The biggest uneploited territory is hardware... enter the Xbox.
I was saying unexploited by msft. Sorry if that didn't make it through the static of my scattered prose.
Really, though, with their stranglehold on the OS, msft is in a perfect position to make a big grab in hardware. All they have to do is "pull a java" by offering "extended featues" in their OS that only work ("are officially supported" is the more likely term) on the msft box. My Dad (bless his winders-using soul) would buy an msft box in a snap if he thought he was getting a completely-co-ordinated product. He uses "genuine GM parts" in his GM car... and he'd use "genuine msft hardware" for his winders-based computing.
The problem, of course, is that everyone (including me) thinks msft is a crushing monopoly and if they tried to expand into box market they'd just prove it even more.
MSFT is into expansion and let's face it, in the software world, they've expanded about as far as they can. What does that leave for new territory? Well, the net for one (or should I say the.NET) but that's a tough nut to crack. The biggest unexploited territory is hardware.... enter the X box.
If msft made a computer today "optimally designed to run Winders 2x" the DOJ would probably send old Bill to Levenworth. The solution, therefore, is for msft to get into the hardware racket via the backdoor. It's a simple concept of thin-edge-of-the-wedgery really:
1. Make a console, give it some net connectivity.
2. Establish a hefty marketshare.
3. Offer web/email/yattayatta as enhancements or a 2.0
4. Bring out a new copy of Office with some web-connected features (like, oh, a power-point driven email reader... msft's had worse ideas...)
5. Offer this new Office for the X crowd.
6. Gotta have a keyboard and mouse for that... make those too.
7. Throw in a monitor for that hi-res everyone wants
8. Announce that the next X-thingy will have the option to run winders
9. It's a computer... but it's still a "game console".
10. Version 4.0 is "optimized to run Winders 2003"
Since the "total Microsoft solution" seems to be actually popular with people, the Xcomputer will sell a tonne. Why buy from Dell? It's essentially only a partially-supported platform by the time we get to point 10. It runs winders standard but those "extra" features require the optimized Xcomputer.
But it's still a game console if the DOJ comes knocking.
yeah, it's a crappy analogy... my original thought was "living and dying are part of a cycle too, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw myself in front of a train..." But that would be a lie. I have thrown myself in front of a train.... mind you it was backing up at the time.
1. Buy a G3 or (eventually) crusoe. Significantly more efficient than those nasty pentiums (pentii?)
2. Sign up for your local utilities optional windpower program.
3. Your local utility doesn't offer wind or solar? Well, replace step two with "harass your local utility till they give you the choice to get pinwheel power".
My fave is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Basically a committee of international climatologists, atmospheric scientists, meteorologists and chemists meeting under the auspices of the UN. They are here.
In the matter of shoes I deffer to the cobbler. These guys are the cobblers.
I have always wondered how these so called greenhouse gases such as Freon12 which is heavier than air, somehow manages to float up into the ozone
Convection. At least in the troposphere (lower atmosphere). In fact, the gas mixture in the atmosphere is not segregated by "weight" at all.... Back in the 19th century is was popular to postulate that space travel was impossible because, by the logic of lighter gasses rising, the entire upper atmosphere would be comprised of hydrogen, and any attempt to send a rocket through the statosphere would cause the atmosphere to explode. Glad we got over that myth...
The earth has been heating and cooling down naturally for millions of years.
Yes, but at a much more gradual rate. The slow rate of natural change allows ecosystems the opportunity to change or migrate. If the temperature rises 3 degrees over several generations of spruce trees, forests of those trees have the opportunity to migrate northward or upward. If it happens in only 100 years, those trees dry up, burn down or get eaten by bud worm. The tides are natural cycles too, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about tsunamis!
Well, I was referring to lingua franca in the sense that it is the language of the State, business and social order. A lot of the infrastructure we take for granted (like, oh, Unix) is written in C. I believe Perl was written in C (correct me if I'm wrong) and a big bag of our tools are too. There were precedents to C for sure and some of them were amazingly well-formed for the time they came from, but C hit it big because it promised the same thing Java does: protability. My how our opinion of "portable" has changed!
