Suffering from a long buzzword noncompliant OS, they buy a company consisting of former employees who have created a superior solution - and combine their technologies to result in:
Mac OS X for Palm!!!!
(wait! I don't need no damn translucent menues on my Palm!)
Let engineering test a product, and they make sure that it has no serious functional flaws.
Let Support test a product, and they make sure that there are no issues that could generate a phone call (personally, they have the best stake, but I'm a support person).
Let marketing test a product, and they'll make sure that all the splash screens and icons look pretty.
Let customers test a product, and they'll make sure it gets the job done.
NONE of these groups is qualified to fully test and debug a piece of software to what you'd consider traditional "engineering" standards. The closest you can come is if you get them all together to design a standard suite of tests to run a product through. With all of these subgroups having a stake in software design, all pulling in different directions, it's no wonder everything's coming apart at the seams.
Failing in promotion and adoption of these standards will leave any perpetrator of lone systems looking like the
schizophrenic guy sitting alone in his malodorous squalor on the subway, having fascinating and animated
discussions, with nobody
I had a lot of the same problems here in California (rural area). And magically, though there was no timetable for when they could do it, originally, they suddenly called, said it was all set to go, they sent out a guy, hooked it up, and bang, we have DSL. At first it wasn't working, then they sent out another guy (4 weeks later?) then fixed their problem at the CO. Finally, it worked, and I'm telling you, DSL is so superior to dial-up, that all the troubles were worth it. Companies charging $30/month for dial-up access are STEALING, because $50/month for DSL makes modem access not worth spit. Dial up providers ought to pay US to use that service.
And as far as cable goes, I would rather lick Bill Gates' bunghole than give another dime to a cable monopoly. I finally told the worthless cable TV provider here to go fuck off, and got satellite TV, and I'm not about to let them screw up my internet access too. Let them wither and die, I say. DSL is DA SHIT!
not only is tidal locking a serious problem, but as others pointed out, variations in temperature due to varying distance to the sun, or shading by the main planet would also have some harsh effects.
Also, IIRC, Jupiter has some pretty intense radiation belts. Intense enough, that they pose a challenge to probes navigating the moons. IIRC, Gallileo had some hard resets when it passed through them. Now that doesn't mean that life cant exist, but all of these factors together make it unlikely to be stable - in other words, able to undergo speciation, let alone, develop into something that can post on slashdot.
This hypothetical civilization colonizes the galaxy in a few million years?
And in all that time, this race has no wars, no economic hard times, no diseases? That could slow them down. It could be that it is culturally a very difficult thing to do, to colonize other planets, light-years away. Given the cultural drift that can occur in two societies that are isolated and unable to communicate, the likelyhood that wars would erupt seems almost a guarantee.
And, even if it IS NOT possible to travel faster than the speed of light, what if it is not technically feasible to colonize another world at all? I mean, we like to draw parallels with sailing the Santa Maria across the Pacific, but it's not quite that simple. It takes a huge amount of resources just to get a paperweight into orbit. Now, how about putting a ship large enough to be home to 1000 or more people for generations, into space, and across the gulf of light years - barring again, disease, cultural instabilities, technical difficulties, etc. Yes, we all want to believe that these problems can be surmounted by a sufficiently advanced civilization - and I'm not saying that they can't. We don't know that. But what if, just what if, that IS the case, that as far as technology goes, we've gone just about as far as we can? What if fusion power is not feasible? What if 1000 people on a generation ship kill eachother? What if life on a generation ship is not sustainable, or requires a much larger biosphere than can be constructed without threatening the economy of the civilization that is building it? What if, 50 years into the journey, an airlock seal blows because a greedy contractor cut corners? There are a lot more reasons why this wont work than simply a civilization blows itself up with atom bombs. And even if it can be made to work, what if it's just a lot harder than we think it is. In that case, the rate of colonization may be much, much, slower than this theory states.
