The more they annoy people, the more visibility worthy indie acts [Harvey Danger] get.
I don't mean to burst your bubble, but Harvey Danger got big while they were signed with Sire records, which is part of Warner-Electra-Atlantic last I checked. It's easy for you to say they're "indie" now, but they can swing that because they had a top 25 hit in 2000 when they released "King James Version" on a major label owned by WEA. And let's be honest here, they're just not that great and weren't even when they were on Sire.
Granted, some indie bands can still make a go of it completely on their own, but Harvey Danger is the norm, rather than the exception. Most bands get signed to major labels, THEN go off and create their own label once they have gotten the exposure. The record companies still control the ability of bands to get airtime. That's just how it continues to be today.
As processors and bandwidth have gotten faster, the amount of crap people can dump on your screen to try to make a buck has increased significantly. Remember when we didn't used to go to a site because there were too many ads? Those days are long past, but have you tried an ad blocker? It makes browsing amazingly fast again. Or how about all the bloatware installed by Dell and HP? That kind of thing would have been intolerable 5 years ago, just on sheer processor speed.
It seems that any effort to optimize has gone out the window these days except for one consumer market -- gaming. Though I still think we're headed to a world with JITted Javascript. Hey, if Apple's iPhone SDK is Javascript, it seems to be the freight train of "progress" to use Javascript.
On Saturday, a rerun of "Mama's Family" and a show called "Build a Better Burger" both had better ratings than the Stanley Cup finals game that was on.
The game was the lowest rated show ever in the history of primetime network television*.
This is why the NHL is embracing any technology that might help.
* - Ratings facts from one of this week's Pardon the Interruption episodes on ESPN.
It's common on/. to believe that every slope is slippery, but that's just not true. Because the lawyers at NJ Turnpike concluded they are within the rule of law to ban this video under copyright -- which is their job, to interpret the law -- we're in a fascist state? I hope most people agree that conclusion is absurd.
Also, is it really an abuse if no one would fight it, not out of fear but common sense or decency? You could take their lawyers to court to reinstate the video... that's what we have courts for. But if you asked a lawyer at the EFF to fight this, for their sake, I hope they would turn you down. Fighting it would mean trying to keep a snuff film, with no political or intellectual value, on YouTube. The EFF should save money and good PR for tangible abuses, like the spying program.
24 hour news cycles. Cameras everywhere, ready to roll on a story. Cable TV. That show was more predictive than any futuristic/sci-fi serial I can think of off the top of my head.
If you're up for a weekend of watching the present of news being predicted in the past, watch a bunch of Max Headroom followed by 1976's Network, an excellent, excellent movie.
Not every DMCA request is not a violation of YOUR rights. For a minute, put yourself in the place a relative of the person driving this car, who probably feel asleep at the wheel on the way to work. How do you think they feel about having people watch their loved one die on You Tube? What about their rights?
So far this is the only DMCA request I actually agree with. Using DMCA to get this, an obvious snuff film, off of the web is at least morally appropriate. I too am not sure about the copyright aspect of a public entity's video, but I'm glad they're at least doing something about keeping the video off of YouTube.
... he was supposed to make it to an earnings conference call but couldn't because he was stuffed in a locker.
His CFO had to report that the company had lost $5.35 when a bully stole its lunch money.
He was exposed for spending corporate funds on comic books and Big League Chew.
I could probably go on forever with these. The reality of this story is that venture capitalists are so desperate to turn anything into money that they apparently see no problem with trying to monetize an 8th grader.
The only one of those that the machine itself has any control over hiding from the user is the path, which can be virtualized. However, many aren't. DTDs certainly don't seem to be.
A distributed system for this kind of mission-critical information is what we need. Think DNS for documents, rather than just hosts.
Companies aren't people, and as such do not have the same rights that people have
That is incorrect. In the eyes of the law, corporations are considered to have the same rights as people. Juristic person describes some of this, but I found the documentary The Corporation to be enlightening on the matter.
I have the distinct feeling that WPF/E is one of those technologies that Microsoft has thrown out there and, after it doesn't catch on, will end up ditching it. Anyone who pays attention to Microsoft knows this happens all the time. About half of the "Live Ideas" have already been abandoned in six months. There's another article on/. that UMPC is all but abandoned. Media PC has one-time big backers like HP are running away, so Microsoft has just started shipping MCE with practically every version of Vista as capitulation.
That's not to say these aren't good products, they just never caught on so Microsoft's dev teams moved on.
