Even Microsoft got that right and they are known for feature bloat. Why not just build a screaming browser that works, then do all the side dishes? After all, it's only been what... 3 years or so in the making?
The last time I bought some I paid $17.99 for 100 of them. They are not the best quality but I haven't had any trouble with them. I might buy another 100 just in case they do go up.
Your missing the point. Most of them seemed more like:
company A gets 100 million in fuding and two weeks later spends 80 million in a givaway promotion... then they declared bacruptcy three months later. The point as I saw it was these people, for the most part, were not the sharpest business people.
Right-o. And since most Windows users are leeches and don't burn any mp3's they listen to, rather they just download the goods ripped by someone else, this won't really affect them.
Seriously though, lets face it, how much of this crap is the general public willing to put up with before they make the move to a OSX Mac or even Linux?
Yes in the perfect world you are correct. However the problem has always been that the company who has the software is looking over their shoulder at all these other word processor apps and they feel that in order to keep or grow their subscriber base they will need to add new features (regardless if they are needed or wanted) to stay ahead of their competitors. So you fall into the same trap where marketing and slick new interfaces and being the first to market continue to be more important than stability or correctness.
Lets face it, the majority of computer users seem to accept that 80% is good enough, they think that's just the way computers work. Have you ever overheard someone on a bus say "OH.. teehee.. then I crashed my computer.. teehee" I hear it a lot in general conversation. And once you learn to save your data a little more often and not do the things that make your computer crash, the software seems to get better and you don't think twice about it. Sad but true... my sister just takes for granted that she will have to reboot a few times a day.. that's just the way it is.
Amen my brother, my little trolling brother, amen. We need something that isn't owned by one of the big boys, like Sun or MS and this could be the ticket. Although I have to wonder why perl seems to be falling out of favor.
But I seem to recall reading that the MITS building was in a strip mall that had a girlie bar in it next to the Altair shop on one side and a laundramat on the other side. Somthing like that anyways.
At $249 the price is right???? I honestly have to say that at about $99 the price would be right. This is not meant as a slam on the product, I've never seen it, but I think these things need to get around $100 to really fly. Until then it's nothing but a geek toy, a cool toy, yes, but a geek toy nonetheless.
How do you respond to the thought that you really never cared about open source software and you only got involved with Red Hat and Linux to "jump on the bandwagon" and try to make your mark on society.
Right-O. He has a job and I'm guessing some long term interest with stocks and the like, of course he is going to tow the corporate line. He pretty much mirrored the standard MS corporate line... Linux is no revolution.. no new innovation... it's only free if your time is not worth anything, Windows might cost money but you save in the long run becasuse it is so blah blah blah... Nothing new here but what do you expect. And also some of what he said was pretty much spot on too.
What would you do if you were interviewed and asked some questions about your company? "Oh all we care about is taking money from our customers.. we usually sit about and laugh at the fools who buy our crap"... no... you would do what he did. It's his job for Christs sake. I did sense a little angst a few times though..
Microsoft is a commercial operating system company that makes most of its revenue from selling its software. We charge money for our software. That is how we pay our developers, our support people and others to provide for the ongoing existence of our company
Like duh... how else do you think a company is going to make money and grow except to charge for it's products. In his shoes I would feel the same way though. Standard disclaimer, I'm no fan of MS or their business practices but i think we need to be realistic here.
WAP died because it sucked. WAP was a classic example of a "technology" which big business tried to tell the public that that wanted, but the public knew better. WAP was a sham from the start, the phone.com people are laughing all the way to the bank too. Now that the PCS industry has realized that they can't shove WAP down the throats of Joe Consumer they are moving away from it. It also shows that the Gartner Group doesn't know squat, if you have enough $$ you can have the Gartner Group rave about your stuff too.
Bluetooth might have problems but it's not because it sucks, it's just not a mature technology.
You have missed my point completely. It's okay though, you are pretty much a reflection of the sad state of slashdot these days. My point had nothing to do with Linux by the way, why do you mention it?
I barely got my parents to successfully use Windows.
That certainly goes along with my claim. My claim was that it was the Internet and cheap hardware that drove the home PC revolution and Windows had nothing to do with it. If those PC's had OS/2 or CP/M or whatever people would have bought them just the same. People bought them mainly to surf the net and send email. Period. I honestly think that no PC is "user friendly" to a non computer type person and you have backed me up with your personal testimony. You parents could have just as easily learned OS/2 as they learned Windows, I assure you. The growth rate of sales is interesting but meaningless because you are selling into a different market today. The early adopters were mainly the hobbyist, people buying today are people just like your parents, five times as many people according to thise stats.