These estimates, that the whole galaxy ought to be colonized by now, in my opinion, are far too optimistic. It has been theorized, how it could be done, but was the full economic impact on the civilization measured? Were ships designed beyond the basic features and principals? This ought to be done with current human technology, to see if it can be done at all. We're not even sure if we can technically put a human on Mars and bring them back - there are many unanswered questions, such as, radiation, human endurance, margin for error, the martian environment (dust, it seems, will be a very seriously major problem, as yet, unaddressed).
interestes of business and interests of customers not compatible?
DUH!
What is a business? A tool for parting a fool and his money.
If a business acts in it's customers' interests, it's because they want to keep those customers, or get more customers. No other reason. Any company that says they're interested in what their customers thing is trying to butter you up. Nothing more. If you're shocked at the realization that businesses want you to give them your money and go away (or come back and give them more), then you've believed their customer relations' department's lies.
It wasn't really the satellite that killed him, it was dating that woman, who was just bad luck. I mean, look at her past several boyfriends! black widow that one.
Re:What class of chips will these be
on
IBMs CMOS 9S
·
· Score: 2
Well, with Intel's recent troubles, and Christmas coming, i don't doubt that the marketroids have been asked to pull something magical out of their butts.
If all else fails, lie.
(previous/recent Intel lies: New Pentium III makes web surfing faster! The Blue Man Group uses and endorses Intel Pentium processors (by inference of them being in our commercials))
A mushroom cloud is not the first thing most people think about. The first thing most people think about is Hanford.
http://www.whistleblower.org/www/hanford.htm
Coal-burning, is also majorly unacceptable to most environmentalists. And they may release clouds of radioactive stuff into the atmosphere, but they don't make entire regions unlivable for millions of years. It's not the plants mostly, it's the fuel production, transportation, and waste storage that is so terrifyingly vexing. If you're not afraid of that, then why don't you go buy a house in Richland, WA? Take a swim in the Columbia river? Got Strontium-90?
Personally, and I think that a lot of/.-ers would agree with me, we should take the US Govt. budget surplus, and probably all of NASA's budget, and probably half of other government programs, and sink it into serious Fusion power research. We can explore space later, but if we don't fix our power problems now, there won't BE a later. Think how much we could invest in NASA programs (and other programs) later, if we didn't have to go fight a war every time OPEC got uppity, or didn't have to clean up oil spills, or didn't have to watch the stock market and the economy spin into recession every time oil speculators got anxious. I know this is oversimplification, and there would be more ramifications than simply putting some "nice projects" on hold. But frankly, when you think about it, if Fusion is possible, that's about the only thing that will ensure mankind's survival 100 years henceforth. Any other scenario is pretty grim.
Of course that will never happen if we keep electing oil barons into the presidency (both Gore AND Bush).
yes, but should they pay by POTENTIAL or ACTUAL audience?
And if it's POTENTIAL audience, then either they're going to have to pull some magical figures out of someone's butt, or the potential audience is like - billions.
Let's not forget that GE controls a huge chunk of media companies. let's not forget that GE makes things like: jet engines, electronic components in nuclear warheads, toasters, electric power generation components.
So it's no wonder that the stories we read in the media point the finger in any direction but at the ones responsible. Is it the California legislation's fault? Is it Intel's fault? Is it Santa Claus' fault? Is it a severe case of NIMBY? (I don't know about y'all, but I have a nuclear plant AND a gas plant with big ugly smokestacks within 20 miles of my house).
California's supply of power is low, because the industry has been fighting tooth and nail with lobbyists to become privatized and deregulated (so they can bill whatever the fuck they want). The people have been fighting it. (through the California legistlature). And though it would be illegal to bill more for power, it's not illegal for them to drag their feet on construction of new plants, and upkeep of old plants. So, as it has been said, old plants have mysteriously dropped off the grid for maintenance reasons, new plants are not coming on line to meet demand. This is in a PARTIALLY deregulated system.
