3. i hope mozilla succeeds past ALL our wildest expectations
BUT.
the news we NEED to hear isn't about release candidates
THE NEWS WE ALL NEED TO HEAR ABOUT MOZILLA IS THAT AOL AND/OR SUN AND/OR IBM AND/OR EARTHLINK AND/OR the EU AND/OR CHINA or ???????
is going to adopt mozilla as its mandatory standard, at the expense of other browsers...
'cause other than that we're all a bunch of ICU nurses/doctors playing a Dead Pool bet
sorry!
REALITY BITES!
......
Re:One of My Favorites...Well, OK, BUT.....
on
The Forever War
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· Score: 3, Insightful
"What made the novel truely disturbing was the alienation that the soldiers experienced upon returning home."
And that was the essence of what the book was about.....
I read the book the week it was published (still have that copy), I was very impressed with Haldeman's treatment of the cultural and psychological aspects of isolation and alientation on soldiers as time passed in their societies "back home".
And from a craft point of view, I still think that it is Haldeman's best book.
However, "Forever War", for me, fairly light on the "s" portion of s/f.
Also, any comparison to Starship Troopers (the book), is merely superficial resemblance.
Johnny Rico, in ST, is the device Heinlein uses to show us the effects of a "limitless war" upon both people and societies, when confronted with an enemy so inhuman that they are merely "Bugs" (a device Scott Card has also used and improved upon in his "Enders" series).....
However, in FW, William Mandela IS the story. His POV dominates the entire book (as was Haldeman's intention).
We never see a maturation curve on Johnny Rico. Sure, he gets older and wiser and tougher as his combat time accumulates, but we don't get to see into his mind the way we do with William Mandela.
Haldeman does a great job with the soldier's POV and his own personal experiences in "Nam ring out nicely in the book, BUT...
"Forever War" is a book that looks within and Starship Troopers is a book that looks without....
s/f has ALWAYS had a wide range of treatment of science and technology, from the wild-but-nonscientific "raygun and mind control" pennings of Doc Smith and his "Lensmen" series to the scientifically carefully crafted work of Charles Sheffield.
Forever War is stong on the story and characters and the resulting insights, but if you are expecting some "kick ass" or unique treatment of relativistic effects, you'll be somewhat disappointed, not much science is being committed.
Right Now every technology/media major player is pursuing the Dream of "subscription revenues", since it is widely perceived by the B School Crowd that this is the best long term Internet success strategy
Earthlink is NOT buying OmniSky out of altrusim, its buying OmniSky to "lock in" as many revenue streams as possible.
That's why MS wants Stinger (and MSN) to suceed SO badly, that they just pulled Maritz off the Project and put Steve in charge of it. Kinda strange the MS CEO taking direct responsibility for a project, isnt it?
Same reason for the shakeups at AOLTIMEWARNER, and for the recent OpenSource-ish(?) attempts in the Symbian/WAP/wireless crowd...
EVERY company that has a "customer base" wants to convert that base to "subscription" or to "even more subscription" (that's why so many wireless providers are eyeing the Docomo services model with such unabashed avarice in their eyes)
this will spell big trouble for both openess and transparency on the Internet, you'll have a AOL-based content control model that will only get more and more restrictive as time goes by...
this will also crowd marginal players out of the market altogether, as they are forced to spend capital trying to match the Big Guys "service for service, feature for feature"...
it will also lead to more revenue tying between the big companies, as they insist on a cut of each others pass through traffic (seen it all before with the telcos, both globally and nationally), leading to a consolidation of content creators, distributors and technology providers...(in english, 2-5 Global Giant Megalopolies (regulated by a global bureaucracy) who provide the technology and the content to much/most of the developed world). From the OmniSky Website ( http://www.omnisky.com )
Dear Valued OmniSky Customer,
Today we announced that OmniSky has agreed to sell its subscriber base and key technology assets to Atlanta-based EarthLink, a leading Internet service provider.
We are very excited about the prospects of this agreement and what it means for you...
...You can look forward to satisfying your need for new features, enhanced functionality, and additional device options in the coming months, all from one company.
(off topic?) Guess we now know that i'm not kharma whoring, since some narrow minded Moderator/writer has mod'd me down twice for having an opinion that disagrees with theirs...let's go for 3 why don't we?..and let's give a big "Thank You" to this same person(s) for tolerance and reason and trying to further the breadth and depth of rational discussion on/. THANKS! for YOUR contribution to the/. Community.
when ***YOU*** are paying $200.00/month for content controlled and regulated connectivity and can't choose your access methods without becoming a "subscription slave" to one of the 2-5 Global Big Media/Content/Access companies, who will "legally" control or own the content on YOUR computer, please remember this post.
Ditto -- the next time you bitch about the quality of discussion on a topic and the quantity of the asci art and 11-year old trolls. Thanks again for your tolerance, reason and understanding.
