Expandability is highly overrated. At work, where I'm a "power user", the only "expansion" of eight PCs in the last six years was extra memory.
In all other cases by the time I need a bigger hard drive, I also need a faster CPU, more memory and a better monitor.
At home, where the usage is less demanding (web surfing), I upgraded modems twice, replaced one hard drive, and added memory. This is of seven computers I had.
All in all, IMHO expandability is something that the average user does not need (beyond swapping components), and the advanced user thinks will need but doesn't either (a few devoted hackers excepted).
A few months back I pointed out that the economic model of search engines is a bit flaky. Here's yet another carcass in the search engine war to prove the point.
Intriguingly, according to some the growth of the web is slowing. The last search engine to index the web before it reaches quiescence is the likeliest candidate for survival.
It is very unclear that the drone war is upon us. The first step in the long road to a full drone war was taken three million years ago, when a chimp picked up a rock and threw it at another chimp. The spear, the arrow, the mortar, the bullet, the air bomb raid, the missile, the smart missile, the airplane drone, are just more steps into a fully drone-d war.
But so long as we have green berets crawling in caves the full drone war is far from a reality, although ever closer by the minute.
And contrary to what others say, there will be a day when all infantry is replaced by drones. Whenever a technological breakthrough happens, people point out temporary defficiencies and hence conclude that the new technology will never replace the old.
From Google:
+Animation will never replace actors.
+technology will never replace teachers
+Systems-on-chip will never replace pc boards
+computer art will never replace traditional art
and my all time favourite:
+the internet will never replace good old-fashioned messenger lemurs
People, people, before you pass judgment you must consider both sides of the issue.
Here are some reasons why maybe IP for universities is a good idea:
(1) It rewards better universities over mediocre universities through market forces. A place like Stanford or CMU is likelier to get a patent and profit from them than Joe Blow Fraternity College.
(2) It helps reduce the gap between professors and industry salaries. Universities have a hard time keeping profs in areas like computer science, business administration, finance and bioinformatics. If they are told that they would ultimately see some economic benefit from their ideas is likelier that they will stay.
(3) Admittedly, research is funded by tax dollars, but so is most industrial research which is given generous tax breaks.
To be clear, I haven't yet made up my mind on this issue, but the one sidedness of the postings in/. was appalling.
I dunno, the McDonald's in Thessaloniki, Greece was pretty packed, in a decidedly non-tourist area (the only reason I was there is because I have relatives in the area). There were quite a few in Belgium as well...
Very interesting. That wasn't my experience in those cities and towns of Spain, France, Belgium, Iceland and Germany where I've visited suburbia (as you can imagine I don't visit suburbia in every town I go to).
The sample would be about a dozen cities altogether, which admittedly is not a huge set, but I thought it would be representative enough. Seemingly it isn't.
Every McDonald's I saw in Berlin was fucking PACKED with people
Did you notice that about 50% of the customers were also tourists like yourself?
I have yet to run across European McDonald's away from a tourist trap. You find bars, bakeries and dinners in the off-the beaten path places but no golden arches.
Contrast that with the US where you can find a McDonalds right smack in the middle of suburbia, a place were a tourist would never venture.
Easy, back in the late 80's TurboPascal was poised to become the language of choice for all developers. At that time Borland should have been porting TurboPascal to other architectures. In fact back then TurboPascal was so dominant that Microsoft stopped all work in compilers. What was Borland's next step:
They took their best programmers of TurboPascal and had them work on TurboC, TurboBasic, TurboProlog, Eureka, Spriiiint...
Borland singlehandedly revived C in the pc category, when they should have been killing it. They put Microsoft back in compiler's game.
Delphi is but a shadow in popularity of what TurboPascal was.
You really need to read up in PC history. When you do, pay special attention to the part on the development path from Lotus 1-2-3 v2.0 to Lotus 1-2-3 v3.0.
That was the big snaffu from Lotus which created an opening for Quattro, WingZ and Excel. None of this imaginary "sabotage" that you like to claim...