Taking on the CLR, the BCL, Windows.Forms, etc. made a lot more sense because it's used so heavily in the corporate world..NET is the VB6 replacement technology (as was apparent when Mono was started up), so it had a built-in audience. Anyone using Windows for business is almost undoubtedly writing.NET code by now. Novell has a lot to gain by offering a platform for people to run those.NET apps without using Windows.
Silverlight, on the other hand, is a consumer technology trying to take marketshare from Adobe. It's a long road to try to do that against any technology that has 95% of the market (like, ahem, windows itself). I don't really understand why Novell would want to take a risk on this. Instead, shore up the ASP.NET code. Keep working on Windows.Forms, LINQ, etc., etc. Those are the most viable businesses... not the Flash rip-off.
I guess I don't get what the big attraction for these guys are.... I know the US's health care system is messed up, but I'm not sure technology can fix all of the aches, pains and dysfunction in our current system.
Of course, but do you think anyone in Congress knows that? Clearly not. The US government either ignores a problem forever or tries to find a silver bullet solution. You don't think it's a good plan for a technologist to position themselves to be the savior of heathcare? Hats off to Steve Case, the guy clearly gets the idea of being a government healthcare software contractor, following in the greatness of Ross Perot before him (Medicare).
Apple is a brand name, not a hardware maker. They distinguish themselves by creating unique devices out of stock parts. Apple cares about hardware in how it looks and and the software for it. They neither make the parts nor put together the parts anymore, so what benefit would they see getting back into that business. Being in the manufacturing and fabrication business would be Apple computer in the 80s, barely the 90s and definitely not the 2000s.
Furthermore, I'm sure this has been brought up in other comments, but wouldn't AMD lose most of their customers who run Linux on Opterons? What existing AMD customer would move to a higher priced XServe just to keep using AMD?
The whole idea is absurd, I'm surprised it made it to the front page of/..
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000?
Your points are valid, but sometimes we need to do what makes most sense now so that we can develop what makes most sense later. I don't think we'll be using U235 fission in the year 3000. Hopefully we'll have come up with fusion, or solar cells that are efficient enough not to take 1.4 sq miles of land for a measly 40 MW.
Solar can't provide enough power right now. So if we don't take on fission, we're going to end up burning coal. I think it's obvious which is worse in that equation.
Look at Windows ME, failed in the marketplace. Look at Vista, failing in the marketplace.
The marketplace had nothing to do with ME's failure. Microsoft killed ME by choice.
Windows ME was an iterative release of the 95/98 branch to appease all of the people who wanted to stick with it for games. Releasing ME wasn't about long term support, it was about trying to get a few extra bucks from that crowd. Microsoft already was pushing to get everyone on the NT branch at the time it was released. W2K was on shelves and XP would be out only a year later and most '98 folk would move to that. ME was simply a money grab; saying it a was a failure in the marketplace shows no knowledge of what Microsoft was doing at the time.
Vista is the next iteration of the NT branch -- their main branch. Unless there's an alternative branch that Microsoft is working on and not telling us about, this is the version (or Vista 2.0, like XP was W2K 2.0) that 100% of Windows machines will be sold with in the coming years. It won't fail because Microsoft doesn't want it to. That's the benefit of being a monopoly.
"30% of business have no intention of moving to Vista, ever."
I think this claim is a media creation. Any IT person who says they will "never" upgrade, yet stay with Windows, is a crackpot. People threatened that for years with 2000 -> XP, and most gave it up eventually. Some people did hold out, and as/.ers will recall, the hold-outs just got bit in the butt by the lack of support for the new daylight savings rules. Which was more disruptive to their business, not upgrading to XP within 6 years or getting caught off guard by the DST thing? I guarantee the same 10% people will pay more attention to Microsoft's sunset date for XP this time around and will be on Vista far in advance.
Beyond holdouts, what are businesses going to do, rewrite their entire codebase to run on Linux? Few will. Those kinds of things sound good in theory, except for the fact that Microsoft's pricing is not stupid. It's usually going to be cheaper to stay on Windows compared to the porting costs, all office workers retrained, custom support costs, etc. There is an indeterminate value in not being vendor locked-in by using Linux (though you may be more distro-locked in), but convincing a boss of that who is not on the Linux train is going to be very tough.
Microsoft's got a really good thing going right now. Their platform is robust from mobile all the way up to servers/databases/etc, and the prices are just about perfect to keep anyone who thinks about moving off the platform. So either 30% of busineses saying they'll never use Vista are fooling themselves or this is yet another journalist trying to tap into the "Vista is DOA" hype.
I wish I had mod points because this post is offtopic. Bad drivers can bring down Windows in a hurry, we knew that. We've known it for years. I don't see any evidence that your bluescreen was caused by the DRM mechanism.