"(I've heard of many other cities that suffer from these conditions, in places ranging from SoCal to NoVa)"
Here in SoCal there ARE a number of neighborhoods "stranded" without DSL, some are high income, some aren't. Mostly PacBell gives you the "we haven't received enough requests to deploy a DSL switch in that area." OR "The CO in that area doesn't have the ability to deploy a DSL switch" answers. Then if you call(ed) Covad/Verizon/??? or any of the other DSL competitors, you received yet another run around.
Aerie Networks will ONLY be able to make this work if they can get most of Ricochets customers back (i was a HUGE Ricochet fan) and due to the fact that they bought Metricom's assets for around 8 cents/dollar (good for them).
"To avoid the $4 to $10 fees Metricom paid on each pole-top transmitter, Aerie is negotiating with municipalities to exchange free service for pole space. This represents major potential savings: 10,300 radios sit on the utility poles of Los Angeles alone, according to Aaronson"
great plan, but in El Lay, where i live, we already have a ton of wireless in the municipal infrastructre (most city workers have city bought/paid for cell phones), i hope our retarded City Council goes for it, but we have BIG budget problems and traditionally they'd rather "take the money and run"...
However, many future deployments of NEW capacity are still likely going to cost Aerie the same that they cost Metricom, and the user h/w (the Merlin and AirCard 300/400) is still fairly expensive...
so, it sounds like they can revive the old Metricom network (though i've heard number of the pole top local transmitters have, UM, disappeared under strange circumstances)...
BUT, will they be able to deploy additional capacity fast enough to compete with other wireless technologies?
as/. has pointed out -- 802.11A rocks and it's subtantially faster than Ricochet...
there have already been articles about some people assembing 802.11B networks in remote/rural areas and intentionally using "edge bleed" to connect their wireless networks into hybrid WANs ("Build Your Own Local Wireless ISP/VoIP Phone Company")....as wireless bridges become cheaper and faster, is Ricochet going to retain its appeal??...Metricom always pitched it at "IBM ad" mobile workers...who is Aerie going to make its "key customer"...
Normally, I do not respond to AC posters, however your post dumps so much dis-information into the/. channel, and we don't want to ruin young minds, SO, proceeding with the following assumptions;
1. That you are either an attorney or have some other close association (due to the fact the garbage that you've spouted is right out of the ABA (American Bar Associaton) Public Relations Handbook)
2. And that you lack either/both the character and integrity to provide even the minimal personal ID of a/. handle. Which demonstrates that you don't even believe your own lies and that's what causes you to resort to anonymous character assassination
I'll deal with just a couple of the most egregious pieces of disinformation you're sprouting.
TO WIT:
"On the other hand, whenever those SAME Americans are called in for jury duty, they're the ones determining the amount of the damages. Funny, eh."
Well, it would be funny if lawyers didn't routine seek to dismiss anyone from a jury with real education, most esp advanced sci/tech degrees or military service, all of which will be routinely be dismissed as potential jurors by preemptory challenges. Best way to get off a jury? Be an average American between 25-55, have some education and pay your bills regularly, You're GONE! SA, The OJ Criminal Jury The 12 Stupidest People in the World
"Furthermore, you're way off-base with regards to contingency fees. First, they're capped in many states, generally around 30%... sometimes less. Second, if a plaintiff doesn't want to pay their lawyer on a contingency basis, they don't have to! It is entirely the choice of the plaintiff. The alternative of course, would be paying up front, but a lot of people couldn't afford that, EVEN THOUGH they have what would otherwise turn out to be successful claims. Third, lawyers assume a risk on contingency: they can easily not get paid at all, should they lose. Or if they don't win enough for their client, they'll wind up losing. (plaintiffs paying on a contingent basis suffer no risk, remember)"
That isn't merely a lie, it's a STINKING lie, by omission. You forgot to mention the "plus expenses" part of that. The nationwide average lawyer's contingency cut is roughly 1/3 of the settlement/judgement PLUS EXPENSES, I believe in the multi-million dollar plus liability cases, it averages to around 42% of the take from their crime. You also forgot to mention that many times the lawyer will loan poor clients living expenses during the trial period, and then charge them MAXIMUM LEGAL INTEREST ON THOSE LIVING EXPENSE LOANS.....can you say, "Shylocking"? Factors don't make as much money.
Also, the cases are not chosen by their merit to either society or a group or by the actual damages done thereto. The cases are chosen by HOW DEEP THE POCKETS OF THE DEFENDANT AND HOW STUPID A JURY CAN BE EMPANELED...anyone reading this can go to Google and Google the publications of the AmericanTrialLawyers association and check out litigation strategies, there and elsewhere on the web.