Their big mistakes are legendary. The fact that you don't know them proves that you have no idea what are you talking about. Go and read up about the history of 1-2-3 and Turbo Pascal, then we can carry on with this exchange.
Everyone (including MS) could survive making a mistake or two.
That is what is just plain incorrect, but you keep coming back at it. You like to claim of a rosier past in which tech companies could screw up and survive. This never existed in the PC world. It just moves too fast.
Most companies, even before M$ was a monopoly did not recover/survive after their first mistake, much less two. WordStar? CPM? Atari? Altair? Kay portables? Apple? Lotus? Ashton Tate? Borland?
I wouldn't say that an all-in-one Mac with flat panel display has been done before.
True enough. My point was that an integrated form factor with a flat panel LCD is already out there (key properties of the iMac). However as you point out, it does not run MacOS....
Which goes to show how ignorant is the typical microsoft basher.
NT was designed by Ken Cutler, of VMS fame. He also incorporated many Unix lessons into the NT kernel which is actually quite an amazing piece of OS engineering.
Things started to go bad when they had to make it look/work like Windows 3.1 for compatibility reasons...
But, Microsoft's monopoly position mean that they're almost immune from mistakes.
You got it ass-backwards. Microsoft was making mistakes and recovering from them better than anybody else way before they became a monopoly.
If I had to attribute M$ success to one single thing (which is simplistic) it would be to their ability to completely, severely f**k up, pick up the pieces and carry on.
They drop the ball with Pascal, Excel, Microsoft Word, FoxBase, Microsoft Works, Windows 2.0, Xenix, Windows 3.0, you name it...
Such a blatant misrepresentation of Joel's comment should be moderated down to -1 troll.
E.g. the article explicitly states that those "useless" features to you, are useful to somebody else, and that is why they need to be there.
King ramen's translation?
2. Load in useless features to drive sales, knowing that your code will suck.
This doesn't make any sense. Higher rated results will automatically get more clickthroughs.
Duh, you can adjust for that.
Compute the standard distribution of click-throughs according to position in the result set and any page outdoing this number gets "moded" up, any one underperforming this number gets moded down...
This short story by Jorge Luis Borges, which I read as a youngster many years back, always seemed prescient to me when it comes to Mapquest and other GIS'es:
...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography. From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda. The piece was written by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. English translation quoted from J. L. Borges, A Universal History of Infamy, Penguin Books, London, 1975.
A while back there was a thread here about the weakness of the revenue model for search engines. Maybe we have found the answer, think about all the revenue that Google could generate with this data!
I'm 50-50 on the whole free software thing. I think it's got some pluses, but it also has some minuses. And definitely one of the minuses is having Richard at the helm. Because when I want to discuss social policy, I want to discuss it with someone who understands that compromise is not always evil, that partial solutions can sometimes be better than no solutions, and that there are ways of doing good for the world that don't fit into the narrow definition of free software. I get none of this from Richard.
A very smart friend of mine once sat next to RMS at a dinner. He asked a few questions and all he could get was pontificating. He tried for about an hour to explain the fine points of an argument and RMS clammed up as a shell and carried on screaming. It wasn't that RMS saw the points and then still disagreed. He simply could not be bothered to listen to a mere mortal.
If you want your side to win, choose your leader wisely. The wrong leader and a foolish move later and suddenly your entire, hard-built organization collapses in less than two months, if you know who I'm talking about.
If I were Microsoft I would give money to keep RMS around. As long as he's there, OS will never trully succeed.
It took Miguel a few years to realize this, thus the GNOME foundation, and the purported statement of regret about GNOME being part of GNU.
I did a quick search in the list and found very few people from big name universities, with all the four big names in the field (software engineering is not my cup of te) that I know missing.
This makes me wonder if this process has any credibility then... Anybody out there who can comment (intelligently) on this?
Slashdot Mirror
You have misconfigured it - simple as that.
