Are you talking about your own opinion and perception, or that of a few hundred million people who do find it convenient?
When you talk of "a few hundred million people who do find it convenient", are you parroting Microsoft marketing materials, or are you merely talking about your own misperceptions? How much Microsoft stock do you own that you are so motivated to misrepresent the facts?
I always get the feeling that the really mould-breaking steps forward come from a single bright idea or accident, rather than by diligent work over long periods.
I think that feeling is misleading.
If you look at the history of penicillin, you'll see that it took decades of work to transform the original observation into a workable product. Furthermore, other people had made the same observation before, but what made Fleming and Florey different was that they invested the hard work to actually transform the initial observation into a working medicine.
Relativity, likewise, was not a flash of insight, but many decades of work just for Einstein himself, and he was building on many decades of work by philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians.
And I guess that the big innovations are big because they came from no-where. If they took 20-30 years to evolve then they would not be a step change.
But the examples you list did take 20-30 years to evolve, often even longer.
Please try and remember that almost every revolutionary idea was unpopular with the peer review system at their time.
Yes, and that is the problem with TED: in addition to using a peer review system, it uses pre-selection by scouts, non-anonymized reviewing, and it seems to go for celebrity factor. How much more exposure do Clinton, Bono, Gell-Mann, Brin, Page, or Wales need?
With a regular conference, at least everybody can submit and the review processes attempt to be fair and impartial. Reviewers still screw up, but at least there's a chance that something innovative and interesting comes through. With TED, just look at the result: it's the usual, media-savvy suspects.
A venue with the kind of visibility and recognition as TED shouldn't send out "spotters" who need to ask Slashdot, it should follow some established protocols for finding and evaluating work. And I think the haphazard selection processs is reflected in the quality of the program.
the Sparc you mention was a lot more underpowered than an equivalent NT machine
That would be a neat trick, given that NT came out in 1993, while the SLC was available a year or two earlier. You could get a 386-based UNIX machine even in the late '80s for less than $2000.
I am a Windows developer (...) It wasn't, it mostly failed. Keep the same opinion today and Linux will be just as successful.
People like you don't count: you decide nothing of significance, you're hard to convince anyway, and you still just don't get where technology is going anyway.
Microsoft didn't get big by being nice or diplomatic, and Linux won't either. Linux also won't get big by trying to play around on Microsoft's turf, but by making Microsoft irrelevant.
Well, for starters, if they paid to retain the employee, they wouldn't have a position to fill, right?
But somebody else would have an open position.
It's just a lot of them have probably moved on to working in areas that actually pay more reasonably. Good programmers are very versatile.
Web development requires completely different skills from systems or application programming. Besides, there is a shortage of good programmers as well.
The only corporation I've seen that doesn't run entirely on Windows desktops is Google, where there are a lot of Macs and some Linux desktops.
Even your Google statistics are completely off. Do you believe all the bullshit Apple and Microsoft marketing are telling you?
But I am also a realist, and I know that back in the old days people chose Office etc. very specifically (contrary to your assertions), and they will continue to do so for many years to come.
Of course, they chose it "specifically", they were just as ill-informed and irrational back then as you are today.
I am very aware of how much business I lose because of this, but the alternative is not worth it.
Perhaps not for you; losing even a few percent of potential business is very much a huge problem for a corporation, and the actual risk from an Office-centric approach is much higher.
Let's make really cheap, low-cost, useful, and robust devices to help people. Why didn't I think of that! Bet nobody else has thought of that before either!
The problem Yahoo has is that it has some great properties, but it can't monetize those properties.
And Microsoft would do any better? Have you looked at how badly Microsoft's own on-line efforts have been going? Microsoft doesn't know what they are doing, and they'd run Yahoo into the ground even faster.
Yahoo should have taken Microsoft's money and run, but afterwards, Microhoo would have failed as surely as Microsoft and Yahoo are failing separately.
You're right, Office did/does suck, but there were no alternatives.
Of course, there were: there were several office suites.
And businesses do need Office, as they can't interoperate otherwise.
There have always been plenty of choices for businesses to interoperate, even during the worst days of the office monopoly.
That's why 95%+ of workspace desktops are some variant of Windows, and it's not going to change anytime soon.
Your 95% number is way too high these days. And there are plenty of businesses that run entirely without Office.
People will choose the software that works most conveniently (as opposed to works the best), and damn the consequences.
Objectively, MS Office already doesn't work "most conveniently": between upgrades, viruses, version incompatibilities, UI changes, etc.
