Mozilla - application of technology developed at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee Transmeta - innovations that failed to deliver Google - PageRank already acknowledged, no other innovations Yahoo - application of technology developed in academia Facebook - blogs, internal e-mail, instant messaging and pictures - not seeing a lot of innovation Napster - somewhat innovative application of technology that had existed for decades Cognio - never heard of them, wikipedia says what they do but nothing about them stands out as particularly innovative
It sounds like you're working in an area of a company that doesn't do innovation. I'm going to assume that you're a software developer (and since this is Slashdot, I've probably got about an 80% chance of being right). If you're working at a bank, or a manufacturing firm, or any other non-software company, of course you're not going to be doing innovation. Real innovation for software will come mostly from software companies along with a few innovations from other areas that have lots of money and absolutely need certain advances (e.g., I read that some of the best research in functional languages was being done in the high finance sector because they need parallelism). The fact is, advances in cars are going to come from car companies, advances in medicines are going to come from pharmaceutical companies.
I've given two examples of companies that have been innovative in the past ten years. How about you give he names of some small companies that have been innovative? Not just companies that have created new products based on existing technologies but real innovation based on real technological advances. And for a real challenge, try to come up with companies outside the world of software.
Your points might make sense for Windows 7 but don't forget that they've been working on Vista for about five years. And decisions to support backward compatibility by using a virtual machine would have had to have been made when they first started. That's not a decision that can be tweaked into the operating system a week before shipping. And at the time that major design was being done on Vista, virtualization was still a nascent technology with no guarantee that it would do what they needed it to do within the time frame they needed it.
Sure, what a few hundred dollars here, a few thousand dollars there. Especially in this economy when you're never sure whether or not you'll have a job tomorrow. QWho needs to pay the rent when you can have the latest software instead?
My point with Google is that they were one of the few small companies that were truly innovative. And PageRank is the only real innovation that I can think of that Google has made (pretty much all of their other offerings are just good applications of existing technology, specifically HTTP requests which invented by Microsoft).
But I stand by my thesis that most basic innovation is coming from large companies. We don't get a wow from it because most innovation is incremental. For example, GE has done some amazing things with MRIs in the past ten years. Each new model wasn't really all that different from the model the year before but looking at them right now compared to ten years ago is pretty impressive.
I didn't say virtualization didn't exist but as an enterprise strength model for seamlessly running applications on a client as if they were running natively, VirtualPC certainly wasn't ready five years ago and really neither was VMWare.
Small companies like Toyota with hybrid cars? Or the advances in cell phone technology like Samsung and Nokia? High definition television? the International Space Station? The fact is most innovation comes from bigger companies. Google is so amazing because PageRank was an innovation. Most other startups are only applying existing technologies in a new way.
I assume this is the way that Microsoft is going. But let's face it, virtualization is only becoming fully capable as of the last year or so. Vista has been in development for at least five years. I can understand why they didn't commit to a technology that was not only unproven at design time but wasn't even an idea.
On the other hand, there are real reasons not to go with virtualization such as performance and security. So who knows where they are going to go with backwards compatibility.
Microsoft is the 800# gorilla in the room because it doesn't break backward compatibility.
I'm not a mac fanboi but from what I've heard the various changes from one version to the next over the past ten years were not as seamless as you indicated. Most of my friends who use macs (none of whom are technical, they're all in the design space) just gave up on trying to get their old software to work with the new version and bought all new software.
Compare that with Microsoft where althought they're not officially supported, almost all DOS applications will still run. So if you bought some piece of software in 1988 for DOS 3.0 chances are pretty good that it will run on Vista.
You're really asking the wrong people about this. Most of the replies you're going to get on Slashdot will be no restrictions because I wouldn't want restrictions on my machine. This is true for adults but you're dealing with children, some as young as 11 years old.
The people you really should be talking to are the parents in your district. Ultimately what their children see and how they interact with the world is up to the parents. I imagine that you will probably have a number of views that you will have to synthesize. Perhaps even create a number of different user profiles and allow parents to choose which one their child will fit into. But the first stop is ask the parents. As an upside, some of the parents will have grappled with many of the same problems at work and will probably have some insights.
Given all the arguing over language dogma here on Slashdot and everywhere else on the internet, I always thought that computer languages were religions.
AT&T existed as THE phone company from 1879 to 1982. 103 years of servicing the communications of a growing USA. Creating a long distance infrastructure for an entire nation. Most companies would love to be such failures.
How about the government monopoly on the roads? Or on national defense? Currency? Courts? What they probably didn't teach you in 10th grade social studies is that everything is a trade-off, and while monopolies are bad sometimes and for some things, they are often good for other things.
The assumption that monopolies are bad is based on the idea that the only true value is progress and perhaps financial returns. Monopolies promote stability, predictability and ease of regulation. Personally I thnk that for communications infrastructure I'd value stability and predictability.
I did read the article (or rather skimmed it). It's a technical RFC. No explanation why it took nine years.
These standards are supposed to influence actual products that are used by actual people. To most people trying to write software, they are part of the analysis that goes into how to write software. If a business analyst on any of my projects were take nine years to finish his work, I'd fire him.