Without the Internet explosion who is to say that the growth rate would not have been flat for the past 5 or 10 years... I really don't understand why you would assume I am bashing Windows by making such a claim. Perhaps you are lacking in reading comprehension skills...
According to those statistics the sales of PC's in 1990 was ~24 million, the sales of PC's in 2000 was ~124 million. I would say that supports my claim fairly well.
It's an interesting note that John Barlow was actually a songwriter for the Gratefull Dead for a while. He was a pretty diverse fellow. For you young folk: the Gratefull Dead was a well known band with a "cult" following; known for their live preformances.
Bah... it's just impossible to actually make a point amongst all the defensive paranoia that exists here. There is a huge difference in the number of PC's sold in 1990 and in 1995+. A huge difference. There is a huge difference in the whole PC industry today when compared to 1990. I didn't say that MS did nothing but hang about and wait for business to take off. I said and I'll stick behind it, the Internet was the killer app that drove the PC revolution.
A small percentage of people in the 80's and early 90's were buying home pc's for writing a letter or to use a spreadsheet, or maybe even to play games, but that number pales in comparison when you look at the number of people who bought a pc in 1994+ to surf the net, send email, etc. That is my claim. That was when the real PC revolution happened. That fact that MS was preloaded on those PC's meant nothing to the people who were buying those PC's. Sure Bill Gates understood the dynamics of the market, and undercutting the competition pricewise but that is beside the point with regards to the "revolution" Note the difference here is why a few people bought PC's in 1992 (letters, spreadsheets) and why billions bought them in 1998 (www, email). I mean you might as well say that Edison drove the home PC revolution because he invented the light bulb. It's silly.
Sigh...Nowhere did I say it was *luck* nowhere did I state anything bad about MS or their software or their business practices.
Once again I will restate my original claim..sigh... I'll try to make it simple...
The driving force behind the PC revolution was the Internet and cheap hardware. The internet was the compelling reason for Mr. or Mrs Schmoe to buy a PC. Meanwhile the prices on hardware started coming down so that you could get a cheap PC for much less than a grand. So we have this killer app, the internet, and we have PC's that are less than a grand. The fact that those PC's came pre-loaded with Windows had nothing to do with it. If all the computers had been preloaded with OS/2 the same thing would have happened. Thus I claim that the Intenet and cheap hardware were the driving force behind the PC revolution. Thank you.
You sir, as as dumb as a wall. Yes your parents bought a cheap PC in the late 80's/early 90's but they were in the minority. My parents bought a commodore 64 in 1982, so what. I didn't say there were no computers sold until 1994. you need to look at the percentage of households had a PC in 1990 versus today? The numbers are not even remotely close.
Once again I will restate my original point that the driving force behind the home PC revolution was the Internet and cheap hardware. The fact that windows was on it is meaningless. If not windows it would have been OS/2 or CP/M or whatever. Windows did not drive the home pc revolution. They went along for the ride. Now if your closed little peanut brain can understand that... I am not bashing MS, nor am I saying anything bad about them, I am merely stating from a historical point of view what happened. Jesus fuck, you windows zealots have to be the fucking worst kind of zealot.
Are we having reading comprehension problems... you smary little retard.
They used Windows to surf the net because it was there, not because it was driving the home PC revolution you dolt. The Internet gave the common folk a compelling reason to buy a PC, so they could look at all the stuff on the web, so they could send emails to aunt Bessy. Nobody ran to the store to buy a PC because of this great MS windows tool, it just so happens that they got Windows on their computers because that was the only choice... Now fuck off you moronic twit.
Probably by realising that MS brought computing to the masses, creating thousands of jobs in the process
Bzzzzzt. The Internet brought computing to the masses, the Internet and cheap hardware drove the home PC craze of the 90's, MS just went along for the ride. MS was in the right place at the right time, that's all. If anyone tried to bring computing to the masses it was Apple back in the 80's. They at least made an effort to try to make computers more people friendly. It took MS until...what...the year 2000 to catch up (arguably) with the Mac interfaces of the 80's...
Have you ever taken part in a meeting where there has been discusison of *breaking* an interface or an API to reduce interoperability or backwards compatability with other products?
Not to be an alarmist, or a paranoid freak, but we need to look at the big picture here.
1) What do we know about big giant corporations?
