"Either a product is good and doesn't need to be spotlighted because it actually has value that people will search and pay for, or a product is bad and it is necessary to lie (story-tell) extensively in order to create demand that would not otherwise be there."
This is a fantasy. People often have to be persuaded to try top-quality products. They also have to be informed that the products exist in the first place. Remember the promotional campaign for the Salk vaccine? Oh no. You don't. You're only 22.
There's still time though. Perhaps you can stop the ads for the human papilloma virus vaccine. That's a good product so it doesn't have to be advertised. We can just wait for women to "search and pay for" it. The ones who don't know about it will have a greater chance of getting genital warts and cervical cancer but that's there problem, right?
You don't seriously think that would work in the real world do you? The IRS would tax you for the full value and then tax your mom for the imputed value of $138,000. You and your mom would end up paying more tax, not less.
But the little comic book-like video says that by using authentic software "You get: The assurance that your IT infrastructure is clean and stable"
Oh really? Who provides that assurance? Certainly not Microsoft. I don't recall ever seeing any MS product (or any piece of software, for that matter) that isn't sold without a warranty including the implied warranty of merchantability. In other words the EULA plainly states the software is completely worthless and that by clicking through, you agree with the manufacturer that the software is completely worthless and that you are surrendering your right to sue them if the software destroys your computer, blows up you house and kills your family etc. etc.
Like I said, I don't advocate stealing intellectual property but turning in criminals who copy and distribute what a manufacturer publicly declares is worthless crap is waaaaay down on my list of wrongs to right.
Incorrect. Fallout and radiation are indeed the major problem with nukes. Unlike conventional explosives, nuclear weapons generate tons of highly poisonous fallout that can drift thousands of miles away from the blast site.
Rescue crews can enter a city bombed with conventional weapons almost immediately after bombing halts. Why do you think fallout shelters were designed to be occupied for weeks or months? Cold war paranoia? No. Hard science.
I'm not a shill for Microsoft. You're a venomously hateful geek utterly beyond his depth in understanding how normal people think and feel about computers. I can understand your bitterness. If must get frustrating and lonely spending your life with you nose pressed against the glass, wondering what life is like for the normals.
"people simply do NOT want to learn a new way of doing things on their computer once they have painfully learned the previous way. This is the SOLE reason Linux hasn't taken over the desktop - inertia(with some help from lack of hardware drivers courtesy of the harfdware manufacturers.)"
The SOLE reason? Wake up fanboy. There are dozens of other far more important reasons Linux hasn't taken over the desktop. Here are just a few.
1) The basic philosophy of Linux is wrong for end users. Linux is designed to be easy for developers, not end users. It assumes the user views the computer as something interesting and worth understanding. Most people see computers as boring and a little creepy inside and that's fine. Most people couldn't point out the master cylinder if you opened the hoods of their cars but that's OK because they can drive all their lives without ever knowing what one is. It's as if car salesman assumed everybody wanted to be an auto mechanic. Linux appeals to only two kinds of people: IT people (because it's designed to suit their needs and it's generally more robust than Windows) and computer hobbyists (because it's endlessly tweakable and the already know how to work it because they're IT people or studying computer science). It has little appeal for just plain folks.
2) Documentation is generally even more poorly written than Windows/Mac documentation. And there are far fewer independent books written for non-technical users.
3) The attitude of Linux advocates towards end users is often hostile and arrogant. Countless times I've heard fanboys scream, "Don't buy that monopolistic crap software from Micro$oft! This FREE program is just as good!" Then when some hapless noob complains on a help forum that said program lacks a feature he liked on his commercial program, the fanboys scream something to the effect, "IT'S FREE! WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT IT DOES DO!"
4) Popular Windows games don't play on Linux.
5) In the Linux world there are only two levels of users. Sysadmins and naive end users. There are virtually no power users like you have in the Windows/Mac world. It's missing the vital middle. Unix has always been organized on the premise that the system will be managed by a highly sophisticated sysadmin. Linux fanboys are always saying things like "Linux isn't too hard for end users. I set up a Linux machine for my father/mother/grandfather/grandmother/aunt Judy on an old Pentium/486/286/toaster oven and he/she loves it!" Exactly.
6) Linux is mired in the past. Too many books for Linux beginners have chapters on vi and/or Emacs. Stop it already! Stop it. I don't have a problem if they're included with distributions for the fossils who may still want to use them but the rest of us have had indoor plumbing for a while now. Time for Posix to standardize on a simple Notepad-like character-based editor for non-geeks. If it already has, I know someone will correct me.
7) This is purely subjective but Gnome (and to a lesser extent KDE) just aren't as pretty as Windows/Mac interfaces.