Doesn't lingua franca mean french language
Technically that would be la langue Francais. Lingua Franca is Latin for "language of the Franks" and dates to the time of Charlamagne (literally Carolus Magnus or Charles the Great) the Frankish king who was crowned Holy Roman Emporer. The HRE was, basically, the last stab of Rome (sacked and beaten in the west) to impart it's imperial "cred" on someone with power and thus maintain the image of an undying line of civilizaiton. It was also a fine way for the newly-minted Catholic church to grab onto a chunk of the state by making emporership conditional upon the approval of the Father of Rome (Pater Romanii, later Poppa Romanii, later just plain old Pope). The bottom line is Charlemagne spoke Frankish, a German-like language that got imported into France during the HRE (displacing Asterix and his Gauls). The adoption of Latin from the vestiges of Rome and the Church gave it a good mixing until it wound up as, essentially French. Witness, for instance, the popular name of Frankish nobility: Clovis. The french call him Louis. Hm. Anyway, since old Chuck spoke Frankish and he ran the show for a large linquistic diverse conquered area, Frankish became the language of everything but the peasant. Sort of like English during colonialism. Viz. Lingua Franca.
Sorry if that was too much, I get carried away sometims.
Me too. However, I get wary around paradigm-change type wording. It seems like a lot of people are out to change the current paradigm just because past paradigm changes have turned out to be Really Neat Things (viz. GUI, OO, RISC). What folks forget is that a lot of paradigm changes have been bad. We just don't remember them because they only lasted 10 minutes
where struct and function definitions are all read and analysed before you are allowed to run any commands
I can't help see how this is something someone wants to change... it enforces planning, enhances readability and almost certainly does good things for run times. I must hasten to add that I am not a proceedural/C fanatic (although I choose C twice as often as java for any randomly-selected project... that's just because of familiarity and the fact that I haven't found a java version of Herb Schildt's complete C reference yet), but dangit typing and declaring structures is a good thing.
what if a problem comes along where I a hex 'driver would be easiest? I'll be ready for it.
A hex driver is $3.99 and takes 20 minutes to buy (commute to hardware store included) and will solve problems that can only be solved with a hex driver
A programming language will take a couple of months to get comfortable with (depending on how much time you have to spend on doing other things at the same time...) will cost about $200 in books, lord-knows-how-much in tools and, in the end, there are no problems that only it alone can solve. There comes a point when you have to ask yourself if it's more efficient to get a "new screwdriver" or just get better at using a dime...
Actually, it's probably a really good idea.... since the rumours of the wacom-style, small-binder-sized, it's-a-clipboard-with-a-g4 apple-branded-and-newton-based PDA are heating up... I must admit that this phrase from the Newton page always bothered me. Start quote:
Rather than two levels of abstraction, class and object, there is just one,
Objects without classes? um.... It's been a looong time since I was afraid of learning a language (although the prospect of objective C causes me a little bit of consternation....) but statements like that scare the willies out of me...
I think lots about this, really, truly:
1. Too many languages? No. Too many C's? maybe. People keep going back to C as the lingua franca so there has to be something to it. If you're going to come up with a new language, sticking to C roots may be the best way to ensure durability.
2. Languages will have to become more spcialized as time progresses and the complexity and scale of computing tasks grow. The future I see in my crystal ball (written in C, btw) are languages devoted to specific tasks such as cgi, game development etc. In a lot of ways this is a throw back to the early days of Fortran, Lisp and Cobol which were non-general languages. There weren't really the issues of scale and complexity back then though that we face now, so it was fairly easy for C to sweep them under the rug.
3. Future specialized languages will almost assuredly be themselves written in c. I'm not talking about yacc-hacks but honest-to-god interpreted or even compiled languages. What this means, though, is that in a future with fragmented languages used for specialized purposes, people looking to expand their power and control will look back to the source of those languages construction which leads to point 4.
4. Which is the same as point 1. People keep going back to the lingua franca.... so future specialized languages should stick closely to C while maintaining all the neat features that make them specialized in the first place...
Was that a bit scattered? Sorry, it's clearly organized in my head, but I haven't gotten around to scribbling out the boxes and arrows yet...
The real irony here is that I honestly can't think of anything that MS has invented... I admit that I don't follow Redmond that closely, but avoid ing news of The Beast is like trying to ignore survivor.... So what have they invented?
DOS - bought for $50k
Winders - ripped off from Apple who bought a tour to see it from Xerox who ripped it off from whats-his-nuts who worked at SRI who, in turn, stole it from Leonardo DaVinci (no, really, the design for the mouse is on the same page as the helicopter...)
Word - Oh, come on. It's a word processor
Excel - Nabbed from Visi-whats-it
PowerPoint - bought
Netscape - No, wait, I mean Mosaic... no, wait I mean Explorer
SQL - New MS innovation removes letters P and L from this acronym.
Age of Empires - No, really, it's Warcraft.
In fact, the only thing I can think of that MS really innovated on was PayWare with the Tiny Basic brouhaha... unless I'm missing something really big and obvious.