Although you must remember: one of the GOALS of tort law, which has a lovely history dating back to the better part of a millennium, is to spread costs, and to put costs on those who can bear them. McD's can bear paying the plaintiff's medical expenses FAR better than she can. And McD's customers, should prices have to go up, et al, can bear the very widely spread damages even better.
i'm sure you didn't mean to, but you actually told the truth here (in a sideways fashion)
Corporations DON'T PAY these judgements, these costs are passed right on to their customers (twice, lost tax revenues from deductions from gross income for the Corp lower their taxes). Frivolous product liability suits exist because, lawyers can pick the pockets of EVERY PERSON THAT BUYS THAT PRODUCT/SERVICE of a large natinal/mulitnational corporation, Because they would rather settle a bullshit lawsuit, than HAVE THE BAD PUBLICITY...when anyone but lawyers or the government does this, it's called EXTORTION. It's legal when lawyers do it.
There are many good lawyers doing good work in civil rights, criminal justice and even class action where there is real harm...but the number of bottom feeding, scum-sucking, sub human, ambulance chasers robbing Americans by holding up large corporations on frivolous liability suits is LEGION...people like you, advertently or otherwise, are brainlessly repeating the self-serving lies that these blood suckers use to "ennoble" themselves in the eyes of the uneducated and unsophisticated public (so they can CONTINUE buying their Beemers and luxury homes, of course).
.......
Re:A brilliant book....Sexuality and Race, Too
on
The Left Hand of Darkness
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· Score: 5, Informative
not just "feminist" issues are covered in LHOD, she takes a pretty good swipe at sexual and racial indentification and sterotyping, too
she was way ahead of her time, as Heinlein was with "I Will Fear No Evil", when Heinlein's protagonist "he" becomes a "she" and has "her" first orgasm, many reviewers had strokes over the "smut"...In LHOD, LeGuin's approaches the subject much more subtlely and makes her points very effectively, just as Varley did with Scirocco Jones in the Demon Trilogy
...
"Actually, that McDonald's case you're so quick to dismiss is exactly like this."
since you seem to be defending a legal system that perceived as rampantly irresponsible by most Americans (in poll after poll*n)...to be precise, i wasn't dismising the McDonald's lawsuit, I was ridiculing it for illustrative purposes.
The DOI/Indian Trust case is not a product/contingent liabilty civil suit, you must think that all/.'rs are stupid. The DOI/Indian Trust case is about the DOI failing to exercise due diligence in the handling of the Indian Trust, to wit, the irresponsible and deleterious handling of both trust fiduciary assets and confidential trust data on its participants and beneficiaries Its ***NOT*** about Bottom Feeding Contingent Liability Lawyers who are sucking this country dry. I hope the Judge in the DOI case breaks it off at the knee in the DOI.
People who support extremely irresponsible and irrational jury decisions, such as the McDonald's case, are costing everybody in America both money and opportunity, here's why:
1."McDonald's profit on coffee sales for two days. That is hardly a burdensome amount - enough to get your attention, but probably something like $20-$50 for us..."
THE SETTLEMENT DIDN'T COST MCDONALD'S ONE NICKEL, IT WAS PAID FOR BY MCDONALD'S ***CUSTOMERS***,...the "us" you were talking about. There is NO "McDonald's". The judgement was also paid for by McD's shareholders.
2. By encouraging people like that the person that sued McD, you create a society that values litigation over common sense.
I don't WANT to be on the road with someone who doesn't grasp that "coffee is hot". Like Stella Liebeck. I hope Stella (and her blood sucking attorney) remain objects of ridicule for every day of the rest of their lives. I also don't want to be on the road with someone who can't identify and manage simple threats to their personal safety.
"Consumer" Lawyers (contingent liability bottomfeeders specifically -- there are many lawyers who contribute to society and do great work for the poor and the needy) create an environment that discourages innovation and makes everyone American intelligent enough to grasp the (scalding liquids = personal danger) equation feel like the legal system is a bad joke designed for morons and con-artists.
Liability insurance add huge dollars to the cost of ***EVERY PRODUCT WE BUY***, it adds enormous costs to every startup company that wants to produce a item for public consumption/operation. When I bought my first Honda Interceptor I was trolling through the Owner's Manual and there in 20pt "Liability Lawyer Bold" was an instruction NOT TO DRINK THE BATTERY ACID!
Bob Heinlein used to have some of his literary characters joke that the standard you should have to meet in order to be allowed to reproduce was the ability to grasp and perform rudimentary integral calculus....I wonder what Bob would think about people who had be instructed that "hot coffee is hot" or "don't drink lethal chemicals"?
