So, is this the death of web 2.0? Are IM programs going to take over the desktop? Are we going to be running word processors as an IM plugin? If Yahoo IM suppose AJAX, anything is possible...
Actually, I did run OS/2. And the key word there was useful.
Well good for you. But most people were still running DOS (I never heard about OS/2 until Warp 5). You apparently missed a good portion of the DOS pain that I am talking about.
Once Windows 3.1 was shipped, DOS' days were numbered. Windows 95 was the absolute end of DOS shortcomings (printer incompatibilities, sound capabilities, memory limitations) despite being the underpinning of Windows. The fact that you can still find DOS in niche areas such as tools and utilities stands testament to the value of a simple "file loader."
Anyway, you are wrong. Memory problems were not just an issue near the end the useful life of DOS. It was an issue starting the day the 286 came out. THe "useful" life of DOS ran well into the days of the 486.. including the days of Windows 3.1.
s Unix not an real OS? What about VMS? What about MVS? None of these have support for Soundblaster or 3D video.
...because those systems didn't have soundblaster or 3D video. If they had, the OS would have supported it because applications were generally not permitted to talk to the hardware directly. My point is that an OS should abstract the system such that applications don't have to manage memory or drive hardware appropriate for the system. There are exceptions, of course, like the Amiga where the hardware was consistent enough and hardware access served as an advantage to users, but in the case of DOS, it was a major shortcoming. DOS was designed for the 8086 and was not significantly updated since.
None have built-in printer support unless you count line printers.
Line printers, and then later, postscript printers.
At least most people that used to complain about DOS not supporting virtual memory and multitasking rather than sound.
People complained about lots of things DOS. Although I don't recall many people complaining about virtual memory, per se. Most DOS users had no idea what virtual memory was. They were too concerned about getting access to memory above 1 megabyte to even begin to consider swapping some of it out to disk. Virtual memory was the least of a DOS user's problems.
Face facts. DOS is easier than Windows. It's just not as convenient. That convenience adds complexity.
DOS was easy in the same way that using a large stone as a hammer is easy. It'll probably get a nail into a board, but anything beyond that you have to make/buy your own tools.
You are complaining about hacks to work around specific hardware limitations of Intel CPUs running under real mode and these limitations only popped up near the end of the useful life of DOS (mostly due to code bloat). They are as much a Windows 1.0 and 2.0 problem as they are for DOS.
Problems with memory only near the end of the useful life of DOS? Are you kidding me? Unless you were running OS/2, DOS was the priamry OS on new 486's. Hell, DOS is *still* around in the form of utility/boot disks. Symantec Ghost still uess DOS boot disks, for example.
DOS was still easy compared to Windows. I'd much rather hack memory limitations than fix registry problems any day. Next time somebody drops a machine on your desk and complains that Windows blue screens on boot, remember how easy it was to fix a DOS machine.
DOS, in and of itself, was "easy" because it didn't do much as an OS. It was little more than a glorified file loader. All the problems stemmed from what DOS didn't do. Applicaitons each had a different way of accessing the hardware and using memory. And that was not easier that windows. It was a bitch. I spent hours upon hours fucking aroudn with memory configurations, trying to load network drivers, trying to get a soundcard to work with a game (because DOS provided no abstraction for sound), etc, etc.
Yeah, Windows is annoying too, but at least it pretends to be a real OS intead of some minor extension to teh system BIOS like DOS is/was.
I respectfully disagree. For many tasks I found DOS much easier to work with than Windows and it didn't require near the amount of computing power that the graphical environments do. It allowed me to customize my system in a way that works efficiently for me (such as accessing any program on my system with two keystrokes). Also, actions that take me many mouse clicks to accomplish in a graphical environment can be accomplished with a single command via batch files.
Oh sure, DOS was easy to work with. Do you remember trying to free "conventional memory" so you could run a certain app? Or trying to get access to any RAM beyond 1M? Some programs used "extended memory." Some wanted "expanded memory." Some wouldn't run with EMM386 loaded. Some required it. It is a good thing that DOS 5.0 (I think) introduced multiple boot configurations, because I needed them. I had to reboot my computer differently depending on what I wanted to do with it that day. And talk about braindead shells.. COMMAND.COM? WTF? Somebody wrote that in like 1981 and it was never updated since. Granted, I kinda got a kick out of "hacking" DOS back in the day. But I'd hardly call it easy to work with.