I think you are the one that is confused. You are referring to micro-evolution, something which has been proven. I am referring to something quite different than that
... evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next. (Curtis and Barnes 1989, p974)
...'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution... (Gould 1983, p335)
Since evolution may be defined as cumulative change in the genetic makeup of a population resulting in increased adaptation to the environment, the fundamental process in evolution is change in allele frequency. (Hartl 1988, p69)
and so on....
While gravity will continue to pull masses together, the ideas of how it works like much or physics are undergoing fundamental changes. This would be similar to finding that pie as exactly equal to 4.
No... gravity continues to work functionally within our defined theory. Evolution continues in the same manner despite debate over increasinly smaller components of the theory. Pi is still functional at 3.14. We refine our theory of gravity, postulate punctuated equilibrium and add digits to Pi. Just because these refinements continue, we don't scrap the theory of gravity, round Pi up to 4 (or down to 3.0 as some claims the Bible says we should...) or scrap the theory of evolution.
The Catholic Church has done many things wrong in its history
Well, first, the Catholics are far from the sole transgressors. The ideology of most major world religions are based on the notions of objective truth and the belief that they, as a group, have some exclusive mandate from their diety/ies. When you get such an ideology taking a predominant role in a society, persecution of out groups becomes almost inevitable. " We are right (absolutely) and have (absolute) God/s on our side" means that all others, by default, must be wrong (absolutely) and out of favour with God/s (absolutely). It's pretty easy in situations like that to come up with a Cathar Crusade, Inquisition, 30 years War (half the participants non-Catholic), or Mass. witch hunt (all paricipants non-Catholic, btw).
Well looking at all the dumb responses to this post, i would have to assume that your point is invalid.
By the same logic, however, one would have to admit that by finding one good nazi you could absolve the ideology. The totalitarian ideology (an inherent part of christianity) is, in my wacky opinion, something to be wary of. We are distrustful and offended by other totalitarian ideologies, I merely submit we should remember the track record of the Christian faith and apply the same caution to it.
Having said that, I once again submit that if you are shocked and dismayed that someone would "persecute" you with a -1 for your belief, then take a moment and think what it must be like to not be able to defend youself in court because you refuse to swear on the Bible, as was the case in Canada until 1985.
Slashdot Mirror
Christ, I wear a hazmat suit just to run Windows!
Macromedia has Freehand to counter Illustrator. It's less feature rich but the splines actually work well...
I was saying unexploited by msft. Sorry if that didn't make it through the static of my scattered prose.
Really, though, with their stranglehold on the OS, msft is in a perfect position to make a big grab in hardware. All they have to do is "pull a java" by offering "extended featues" in their OS that only work ("are officially supported" is the more likely term) on the msft box. My Dad (bless his winders-using soul) would buy an msft box in a snap if he thought he was getting a completely-co-ordinated product. He uses "genuine GM parts" in his GM car... and he'd use "genuine msft hardware" for his winders-based computing.
The problem, of course, is that everyone (including me) thinks msft is a crushing monopoly and if they tried to expand into box market they'd just prove it even more.
Actually, I hope he used the new Apple mouse. The alternative, though, would be the wingman gaming mouse which has full mac support. Although, personally, I don't mind the hocky puck mouse
Does your mom know act like this?
If msft made a computer today "optimally designed to run Winders 2x" the DOJ would probably send old Bill to Levenworth. The solution, therefore, is for msft to get into the hardware racket via the backdoor. It's a simple concept of thin-edge-of-the-wedgery really:
1. Make a console, give it some net connectivity.
2. Establish a hefty marketshare.
3. Offer web/email/yattayatta as enhancements or a 2.0
4. Bring out a new copy of Office with some web-connected features (like, oh, a power-point driven email reader... msft's had worse ideas...)
5. Offer this new Office for the X crowd.
6. Gotta have a keyboard and mouse for that... make those too.
7. Throw in a monitor for that hi-res everyone wants
8. Announce that the next X-thingy will have the option to run winders
9. It's a computer... but it's still a "game console".
10. Version 4.0 is "optimized to run Winders 2003"
Since the "total Microsoft solution" seems to be actually popular with people, the Xcomputer will sell a tonne. Why buy from Dell? It's essentially only a partially-supported platform by the time we get to point 10. It runs winders standard but those "extra" features require the optimized Xcomputer.
But it's still a game console if the DOJ comes knocking.
Am I paranoid or what?
Wait a minute... does this mean that melissa and iloveyou were... spam?