BONUS ROUND: Last year/b4 in Canada, some poor kid, during finals, had been on a classic "study to you drop" push, after a particular exam (Math???), he went on a drinking binge with his friends, got good and tanked (hadn't had much sleep/food for a coupla days)...sometime, early AM, he went to get a Coke from the dorm vending machine, he didn't have any change, so he shook the machine to loosen a Coke...didn't work too well, the machine fell over and crushed him to death (suffocation)....
his parents are sueing (Coke and the College) for big $$$$, claiming that Coca-Cola hadn't met the Canadian labeling laws for "dangerous machinery", by not providing an instructional label....they parents are angry and grief stricken and some a'hole attorney is looking to collect his 40-50% on their grief...Let's see; drunk, stealing a coke, shaking a several hundred pound vending machine with no one in sight, couldn't get out of the way in time...yeah, sure sounds like Coke's fault to me
.....
"In a sweeping action with far-reaching but unclear ramifications, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted the emergency request, which was brought on behalf of 300,000 American Indians whose assets are housed on a computer infrastructure so easily penetrable that a court investigator and his team of security experts were able to break in and repeatedly access, modify and even create trust data -- all without raising a response from the government."
it's actually well past time for the courts to hold organizations whose systems are busted by 12 year old scriddies running "canned scripts" from Toolz sites
how would you feel if this were your families' or your companie's sensitive and/or private information??? Information about your 502 or your daughter's rape, or your son's juvenille arrest for possessing underage TeleTubbie Pr0n?
"Coupled with the judge's action were criticisms from members of Congress about the security failures. "The GAO told us five years ago that the fund was in shambles," said Rep. Jim Hansen (R-Utah,) chairman of the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over Indian affairs. "Now we learn that a computer security system deployed in 1999 is virtually worthless," he said."
i don't think anyone on/. wants to see liability extended to the same absurd levels of product and contingent liability that have been demonstrated in the McDonalds and other Python-esque liability cases, BUT...
...isn't it about time the direct creators, distributors and managers of dangerously insecure computer systems have at least SOME small legal responsible (and limited accompanying monetary liability)????
If the facts on the Indian Trust website ARE true, DOI (and Congress) have long been aware of the problems and have been ducking the bullet on fixing it...if this were my money/info, I'd sure be upset...
Re:Interesting...Liked the engineering economics
on
Why ADCo?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
BUT, even the SFGate article says"
"The reasons for that, boiled down, revolve around the costs involved in small telecom companies trying to do too many things all at once."
i haven't read the study in depth yet, but looking at the TOC and skimming the section heads, they seem to ignore a POLITICAL reality....
The Telcos ***DON'T WANT*** to solve the LastMileProblem.
The Telcos had, up until the construction of the fiber backbone, ARPANET and courts' decision that made telcos open the backbone up to competitors, a REALLY SWEET business model
strictly "Cost Plus, Plus" and very cozy relationships with their Fed/State regulators, many of whom were telco execs doing the "Public Service" tour of duty...which made the telco business a "name your own rates" kinda business
the more broadband deployed, the less value switched circuits have, and the more value packets acquire
the Telcos would much rather sell analog switched, retail priced voice services (where they created the business model and still control it), than...
...packet based, circuit-less (or virtual circuits, if you prefer) communications, where they cannot charge per packet and have to share their packet revenues with broadband providers...
i'm routing, uh, rooting, for the ADCOs, but, if you will recall, CLEC's were also supposed to solve at least part of the problem, and before them the RBOC's (soon to be "The RBOC or So")were going to wire the "bridge to the future"...
as a engineer geek, it sounds to me like the ADCOs can solve acutally solve the deployment of high speed fiber to the businesses and homes in the local loop (though you'll probably end up with a very limited number of very big ADCOs, economies of scale being very real)....
but, what about a business model that will allow broadband providers to survive w/o the consumer being charged "per packet" (like Docomo) or "per bandwidth" like fractional T?
Switched circuits are wasting assets, telcos and analog voice are doomed businesses,BUT...
..so far, no successful new business model has emerged to replace them
...
Re:Real advance is...Streaming Video ALL OVER
on
Electronic Paper
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· Score: 2
Uhm, no. The thing would have to project different views to different perspectives
i'm not saying that the 1stGen of this will be "adaptive", it won't...as you implied, that's way beyond anything we understand now about perspective presentation
it will "mimic" specific local surrounds, so you'll take on textures, colors, backgrounds, prob with user input, this will basically be a "nighttime" technology, where a SpecOp/Sniper will select his own "localized" camo...mimic a local; tree, bush, rock, whatever
the ghillie suit is designed to break up those "regular, symmetrical shapes" (which form the base of nightime vision for humans), this will be a ghillie suit that's somewhat more adaptable to local surroundings...it will NOT adaptively morph with movement, that's still sci-fi
Re:Real advance is...Streaming Video ALL OVER
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 3
1. Advertisings displays out of BRunner and Neuromancer, entire urban Downtowns morphed into 24/7 streaming video walls
This will definitly come to be - specially if producing large surfaces of e-paper is cheap enough. Then again, having moving images all around you might be a bit of a sensory overload...