In other words, the power companies are trying to build their case for rate-raising, by artificially constraining supply, in an attempt to increase demand (gee, where have we seen THAT movie before? Oh yeah, that old TV series, "RIAA's Angels".)
For a man worth in excess of $40 billion, multiplying his electric bill times 100 isn't going to make running his thin clients any more of an economic decision.
For him, an economic decision is whether to have custom crafted solid gold cases for those thin clients made by children in Ecuador, or machinists in San Jose.
and why is the common Java joke - write once, debug everywhere.
That debugging effort does not come cheap. If people wrote their JVM's right, it shouldn't be necessary.
But it is.
therefore, it is CHEAPER, in the long run, for a developer to write for one platform only - and if they can eliminate all the other platforms through strategic chicanery, they have all the benefits of single-platform development, without the drawbacks (missing large market segments).
Of course, as we all know, this does ignore the needs of the user. Well, who cares about the needs of the user. If they've got a wallet, that's all the developer needs.
no. not 'nuff said. The money is not necessarily in the OS, and never was. It's in control. Domination. The middleware. The platform. Sure, MS may port to other platforms, to get seats - but don't believe for one minute that that will not be used as a migration tactic. Cross platform development doubles the developer's costs. Even with Java. If.NET exists on other platforms, it will be to lure people into dependence on.NET. Then, when.NET achieves dominance, they will slowly decrease cross-platform parity. Certain features won't be implemented on non-windows. Performance and stability on non-windows will lag. The disparity will ramp slowly, until people who may have been on other platforms, slowly migrate to windows to mitigate their own support costs. Cutting development costs on MS's end is the main goal, but dominance is a sweet side benefit.
All I know is, with Office 2000, those supposed "smart menues" that only show you stuff that you normally use are a complete pain in the ass. I'd rather have all the options visible, and intelligently organized.
As far as your idea for CLI/pipe metaphor? It's been done - years ago, some shareware guy made something for the Mac called "filter-top", it extended text processing to a drag-n-drop system. It seemed all neat and everything, but I just never found a use for it, so I didn't read the docs thorougly. But it did look like it had some pretty cool potential. Maybe he's still got a web page out there somewhere?
anyone who says that they believe that voice recognition has a strong future in computer interfaces is trying to sell you something.
I for one do *not* want to have to speak "Netscape, open pr0n site" aloud at the office. For example.
nuff said?
The next advance in human-computer interface has already been described in cheezy SciFi tv shows. Holographic displays which can expand to many times the size of their transmitter (which you could wear or carry in your pocket), and respond to physical interaction. Actually, I think I first read about that in Greg Bear's Eon book. (it was used to augment human communication - but in a weird way). Until this technology is invented for real - I don't see anything else really improving on what we have now in a meaningful way. Yes, voice recognition can play a role, but it will probably not be significant. Macs have had speech recognition built into the OS for years. Who actually uses it?
Server has been out for over a year (okay, not relevant to the GUI discussion) - and X consumer has been in beta for two months with tens of thousands of users. Nothin but screenshots is vapor. Actual CD's is substantial.
An uptime of 3 weeks for a beta - is phenomenal (disclaimer - I'm used to Windoze and Classic Mac OS; my new e250 at work is doing pretty well too;-))
but the reason the Enterprise market has been so Solaris
based, is that their hardware is rock solid in comparison
yeah, and swapping to a new CPU is going to change that? Face it, Intel and it's cronies just want to sell commodity hardware at enterprise prices. As long as they continue to do so, they will not unseat Sun - unless Sun decides to try to do the same thing (hey, why did that plastic face plate just snap off of my brand new $20k Sun E250? )
Slashdot Mirror
sorry, I was overcome with raw intense hatred. Just wanna kill now.
Maybe they can pull an Apple;
Suffering from a long buzzword noncompliant OS, they buy a company consisting of former employees who have created a superior solution - and combine their technologies to result in:
Mac OS X for Palm!!!!
(wait! I don't need no damn translucent menues on my Palm!)
There is no such thing as unbiased testing.