They are ultimatly concerned with growing their revenues, this is usually at the expense of the truth, or privacy, or "fair play."
2) What is the trend among big business today?
Mega-merger. The big boys keep merging and forming even bigger corporations. AOL-Time Warner anybody? This trend will continue too. What's the joke... in a few years we will only have 3 or 4 companies.. Sony, IBM, MS, GM...
3) Who will be able to protect us in the future when these giant companies, with gross amounts of money, want to track us like a dog?
Nobody.
Actually Netscape 6 came mainly from employees of Netscape/AOL. Unless I am mistaken it's my understanding that there are only a handfull of contributers from the community.
And actually I've been writing code for Linux for a couple of years and I have never even taken a peak at the kernel code. I have looked at the code of other linux programs to see how they handled a certain problem, but no, I've never cared to look at the guts of the kernel. And quite frankly if I need to do that then there is something quite wrong, either with my code or linux. I trust that the c libraries that I'm using are quite bug free at this point, and when I do make a systems call I tend to stick with the tried and true API calls.
I suppose if you are doing some low level systems programming then it might be beneficial to have a look at the code, but this would be very rare, IMHO. Now then, I guess a true geek would like it jsut to be able to muck about in it, but I really don't have the time.
Hmmmm... perhaps. I have a hard time thinking that anyone would really want to spend an enourmous amount of time sifting through a mountain of Win2k source code to debug their program. It would probably be easier to take a step back and rethink your original solution. I see this more as a political PR spin move. Then again it would be beneficial to someone who is building a product which competes with IE or MS Office for the Windows platform, but I doubt MS is driving over to AOL or Corel to give them the code.
I've always held the opinion that not too many people would really care if MS opened up the source code. I think we learned a lesson from Netscape. When they opened up the code they had very few people who contributed or even really cared, the reason being there was a pretty steep learning curve before you get up to speed, I mean really, who has that much time on their hands. It's not like Linux, which has been open for years and has had a lot of time to build momentum. Although I think it was a briliant move by Netscape to open up the code before AOL bought them, basically they made sure that AOL couldn't destroy the one thing they loved.
Slashdot Mirror
I claim this first post for the baby Jesus !!!!
LONG LIVE JESUS !!!!!!
Why does a browser need an email client?
Even Microsoft got that right and they are known for feature bloat. Why not just build a screaming browser that works, then do all the side dishes? After all, it's only been what... 3 years or so in the making?
The last time I bought some I paid $17.99 for 100 of them. They are not the best quality but I haven't had any trouble with them. I might buy another 100 just in case they do go up.
Your missing the point. Most of them seemed more like:
company A gets 100 million in fuding and two weeks later spends 80 million in a givaway promotion... then they declared bacruptcy three months later. The point as I saw it was these people, for the most part, were not the sharpest business people.
sadly enough I must agree with you.
sigh....
Right-o. And since most Windows users are leeches and don't burn any mp3's they listen to, rather they just download the goods ripped by someone else, this won't really affect them.
Seriously though, lets face it, how much of this crap is the general public willing to put up with before they make the move to a OSX Mac or even Linux?
Or is it true that most people really don't care?
Yes in the perfect world you are correct. However the problem has always been that the company who has the software is looking over their shoulder at all these other word processor apps and they feel that in order to keep or grow their subscriber base they will need to add new features (regardless if they are needed or wanted) to stay ahead of their competitors. So you fall into the same trap where marketing and slick new interfaces and being the first to market continue to be more important than stability or correctness.
Lets face it, the majority of computer users seem to accept that 80% is good enough, they think that's just the way computers work. Have you ever overheard someone on a bus say "OH.. teehee.. then I crashed my computer.. teehee" I hear it a lot in general conversation. And once you learn to save your data a little more often and not do the things that make your computer crash, the software seems to get better and you don't think twice about it. Sad but true... my sister just takes for granted that she will have to reboot a few times a day.. that's just the way it is.
Amen my brother, my little trolling brother, amen. We need something that isn't owned by one of the big boys, like Sun or MS and this could be the ticket. Although I have to wonder why perl seems to be falling out of favor.
But I seem to recall reading that the MITS building was in a strip mall that had a girlie bar in it next to the Altair shop on one side and a laundramat on the other side. Somthing like that anyways.
At $249 the price is right???? I honestly have to say that at about $99 the price would be right. This is not meant as a slam on the product, I've never seen it, but I think these things need to get around $100 to really fly. Until then it's nothing but a geek toy, a cool toy, yes, but a geek toy nonetheless.
