but within 5 years or so.
Also, small problem that CE/NT/2K/XP all share LOTS of code any more. Every wonder why CE devices require 10x the clock rates of a PalmOS device?
1981??? how 'bout 1984.
Which one?
IIS and DNS are not setup on a default install of any of Windows 2000 Server products
Default install of Windows? Anyone that does so is definitely asking for problems. I like to know what the hell is actually getting installed on my PC, although with Win2K I'm wondering how many no-ops it took to fill my \WINNT to 900 MBs, when all Cache and Temp folders are elsewhere.
Nevermind, I figured it out. I'm using a Macroslop operating system...
AaronReally, Artisan is more appropriate than engineer. And, IANAL, but as someone with an engineering degree, as far as the law is concerned, while I do engineering work, I am not an Engineer. I don't have my Professional Engineering license. VERY important thing in the law. I cannot sit on the stand, and state that I am an Engineer, just that I do engineering work.
artisan \Ar"ti*san\ (?; 277), n. [F. artisan, fr. L. artitus skilled in arts, fr. ars, artis, art: cf. It. artigiano. See Art, n.] 1. One who professes and practices some liberal art; an artist. [Obs.]
2. One trained to manual dexterity in some mechanic art or trade; and handicraftsman; a mechanic.
Syn: Artificer; artist.
Usage: Artisan, Artist, Artificer. An artist is one who is skilled in some one of the fine arts; an artisan is one who exercises any mechanical employment. A portrait painter is an artist; a sign painter is an artisan, although he may have the taste and skill of an artist. The occupation of the former requires a fine taste and delicate manipulation; that of the latter demands only an ordinary degree of contrivance and imitative power. An artificer is one who requires power of contrivance and adaptation in the exercise of his profession. The word suggest neither the idea of mechanical conformity to rule which attaches to the term artisan, nor the ideas of refinement and of peculiar skill which belong to the term artist.
Also from Dictionary.com
Or, they could simply expect that when the copyright expires (70-80 years?) that no-one will want to use a DVD anyway, so it doesn't matter. They'll have some other technology by then, and won't be caring if people are copying DVDs.
Aaron
I had the same problem as well, didn't go away until I switched KBs... Never did figure out the cause. However, the char only showed up in the console once I had X11 going, so it didn't seem to do any damage, just cause the occaisional beep from the speaker. Aaron
Microsoft's original "Natural keyboard" tilted back, not forward. I had one of those at my previous employer. Best KB I've used. I'm currently using the v2.0 "improved" one, that will fit in a KB drawer, and tilts forward... @#$@%#. Needless to say, I left it flat. But I've managed to setup my office so I have minimal wrist bend. Now if I could just cure my hunching over the desk..... And I even have a Herman Miller chair. Aaron
I also dissagree. I also use different names, although they don't vary much.
I have several different names I use, in different forums. I'm one name in one group (this geek community), but another in one of the other forums I participate in (off-roading).
My "indentities" sometimes don't get along very well with each other. Not in the sense of multiple personalities, but in that I use different language/mindsets depending on where I'm at.
Examples are my parents, friends from work, friends from school, and my off-road buddies.
I'm fairly straight-laced around my parents, don't swear, etc, because they don't like that. When around people I work with, I can talk about highly techinical subjects (embedded programming, etc.). When people from school, it's likely to be cars/societal issues/algorithms. However, when I'm off-roading, I can't be that technical, I'm just out having fun with friends, and probably drinking afterwards.
3 to 4 very different sides to my personality. I use different personas in person with these groups. So I do the same here, on-line, within those same groups and others.
When wearing one persona, I don't need to worry about the other
My intent was not to flame all CSs, just those I had to deal with in my classes.
GMI is a small engineering school, now called "kettering university". Was once General Motors Institute. Caters heavily to Mechanical Engineering (go figure), but the ECE department is actually pretty good. Slightly centered on industrial automation and cars, but moving away from that and towards more high-tech uses of electronics/computers.
I went there for the co-op program. Nice idea, being able to co-op from my freshman year on, but would I do it again? only for the friends. Take your money to MIT/Cal/Stanford instead. Much cooler toys/labs to play with elsewhere.
Very assute of you to notice that they don't have civil engineering.
Please crawl back under the bridge now.
I used Nachos at GMI. It was ok, but the prof murdered the class unbeleivably....
C++, btw, made the class usefull. I, being a CE, and thankfully not a CS student, actually knew C/C++ from my other classes, and didn't have to come up to speed on it they way all the poor CS students did from their hellish experiences with Modula-2.
I took java, and that was painfull, not the language so much as that I was coding in 4 hours, start/finish what they would spend 2 weeks on... The CS people were pretty pitiful. But then, the CS program was even worse.
End of story: We used nachos, it was kinda cool, but if you're going into CS, go elsewhere. If you're going into CE, then it's a decent place.
If I remember Phys III correctly, the boom is because as you approach the speed of sound, the sound wave stack on top of each other, creating a VERY high pressure zone (all the pressurizations and rarifications of the waves start adding up), basically a standing wave directly in front of you that keeps amplifying itself. After to pass the speed of sound, you pass by the wave, and it propagates like a normal (although massive) sound wave. Creating a sonic boom when that wave passes by. Once you go supersonic, things act different, and I won't try to dreg that up from memory. But I do think that as she slows back down, she's going to get a hell of a kick in the ass when that wave catches back up with her.
I did something like that to an alarm clock that died, and left me late for class.... Was a great stress-releiver to occasionally stomp on the bits and pieces later that week as I worked on a class project that wasn't going well...