The rest of your post is somewhat insightful but completely off topic. XP being "EOL in 7 months"? Where'd you come up with that?
Hey./ commenters, you're supposed to be IT experts. So pretend you know the difference between Java and Javascript.
But here's a tip: if you don't really know or care what the difference is, you can just say "Web 2.0" and all of the buzzword lovers will nod in silent understanding and tell you that Microsoft is doomed by Web 2.0.
but when Sony does it people tell them to stop trying to be different... I know people will cry about the console market being different, but the principals of the decisions are the same.
No one's crying about Sony trying to be different. It's far worse for them than that: no one is willing to spend $600 on their pet project. Intel, on the other hand, will probably make things cheaper by merging these on the desktop.
When Be tried to make deals with OEMs to bundle or pre-install BeOS as a free option, Microsoft "persuaded" them not to.
Oh please. You're claiming that Microsoft pulled anticompetitive pricing tactics against Be trying to dump their OS on consumers? Provide some record of this. Because if it's true, I've lost respect for Microsoft as a monopolist.
What would have been the benefit for the OEM when it would have created a support issue? No OEM wants to deal with support calls related to an OS that had zero applications. Even today, OEMs won't install Linux for typical home desktop machines because it creates a support problem... yet you claim they had to be strongarmed into not installing BeOS ten years ago? C'mon.
I am an OS geek, I had a triple booted machine running BeOS, Linux and Windows in 1998. Guess which OS never got used? And I wanted BeOS to succeed. The reality is that no one had to kill BeOS. It was an OS without a market from day one. If Zeta died today, no one would notice more than a cute project finally fading off into the sunset.
Slashdot Mirror
You can do this (most companies do). Just do it with a PIP, not surprise them one day by walking them out the door with no prior feedback.
The more they annoy people, the more visibility worthy indie acts [Harvey Danger] get.
I don't mean to burst your bubble, but Harvey Danger got big while they were signed with Sire records, which is part of Warner-Electra-Atlantic last I checked. It's easy for you to say they're "indie" now, but they can swing that because they had a top 25 hit in 2000 when they released "King James Version" on a major label owned by WEA. And let's be honest here, they're just not that great and weren't even when they were on Sire.
Granted, some indie bands can still make a go of it completely on their own, but Harvey Danger is the norm, rather than the exception. Most bands get signed to major labels, THEN go off and create their own label once they have gotten the exposure. The record companies still control the ability of bands to get airtime. That's just how it continues to be today.
As processors and bandwidth have gotten faster, the amount of crap people can dump on your screen to try to make a buck has increased significantly. Remember when we didn't used to go to a site because there were too many ads? Those days are long past, but have you tried an ad blocker? It makes browsing amazingly fast again. Or how about all the bloatware installed by Dell and HP? That kind of thing would have been intolerable 5 years ago, just on sheer processor speed.
It seems that any effort to optimize has gone out the window these days except for one consumer market -- gaming. Though I still think we're headed to a world with JITted Javascript. Hey, if Apple's iPhone SDK is Javascript, it seems to be the freight train of "progress" to use Javascript.
On Saturday, a rerun of "Mama's Family" and a show called "Build a Better Burger" both had better ratings than the Stanley Cup finals game that was on.
The game was the lowest rated show ever in the history of primetime network television*.
This is why the NHL is embracing any technology that might help.
* - Ratings facts from one of this week's Pardon the Interruption episodes on ESPN.
It's common on /. to believe that every slope is slippery, but that's just not true. Because the lawyers at NJ Turnpike concluded they are within the rule of law to ban this video under copyright -- which is their job, to interpret the law -- we're in a fascist state? I hope most people agree that conclusion is absurd.
... that's what we have courts for. But if you asked a lawyer at the EFF to fight this, for their sake, I hope they would turn you down. Fighting it would mean trying to keep a snuff film, with no political or intellectual value, on YouTube. The EFF should save money and good PR for tangible abuses, like the spying program.
Also, is it really an abuse if no one would fight it, not out of fear but common sense or decency? You could take their lawyers to court to reinstate the video
24 hour news cycles. Cameras everywhere, ready to roll on a story. Cable TV. That show was more predictive than any futuristic/sci-fi serial I can think of off the top of my head.
If you're up for a weekend of watching the present of news being predicted in the past, watch a bunch of Max Headroom followed by 1976's Network, an excellent, excellent movie.
Accidental double negative. Was supposed to be "Not every DMCA request is a violation of YOUR rights"
Not every DMCA request is not a violation of YOUR rights. For a minute, put yourself in the place a relative of the person driving this car, who probably feel asleep at the wheel on the way to work. How do you think they feel about having people watch their loved one die on You Tube? What about their rights?