How do you respond to the thought that you really never cared about open source software and you only got involved with Red Hat and Linux to "jump on the bandwagon" and try to make your mark on society.
Right-O. He has a job and I'm guessing some long term interest with stocks and the like, of course he is going to tow the corporate line. He pretty much mirrored the standard MS corporate line... Linux is no revolution.. no new innovation... it's only free if your time is not worth anything, Windows might cost money but you save in the long run becasuse it is so blah blah blah... Nothing new here but what do you expect. And also some of what he said was pretty much spot on too.
What would you do if you were interviewed and asked some questions about your company? "Oh all we care about is taking money from our customers.. we usually sit about and laugh at the fools who buy our crap"... no... you would do what he did. It's his job for Christs sake. I did sense a little angst a few times though..
Microsoft is a commercial operating system company that makes most of its revenue from selling its software. We charge money for our software. That is how we pay our developers, our support people and others to provide for the ongoing existence of our company
Like duh... how else do you think a company is going to make money and grow except to charge for it's products. In his shoes I would feel the same way though. Standard disclaimer, I'm no fan of MS or their business practices but i think we need to be realistic here.
WAP died because it sucked. WAP was a classic example of a "technology" which big business tried to tell the public that that wanted, but the public knew better. WAP was a sham from the start, the phone.com people are laughing all the way to the bank too. Now that the PCS industry has realized that they can't shove WAP down the throats of Joe Consumer they are moving away from it. It also shows that the Gartner Group doesn't know squat, if you have enough $$ you can have the Gartner Group rave about your stuff too.
Bluetooth might have problems but it's not because it sucks, it's just not a mature technology.
You have missed my point completely. It's okay though, you are pretty much a reflection of the sad state of slashdot these days. My point had nothing to do with Linux by the way, why do you mention it?
I barely got my parents to successfully use Windows.
That certainly goes along with my claim. My claim was that it was the Internet and cheap hardware that drove the home PC revolution and Windows had nothing to do with it. If those PC's had OS/2 or CP/M or whatever people would have bought them just the same. People bought them mainly to surf the net and send email. Period. I honestly think that no PC is "user friendly" to a non computer type person and you have backed me up with your personal testimony. You parents could have just as easily learned OS/2 as they learned Windows, I assure you. The growth rate of sales is interesting but meaningless because you are selling into a different market today. The early adopters were mainly the hobbyist, people buying today are people just like your parents, five times as many people according to thise stats.
Without the Internet explosion who is to say that the growth rate would not have been flat for the past 5 or 10 years... I really don't understand why you would assume I am bashing Windows by making such a claim. Perhaps you are lacking in reading comprehension skills...
According to those statistics the sales of PC's in 1990 was ~24 million, the sales of PC's in 2000 was ~124 million. I would say that supports my claim fairly well.
It's an interesting note that John Barlow was actually a songwriter for the Gratefull Dead for a while. He was a pretty diverse fellow. For you young folk: the Gratefull Dead was a well known band with a "cult" following; known for their live preformances.
Bah... it's just impossible to actually make a point amongst all the defensive paranoia that exists here. There is a huge difference in the number of PC's sold in 1990 and in 1995+. A huge difference. There is a huge difference in the whole PC industry today when compared to 1990. I didn't say that MS did nothing but hang about and wait for business to take off. I said and I'll stick behind it, the Internet was the killer app that drove the PC revolution.
A small percentage of people in the 80's and early 90's were buying home pc's for writing a letter or to use a spreadsheet, or maybe even to play games, but that number pales in comparison when you look at the number of people who bought a pc in 1994+ to surf the net, send email, etc. That is my claim. That was when the real PC revolution happened. That fact that MS was preloaded on those PC's meant nothing to the people who were buying those PC's. Sure Bill Gates understood the dynamics of the market, and undercutting the competition pricewise but that is beside the point with regards to the "revolution" Note the difference here is why a few people bought PC's in 1992 (letters, spreadsheets) and why billions bought them in 1998 (www, email). I mean you might as well say that Edison drove the home PC revolution because he invented the light bulb. It's silly.
Sigh...Nowhere did I say it was *luck* nowhere did I state anything bad about MS or their software or their business practices.
Once again I will restate my original claim..sigh... I'll try to make it simple...