One thing I hope that is added to Windows is a full and complete command-line interface as an alternative to the graphical interface. This is one of the reasons that I'm considering moving to Linux; I can choose (1) the way I want to interface with the system and (2) the look and feel of the graphical interface.
Well, if DOS is your model for an ideal system, Linux will be heaven for you. I'm surprised you haven't moved to Linux already.
Then there are probably few survivors at Microsoft. Ozzie has his work cut out. You can brag about Lotus Notes all you want, but that was developed from scratch when you can make the proper design decisions.
Heh, which part of Notes looks like it was based on proper design decisions?
As someone in the industry, and who also has a hobby of studying viral marketing, I have to say I think this is a good thing for us. Whereas before a lot of clients would pound their agency over their head to make their ads in ways they saw fit (which often times is the culprit for all the annoying, bland and laughable ads out there); now they will hopefully allow us more creative freedom to give viewers something they actually wanna check out.
You can count me out. I'll continue to filter out as much of your inane garbage as I can. I skip all commercials on TV, block all ads on the internet, and change the channel on the radio any time an ad comes on. See, the problem for you, as an advertiser, is that you are starting with a handicap... a bias against you. Most people have better thing to watch/listen to/read than ads. They turn on their TV to watch a show or movie. No matter how interesting your ads are, you are interrupting that show or movie and, overall, harming the viewing experience.
Yes, we want to drive business for our clients, that is our business. But there is not a single person at any ad agency who doesn't want to be known for their creative, and this will give them great leverage with their clients to be able to say, "look, the only way you'll get customers with the huge problem of advertising saturation is to give them content that they actually seek out and pass along, and the only way to do this is to give us more creative freedom."
So how do you deal with a market that is saturated with viral marketing?
You are mistaken. The effectiveness of viral advertising has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of a product. Nothing. Zilch. Nil. Nada. It has everythign to do with how the tone of a particular advertisement resonates with the audience. Take the Budwiser frogs for example. Bud, Wise, and Er (or whatever they were called). Budwiser makes shitty beer. One of the worst. But I found the ads pretty amusing. Granted, I never went out of my way to tell me friends about the ads, but i know people who did. That is viral advertising.
It is interesting that you would associated the quality of a product with the quality of its advertisement. You are an advertiser's best friend.;)
Perception is important. I don't consider mere product placement to be advertising unless some character is explicitly saying things like, "Mmm, Pepsi is good. Drink Pepsi." I mean, a movie generally has to have some products in it, why not get paid to use a specific one? It could be argued that it is actually better than havign the "generic" version of a product in a movie/show as far as realism goes.
Even if they could come up with advertising that I actually wanted to watch, it seems to me that it would necessarily be accompanied by a decrease overall quality of programming. I mean, part of the problem with advertisement, particularly on television, is the interruption factor. I don't care if the advertisements are world class funny and entertaiing. I am trying to watch my damn show! The only way you could get me to want to see the advertising is to decrease the quality of said show such that I don't care if it is interrupted. But at that point, I'm probably not going to watching TV anyway. So there is no net gain.
I guess they could just have special channels dedicated to such entertaining advertisements, but geez, what kind of loser would spend more than a few minutes on that?
Viral advertising works because it is rare. How could it be the norm? I seriously doubt that there is enough talent out there to regularly churn out advertising that is entertaining enough. It is, after all, only advertising. People will learn to filter it out.
Simple, if you customers can't shop on your site because there is some problem with the SSL, they will simply go somewhere else. They won't care about Verisign being evil, they won't care how doing business with them is wrong, they won't care what excuses you could give them. They simply will go somewhere else.
The problem with Verisign isn't that they are evil. It is that they are EXPENSIVE. There are some very cheap CAs that will be happy ti sign your cert and your customers won't know the differnce.
I don't really care for the fluorescent bulb replacement for the house. They don't look quite right. Maybe I am just used to the yellowish glow of incandescent, but fluorecent lights are just too harsh. Even the ones that are supposed to be "soft." I imagine LEDs would be simlar if my LED flashlight is any gauge.