There are many more reasons. These are just off the top of my head.
I assume the post is referring to capacity and not physical size. These young punks today. Why in my day we had 10MB drives and we were happy with them! And we had to walk to and from school in the driving snow uphill BOTH WAYS!
Daniel Eran's site is a terrible mishmosh that doesn't look good in Firefox or IE. In Firefox there were giant-sized gray letters superimposed over the text. On IE at the highest level of text magnification the type was still on the smallish size. His narrative seems to be a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness diatribe that meanders and folds back upon itself.
There's a weird picture of a Windows logo with blue lines and flames. Click on it and you get a page entitled "1990-1995: Why the World Went Windows."
On that page there's a link entitled "1990-1995: The Race to Deliver the Next New Platform IBM and Microsoft partner on OS/2."
Okaaaay. Well a lot was happening in those years, after all. But if you click on that link you bring up a page entitled "1990-1995: Hitting the Wall." Say what?
I'm embarrassed for the poor schmuck. One of the downsides of the Web is that it allows people to soil themselves in public.
Your "risk to corporate profit" argument doesn't fly unless you're arguing that the Bush administration has some kind of stake in the least reliable carriers.
If the figures were published the effect would presumably be that the profits of the worst carriers might suffer and the profits of the best carriers might improve as customers migrate to the better carriers.
Why would the Bush administration care who wins and who loses?
The environment does indeed determine many things. People die in blizzards and heat waves.
Africans have dark skin not because it's hot but because ultraviolet radiation from the sun is more intense near the equator, where humans first appeared. As humans ventured to more temperate zones babies born with less melanin were more likely to survive and join the gene pool.
Your head is filled with crazy ideas. What evidence is there that it's "quite common for otherwise successful people to become homeless"? How common? According to who?
"Homelessness is a downward spiral which is difficult to get out of."
Again, according to who? How difficult? Anyone who is homeless because he or she "truly and honestly had some bad luck" will find that there are numerous private and public agencies that offer housing, training, employment help and lots of other help to bet back on their feet.
What's so surprising about that? Linux is a very good OS for running webservers. For working with (i.e., sharing files with) other organizations and recruiting people who already know how to use applications and an OS, Windows is clearly the OS of choice. That may change, but right now that's the way it is.
I agree. Until recently I worked in a software company whose product came in Solaris and Linux versions but which was otherwise mostly a Windows shop on the desktop. (I know, weird, huh?) When I moved our documentation from MS Word to OO one of my colleagues, a Linux developer, complained at how ugly the docs now looked. Whereas he had used Word before he was now using OO on his Linux system. The same docs and font (Arial) that looked fine when you looked at the doc using the Windows version of OO looked like crap when viewed in OO on a Linux machine. That's really dumb.
And the fonts used in the GUI itself aren't so hot either.
However odious this practice is it doesn't qualify as bait and switch. "You buy a Home edition, for your home, only to..." No, you don't buy it for your home. You buy it for your PC. And I'm sure the box will describe the conditions of sale quite clearly with a URL so you can read it it in more detail at your leisure.
This restriction will primarly affect people who build their own PCs, users who can hardly be described as naive.
I lost a dear friend to breast cancer in 1998 but I think it's screwy to focus so much on it. Look at this PDF table from the National Cancer Institute. It shows that estimated deaths from digestive system cancers (136,180) will be more than triple the number of deaths from breast cancer (41,430) this year. Both figures are for both male and female deaths. Even when you look at just female deaths, digestive system cancers will kill half again as many women as breast cancer will (60,970 vs. 40,970).
Another example of misplaced public health priorities due to the publicity machine.
The comedian Robert Klein actually did a bit about this. How Armstrong could have made a fortune by selling out before he left Earth and then saying, "COCA-COLA!" as he put his foot out on the moon.
The Sherman Act does not make bundling Windows Media Player with Microsoft Windows illegal. The Sherman Act makes various anti-competitive practices illegal. Whether or not including WMP in Windows fits that definition is debatable and, IIRC has yet to be brought before any US court.
Slashdot Mirror
"Either a product is good and doesn't need to be spotlighted because it actually has value that people will search and pay for, or a product is bad and it is necessary to lie (story-tell) extensively in order to create demand that would not otherwise be there."
This is a fantasy. People often have to be persuaded to try top-quality products. They also have to be informed that the products exist in the first place. Remember the promotional campaign for the Salk vaccine? Oh no. You don't. You're only 22.
There's still time though. Perhaps you can stop the ads for the human papilloma virus vaccine. That's a good product so it doesn't have to be advertised. We can just wait for women to "search and pay for" it. The ones who don't know about it will have a greater chance of getting genital warts and cervical cancer but that's there problem, right?