The driving force behind the PC revolution was the Internet and cheap hardware. The internet was the compelling reason for Mr. or Mrs Schmoe to buy a PC. Meanwhile the prices on hardware started coming down so that you could get a cheap PC for much less than a grand. So we have this killer app, the internet, and we have PC's that are less than a grand. The fact that those PC's came pre-loaded with Windows had nothing to do with it. If all the computers had been preloaded with OS/2 the same thing would have happened. Thus I claim that the Intenet and cheap hardware were the driving force behind the PC revolution. Thank you.
You sir, as as dumb as a wall. Yes your parents bought a cheap PC in the late 80's/early 90's but they were in the minority. My parents bought a commodore 64 in 1982, so what. I didn't say there were no computers sold until 1994. you need to look at the percentage of households had a PC in 1990 versus today? The numbers are not even remotely close.
Once again I will restate my original point that the driving force behind the home PC revolution was the Internet and cheap hardware. The fact that windows was on it is meaningless. If not windows it would have been OS/2 or CP/M or whatever. Windows did not drive the home pc revolution. They went along for the ride. Now if your closed little peanut brain can understand that... I am not bashing MS, nor am I saying anything bad about them, I am merely stating from a historical point of view what happened. Jesus fuck, you windows zealots have to be the fucking worst kind of zealot.
Are we having reading comprehension problems... you smary little retard.
They used Windows to surf the net because it was there, not because it was driving the home PC revolution you dolt. The Internet gave the common folk a compelling reason to buy a PC, so they could look at all the stuff on the web, so they could send emails to aunt Bessy. Nobody ran to the store to buy a PC because of this great MS windows tool, it just so happens that they got Windows on their computers because that was the only choice... Now fuck off you moronic twit.
Probably by realising that MS brought computing to the masses, creating thousands of jobs in the process
Bzzzzzt. The Internet brought computing to the masses, the Internet and cheap hardware drove the home PC craze of the 90's, MS just went along for the ride. MS was in the right place at the right time, that's all. If anyone tried to bring computing to the masses it was Apple back in the 80's. They at least made an effort to try to make computers more people friendly. It took MS until...what...the year 2000 to catch up (arguably) with the Mac interfaces of the 80's...
Have you ever taken part in a meeting where there has been discusison of *breaking* an interface or an API to reduce interoperability or backwards compatability with other products?
Not to be an alarmist, or a paranoid freak, but we need to look at the big picture here.
1) What do we know about big giant corporations?
They are ultimatly concerned with growing their revenues, this is usually at the expense of the truth, or privacy, or "fair play."
2) What is the trend among big business today?
Mega-merger. The big boys keep merging and forming even bigger corporations. AOL-Time Warner anybody? This trend will continue too. What's the joke... in a few years we will only have 3 or 4 companies.. Sony, IBM, MS, GM...
3) Who will be able to protect us in the future when these giant companies, with gross amounts of money, want to track us like a dog?
Nobody.
Actually Netscape 6 came mainly from employees of Netscape/AOL. Unless I am mistaken it's my understanding that there are only a handfull of contributers from the community.
And actually I've been writing code for Linux for a couple of years and I have never even taken a peak at the kernel code. I have looked at the code of other linux programs to see how they handled a certain problem, but no, I've never cared to look at the guts of the kernel. And quite frankly if I need to do that then there is something quite wrong, either with my code or linux. I trust that the c libraries that I'm using are quite bug free at this point, and when I do make a systems call I tend to stick with the tried and true API calls.
I suppose if you are doing some low level systems programming then it might be beneficial to have a look at the code, but this would be very rare, IMHO. Now then, I guess a true geek would like it jsut to be able to muck about in it, but I really don't have the time.
Hmmmm... perhaps. I have a hard time thinking that anyone would really want to spend an enourmous amount of time sifting through a mountain of Win2k source code to debug their program. It would probably be easier to take a step back and rethink your original solution. I see this more as a political PR spin move. Then again it would be beneficial to someone who is building a product which competes with IE or MS Office for the Windows platform, but I doubt MS is driving over to AOL or Corel to give them the code.
I've always held the opinion that not too many people would really care if MS opened up the source code. I think we learned a lesson from Netscape. When they opened up the code they had very few people who contributed or even really cared, the reason being there was a pretty steep learning curve before you get up to speed, I mean really, who has that much time on their hands. It's not like Linux, which has been open for years and has had a lot of time to build momentum. Although I think it was a briliant move by Netscape to open up the code before AOL bought them, basically they made sure that AOL couldn't destroy the one thing they loved.