Umm, I think developing custom applications on top of SQL is exactly the kind of expensive thing they were looking to avoid. Although I don't know that there is any way to avoid it. Consolidating data and writing effective interfaces that work for everyone is not a trivial task. Sure, there are RAD tools that can speed things up, but at some poitn you are going to have to bring in SOMEONE who knows what they are doing. A couple IT guys and some users with MS Access skillz just isn't going to cut it.
I'd have to second this. Filemaker has come a little ways with FM 7/8. It now has centralize authentication (auth against ActiveDirectory). Has web publishing capabilities. And if you really need to, you can pull data from it into a "regualar" website via FX.php. I, personally, wouldn't use Filemaker because I'd rather use a "real" development environment like Ruby on Rails for database driven applications. But filemaker seems to work well for people who can put together MS Access type stuff.
As for SQL support in Filemaker though, I must say that it is pretty poor. As far as I know, Filemaker can only IMPORT from SQL sources. It can't access them live.
Actually, coffee stouts/porters were common before the Drew Carey Show. Not exactly revolutionary. I don't mean to take away from such a classic show or anything. I'm just saying..
Or I could just install one of the many native Bittorrent clients for OS X. Actually, I think I will. The only reason I installed Azureus at all was because that is what I knew from other platforms.
For what it does, it's pretty fast in operation. But, that said, it's pretty slow, because what it does is so complicated. So yeah, it's an annoying one.
Maybe it is complicated on the backend assembling all those torrents, but from a user's persepective, it is pretty simple. Display a list of downloading/queued items with some status and statistics in a couple tabs. That's it. Somehow they've made something like that feel slow.
To be fair, you can write GTK, Qt, and Cocoa apps in Java. "Bloat and hideousness" is largely a myth (people who stare at top all day might notice more memory use, but that's about where Java's "bloat" ends).
A myth?? Don't tell me it is a myth. I can start up Azereus on my Mac and experience it first hand. The only reason I keep that piece of crap around is because, for the most part, I dont' have to interact with it to use it.
Java has proven itself to be fast and reliable on the server-side, but it's never (until, hopefully, soon) really had the GUI muscle to back it up. But with any luck, soon it shall, and we can get away from having to rely on native applications so much.
But I LIKE native applications. Why dont' developers understand that? Users don't care how cool the language is or how portable it is. They just want it to run, and the faster and more integrated with the OS, the better.
Azeurus and limewire/frostwire are just 2 I know of.
Azeurus is a perfect example of the hideousness I am talking about. At least on Mac. It isn't so bad on Linux due to the GTK plugin. But it is still a little "off." Do people use Limewire anymore?
Yes its not as integrated into windows which sucks for business apps but the java api is next to none for creating graphics desktop and phone apps.
"graphics desktop?" What is that? And why is Java so good for it?
Java 1.5 has alot more precompiled byte code and dynamic class loading. Java 1.6 will include the java 3d api and use the systems native GPU fully for the effects.
Java has made lots of promises over the years. We'll see how it works out. But as far as I can tell Java best just stay on the web server where it can actually get some work done and nobody has to look at it.
Slashdot Mirror
So, is this the death of web 2.0? Are IM programs going to take over the desktop? Are we going to be running word processors as an IM plugin? If Yahoo IM suppose AJAX, anything is possible...
Well good for you. But most people were still running DOS (I never heard about OS/2 until Warp 5). You apparently missed a good portion of the DOS pain that I am talking about.
Anyway, you are wrong. Memory problems were not just an issue near the end the useful life of DOS. It was an issue starting the day the 286 came out. THe "useful" life of DOS ran well into the days of the 486.. including the days of Windows 3.1.
Line printers, and then later, postscript printers.
People complained about lots of things DOS. Although I don't recall many people complaining about virtual memory, per se. Most DOS users had no idea what virtual memory was. They were too concerned about getting access to memory above 1 megabyte to even begin to consider swapping some of it out to disk. Virtual memory was the least of a DOS user's problems.
DOS was easy in the same way that using a large stone as a hammer is easy. It'll probably get a nail into a board, but anything beyond that you have to make/buy your own tools.