And, of course, we need to change that attitude and that fact. In part, that will involve making MS Office use less convenient by, for example, telling people to go to hell when they want my business and send MS Office documents.
Yes, there was, because non-MS machines couldn't run Office, or much of anything else useful in a typical business, for that matter
Office was a p.o.s. for many years, and there were plenty of alternatives to it.
Unfortunately, those days are still with us somewhat - no one has succeeded in breaking the Office stranglehold.
The only "stranglehold" is that people assume that they need to use Office. You don't. I have licenses through work and I don't even bother installing it anymore.
Windows NT was a breth of fresh air back in the day of £10k per unix workstation, its no wonder companies migrated in droves (yep, I was there, I even today work on a product that has lots of 'port to NT' comments in it).
You don't know what you're talking about. Machines like the SPARCstation SLC were available for less than a PC. As soon as Pentiums were out, you could run UNIX on them. And Linux and NT basically evolved in parallel. There was never a time at which a Microsoft machine was a cost-effective alternative to a non-Windows machine.
If it gets stuck in a "thats not free you can't use it" religious battle, expect it remain a niche solution.
The only religious nut here is people like you. And, don't worry, open source developers are aware that there are plenty of idiots like you out there, but we don't think we need to cozy up to you to wrest control of the market from Microsoft.
The fact that when these things came to dominance they were the best readily available product (based on price and platform) on the market seems to totally slip by your radar.
That is absolutely wrong. Microsoft was years behind others in each of those product categories. Microsoft only succeeded because IBM handed them a monopoly on a silver platter and they ruthlessly exploited it.
but you start it off with emotionally charged nonsense that it makes your comment suspect.
I'm sorry you are too stupid to realize it, but I was there, and what I said is absolutely correct: throughout Microsoft's history, people could easily have chosen better products at the same or lower price. Microsoft is exactly the right example for what happens when short sighted and uninformed people make choices that don't take into account the long term consequences of their choices.
That's bullshit. What put the PC into every home and office was the decreasing price of microprocessors. Microsoft was just riding the wave, they didn't cause it.
There was far better software available at the time than anything from Microsoft. The only reason Microsoft became part of the PC revolution was because IBM handed them a monopoly and they illegally exploited it.
The "if the code works, use it" attitude is what gave us the DOS, Windows, and MS Office monopolies. It's particularly dangerous because most people have no idea what "working" means when they start out using something, and then establish a bad standard.
Being purist about this sort of thing is pragmatic. OK, so occasionally use Skype or whatever if you really need to. But if you simply don't give damn, you risk condemning us to another several decades of bad monopolies of one or the other kind.
For user-generated content, the users are the "rights owners". So it's wrong to say that the law is increasingly siding with rights owners.
What the article is perhaps trying to say is that the law is increasingly (?) siding with big business to keep smaller competitors out of the market.
Note, however, that the Viacom decision really has nothing to do with that. The Viacom decision is about determining what viewers actually view, and whether big business content is more (or less) popular than other content.
The OSS community have managed to build a better browser than IE, but how come they haven't been able to duplicate the Apple GUI experience?
A lot of the Apple GUI experience is driven by three things: (1) what Apple users are used to, (2) creating a distinctive Apple "community", (3) looking nice in the store and being easy to market.
such as difference philosophies or lack of people with good a understanding of user psychology and graphic design principles?
Apple machines have nice graphic design, but KDE and Gnome also do (if different).
As for "psychology", try to find some actual evidence that the Apple UI is objectively superior.
In fact, all that is know about GUIs is public and out there, and all major GUI developers incorporate it into their systems, so there simply aren't any big differences between GUIs.
I think your premise is wrong: KDE, Gnome, Vista, and OS X do not differ much in the quality of their user interface design. They differ somewhat in the quality of their interaction design (e.g., Vista's annoying pseudo-security pop-ups), but even there, Apple also has issues.
A shortage of web developers means that there are, say, 10000 jobs and 9000 developers who could fill them. How does someone sticking with a company through hard times fill in any of the unfilled 1000 positions?
That's nice, but it doesn't help alleviate a shortage. If there's a shortage, then your company giving better conditions just moves people around and means that the person will be missing somewhere else.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you talking about your own opinion and perception, or that of a few hundred million people who do find it convenient?
When you talk of "a few hundred million people who do find it convenient", are you parroting Microsoft marketing materials, or are you merely talking about your own misperceptions? How much Microsoft stock do you own that you are so motivated to misrepresent the facts?
If they had a lot of free time to play around, maybe they'd figure out how to use alternatives. Until then, Windows is convenient.
Installing and maintaining a Windows machine takes much more time than installing and maintaining a Linux machine.