I have the default installation from the CDs, just like most windows users have the default installations.
Funny, as I write this we are trying to recover data from our compromised Linux system (RedHat).
Expandability is highly overrated. At work, where I'm a "power user", the only "expansion" of eight PCs in the last six years was extra memory.
In all other cases by the time I need a bigger hard drive, I also need a faster CPU, more memory and a better monitor.
At home, where the usage is less demanding (web surfing), I upgraded modems twice, replaced one hard drive, and added memory. This is of seven computers I had.
All in all, IMHO expandability is something that the average user does not need (beyond swapping components), and the advanced user thinks will need but doesn't either (a few devoted hackers excepted).
A few months back I pointed out that the economic model of search engines is a bit flaky. Here's yet another carcass in the search engine war to prove the point.
Intriguingly, according to some the growth of the web is slowing. The last search engine to index the web before it reaches quiescence is the likeliest candidate for survival.
It is very unclear that the drone war is upon us. The first step in the long road to a full drone war was taken three million years ago, when a chimp picked up a rock and threw it at another chimp. The spear, the arrow, the mortar, the bullet, the air bomb raid, the missile, the smart missile, the airplane drone, are just more steps into a fully drone-d war.
But so long as we have green berets crawling in caves the full drone war is far from a reality, although ever closer by the minute.
And contrary to what others say, there will be a day when all infantry is replaced by drones. Whenever a technological breakthrough happens, people point out temporary defficiencies and hence conclude that the new technology will never replace the old.
From Google:
+Animation will never replace actors.
+technology will never replace teachers
+Systems-on-chip will never replace pc boards
+computer art will never replace traditional art
and my all time favourite:
+the internet will never replace good old-fashioned messenger lemurs
People, people, before you pass judgment you must consider both sides of the issue.
/. was appalling.
Here are some reasons why maybe IP for universities is a good idea:
(1) It rewards better universities over mediocre universities through market forces. A place like Stanford or CMU is likelier to get a patent and profit from them than Joe Blow Fraternity College.
(2) It helps reduce the gap between professors and industry salaries. Universities have a hard time keeping profs in areas like computer science, business administration, finance and bioinformatics. If they are told that they would ultimately see some economic benefit from their ideas is likelier that they will stay.
(3) Admittedly, research is funded by tax dollars, but so is most industrial research which is given generous tax breaks.
To be clear, I haven't yet made up my mind on this issue, but the one sidedness of the postings in
Very interesting. That wasn't my experience in those cities and towns of Spain, France, Belgium, Iceland and Germany where I've visited suburbia (as you can imagine I don't visit suburbia in every town I go to).
The sample would be about a dozen cities altogether, which admittedly is not a huge set, but I thought it would be representative enough. Seemingly it isn't.
Did you notice that about 50% of the customers were also tourists like yourself?
I have yet to run across European McDonald's away from a tourist trap. You find bars, bakeries and dinners in the off-the beaten path places but no golden arches.
Contrast that with the US where you can find a McDonalds right smack in the middle of suburbia, a place were a tourist would never venture.
Easy, back in the late 80's TurboPascal was poised to become the language of choice for all developers. At that time Borland should have been porting TurboPascal to other architectures. In fact back then TurboPascal was so dominant that Microsoft stopped all work in compilers. What was Borland's next step:
They took their best programmers of TurboPascal and had them work on TurboC, TurboBasic, TurboProlog, Eureka, Spriiiint...
Borland singlehandedly revived C in the pc category, when they should have been killing it. They put Microsoft back in compiler's game.
Delphi is but a shadow in popularity of what TurboPascal was.
You really need to read up in PC history. When you do, pay special attention to the part on the development path from Lotus 1-2-3 v2.0 to Lotus 1-2-3 v3.0.
That was the big snaffu from Lotus which created an opening for Quattro, WingZ and Excel. None of this imaginary "sabotage" that you like to claim...