In a sense, i cheated here, most downtowns are already chock a block with video, in store windows and on the tops and sides of buildings, neon, spot lighted displays and Mitsu Jumbotrons and local merchants using LED/LCD displays for their own purposes...epaper will just help organize and increase the deployment rate, as it is less intrusive than putting up a jumbotron....the sensory overload is already bad in some american cities, yes, it will get worse
2. Guess, Gap, Gucci, Hillfiger, Lauren, et al incorporating streaming logo displays in clothing
Transparent clothing with smoothly moving semi-transparent areas....
as the costs of this stuff scales down, you will have clothing with lots of panel and not much fabric, you can use the panels to mimic fabrics and other textures; scales, skin from other creatures, your desktop wallpaper, your grandbaby's face, whatever...imagine the lawsuits that are gonna happen with this technology
3. Functional PDA's that are wearable and shapeable to specialized applications
The problem here is how to input data and give commands to the PDA. An actual flexible screen is probably a no-no for most applications (imagine reading your newspaper with no hands - not very practical)
certain people are aleady working on various types of virtual keyboards (one of these companies won a "Best of COMDEX" Award last month, the Virtutech Simics - Way Cool http://www.virtutech.com -- you could have a wrist bracelet PDA screen with the processor/hardware in a bracelet watch combo connected with wireless
4. Rooms that can be turned in SensorySurround MM experiences with 5.1 or DTS or DolbyPro, throw in a DVD or IMAX experience, talk about "Immersive"!!
If the wide e-paper surfaces are made cheaply maybe. The problem here is either big pixels (small number of pixels - big surface) or lack of storage and bandwidth (lots of pixels, lots of data - to keep the same pixel-size, the number of pixels increases roughly with the square of the diagonal, and so does the ammount of data)
Absolutely True --- a combination of Moore's Law and "spoofing" background textures they way games do now will provide some solutions here, until such environments can determine your "area of focus"..you don't need great detail in those areas behind/to the side of you
5. Genuine combat gear (ala "Predator") that can mimic the surrounding environment..the ultimate "Ghillie Suit" for snipers and SpecOps
If you can get good enough sensors to feed the screens plus color screens, then yes, this is a very realistic possibility.
and currently being worked on in the NL's, it won't be "invisibility" or anything like it, but, even in the 1stGen products it will take tactical camoflage to new levels of effectives (and drive the overhead's CRAZY)..imagine a "tarp" of this stuff covering a tank or a combat fuel depot, mimicing the surrounding terrain, with the tarp also being an emi/rfi shield???
6. Completely accurate training environments for many, many "environmentally difficult" training situations from fire/rescue, law enforcement, combat, flight, driving, to Wall Street Trading Floor Simulations...WHOO DOGGIE!
Preparing for high-stress situations wich happen in non-controled environments (an airplane cockpit is a controled environment) requires not only quality imaging but also other inputs such as sound, smell, temperature - imagine training fireman - some of the most inportant inputs for an experienced fireman come from the senses of smell (smoke), sound (a wooden beam starting to break) and touch (feeling burning hot air coming from a certain direction).
the modern commerical flight simulators already provide most of the necessary environmental factors and when you consider the military flight training sims for the Shuttle and fighter craft (i've heard the F-18 and F-117A sims are remarkably life like), we pretty much have most of this paradigm defined and explored, once epaper is delivered, it's up to the biz types to deliver viable products
in your excellent firefighting example, using the "projection" type of training rooms already in existence for law enforcement and the military, how hard would it be for a company like WED (Disney Imageneering) to add many of the olfactory and tactile elements as they do right now in their theme parks?
perfect???? of course not, but quite a bit better than what we have now....a step forward is just that
Re:Real advance is...Streaming Video ALL OVER
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
this is the kind of advance that shows how far the Kingdoms of the Sun and the Soft are out of it...
The NextGen of Tech may well go to the device manufacturers and the consumer megalopolies who actually try to deliver what customers want...
Imagine the Gibsonian uses for this stuff...
1. Advertisings displays out of BRunner and Neuromancer, entire urban Downtowns morphed into 24/7 streaming video walls
2. Guess, Gap, Gucci, Hillfiger, Lauren, et al incorporating streaming logo displays in clothing
3. Functional PDA's that are wearable and shapeable to specialized applications
4. Rooms that can be turned in SensorySurround MM experiences with 5.1 or DTS or DolbyPro, throw in a DVD or IMAX experience, talk about "Immersive"!!
5. Genuine combat gear (ala "Predator") that can mimic the surrounding environment..the ultimate "Ghillie Suit" for snipers and SpecOps
6. Completely accurate training environments for many, many "environmentally difficult" training situations from fire/rescue, law enforcement, combat, flight, driving, to Wall Street Trading Floor Simulations...WHOO DOGGIE!
7.??????????????
Gibson, Shirley, Bova, Vinge, Cadigan...Your World and Welcome to it!