-matthew
Problems with memory only near the end of the useful life of DOS? Are you kidding me? Unless you were running OS/2, DOS was the priamry OS on new 486's. Hell, DOS is *still* around in the form of utility/boot disks. Symantec Ghost still uess DOS boot disks, for example.
DOS, in and of itself, was "easy" because it didn't do much as an OS. It was little more than a glorified file loader. All the problems stemmed from what DOS didn't do. Applicaitons each had a different way of accessing the hardware and using memory. And that was not easier that windows. It was a bitch. I spent hours upon hours fucking aroudn with memory configurations, trying to load network drivers, trying to get a soundcard to work with a game (because DOS provided no abstraction for sound), etc, etc.
Yeah, Windows is annoying too, but at least it pretends to be a real OS intead of some minor extension to teh system BIOS like DOS is/was.
-matthew
Oh sure, DOS was easy to work with. Do you remember trying to free "conventional memory" so you could run a certain app? Or trying to get access to any RAM beyond 1M? Some programs used "extended memory." Some wanted "expanded memory." Some wouldn't run with EMM386 loaded. Some required it. It is a good thing that DOS 5.0 (I think) introduced multiple boot configurations, because I needed them. I had to reboot my computer differently depending on what I wanted to do with it that day. And talk about braindead shells.. COMMAND.COM? WTF? Somebody wrote that in like 1981 and it was never updated since. Granted, I kinda got a kick out of "hacking" DOS back in the day. But I'd hardly call it easy to work with.
Well, if DOS is your model for an ideal system, Linux will be heaven for you. I'm surprised you haven't moved to Linux already.
-matthew
Good question. One has to wonder if BG was ever really much of a coder. I think he once write a BASIC interpreter? I know he didn't write DOS.
-matthew
Heh, which part of Notes looks like it was based on proper design decisions?
-matthew
As someone in the industry, and who also has a hobby of studying viral marketing, I have to say I think this is a good thing for us. Whereas before a lot of clients would pound their agency over their head to make their ads in ways they saw fit (which often times is the culprit for all the annoying, bland and laughable ads out there); now they will hopefully allow us more creative freedom to give viewers something they actually wanna check out.
You can count me out. I'll continue to filter out as much of your inane garbage as I can. I skip all commercials on TV, block all ads on the internet, and change the channel on the radio any time an ad comes on. See, the problem for you, as an advertiser, is that you are starting with a handicap... a bias against you. Most people have better thing to watch/listen to/read than ads. They turn on their TV to watch a show or movie. No matter how interesting your ads are, you are interrupting that show or movie and, overall, harming the viewing experience.
Yes, we want to drive business for our clients, that is our business. But there is not a single person at any ad agency who doesn't want to be known for their creative, and this will give them great leverage with their clients to be able to say, "look, the only way you'll get customers with the huge problem of advertising saturation is to give them content that they actually seek out and pass along, and the only way to do this is to give us more creative freedom."
So how do you deal with a market that is saturated with viral marketing?
-matthew
What in the world are you talking about? What does "Firefly" or "Wonderfalls" have to do with viral marketing?
-matthew
You are mistaken. The effectiveness of viral advertising has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of a product. Nothing. Zilch. Nil. Nada. It has everythign to do with how the tone of a particular advertisement resonates with the audience. Take the Budwiser frogs for example. Bud, Wise, and Er (or whatever they were called). Budwiser makes shitty beer. One of the worst. But I found the ads pretty amusing. Granted, I never went out of my way to tell me friends about the ads, but i know people who did. That is viral advertising.
;)
It is interesting that you would associated the quality of a product with the quality of its advertisement. You are an advertiser's best friend.
-matthew
Perception is important. I don't consider mere product placement to be advertising unless some character is explicitly saying things like, "Mmm, Pepsi is good. Drink Pepsi." I mean, a movie generally has to have some products in it, why not get paid to use a specific one? It could be argued that it is actually better than havign the "generic" version of a product in a movie/show as far as realism goes.
-matthew
Even if they could come up with advertising that I actually wanted to watch, it seems to me that it would necessarily be accompanied by a decrease overall quality of programming. I mean, part of the problem with advertisement, particularly on television, is the interruption factor. I don't care if the advertisements are world class funny and entertaiing. I am trying to watch my damn show! The only way you could get me to want to see the advertising is to decrease the quality of said show such that I don't care if it is interrupted. But at that point, I'm probably not going to watching TV anyway. So there is no net gain.