I know, I know, comittees take a long time, blah, blah blah..... But look at it from the other side: if you had decided to create a new piece of software in 1999 but wanted to wait for this RFC so that your software were standards compliant, your market would have passed you by. If on the other hand you went ahead and built the software you would now be faced with the choice of not being standards compliant or throwing away a substantial part of your software investment in order to satisfy a standard that is eight and a half years late.
Standards are important. If this is the quality of work we can expect from standards bodies, then perhaps standards are too important to be left in the hands of standards bodies.
Is it any wonder that so much software is not standards compliant. I mean seriously, if standards bodies really want to be taken seriously outside of academia, they really need to start working more than a few minutes a month. Have these people thought about adopting this standard: the forty hour work week.
I for one am glad Microsoft is planning on certifying SSD disks. Hopefully that will keep Joe's SSD and Auto Wrecking out of the SSD space. I work in the Microsoft world and from what I've seen most of the really big problems aren't caused by Microsoft but by third party vendors in both the hardware and software space building cheap stuff.
Maybe you should look at the article again, or even the summary. This isn't the CRTC, this is ACTRA and SOCAN. While groups like this are pretty powerful in the U.S., they're really not too powerful up here.
And do you really think the CRTC is going to tax ISPs? That would be Bell and Rogers? When have the CRTC ever sttod up to either of those companies?
But now you're talking about the MVC Except pattern. In other words, it's MVC except for a few things we threw in there. So in the case you've cited, you've broken the MVC pattern.
That's not to say that what you're doing is wrong. In this case being slavish to a pattern creates worse software.
True, but compared to the engine of a Model A Ford, the engine in a modern car is a paragon of efficiency.
Hydrogen technology is still in its nascent stages. The best thing to do is to adopt it and then there will be a reason for companies to research more efficient ways of converting hydrogen to energy.
A hypothetical tree dwelling civilisation would try to reign in the forces around it.
Would they? Certainly a tree dwelling civilization created by us would try.
My point is that low entropy and high entropy may just be a matter of perspective. We have a perspective that is coloured by our circumstances, i.e., an agricultural society on a small planet. What would a completely different society see as low vs. high entropy? How about an advanced society of hunter gatherers? How about a society made up of intelligent stars? Or gaseous beings that live in the surface of a gas giant? What would low vs high entropy look like to them?
Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla - application of technology developed at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee
Transmeta - innovations that failed to deliver
Google - PageRank already acknowledged, no other innovations
Yahoo - application of technology developed in academia
Facebook - blogs, internal e-mail, instant messaging and pictures - not seeing a lot of innovation
Napster - somewhat innovative application of technology that had existed for decades
Cognio - never heard of them, wikipedia says what they do but nothing about them stands out as particularly innovative
Sorry, still not seeing al
It sounds like you're working in an area of a company that doesn't do innovation. I'm going to assume that you're a software developer (and since this is Slashdot, I've probably got about an 80% chance of being right). If you're working at a bank, or a manufacturing firm, or any other non-software company, of course you're not going to be doing innovation. Real innovation for software will come mostly from software companies along with a few innovations from other areas that have lots of money and absolutely need certain advances (e.g., I read that some of the best research in functional languages was being done in the high finance sector because they need parallelism). The fact is, advances in cars are going to come from car companies, advances in medicines are going to come from pharmaceutical companies.
I've given two examples of companies that have been innovative in the past ten years. How about you give he names of some small companies that have been innovative? Not just companies that have created new products based on existing technologies but real innovation based on real technological advances. And for a real challenge, try to come up with companies outside the world of software.
Your points might make sense for Windows 7 but don't forget that they've been working on Vista for about five years. And decisions to support backward compatibility by using a virtual machine would have had to have been made when they first started. That's not a decision that can be tweaked into the operating system a week before shipping. And at the time that major design was being done on Vista, virtualization was still a nascent technology with no guarantee that it would do what they needed it to do within the time frame they needed it.
Sure, what a few hundred dollars here, a few thousand dollars there. Especially in this economy when you're never sure whether or not you'll have a job tomorrow. QWho needs to pay the rent when you can have the latest software instead?
My point with Google is that they were one of the few small companies that were truly innovative. And PageRank is the only real innovation that I can think of that Google has made (pretty much all of their other offerings are just good applications of existing technology, specifically HTTP requests which invented by Microsoft).
But I stand by my thesis that most basic innovation is coming from large companies. We don't get a wow from it because most innovation is incremental. For example, GE has done some amazing things with MRIs in the past ten years. Each new model wasn't really all that different from the model the year before but looking at them right now compared to ten years ago is pretty impressive.
I didn't say virtualization didn't exist but as an enterprise strength model for seamlessly running applications on a client as if they were running natively, VirtualPC certainly wasn't ready five years ago and really neither was VMWare.
Small companies like Toyota with hybrid cars? Or the advances in cell phone technology like Samsung and Nokia? High definition television? the International Space Station? The fact is most innovation comes from bigger companies. Google is so amazing because PageRank was an innovation. Most other startups are only applying existing technologies in a new way.