......
in the just completed (rather dull) Fall COMDEX, i spoke to a number of people who had iPod's, they all loved them, BUT, about half of them were using them as portable storage, in addition to their MP3 duties....
most popular use was transferring movies to your iPod for viewing through your (apple, obviously) notebook.....
at 10GB and 250$, this also becomes a good alternative for the Wintel crowd as a "Personal Storage Device"...
you could put a movie file, some MP3/WMA's, TeleTubbie Pr0n, etc on this, your backups of key programs, data, etc...
for the money this is a LOT cheaper (if slower -- til USB 2) then the 1394 external drives people (including me) have been buying and much more portable....
Normally, i don't respond to AC posters, but you weren't obnoxious and you seemed to be actually trying to deal with my points, so, out of courtesy (can i say that on/.?), here's a rather abbreviated response (prob still 2 long for lameness)
"I don't think you read it very closely. "
Not to be pissy in that/. kinda way, but actually i did, i appreciate your literalism, but, i've been dealing with these kind of coders for a long time (and in large teams), so my reaction is about 70% to Joel's words and about 30% to what i've SEEN when you design/code his way:
eliminating our agreements, here's my response
1. More features are always better features
Ok, but
2. Coders are not responsible for optimization
YOU: "He didn't say that. He said that most memory "optimization" doesn't actually help much, which is true."
I wasn't referring to his quote about memory optimization, I was referring to his repeated statements about "bloatware" and "features". Optimization is not merely about reducing run times or footprint, it also is about choosing the right design and architecture. If you have a program where a given feature is used >1% of the time by >1% of the users and you keep it in new version, you have "non-optimized" code. Giving marketing droids free reign to include features leads to bloatware products like Word and Excel, where even MS acknowledges that most users NEVER use most features. I think Joel makes it pretty clear right here with "For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner". That's a defintion of the ESSENCE of non-optimized software design.
3. Hardware vendors must not change h/w designs that would break installed base, even to improve their architecture
YOU: "He didn't say that at all."
No, he sure didn't SAY it. Because essential to Joel's thinking on code/design is that you "fix it in the next version". He makes that perfectly clear in numerous places in the interview. Well, if you have version after version....and each of them getting bloatier, your hardware vendor has lost his ability to do any major redesign of the h/w without either breaking his h/w or your computer. As someone pointed out earlier in this thread, that leads, for example, to the microcode solution (and in devices, shimware). The best example of this is both Transmeta and Intel, both of whom have to mask more efficent cpu designs under an inefficient microcode layer in order not to break the installed base. Transmeta (bless them) is at least doing it by design.
4. Your s/w is SOOOO... important that shipping delays for optimization/tuning/additional debugging are not to be accepted
YOU: "You threw in that "additional debugging". He never advocated shipping bugs. As for optimization and tuning... he didn't say that there are no circumstances under which you can delay the software for optimization. He did say that it's not generally a good idea... and he's right. Generally, it's better to ship something correct but slow on time, and release updates, so that you at least have something on the market, unless the thing is so unbearably slow that it's unusable. "
WHOA! "Generally, it's better to ship something correct but slow on time", REALLY? better for WHO? Certainly NOT the user (Wordperfect Windows 6, dBase Windows 1, Access 1.0 and the 1.1 release are perfect examples of this) who ends up paying $$$$$ for crap and then hope the vendor is going to get around to fixing it. And on your/his point about "it's not generally a good idea.." to delay RTM/ship for additional optimization, if you've lead a commericial software team (even a small one) you know "it's not a good idea..." from managment, will turn into "Don't". by the time it gets to your coders.
6. There's never a reason to rewrite extent code, EVER...(here's my nominee for that reason -- Microsoft Outlook)
YOU: "No, he said there's never a reason for a ground-up rewrite --- and he's right. Refactoring, on the other hand, is great: rewriting extant code a bit at a time."
Now, it's YOU who are taking him out of context (as you have accused me of doing). NOT ONCE does he mention "refactoring" code. The closest he comes to it is suggesting that if something is really broken, you can rewrite it a little bit at a time.
There are actually LOTS of reasons to do a ground up rewrite. I wasn't being sarcastic when i mentioned Outlook, nor was i bashing MS, i know and like a lot of them and respect many of their products. Many Softies are terminally embarassed by Outlook and all the problems it has caused.
The architectural design of Outlook is so poor that it has led to billions of dollars of lost data and systems damage. Yet, because of all of the things that Joel has promoted (and MS' ego), they keep recreating that program, version after version. The mistakes of the earlier versions are retained and the new version have new exploits created as a consequence of the old architecture
7. Architecture is secondary to UI, maintanence of the UI experience is the MOST important standard
YOU:"I don't recall him saying that either, but maybe I missed it."
I can see how, if you don't do a lot of design or architecture, how that would be non-obivous.