They say why they did it?
That would make sense as to why he wanted to use Java, but I was going on the basis of technical merit.
I am aware that there is still a lot of buzz about Java, but never understood why it was used in an embedded scenario.
I've programmed in java, and other than the nicely done threading model, don't see much of a reason to use it over C++. I'm not trying to start a flame-war with this, but am curious as to why Java is the language of choice for this.
Is Java better for this? I don't see why it would be...
And Athlons and PIIIs have that wonderfull, deep pipeline that gets trashed on every interrupt or cache miss... And cache misses are 10%, so you spend a lot of time rebuilding that deep pipe-line.
A deep pipeline scales the Mhz ladder better, but it takes more Mhz to do the same amount of work... And so long as you are spending all of your time in the same loop, acessing sequential data, without any interrupts, then you're fine.
There are a lot of uses for Alphas running NT. They're called workstations. Office is bloatware that still doesn't need an Alpha to run. However, I have seen Industrial Automation software packages that make dual Xenon (or whatever they are called, Xeon?) boxes cry.
When you're receiving 10,000 numbers a second from a control system, logging some of them to disk, running alarming algorithms on others, and presenting others on the screen graphically, you can get enough going on that you need more horsepower than a desktop computer, but you don't want the kind of hardware you get when you buy a SERVER. Just a box that can crunch a LOT of data, and deal with a decent amount of I/O, at the same time.
Logging/Trending is a HUGE pain, when the user of the workstation decides to view 300MB worth of data... That tends to slow things down for a bit.
Ok. This is the product used to monitor it, the i.LON. It's a router capable of serving HTTP that routes data from our networks (LonWorks) to IP. Also serves data from LonWorks networks via http. Not an enterprise-class web-server, obviously, but good for this sort of thing.
The house is in Capitola, CA. It's address is: www.cybermanor.com/capitola. Hit the link for Remote Control. Go to just www.cybermanor.com for more information on the entire system.
I also came across this press release from last week (had a major trade show, with LOTS of releases). How a school in florida is using it to stop prankster students from screwing with the thermostats in the rooms.
Well, actually, it has caught on, just not in our lovely country. I work at Echelon (No, not the CIA, and deal with this stuff day in and out).
Pretty cool technology, there's several different network types, powerline only being one. Powerline is difficult... But you're right about the rail transit systems.
The twisted-pair (not ethernet) network transceivers are MUCH more popular (and faster), but they are much more limited in noisy environments. The TP systems are used heavily in HVAC and other commercial building controls (like lighting).
There is a person who own's a house in CA that they rent-out, that they remotely monitor/control via the 'net. When no-one is renting out the house, you can view the different rooms via the web. Very cool.
Reply to this (on slashdot) if you're interested in more info on things, and I'll e-mail back.
What amazes me is the number of people that have been snowed by Intel's marketing hype over clock-rates.
Who gives a shit how fast the clock is? It doesn't matter!
What actually matters is the amount of time to get the processing done. The PPC does a VERY good job of crunching data, especially vector/FP data, in few clock cycles. This keeps the clock-rates, and therefore the power consumption down.
If you took a G4, clocked it at 1GHz, it would crush the x86 processors. But it's not designed to run at those speeds, so it crushes them anyway, at 500Mhz.
I grew up in one of the big one-horse towns in the States... Flint, MI. Several decades ago, it was a very properous town. Now, after the giant Union/Corp. war between the UAW and GM, it's a hell-hole.
The UAW continually raised labor prices in the area, until GM decided to leave... Then the UAW would strike to stop GM from leaving... A lot of the jobs went to the South (not mexico), where there was a lower cost of living.
Why was there a lower cost of living? Because not everyone had cushy UAW jobs. Those in the Flint area who didn't work in a UAW shop (side-industries, mostly) got raped every time the UAW got their cost-of-living adjustment. Prices rose to match, exactly. Why? Because when 80% (guesstimate) of the people just got a 5% raise, you can afford to raise your prices 5%...
In the end, the UAW lost... They killed the town because GM just wanted to make a higher-quality product, using more technological methods than un-skilled labor.
The saddest thing was watching all these people graduating from high-school, beleiving that there was a job in the GM shops waiting for them, that because their parents, and their parent's parents worked their, that they were entitled to a job there.
Sorry, I got an Engineering degree, and am now somewhat comfortable, not as much as I'd like, but I'm not going to complain...
So how is this at all on-topic? I've watched first-hand people whining that $60,000/year with full benefits/401K wasn't enough... For a 40 hour/week job in an area where everyone can easily afford a _HOUSE_, a new truck every year (GM Option 1 Discount already applied to advertised prices), and those toys needed to go spend a week in the fall deer hunting...
Unions? That's ok, I don't want them. My skills are in demand. If they weren't, I'd acquire those that were.
I once saw a wonderfull report that a study had determined that while playing violet video games, their heart-rates and blood-pressure increased...
Yep, games are evil, and make 6-year-olds shoot each other...
Although, I noticed that when I start getting up on levels in Tetris or Columns, my heart was screaming-fast, and pounding hard... I'm sure my blood-pressure was quite-high, too.
Yep, damn games are causing kids to get into games and kill each other over who gets to sell crack on which corner...
Oh wait... They've been doing that for years...
ICQ has a wonderfull privacy feature. I make myself invisible to all but two people, who rarely come online, but when online, I want to be able to chat with. The rest all think that I'm disconnected. Very nice. :)