So far this is the only DMCA request I actually agree with. Using DMCA to get this, an obvious snuff film, off of the web is at least morally appropriate. I too am not sure about the copyright aspect of a public entity's video, but I'm glad they're at least doing something about keeping the video off of YouTube.
... he was supposed to make it to an earnings conference call but couldn't because he was stuffed in a locker.
His CFO had to report that the company had lost $5.35 when a bully stole its lunch money.
He was exposed for spending corporate funds on comic books and Big League Chew.
I could probably go on forever with these. The reality of this story is that venture capitalists are so desperate to turn anything into money that they apparently see no problem with trying to monetize an 8th grader.
I think you mean 45nm for Intel.
Yes, AMD is far behind Intel in manufacturing prowess... as is just about everyone.
A URL has:
The only one of those that the machine itself has any control over hiding from the user is the path, which can be virtualized. However, many aren't. DTDs certainly don't seem to be.
A distributed system for this kind of mission-critical information is what we need. Think DNS for documents, rather than just hosts.
Proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in are also dead ends.
I'm not so sure. A couple tiny startups called Adobe and Microsoft seem to be doing pretty well with that strategy.
Companies aren't people, and as such do not have the same rights that people have
That is incorrect. In the eyes of the law, corporations are considered to have the same rights as people. Juristic person describes some of this, but I found the documentary The Corporation to be enlightening on the matter.
I have the distinct feeling that WPF/E is one of those technologies that Microsoft has thrown out there and, after it doesn't catch on, will end up ditching it. Anyone who pays attention to Microsoft knows this happens all the time. About half of the "Live Ideas" have already been abandoned in six months. There's another article on /. that UMPC is all but abandoned. Media PC has one-time big backers like HP are running away, so Microsoft has just started shipping MCE with practically every version of Vista as capitulation.
.NET is the VB6 replacement technology (as was apparent when Mono was started up), so it had a built-in audience. Anyone using Windows for business is almost undoubtedly writing .NET code by now. Novell has a lot to gain by offering a platform for people to run those .NET apps without using Windows.
That's not to say these aren't good products, they just never caught on so Microsoft's dev teams moved on.
Taking on the CLR, the BCL, Windows.Forms, etc. made a lot more sense because it's used so heavily in the corporate world.
Silverlight, on the other hand, is a consumer technology trying to take marketshare from Adobe. It's a long road to try to do that against any technology that has 95% of the market (like, ahem, windows itself). I don't really understand why Novell would want to take a risk on this. Instead, shore up the ASP.NET code. Keep working on Windows.Forms, LINQ, etc., etc. Those are the most viable businesses... not the Flash rip-off.
I guess I don't get what the big attraction for these guys are.... I know the US's health care system is messed up, but I'm not sure technology can fix all of the aches, pains and dysfunction in our current system.
Of course, but do you think anyone in Congress knows that? Clearly not. The US government either ignores a problem forever or tries to find a silver bullet solution. You don't think it's a good plan for a technologist to position themselves to be the savior of heathcare? Hats off to Steve Case, the guy clearly gets the idea of being a government healthcare software contractor, following in the greatness of Ross Perot before him (Medicare).
Apple is a brand name, not a hardware maker. They distinguish themselves by creating unique devices out of stock parts. Apple cares about hardware in how it looks and and the software for it. They neither make the parts nor put together the parts anymore, so what benefit would they see getting back into that business. Being in the manufacturing and fabrication business would be Apple computer in the 80s, barely the 90s and definitely not the 2000s.
/..
Furthermore, I'm sure this has been brought up in other comments, but wouldn't AMD lose most of their customers who run Linux on Opterons? What existing AMD customer would move to a higher priced XServe just to keep using AMD?
The whole idea is absurd, I'm surprised it made it to the front page of
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000?
Your points are valid, but sometimes we need to do what makes most sense now so that we can develop what makes most sense later. I don't think we'll be using U235 fission in the year 3000. Hopefully we'll have come up with fusion, or solar cells that are efficient enough not to take 1.4 sq miles of land for a measly 40 MW.
Solar can't provide enough power right now. So if we don't take on fission, we're going to end up burning coal. I think it's obvious which is worse in that equation.
Look at Windows ME, failed in the marketplace. Look at Vista, failing in the marketplace.
The marketplace had nothing to do with ME's failure. Microsoft killed ME by choice.