What a hateful little turd you are.
The author of a play is the playwright. The author of a movie is the director.
In the theater, the director's job is to work in service to the playwright to bring his vision to the stage.
In film, the screenwriter's job is to work in service to the director to give him the raw material to bring his vision to the screen.
Evidently this author of TFA is not aware of this reality.
One can certainly imagine things being different but this is how it has always been.
You don't seriously think that would work in the real world do you? The IRS would tax you for the full value and then tax your mom for the imputed value of $138,000. You and your mom would end up paying more tax, not less.
But the little comic book-like video says that by using authentic software "You get: The assurance that your IT infrastructure is clean and stable"
Oh really? Who provides that assurance? Certainly not Microsoft. I don't recall ever seeing any MS product (or any piece of software, for that matter) that isn't sold without a warranty including the implied warranty of merchantability. In other words the EULA plainly states the software is completely worthless and that by clicking through, you agree with the manufacturer that the software is completely worthless and that you are surrendering your right to sue them if the software destroys your computer, blows up you house and kills your family etc. etc.
Like I said, I don't advocate stealing intellectual property but turning in criminals who copy and distribute what a manufacturer publicly declares is worthless crap is waaaaay down on my list of wrongs to right.
Incorrect. Fallout and radiation are indeed the major problem with nukes. Unlike conventional explosives, nuclear weapons generate tons of highly poisonous fallout that can drift thousands of miles away from the blast site.
Rescue crews can enter a city bombed with conventional weapons almost immediately after bombing halts. Why do you think fallout shelters were designed to be occupied for weeks or months? Cold war paranoia? No. Hard science.
This guy should run a stock tip sheet.
I'm not a shill for Microsoft. You're a venomously hateful geek utterly beyond his depth in understanding how normal people think and feel about computers. I can understand your bitterness. If must get frustrating and lonely spending your life with you nose pressed against the glass, wondering what life is like for the normals.
"people simply do NOT want to learn a new way of doing things on their computer once they have painfully learned the previous way. This is the SOLE reason Linux hasn't taken over the desktop - inertia(with some help from lack of hardware drivers courtesy of the harfdware manufacturers.)"
The SOLE reason? Wake up fanboy. There are dozens of other far more important reasons Linux hasn't taken over the desktop. Here are just a few.
1) The basic philosophy of Linux is wrong for end users. Linux is designed to be easy for developers, not end users. It assumes the user views the computer as something interesting and worth understanding. Most people see computers as boring and a little creepy inside and that's fine. Most people couldn't point out the master cylinder if you opened the hoods of their cars but that's OK because they can drive all their lives without ever knowing what one is. It's as if car salesman assumed everybody wanted to be an auto mechanic. Linux appeals to only two kinds of people: IT people (because it's designed to suit their needs and it's generally more robust than Windows) and computer hobbyists (because it's endlessly tweakable and the already know how to work it because they're IT people or studying computer science). It has little appeal for just plain folks.
2) Documentation is generally even more poorly written than Windows/Mac documentation. And there are far fewer independent books written for non-technical users.
3) The attitude of Linux advocates towards end users is often hostile and arrogant. Countless times I've heard fanboys scream, "Don't buy that monopolistic crap software from Micro$oft! This FREE program is just as good!" Then when some hapless noob complains on a help forum that said program lacks a feature he liked on his commercial program, the fanboys scream something to the effect, "IT'S FREE! WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL FOR WHAT IT DOES DO!"
4) Popular Windows games don't play on Linux.
5) In the Linux world there are only two levels of users. Sysadmins and naive end users. There are virtually no power users like you have in the Windows/Mac world. It's missing the vital middle. Unix has always been organized on the premise that the system will be managed by a highly sophisticated sysadmin. Linux fanboys are always saying things like "Linux isn't too hard for end users. I set up a Linux machine for my father/mother/grandfather/grandmother/aunt Judy on an old Pentium/486/286/toaster oven and he/she loves it!" Exactly.
6) Linux is mired in the past. Too many books for Linux beginners have chapters on vi and/or Emacs. Stop it already! Stop it. I don't have a problem if they're included with distributions for the fossils who may still want to use them but the rest of us have had indoor plumbing for a while now. Time for Posix to standardize on a simple Notepad-like character-based editor for non-geeks. If it already has, I know someone will correct me.
7) This is purely subjective but Gnome (and to a lesser extent KDE) just aren't as pretty as Windows/Mac interfaces.
There are many more reasons. These are just off the top of my head.
Why doesn't /. just disable links to goatse.cx in posts? I guess they fear alienating the all-important juvenile jerk-off bloc.