I guess they could just have special channels dedicated to such entertaining advertisements, but geez, what kind of loser would spend more than a few minutes on that?
-matthew
Viral advertising works because it is rare. How could it be the norm? I seriously doubt that there is enough talent out there to regularly churn out advertising that is entertaining enough. It is, after all, only advertising. People will learn to filter it out.
-matthew
I haven't found any reason to change.
Isn't a Thawte signature like hundreds of $$$ a year? That should be enough to make you want to change.
-matthew
The problem with Verisign isn't that they are evil. It is that they are EXPENSIVE. There are some very cheap CAs that will be happy ti sign your cert and your customers won't know the differnce.
-matthew
I don't really care for the fluorescent bulb replacement for the house. They don't look quite right. Maybe I am just used to the yellowish glow of incandescent, but fluorecent lights are just too harsh. Even the ones that are supposed to be "soft." I imagine LEDs would be simlar if my LED flashlight is any gauge.
-matthew
Oh my god! Something is eroding the Artic Ocean! Soon there will be no more oceans and we will be hot AND dry!
-matthew
Umm, I think developing custom applications on top of SQL is exactly the kind of expensive thing they were looking to avoid. Although I don't know that there is any way to avoid it. Consolidating data and writing effective interfaces that work for everyone is not a trivial task. Sure, there are RAD tools that can speed things up, but at some poitn you are going to have to bring in SOMEONE who knows what they are doing. A couple IT guys and some users with MS Access skillz just isn't going to cut it.
-matthew
I'd have to second this. Filemaker has come a little ways with FM 7/8. It now has centralize authentication (auth against ActiveDirectory). Has web publishing capabilities. And if you really need to, you can pull data from it into a "regualar" website via FX.php. I, personally, wouldn't use Filemaker because I'd rather use a "real" development environment like Ruby on Rails for database driven applications. But filemaker seems to work well for people who can put together MS Access type stuff.
As for SQL support in Filemaker though, I must say that it is pretty poor. As far as I know, Filemaker can only IMPORT from SQL sources. It can't access them live.
-matthew
Actually, coffee stouts/porters were common before the Drew Carey Show. Not exactly revolutionary. I don't mean to take away from such a classic show or anything. I'm just saying..
-matthew
(insert correction to water comparison replacing "water" with "urine" here)
BAD for lusers because then they get in the habit of "Just say OK." I hear Nancy Reagan is pretty upset.
-matthew
Or I could just install one of the many native Bittorrent clients for OS X. Actually, I think I will. The only reason I installed Azureus at all was because that is what I knew from other platforms.
-matthew
Maybe it is complicated on the backend assembling all those torrents, but from a user's persepective, it is pretty simple. Display a list of downloading/queued items with some status and statistics in a couple tabs. That's it. Somehow they've made something like that feel slow.
-matthew
To be fair, you can write GTK, Qt, and Cocoa apps in Java. "Bloat and hideousness" is largely a myth (people who stare at top all day might notice more memory use, but that's about where Java's "bloat" ends).
A myth?? Don't tell me it is a myth. I can start up Azereus on my Mac and experience it first hand. The only reason I keep that piece of crap around is because, for the most part, I dont' have to interact with it to use it.
Java has proven itself to be fast and reliable on the server-side, but it's never (until, hopefully, soon) really had the GUI muscle to back it up. But with any luck, soon it shall, and we can get away from having to rely on native applications so much.
But I LIKE native applications. Why dont' developers understand that? Users don't care how cool the language is or how portable it is. They just want it to run, and the faster and more integrated with the OS, the better.
-matthew
Azeurus is a perfect example of the hideousness I am talking about. At least on Mac. It isn't so bad on Linux due to the GTK plugin. But it is still a little "off." Do people use Limewire anymore?
"graphics desktop?" What is that? And why is Java so good for it?
Java has made lots of promises over the years. We'll see how it works out. But as far as I can tell Java best just stay on the web server where it can actually get some work done and nobody has to look at it.
-matthew