Windows ME was an iterative release of the 95/98 branch to appease all of the people who wanted to stick with it for games. Releasing ME wasn't about long term support, it was about trying to get a few extra bucks from that crowd. Microsoft already was pushing to get everyone on the NT branch at the time it was released. W2K was on shelves and XP would be out only a year later and most '98 folk would move to that. ME was simply a money grab; saying it a was a failure in the marketplace shows no knowledge of what Microsoft was doing at the time.
Vista is the next iteration of the NT branch -- their main branch. Unless there's an alternative branch that Microsoft is working on and not telling us about, this is the version (or Vista 2.0, like XP was W2K 2.0) that 100% of Windows machines will be sold with in the coming years. It won't fail because Microsoft doesn't want it to. That's the benefit of being a monopoly.
Well then colour me crackpot
;)
Ahem. I said: "Any IT person who says they will "never" upgrade, yet stay with Windows, is a crackpot."
As much as you might want to be labeled a crackpot, seems you're not included in that group.
"30% of business have no intention of moving to Vista, ever."
/.ers will recall, the hold-outs just got bit in the butt by the lack of support for the new daylight savings rules. Which was more disruptive to their business, not upgrading to XP within 6 years or getting caught off guard by the DST thing? I guarantee the same 10% people will pay more attention to Microsoft's sunset date for XP this time around and will be on Vista far in advance.
I think this claim is a media creation. Any IT person who says they will "never" upgrade, yet stay with Windows, is a crackpot. People threatened that for years with 2000 -> XP, and most gave it up eventually. Some people did hold out, and as
Beyond holdouts, what are businesses going to do, rewrite their entire codebase to run on Linux? Few will. Those kinds of things sound good in theory, except for the fact that Microsoft's pricing is not stupid. It's usually going to be cheaper to stay on Windows compared to the porting costs, all office workers retrained, custom support costs, etc. There is an indeterminate value in not being vendor locked-in by using Linux (though you may be more distro-locked in), but convincing a boss of that who is not on the Linux train is going to be very tough.
Microsoft's got a really good thing going right now. Their platform is robust from mobile all the way up to servers/databases/etc, and the prices are just about perfect to keep anyone who thinks about moving off the platform. So either 30% of busineses saying they'll never use Vista are fooling themselves or this is yet another journalist trying to tap into the "Vista is DOA" hype.
I installed Vista on my MacPro - in 12 minutes, i had a successfully BSOD'd Vista by playing a standard DiVX 6.0 file on Vista.
So you installed Vista on a platform with beta drivers from a Microsoft competitor and complain with it bluescreens? That part's definitely not a shock.
I wish I had mod points because this post is offtopic. Bad drivers can bring down Windows in a hurry, we knew that. We've known it for years. I don't see any evidence that your bluescreen was caused by the DRM mechanism.
The rest of your post is somewhat insightful but completely off topic. XP being "EOL in 7 months"? Where'd you come up with that?
It sounds like a drumroll Tito Puente might have done. It's about the right pitch for one of his timbales.
Although, it also kind of sounds like the signal being sent around on satellites in ID4.
So basically it's either a message from one of the greatest Latin drummers or aliens hell bent on destroying the earth. Have a nice weekend everyone!
Hey ./ commenters, you're supposed to be IT experts. So pretend you know the difference between Java and Javascript.
But here's a tip: if you don't really know or care what the difference is, you can just say "Web 2.0" and all of the buzzword lovers will nod in silent understanding and tell you that Microsoft is doomed by Web 2.0.
but when Sony does it people tell them to stop trying to be different... I know people will cry about the console market being different, but the principals of the decisions are the same.
No one's crying about Sony trying to be different. It's far worse for them than that: no one is willing to spend $600 on their pet project. Intel, on the other hand, will probably make things cheaper by merging these on the desktop.
When Be tried to make deals with OEMs to bundle or pre-install BeOS as a free option, Microsoft "persuaded" them not to.
Oh please. You're claiming that Microsoft pulled anticompetitive pricing tactics against Be trying to dump their OS on consumers? Provide some record of this. Because if it's true, I've lost respect for Microsoft as a monopolist.
What would have been the benefit for the OEM when it would have created a support issue? No OEM wants to deal with support calls related to an OS that had zero applications. Even today, OEMs won't install Linux for typical home desktop machines because it creates a support problem... yet you claim they had to be strongarmed into not installing BeOS ten years ago? C'mon.
I am an OS geek, I had a triple booted machine running BeOS, Linux and Windows in 1998. Guess which OS never got used? And I wanted BeOS to succeed. The reality is that no one had to kill BeOS. It was an OS without a market from day one. If Zeta died today, no one would notice more than a cute project finally fading off into the sunset.