Euclidean geometry is for wimps. I had to drink my milk out of a Klein bottle!
I assume the post is referring to capacity and not physical size. These young punks today. Why in my day we had 10MB drives and we were happy with them! And we had to walk to and from school in the driving snow uphill BOTH WAYS!
Daniel Eran's site is a terrible mishmosh that doesn't look good in Firefox or IE. In Firefox there were giant-sized gray letters superimposed over the text. On IE at the highest level of text magnification the type was still on the smallish size. His narrative seems to be a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness diatribe that meanders and folds back upon itself.
4 5B1-A659-AD7473899D7D.html
For example, on this page:
http://roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/4E2A8848-5738-
There's a weird picture of a Windows logo with blue lines and flames. Click on it and you get a page entitled "1990-1995: Why the World Went Windows."
On that page there's a link entitled "1990-1995: The Race to Deliver the Next New Platform IBM and Microsoft partner on OS/2."
Okaaaay. Well a lot was happening in those years, after all. But if you click on that link you bring up a page entitled "1990-1995: Hitting the Wall." Say what?
I'm embarrassed for the poor schmuck. One of the downsides of the Web is that it allows people to soil themselves in public.
Your "risk to corporate profit" argument doesn't fly unless you're arguing that the Bush administration has some kind of stake in the least reliable carriers.
If the figures were published the effect would presumably be that the profits of the worst carriers might suffer and the profits of the best carriers might improve as customers migrate to the better carriers.
Why would the Bush administration care who wins and who loses?
The environment does indeed determine many things. People die in blizzards and heat waves.
Africans have dark skin not because it's hot but because ultraviolet radiation from the sun is more intense near the equator, where humans first appeared. As humans ventured to more temperate zones babies born with less melanin were more likely to survive and join the gene pool.
Somebody had to explain this to you?
What part of Wisconsin are you from?
Your head is filled with crazy ideas. What evidence is there that it's "quite common for otherwise successful people to become homeless"? How common? According to who?
"Homelessness is a downward spiral which is difficult to get out of."
Again, according to who? How difficult? Anyone who is homeless because he or she "truly and honestly had some bad luck" will find that there are numerous private and public agencies that offer housing, training, employment help and lots of other help to bet back on their feet.
Go to Google and enter "convert 6,300,000 yen to dollars".
The answer:
6,300,000 Japanese yen = 54,286.9453 U.S. dollars
Who's smoking what?
In reply to #16787287:
What's so surprising about that? Linux is a very good OS for running webservers. For working with (i.e., sharing files with) other organizations and recruiting people who already know how to use applications and an OS, Windows is clearly the OS of choice. That may change, but right now that's the way it is.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work. What one considers "hot" is too subjective to be useful. Too much eyeshadow != hot.
I agree. Until recently I worked in a software company whose product came in Solaris and Linux versions but which was otherwise mostly a Windows shop on the desktop. (I know, weird, huh?) When I moved our documentation from MS Word to OO one of my colleagues, a Linux developer, complained at how ugly the docs now looked. Whereas he had used Word before he was now using OO on his Linux system. The same docs and font (Arial) that looked fine when you looked at the doc using the Windows version of OO looked like crap when viewed in OO on a Linux machine. That's really dumb.
And the fonts used in the GUI itself aren't so hot either.
I understand Mark Andressen was unfazed by Internet Explorer.
However odious this practice is it doesn't qualify as bait and switch. "You buy a Home edition, for your home, only to..." No, you don't buy it for your home. You buy it for your PC. And I'm sure the box will describe the conditions of sale quite clearly with a URL so you can read it it in more detail at your leisure.
This restriction will primarly affect people who build their own PCs, users who can hardly be described as naive.
I lost a dear friend to breast cancer in 1998 but I think it's screwy to focus so much on it. Look at this PDF table from the National Cancer Institute. It shows that estimated deaths from digestive system cancers (136,180) will be more than triple the number of deaths from breast cancer (41,430) this year. Both figures are for both male and female deaths. Even when you look at just female deaths, digestive system cancers will kill half again as many women as breast cancer will (60,970 vs. 40,970).
Another example of misplaced public health priorities due to the publicity machine.
The comedian Robert Klein actually did a bit about this. How Armstrong could have made a fortune by selling out before he left Earth and then saying, "COCA-COLA!" as he put his foot out on the moon.
The Sherman Act does not make bundling Windows Media Player with Microsoft Windows illegal. The Sherman Act makes various anti-competitive practices illegal. Whether or not including WMP in Windows fits that definition is debatable and, IIRC has yet to be brought before any US court.