Simply put, if you can't ever change the base code, you can't ever effectively change the UI, as the integration between the UI and base code is (or should be) the tightest of all the design bindings in the entire OS or App. Witness "Windows Explorer", it's a clunky, ugly, non-effective piece of crap because it is bound to the files systems design and the UI. Everyone hates it (incl many Softies), but you can't do much, if anything, about it.
8. Any problems caused by #7 above should never be fixed by redesign, but instead should be prioritized and patched by response to User problems.
YOU: "Yeah, that is redesign, regardless of whether you want to use some derogatory term like "patching" or not."
NOPE, sorry, these are both very clear "terms of art" with five decades of clear definition and usage behind them. You don't "design" a patch they way you "redesign" a app, system or even a feature.
Patches fix things that are broken. Usu with a "one patch" to "one problem" ratio, unless you really messed up your design and QC (if you want to see what happens when you attempt to "redesign" by "patch" -- see the NT4 "Service Pack of Death").
"Redesign" is not done at the "support" or "QC" level, but at the "architectural" level, redesign consists of stepping back from the extent product and saying "how can we do this better next time?" NOT "How can we save ourselves some future design time by using this patch to throw in additional features?"
........
"Joel: Don't get me started! If you're a software company, there are lots of great business reasons to love bloatware. For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make users' lives better (if they use them) and don't usually hurt (if they don't). As a user, if your software vendor stops, before shipping, and spends two months squeezing the code down to make it 50% smaller, the net benefit to you is going to be imperceptible, but you went for two months without new features that you needed, and THAT hurt."
Can you spot the "seat of the pants/never piss of the installed base"-oriented design fallicies just in that one paragraph:
1. More features are always better features
2. Coders are not responsible for optimization
3. Hardware vendors must not change h/w designs that would break installed base, even to improve their architecture
4. Your s/w is SOOOO... important that shipping delays for optimization/tuning/additional debugging are not to be accepted
further from the rest of the interview;
6. There's never a reason to rewrite extent code, EVER...(here's my nominee for that reason -- Microsoft Outlook)
7. Architecture is secondary to UI, maintanence of the UI experience is the MOST important standard
8. Any problems caused by #7 above should never be fixed by redesign, but instead should be prioritized and patched by response to User problems.
i could go on, but i think i've gotten the highlights, did i miss any???
Gee, can anybody figure out a s/w product(s) family that seems to be a living demo of (my phrase) "Design By Release Date, Redesign by User Complaints" School of coding????
i'll even agree with Joel that you should be very careful with "scratch" redesigns, and too many people would rather rewrite viable code than fix it....
BUT JEEZ, should you hold on to a payroll system written in FORTRAN69 (or LISP or ALGOL or FORTH...), just because it works, even if you have NO OTHER apps in FORTRAN and don't have one single FORTRAN programmer working for you????
.....
"The sober truth is that although consumers are bothered by multiple user IDs and passwords, most consumers don't see much relative value in having one credential to navigate the Web," Avivah Litan, vice president and research director for Gartner, said in a statement.
before "single sign on" becomes useful, let's consider just some of things that don't exist now, that are needed to make it useful/valuable/necessary...to Joe/Jane Average
1. micropayments - we've been talking about them for years..still no standards, still no positive participation from the major central banking systems..PayPal has had to fight to get as far as it has
2. user authentication - biometrics are coming along nicely, but they have no useful installed base to speak off, and the first gen laptops with biometric user control has no way to "authenticate" the user
3. encryption - no agreement on standards, with the US Gov fighting ANY kind of suggestion to implement standard encryption of email, and pushing for "back doors" in every type of system they can
4. trust - who do you want to have access to ALL your confidential info - Armey, Bush, Case, Daschle, Ellison, Gates, Gephardt, Levin, McNealy, Murdoch, Rather, Redstone?????? All of these individuals (and their respective orgs) have been repeatedly shown to be driven by, UH, "goal achieveing orientation" and NOT by "philosophical/ethical/moral orientation"
5. Systems Security - even if you perceive that you trust the above folk to know that you peruse "Teletubbie FreakySex Sites" or "Death, The Beginning of your New Love Life" newsgroups,
ALL of these orgs have systems with major security flaws...so even with the "best of intentions"...chances are the whole world will find out what you did with that purple teletubbie doll...(and if you keep the video in "My Pictures" we can probably all watch it, too).
i just attended MS Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, where PassPort "single sign on" was a BIG push by the MS marketeers...most of the attendees couldn't have cared less
it's much more likely that after all the members of the "Billionaire Boyz Klub" are done with wrangling over "single sign on" as a way to insure "vendor lock in", that the G will step in, and shove their vision of this down ***EVERYBODIES" throats..."for our own good", of course
In the late 19th century, Albert A Michelson, according to many the "Greatest" physicist of his time (and winner of the first Nobel prize in Physics (1907), decided to measure the speed of light...in 1878, he did so accurately for the first time, he was using about $10.00 of lab equipment, btw...his passion for accuracy and precision led to his teaming up with Edward W. Morley, in 1878 to prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", through the....