It's Windows users that apparently have "a lot of free time to play around".
It would also matter if only some videos were uploaded by Viacom employees because it would weaken some of their claims of harm and loss.
Why would someone use an OS that is proprietary and expensive when there is a free OS that is open source and costs nothing? Convenience.
That can't be it, because Windows is not particularly convenient.
I always get the feeling that the really mould-breaking steps forward come from a single bright idea or accident, rather than by diligent work over long periods.
I think that feeling is misleading.
If you look at the history of penicillin, you'll see that it took decades of work to transform the original observation into a workable product. Furthermore, other people had made the same observation before, but what made Fleming and Florey different was that they invested the hard work to actually transform the initial observation into a working medicine.
Relativity, likewise, was not a flash of insight, but many decades of work just for Einstein himself, and he was building on many decades of work by philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians.
And I guess that the big innovations are big because they came from no-where. If they took 20-30 years to evolve then they would not be a step change.
But the examples you list did take 20-30 years to evolve, often even longer.
Please try and remember that almost every revolutionary idea was unpopular with the peer review system at their time.
Yes, and that is the problem with TED: in addition to using a peer review system, it uses pre-selection by scouts, non-anonymized reviewing, and it seems to go for celebrity factor. How much more exposure do Clinton, Bono, Gell-Mann, Brin, Page, or Wales need?
With a regular conference, at least everybody can submit and the review processes attempt to be fair and impartial. Reviewers still screw up, but at least there's a chance that something innovative and interesting comes through. With TED, just look at the result: it's the usual, media-savvy suspects.
A venue with the kind of visibility and recognition as TED shouldn't send out "spotters" who need to ask Slashdot, it should follow some established protocols for finding and evaluating work. And I think the haphazard selection processs is reflected in the quality of the program.
the Sparc you mention was a lot more underpowered than an equivalent NT machine
That would be a neat trick, given that NT came out in 1993, while the SLC was available a year or two earlier. You could get a 386-based UNIX machine even in the late '80s for less than $2000.
I am a Windows developer (...) It wasn't, it mostly failed. Keep the same opinion today and Linux will be just as successful.
People like you don't count: you decide nothing of significance, you're hard to convince anyway, and you still just don't get where technology is going anyway.
Microsoft didn't get big by being nice or diplomatic, and Linux won't either. Linux also won't get big by trying to play around on Microsoft's turf, but by making Microsoft irrelevant.
Well, for starters, if they paid to retain the employee, they wouldn't have a position to fill, right?
But somebody else would have an open position.
It's just a lot of them have probably moved on to working in areas that actually pay more reasonably. Good programmers are very versatile.
Web development requires completely different skills from systems or application programming. Besides, there is a shortage of good programmers as well.
The only corporation I've seen that doesn't run entirely on Windows desktops is Google, where there are a lot of Macs and some Linux desktops.
Even your Google statistics are completely off. Do you believe all the bullshit Apple and Microsoft marketing are telling you?
But I am also a realist, and I know that back in the old days people chose Office etc. very specifically (contrary to your assertions), and they will continue to do so for many years to come.
Of course, they chose it "specifically", they were just as ill-informed and irrational back then as you are today.
I am very aware of how much business I lose because of this, but the alternative is not worth it.
Perhaps not for you; losing even a few percent of potential business is very much a huge problem for a corporation, and the actual risk from an Office-centric approach is much higher.
Let's make really cheap, low-cost, useful, and robust devices to help people. Why didn't I think of that! Bet nobody else has thought of that before either!
The problem Yahoo has is that it has some great properties, but it can't monetize those properties.
And Microsoft would do any better? Have you looked at how badly Microsoft's own on-line efforts have been going? Microsoft doesn't know what they are doing, and they'd run Yahoo into the ground even faster.
Yahoo should have taken Microsoft's money and run, but afterwards, Microhoo would have failed as surely as Microsoft and Yahoo are failing separately.
You're right, Office did/does suck, but there were no alternatives.
Of course, there were: there were several office suites.
And businesses do need Office, as they can't interoperate otherwise.
There have always been plenty of choices for businesses to interoperate, even during the worst days of the office monopoly.
That's why 95%+ of workspace desktops are some variant of Windows, and it's not going to change anytime soon.
Your 95% number is way too high these days. And there are plenty of businesses that run entirely without Office.
People will choose the software that works most conveniently (as opposed to works the best), and damn the consequences.
Objectively, MS Office already doesn't work "most conveniently": between upgrades, viruses, version incompatibilities, UI changes, etc.