I assume this is the way that Microsoft is going. But let's face it, virtualization is only becoming fully capable as of the last year or so. Vista has been in development for at least five years. I can understand why they didn't commit to a technology that was not only unproven at design time but wasn't even an idea.
On the other hand, there are real reasons not to go with virtualization such as performance and security. So who knows where they are going to go with backwards compatibility.
Microsoft is the 800# gorilla in the room because it doesn't break backward compatibility. I'm not a mac fanboi but from what I've heard the various changes from one version to the next over the past ten years were not as seamless as you indicated. Most of my friends who use macs (none of whom are technical, they're all in the design space) just gave up on trying to get their old software to work with the new version and bought all new software. Compare that with Microsoft where althought they're not officially supported, almost all DOS applications will still run. So if you bought some piece of software in 1988 for DOS 3.0 chances are pretty good that it will run on Vista.
You're really asking the wrong people about this. Most of the replies you're going to get on Slashdot will be no restrictions because I wouldn't want restrictions on my machine. This is true for adults but you're dealing with children, some as young as 11 years old.
The people you really should be talking to are the parents in your district. Ultimately what their children see and how they interact with the world is up to the parents. I imagine that you will probably have a number of views that you will have to synthesize. Perhaps even create a number of different user profiles and allow parents to choose which one their child will fit into. But the first stop is ask the parents. As an upside, some of the parents will have grappled with many of the same problems at work and will probably have some insights.
As opposed to everybody else here who are so busy that they don't even have the time to look at Slashdot. Oh, wait...
Given all the arguing over language dogma here on Slashdot and everywhere else on the internet, I always thought that computer languages were religions.
Is this what you meant? A few sentences later :
Complete failure?
AT&T existed as THE phone company from 1879 to 1982. 103 years of servicing the communications of a growing USA. Creating a long distance infrastructure for an entire nation. Most companies would love to be such failures.
How about the government monopoly on the roads? Or on national defense? Currency? Courts? What they probably didn't teach you in 10th grade social studies is that everything is a trade-off, and while monopolies are bad sometimes and for some things, they are often good for other things.
The assumption that monopolies are bad is based on the idea that the only true value is progress and perhaps financial returns. Monopolies promote stability, predictability and ease of regulation. Personally I thnk that for communications infrastructure I'd value stability and predictability.
I did read the article (or rather skimmed it). It's a technical RFC. No explanation why it took nine years.
These standards are supposed to influence actual products that are used by actual people. To most people trying to write software, they are part of the analysis that goes into how to write software. If a business analyst on any of my projects were take nine years to finish his work, I'd fire him.
I know, I know, comittees take a long time, blah, blah blah..... But look at it from the other side: if you had decided to create a new piece of software in 1999 but wanted to wait for this RFC so that your software were standards compliant, your market would have passed you by. If on the other hand you went ahead and built the software you would now be faced with the choice of not being standards compliant or throwing away a substantial part of your software investment in order to satisfy a standard that is eight and a half years late.
Standards are important. If this is the quality of work we can expect from standards bodies, then perhaps standards are too important to be left in the hands of standards bodies.
Nine years? Nine YEARS? Are you kidding me?
Is it any wonder that so much software is not standards compliant. I mean seriously, if standards bodies really want to be taken seriously outside of academia, they really need to start working more than a few minutes a month. Have these people thought about adopting this standard: the forty hour work week.
I for one am glad Microsoft is planning on certifying SSD disks. Hopefully that will keep Joe's SSD and Auto Wrecking out of the SSD space. I work in the Microsoft world and from what I've seen most of the really big problems aren't caused by Microsoft but by third party vendors in both the hardware and software space building cheap stuff.
Maybe you should look at the article again, or even the summary. This isn't the CRTC, this is ACTRA and SOCAN. While groups like this are pretty powerful in the U.S., they're really not too powerful up here.
And do you really think the CRTC is going to tax ISPs? That would be Bell and Rogers? When have the CRTC ever sttod up to either of those companies?
But now you're talking about the MVC Except pattern. In other words, it's MVC except for a few things we threw in there. So in the case you've cited, you've broken the MVC pattern.
That's not to say that what you're doing is wrong. In this case being slavish to a pattern creates worse software.
True, but compared to the engine of a Model A Ford, the engine in a modern car is a paragon of efficiency.
Hydrogen technology is still in its nascent stages. The best thing to do is to adopt it and then there will be a reason for companies to research more efficient ways of converting hydrogen to energy.
Would they? Certainly a tree dwelling civilization created by us would try. My point is that low entropy and high entropy may just be a matter of perspective. We have a perspective that is coloured by our circumstances, i.e., an agricultural society on a small planet. What would a completely different society see as low vs. high entropy? How about an advanced society of hunter gatherers? How about a society made up of intelligent stars? Or gaseous beings that live in the surface of a gas giant? What would low vs high entropy look like to them?
Storing energy. And apparently not a very efficient one.
But then again, the first internal combustion engines weren't very efficient either and look where we are now.