Let engineering test a product, and they make sure that it has no serious functional flaws.
Let Support test a product, and they make sure that there are no issues that could generate a phone call (personally, they have the best stake, but I'm a support person).
Let marketing test a product, and they'll make sure that all the splash screens and icons look pretty.
Let customers test a product, and they'll make sure it gets the job done.
NONE of these groups is qualified to fully test and debug a piece of software to what you'd consider traditional "engineering" standards. The closest you can come is if you get them all together to design a standard suite of tests to run a product through. With all of these subgroups having a stake in software design, all pulling in different directions, it's no wonder everything's coming apart at the seams.
Failing in promotion and adoption of these standards will leave any perpetrator of lone systems looking like the
schizophrenic guy sitting alone in his malodorous squalor on the subway, having fascinating and animated
discussions, with nobody
. . . like Novell
If you've read Microsoft's Encarta entries on "Microsoft" or "Bill Gates", you know that they've already started doing this.
MS-English is already a reality.
. . .then we are all well and truly fucked.
Perhaps I'll go build a little wooden shack in Nebraska or Montana or wherever the fuck the Unibomber was living.
I had a lot of the same problems here in California (rural area). And magically, though there was no timetable for when they could do it, originally, they suddenly called, said it was all set to go, they sent out a guy, hooked it up, and bang, we have DSL. At first it wasn't working, then they sent out another guy (4 weeks later?) then fixed their problem at the CO. Finally, it worked, and I'm telling you, DSL is so superior to dial-up, that all the troubles were worth it. Companies charging $30/month for dial-up access are STEALING, because $50/month for DSL makes modem access not worth spit. Dial up providers ought to pay US to use that service.
And as far as cable goes, I would rather lick Bill Gates' bunghole than give another dime to a cable monopoly. I finally told the worthless cable TV provider here to go fuck off, and got satellite TV, and I'm not about to let them screw up my internet access too. Let them wither and die, I say. DSL is DA SHIT!
not only is tidal locking a serious problem, but as others pointed out, variations in temperature due to varying distance to the sun, or shading by the main planet would also have some harsh effects.
Also, IIRC, Jupiter has some pretty intense radiation belts. Intense enough, that they pose a challenge to probes navigating the moons. IIRC, Gallileo had some hard resets when it passed through them. Now that doesn't mean that life cant exist, but all of these factors together make it unlikely to be stable - in other words, able to undergo speciation, let alone, develop into something that can post on slashdot.
This hypothetical civilization colonizes the galaxy in a few million years?
And in all that time, this race has no wars, no economic hard times, no diseases? That could slow them down. It could be that it is culturally a very difficult thing to do, to colonize other planets, light-years away. Given the cultural drift that can occur in two societies that are isolated and unable to communicate, the likelyhood that wars would erupt seems almost a guarantee.
And, even if it IS NOT possible to travel faster than the speed of light, what if it is not technically feasible to colonize another world at all? I mean, we like to draw parallels with sailing the Santa Maria across the Pacific, but it's not quite that simple. It takes a huge amount of resources just to get a paperweight into orbit. Now, how about putting a ship large enough to be home to 1000 or more people for generations, into space, and across the gulf of light years - barring again, disease, cultural instabilities, technical difficulties, etc. Yes, we all want to believe that these problems can be surmounted by a sufficiently advanced civilization - and I'm not saying that they can't. We don't know that. But what if, just what if, that IS the case, that as far as technology goes, we've gone just about as far as we can? What if fusion power is not feasible? What if 1000 people on a generation ship kill eachother? What if life on a generation ship is not sustainable, or requires a much larger biosphere than can be constructed without threatening the economy of the civilization that is building it? What if, 50 years into the journey, an airlock seal blows because a greedy contractor cut corners? There are a lot more reasons why this wont work than simply a civilization blows itself up with atom bombs. And even if it can be made to work, what if it's just a lot harder than we think it is. In that case, the rate of colonization may be much, much, slower than this theory states.