And, of course, we need to change that attitude and that fact. In part, that will involve making MS Office use less convenient by, for example, telling people to go to hell when they want my business and send MS Office documents.
I haven't had to reboot my routers (WRT54G) in the last 3 years, except for the occasional firmware upgrade.
Yes, there was, because non-MS machines couldn't run Office, or much of anything else useful in a typical business, for that matter
Office was a p.o.s. for many years, and there were plenty of alternatives to it.
Unfortunately, those days are still with us somewhat - no one has succeeded in breaking the Office stranglehold.
The only "stranglehold" is that people assume that they need to use Office. You don't. I have licenses through work and I don't even bother installing it anymore.
Windows NT was a breth of fresh air back in the day of £10k per unix workstation, its no wonder companies migrated in droves (yep, I was there, I even today work on a product that has lots of 'port to NT' comments in it).
You don't know what you're talking about. Machines like the SPARCstation SLC were available for less than a PC. As soon as Pentiums were out, you could run UNIX on them. And Linux and NT basically evolved in parallel. There was never a time at which a Microsoft machine was a cost-effective alternative to a non-Windows machine.
If it gets stuck in a "thats not free you can't use it" religious battle, expect it remain a niche solution.
The only religious nut here is people like you. And, don't worry, open source developers are aware that there are plenty of idiots like you out there, but we don't think we need to cozy up to you to wrest control of the market from Microsoft.
The fact that when these things came to dominance they were the best readily available product (based on price and platform) on the market seems to totally slip by your radar.
That is absolutely wrong. Microsoft was years behind others in each of those product categories. Microsoft only succeeded because IBM handed them a monopoly on a silver platter and they ruthlessly exploited it.
but you start it off with emotionally charged nonsense that it makes your comment suspect.
I'm sorry you are too stupid to realize it, but I was there, and what I said is absolutely correct: throughout Microsoft's history, people could easily have chosen better products at the same or lower price. Microsoft is exactly the right example for what happens when short sighted and uninformed people make choices that don't take into account the long term consequences of their choices.
It's what put the PC into every home and office.
That's bullshit. What put the PC into every home and office was the decreasing price of microprocessors. Microsoft was just riding the wave, they didn't cause it.
There was far better software available at the time than anything from Microsoft. The only reason Microsoft became part of the PC revolution was because IBM handed them a monopoly and they illegally exploited it.
The "if the code works, use it" attitude is what gave us the DOS, Windows, and MS Office monopolies. It's particularly dangerous because most people have no idea what "working" means when they start out using something, and then establish a bad standard.
Being purist about this sort of thing is pragmatic. OK, so occasionally use Skype or whatever if you really need to. But if you simply don't give damn, you risk condemning us to another several decades of bad monopolies of one or the other kind.
For user-generated content, the users are the "rights owners". So it's wrong to say that the law is increasingly siding with rights owners.
What the article is perhaps trying to say is that the law is increasingly (?) siding with big business to keep smaller competitors out of the market.
Note, however, that the Viacom decision really has nothing to do with that. The Viacom decision is about determining what viewers actually view, and whether big business content is more (or less) popular than other content.
The OSS community have managed to build a better browser than IE, but how come they haven't been able to duplicate the Apple GUI experience?
A lot of the Apple GUI experience is driven by three things: (1) what Apple users are used to, (2) creating a distinctive Apple "community", (3) looking nice in the store and being easy to market.
such as difference philosophies or lack of people with good a understanding of user psychology and graphic design principles?
Apple machines have nice graphic design, but KDE and Gnome also do (if different).
As for "psychology", try to find some actual evidence that the Apple UI is objectively superior.
In fact, all that is know about GUIs is public and out there, and all major GUI developers incorporate it into their systems, so there simply aren't any big differences between GUIs.
I think your premise is wrong: KDE, Gnome, Vista, and OS X do not differ much in the quality of their user interface design. They differ somewhat in the quality of their interaction design (e.g., Vista's annoying pseudo-security pop-ups), but even there, Apple also has issues.
A shortage of web developers means that there are, say, 10000 jobs and 9000 developers who could fill them. How does someone sticking with a company through hard times fill in any of the unfilled 1000 positions?
It about keeping the good ones.
That's nice, but it doesn't help alleviate a shortage. If there's a shortage, then your company giving better conditions just moves people around and means that the person will be missing somewhere else.
Bullshit. Every single "problem" you listed there is indicative of incompetent administration, not the system.
Incompetent administration is a system problem: systems should be designed so that they are easy to administer, without restricting functionality.
Wouldn't you get the same functionality with a $1.50 cable connecting the output to the input.