I can see how that relates to Spam... wasn't it Jackson who said "Give me Liberty or Give Me All Teen XXX Babes Live!!!!!"?
yeah, it's a crappy analogy... my original thought was "living and dying are part of a cycle too, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw myself in front of a train..." But that would be a lie. I have thrown myself in front of a train.... mind you it was backing up at the time.
no, no, no... I said a G3. Besides, if you need real power, why not pick up an xtrem mac modification. It's a 1200Mhz G4.
1. Buy a G3 or (eventually) crusoe. Significantly more efficient than those nasty pentiums (pentii?)
2. Sign up for your local utilities optional windpower program.
3. Your local utility doesn't offer wind or solar? Well, replace step two with "harass your local utility till they give you the choice to get pinwheel power".
There. You're set.
In the matter of shoes I deffer to the cobbler. These guys are the cobblers.
Convection. At least in the troposphere (lower atmosphere). In fact, the gas mixture in the atmosphere is not segregated by "weight" at all.... Back in the 19th century is was popular to postulate that space travel was impossible because, by the logic of lighter gasses rising, the entire upper atmosphere would be comprised of hydrogen, and any attempt to send a rocket through the statosphere would cause the atmosphere to explode. Glad we got over that myth...
The earth has been heating and cooling down naturally for millions of years.
Yes, but at a much more gradual rate. The slow rate of natural change allows ecosystems the opportunity to change or migrate. If the temperature rises 3 degrees over several generations of spruce trees, forests of those trees have the opportunity to migrate northward or upward. If it happens in only 100 years, those trees dry up, burn down or get eaten by bud worm. The tides are natural cycles too, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about tsunamis!
That was the tiny basic I referred to... ah, how the Altair managed to open so many doors while closing so many others...
Well, I was referring to lingua franca in the sense that it is the language of the State, business and social order. A lot of the infrastructure we take for granted (like, oh, Unix) is written in C. I believe Perl was written in C (correct me if I'm wrong) and a big bag of our tools are too. There were precedents to C for sure and some of them were amazingly well-formed for the time they came from, but C hit it big because it promised the same thing Java does: protability. My how our opinion of "portable" has changed!
Doesn't lingua franca mean french language
Technically that would be la langue Francais. Lingua Franca is Latin for "language of the Franks" and dates to the time of Charlamagne (literally Carolus Magnus or Charles the Great) the Frankish king who was crowned Holy Roman Emporer. The HRE was, basically, the last stab of Rome (sacked and beaten in the west) to impart it's imperial "cred" on someone with power and thus maintain the image of an undying line of civilizaiton. It was also a fine way for the newly-minted Catholic church to grab onto a chunk of the state by making emporership conditional upon the approval of the Father of Rome (Pater Romanii, later Poppa Romanii, later just plain old Pope). The bottom line is Charlemagne spoke Frankish, a German-like language that got imported into France during the HRE (displacing Asterix and his Gauls). The adoption of Latin from the vestiges of Rome and the Church gave it a good mixing until it wound up as, essentially French. Witness, for instance, the popular name of Frankish nobility: Clovis. The french call him Louis. Hm. Anyway, since old Chuck spoke Frankish and he ran the show for a large linquistic diverse conquered area, Frankish became the language of everything but the peasant. Sort of like English during colonialism. Viz. Lingua Franca.
Sorry if that was too much, I get carried away sometims.
Me too. However, I get wary around paradigm-change type wording. It seems like a lot of people are out to change the current paradigm just because past paradigm changes have turned out to be Really Neat Things (viz. GUI, OO, RISC). What folks forget is that a lot of paradigm changes have been bad. We just don't remember them because they only lasted 10 minutes
where struct and function definitions are all read and analysed before you are allowed to run any commands
I can't help see how this is something someone wants to change... it enforces planning, enhances readability and almost certainly does good things for run times. I must hasten to add that I am not a proceedural/C fanatic (although I choose C twice as often as java for any randomly-selected project... that's just because of familiarity and the fact that I haven't found a java version of Herb Schildt's complete C reference yet), but dangit typing and declaring structures is a good thing.
you're bluffing.
A hex driver is $3.99 and takes 20 minutes to buy (commute to hardware store included) and will solve problems that can only be solved with a hex driver
A programming language will take a couple of months to get comfortable with (depending on how much time you have to spend on doing other things at the same time...) will cost about $200 in books, lord-knows-how-much in tools and, in the end, there are no problems that only it alone can solve. There comes a point when you have to ask yourself if it's more efficient to get a "new screwdriver" or just get better at using a dime...