Their big mistakes are legendary. The fact that you don't know them proves that you have no idea what are you talking about. Go and read up about the history of 1-2-3 and Turbo Pascal, then we can carry on with this exchange.
Everyone (including MS) could survive making a mistake or two.
That is what is just plain incorrect, but you keep coming back at it. You like to claim of a rosier past in which tech companies could screw up and survive. This never existed in the PC world. It just moves too fast.
Most companies, even before M$ was a monopoly did not recover/survive after their first mistake, much less two. WordStar? CPM? Atari? Altair? Kay portables? Apple? Lotus? Ashton Tate? Borland?
The list is endless....
I wouldn't say that an all-in-one Mac with flat panel display has been done before.
True enough. My point was that an integrated form factor with a flat panel LCD is already out there (key properties of the iMac). However as you point out, it does not run MacOS....
Not at all. The point is which came first, M$ resilience to mistakes or its monopoly?
While the two feed from each other, M$ was on a class of its own when it came to recovering from mistakes much before it was a monopoly.
The market did not think much of either Word 1.0 or Word 2.0. As usual, Microsoft succeeded in the third attempt: Word 3.0.
Which goes to show how ignorant is the typical microsoft basher.
NT was designed by Ken Cutler, of VMS fame. He also incorporated many Unix lessons into the NT kernel which is actually quite an amazing piece of OS engineering.
Things started to go bad when they had to make it look/work like Windows 3.1 for compatibility reasons...
But, Microsoft's monopoly position mean that they're almost immune from mistakes.
You got it ass-backwards. Microsoft was making mistakes and recovering from them better than anybody else way before they became a monopoly.
If I had to attribute M$ success to one single thing (which is simplistic) it would be to their ability to completely, severely f**k up, pick up the pieces and carry on.
They drop the ball with Pascal, Excel, Microsoft Word, FoxBase, Microsoft Works, Windows 2.0, Xenix, Windows 3.0, you name it...
Such a blatant misrepresentation of Joel's comment should be moderated down to -1 troll.
E.g. the article explicitly states that those "useless" features to you, are useful to somebody else, and that is why they need to be there.
King ramen's translation?
2. Load in useless features to drive sales, knowing that your code will suck.
Duh, you can adjust for that.
Compute the standard distribution of click-throughs according to position in the result set and any page outdoing this number gets "moded" up, any one underperforming this number gets moded down...
A while back there was a thread here about the weakness of the revenue model for search engines. Maybe we have found the answer, think about all the revenue that Google could generate with this data!
Anybody knows when Google is going public?
I'm 50-50 on the whole free software thing. I think it's got some pluses, but it also has some minuses. And definitely one of the minuses is having Richard at the helm. Because when I want to discuss social policy, I want to discuss it with someone who understands that compromise is not always evil, that partial solutions can sometimes be better than no solutions, and that there are ways of doing good for the world that don't fit into the narrow definition of free software. I get none of this from Richard.
A very smart friend of mine once sat next to RMS at a dinner. He asked a few questions and all he could get was pontificating. He tried for about an hour to explain the fine points of an argument and RMS clammed up as a shell and carried on screaming. It wasn't that RMS saw the points and then still disagreed. He simply could not be bothered to listen to a mere mortal.
If you want your side to win, choose your leader wisely. The wrong leader and a foolish move later and suddenly your entire, hard-built organization collapses in less than two months, if you know who I'm talking about.
If I were Microsoft I would give money to keep RMS around. As long as he's there, OS will never trully succeed.
It took Miguel a few years to realize this, thus the GNOME foundation, and the purported statement of regret about GNOME being part of GNU.
I did a quick search in the list and found very few people from big name universities, with all the four big names in the field (software engineering is not my cup of te) that I know missing.
This makes me wonder if this process has any credibility then... Anybody out there who can comment (intelligently) on this?
I have a feeling that some geeks might rank a date with Linus above a date with a woman. Particularly if those geeks are women.
Touche. My apologies to all geekettes.