These estimates, that the whole galaxy ought to be colonized by now, in my opinion, are far too optimistic. It has been theorized, how it could be done, but was the full economic impact on the civilization measured? Were ships designed beyond the basic features and principals? This ought to be done with current human technology, to see if it can be done at all. We're not even sure if we can technically put a human on Mars and bring them back - there are many unanswered questions, such as, radiation, human endurance, margin for error, the martian environment (dust, it seems, will be a very seriously major problem, as yet, unaddressed).
interestes of business and interests of customers not compatible?
DUH!
What is a business? A tool for parting a fool and his money.
If a business acts in it's customers' interests, it's because they want to keep those customers, or get more customers. No other reason. Any company that says they're interested in what their customers thing is trying to butter you up. Nothing more. If you're shocked at the realization that businesses want you to give them your money and go away (or come back and give them more), then you've believed their customer relations' department's lies.
It wasn't really the satellite that killed him, it was dating that woman, who was just bad luck. I mean, look at her past several boyfriends! black widow that one.
I believe a 10Ghz G3 would toast a 500MHz G4.
You listnin' Motorola?
Well, with Intel's recent troubles, and Christmas coming, i don't doubt that the marketroids have been asked to pull something magical out of their butts.
If all else fails, lie.
(previous/recent Intel lies: New Pentium III makes web surfing faster! The Blue Man Group uses and endorses Intel Pentium processors (by inference of them being in our commercials))
A mushroom cloud is not the first thing most people think about. The first thing most people think about is Hanford.
/.-ers would agree with me, we should take the US Govt. budget surplus, and probably all of NASA's budget, and probably half of other government programs, and sink it into serious Fusion power research. We can explore space later, but if we don't fix our power problems now, there won't BE a later. Think how much we could invest in NASA programs (and other programs) later, if we didn't have to go fight a war every time OPEC got uppity, or didn't have to clean up oil spills, or didn't have to watch the stock market and the economy spin into recession every time oil speculators got anxious. I know this is oversimplification, and there would be more ramifications than simply putting some "nice projects" on hold. But frankly, when you think about it, if Fusion is possible, that's about the only thing that will ensure mankind's survival 100 years henceforth. Any other scenario is pretty grim.
http://www.whistleblower.org/www/hanford.htm
Coal-burning, is also majorly unacceptable to most environmentalists. And they may release clouds of radioactive stuff into the atmosphere, but they don't make entire regions unlivable for millions of years. It's not the plants mostly, it's the fuel production, transportation, and waste storage that is so terrifyingly vexing. If you're not afraid of that, then why don't you go buy a house in Richland, WA? Take a swim in the Columbia river? Got Strontium-90?
Personally, and I think that a lot of
Of course that will never happen if we keep electing oil barons into the presidency (both Gore AND Bush).
yes, but should they pay by POTENTIAL or ACTUAL audience?
And if it's POTENTIAL audience, then either they're going to have to pull some magical figures out of someone's butt, or the potential audience is like - billions.
Let's not forget that GE controls a huge chunk of media companies. let's not forget that GE makes things like: jet engines, electronic components in nuclear warheads, toasters, electric power generation components.
So it's no wonder that the stories we read in the media point the finger in any direction but at the ones responsible. Is it the California legislation's fault? Is it Intel's fault? Is it Santa Claus' fault? Is it a severe case of NIMBY? (I don't know about y'all, but I have a nuclear plant AND a gas plant with big ugly smokestacks within 20 miles of my house).
California's supply of power is low, because the industry has been fighting tooth and nail with lobbyists to become privatized and deregulated (so they can bill whatever the fuck they want). The people have been fighting it. (through the California legistlature). And though it would be illegal to bill more for power, it's not illegal for them to drag their feet on construction of new plants, and upkeep of old plants. So, as it has been said, old plants have mysteriously dropped off the grid for maintenance reasons, new plants are not coming on line to meet demand. This is in a PARTIALLY deregulated system.