Actually, it's probably a really good idea.... since the rumours of the wacom-style, small-binder-sized, it's-a-clipboard-with-a-g4 apple-branded-and-newton-based PDA are heating up... I must admit that this phrase from the Newton page always bothered me. Start quote:
Rather than two levels of abstraction, class and object, there is just one,
Objects without classes? um.... It's been a looong time since I was afraid of learning a language (although the prospect of objective C causes me a little bit of consternation....) but statements like that scare the willies out of me...
I think lots about this, really, truly:
1. Too many languages? No. Too many C's? maybe. People keep going back to C as the lingua franca so there has to be something to it. If you're going to come up with a new language, sticking to C roots may be the best way to ensure durability.
2. Languages will have to become more spcialized as time progresses and the complexity and scale of computing tasks grow. The future I see in my crystal ball (written in C, btw) are languages devoted to specific tasks such as cgi, game development etc. In a lot of ways this is a throw back to the early days of Fortran, Lisp and Cobol which were non-general languages. There weren't really the issues of scale and complexity back then though that we face now, so it was fairly easy for C to sweep them under the rug.
3. Future specialized languages will almost assuredly be themselves written in c. I'm not talking about yacc-hacks but honest-to-god interpreted or even compiled languages. What this means, though, is that in a future with fragmented languages used for specialized purposes, people looking to expand their power and control will look back to the source of those languages construction which leads to point 4.
4. Which is the same as point 1. People keep going back to the lingua franca.... so future specialized languages should stick closely to C while maintaining all the neat features that make them specialized in the first place...
Was that a bit scattered? Sorry, it's clearly organized in my head, but I haven't gotten around to scribbling out the boxes and arrows yet...
DOS - bought for $50k
Winders - ripped off from Apple who bought a tour to see it from Xerox who ripped it off from whats-his-nuts who worked at SRI who, in turn, stole it from Leonardo DaVinci (no, really, the design for the mouse is on the same page as the helicopter...)
Word - Oh, come on. It's a word processor
Excel - Nabbed from Visi-whats-it
PowerPoint - bought
Netscape - No, wait, I mean Mosaic... no, wait I mean Explorer
SQL - New MS innovation removes letters P and L from this acronym.
Age of Empires - No, really, it's Warcraft.
In fact, the only thing I can think of that MS really innovated on was PayWare with the Tiny Basic brouhaha... unless I'm missing something really big and obvious.
Actually, I'm under the impression that all television was aired after Rosewell...
Since evolution may be defined as cumulative change in the genetic makeup of a population resulting in increased adaptation to the environment, the fundamental process in evolution is change in allele frequency. (Hartl 1988, p69)
and so on....
While gravity will continue to pull masses together, the ideas of how it works like much or physics are undergoing fundamental changes. This would be similar to finding that pie as exactly equal to 4.
No... gravity continues to work functionally within our defined theory. Evolution continues in the same manner despite debate over increasinly smaller components of the theory. Pi is still functional at 3.14. We refine our theory of gravity, postulate punctuated equilibrium and add digits to Pi. Just because these refinements continue, we don't scrap the theory of gravity, round Pi up to 4 (or down to 3.0 as some claims the Bible says we should...) or scrap the theory of evolution.
The Catholic Church has done many things wrong in its history
Well, first, the Catholics are far from the sole transgressors. The ideology of most major world religions are based on the notions of objective truth and the belief that they, as a group, have some exclusive mandate from their diety/ies. When you get such an ideology taking a predominant role in a society, persecution of out groups becomes almost inevitable. " We are right (absolutely) and have (absolute) God/s on our side" means that all others, by default, must be wrong (absolutely) and out of favour with God/s (absolutely). It's pretty easy in situations like that to come up with a Cathar Crusade, Inquisition, 30 years War (half the participants non-Catholic), or Mass. witch hunt (all paricipants non-Catholic, btw).
Well looking at all the dumb responses to this post, i would have to assume that your point is invalid.
By the same logic, however, one would have to admit that by finding one good nazi you could absolve the ideology. The totalitarian ideology (an inherent part of christianity) is, in my wacky opinion, something to be wary of. We are distrustful and offended by other totalitarian ideologies, I merely submit we should remember the track record of the Christian faith and apply the same caution to it.
Having said that, I once again submit that if you are shocked and dismayed that someone would "persecute" you with a -1 for your belief, then take a moment and think what it must be like to not be able to defend youself in court because you refuse to swear on the Bible, as was the case in Canada until 1985.
From the irony dept. the Flat Earth Society announced in 1995 that their membership was global.
ha!
grappler, I thought you were dead... maybe a mining accident.