In other words, the power companies are trying to build their case for rate-raising, by artificially constraining supply, in an attempt to increase demand (gee, where have we seen THAT movie before? Oh yeah, that old TV series, "RIAA's Angels".)
For a man worth in excess of $40 billion, multiplying his electric bill times 100 isn't going to make running his thin clients any more of an economic decision.
For him, an economic decision is whether to have custom crafted solid gold cases for those thin clients made by children in Ecuador, or machinists in San Jose.
and why is the common Java joke - write once, debug everywhere.
That debugging effort does not come cheap. If people wrote their JVM's right, it shouldn't be necessary.
But it is.
therefore, it is CHEAPER, in the long run, for a developer to write for one platform only - and if they can eliminate all the other platforms through strategic chicanery, they have all the benefits of single-platform development, without the drawbacks (missing large market segments).
Of course, as we all know, this does ignore the needs of the user. Well, who cares about the needs of the user. If they've got a wallet, that's all the developer needs.
a Higgs field.
Which would be REAL handy if you found a way to push off on that.
MSXML.
.NET exists on other platforms, it will be to lure people into dependence on .NET. Then, when .NET achieves dominance, they will slowly decrease cross-platform parity. Certain features won't be implemented on non-windows. Performance and stability on non-windows will lag. The disparity will ramp slowly, until people who may have been on other platforms, slowly migrate to windows to mitigate their own support costs. Cutting development costs on MS's end is the main goal, but dominance is a sweet side benefit.
'nuff said.
no. not 'nuff said. The money is not necessarily in the OS, and never was. It's in control. Domination. The middleware. The platform. Sure, MS may port to other platforms, to get seats - but don't believe for one minute that that will not be used as a migration tactic. Cross platform development doubles the developer's costs. Even with Java. If
Same shit, different day.
All I know is, with Office 2000, those supposed "smart menues" that only show you stuff that you normally use are a complete pain in the ass. I'd rather have all the options visible, and intelligently organized.
As far as your idea for CLI/pipe metaphor? It's been done - years ago, some shareware guy made something for the Mac called "filter-top", it extended text processing to a drag-n-drop system. It seemed all neat and everything, but I just never found a use for it, so I didn't read the docs thorougly. But it did look like it had some pretty cool potential. Maybe he's still got a web page out there somewhere?
Yeah, handwriting recognition is a kludge to get past the limitation that you can't slip a keyboard into your pocket.
anyone who says that they believe that voice recognition has a strong future in computer interfaces is trying to sell you something.
I for one do *not* want to have to speak "Netscape, open pr0n site" aloud at the office. For example.
nuff said?
The next advance in human-computer interface has already been described in cheezy SciFi tv shows. Holographic displays which can expand to many times the size of their transmitter (which you could wear or carry in your pocket), and respond to physical interaction. Actually, I think I first read about that in Greg Bear's Eon book. (it was used to augment human communication - but in a weird way). Until this technology is invented for real - I don't see anything else really improving on what we have now in a meaningful way. Yes, voice recognition can play a role, but it will probably not be significant. Macs have had speech recognition built into the OS for years. Who actually uses it?
OS X is NOT vapor you moron!
;-))
Server has been out for over a year (okay, not relevant to the GUI discussion) - and X consumer has been in beta for two months with tens of thousands of users. Nothin but screenshots is vapor. Actual CD's is substantial.
An uptime of 3 weeks for a beta - is phenomenal (disclaimer - I'm used to Windoze and Classic Mac OS; my new e250 at work is doing pretty well too
but the reason the Enterprise market has been so Solaris
based, is that their hardware is rock solid in comparison
yeah, and swapping to a new CPU is going to change that? Face it, Intel and it's cronies just want to sell commodity hardware at enterprise prices. As long as they continue to do so, they will not unseat Sun - unless Sun decides to try to do the same thing (hey, why did that plastic face plate just snap off of my brand new $20k Sun E250? )