Michelson-Morley Experiment. Michelson's career had been golden, and he was widely regarded as the best physicist of the 19th century. So, everyone "knew" that he would successfully prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", which would be the finally block in the edifice of Classical Newtonian physics...
instead, the experiment went completeley wrong, conclusively proved the lack of the cosmic ether, and Newton was kicked to the gutter (as an explanation for sub-macroscopic events)...
here's a link to a pretty good, non-technical account of this from U of Va....http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.e du/lectures/michelson.html.....there's also a great page on Michelson here;....http://hum.amu.edu.pl/~zbzw/ph/sci/aam.ht m
In the 1950's, in the particle chambers of UCLA, strange traces were seen on the photograpic plates of particle collisions....physics of the time couldn't account for this particle, so the postdocs and the grad students waggishly nicknamed the unknown particle the "what-on", and many ignored it for over 20 years...
as instumentation and our undestanding of sub-nuclear particles became better, some other grad students, looking for new frontiers (and new dissertation topics), started researching the "what-on"...it has become....
The Quark and is now the center of the posh new "String Theory", which is yet another attempt to explain overall particle to particle interaction,and from the standpoint of "Classical Quantum Dynamics", Superstring theory kicks QD to the curb....here we go again.....
here's a good page on String Theory
http://superstringtheory.com/
the point being...these things we are discussing are so far beyond our abilities to directly sense or measure them, it's like the old story of the scientists examining an elephant in a lightless, closed room...
one scientist grabs the tail and thinks its a thin, long snake, another scientist grabs a tusk and thinks its a rhino, another grabs the trunk and thinks its a python...
since we have no ability to directly "view" or "measure" these things, we are using inference and deduction to provide us with our theories, yet as every generation of instrumentation improves and gives us new "information" we take that info and rework it...
face it, we could come up with a "Unified Theory" that completely explains our current "knowledge" about physics, to the satisfaction of 99% of the scientists on the face of the earth and....
it could be kicked over by some new experiment, just the way that Michelson-Morely kicked over "Classical" Physics...
Apple has led the educational market for many years, and 38K laptops is certainly a big win for them....
However, with M$ and the ***Billion Dollar*** Settlement offer still floating around (looking however less politically viable everday)
What can Apple do to keep their educational position?
they need to be putting Apple products into the big city K-12 school systems....
New York, Chi Town, El Lay, Don't forget the Motor City...these school systems have orders of magnitude more students in them than the entire state of Maine..many future developers and other technologists will come from the Big City school districts...
One of the edges that MS has being a software centric company, is that "giving away" products like WinOS and Office and Visual Studio involves only trivial duplication costs...MS could burn "collections" of educationally aimed software on to DVD's and have "per byte" costs that are microscopic
Apple has to cough up genuine hardware that represents real (and very non-trivial) capital and production costs, which in its current market position is not an attractive proposition...
What will Maine (or any other state) do if MS comes along and offers them 50,000 low-cost XP laptops (bullied out of Compaq or Gateway or some other Wintel mfgr with big inventory excess problems) with Office, FlightSim, and Visual Studio pre-loaded for net net cost????
Maine would probably dump their Apple order in a second......
This is what happens when you have a monopoly position....
QuickTime is a PERFECT example of something Apple got ***WAY RIGHT***
they treated it as multiplatform product, ignrored what the competition was doing, updated it frequently to accomodate new technology and changing hardware/software bases, didn't try to make a fortune off of it, and worked with their user/developer base to make sure they got what they needed to deploy it, and treated it as an "open standard" to a large degree
QT has the most stable and best rendering collection of COCDEC's of any of the video players, and for quality of presentation, QT 3D is still way ahead of the competition...
the number and variety of the CODEC's available for QT show a mature platform that can do just about anything possible with the hardware available
i'm associated with a web design company that has done over 200 commercial web sites, including record artists and film sites....
and 3 years ago everyone of the media companies we did business with always wanted QT, NOW, when we get new "Developer Guidelines", they almost always ask for Real or WindowsMedia...
we've continued to push QT, but just finished a film site that we were ordered to use WindowsMedia "or else"
at this rate, WindowsMedia and REAL will not be leaving much room for a competitive product in the next 18-36 months
Hey Apple, how about QT for LINUX???? can it save the day????
or is QT going to be another "stranded" product???
the key quote for LINUX's prosperity and survival was "After constructing a practical solution, the Test Center reached the following conclusion: Linux and associated Linux applications can accomplish many of the same tasks as the Wintel standard at a much lower initial cost,in this case, for 93 percent less than the software cost of a similar Windows-based network,and without many of the licensing hassles presented by traditional software platforms."
MS' business models have always included lowballing the competition, either with pricing and/or features.
LINXU needs to pitch itself to two major markets.
1. The low cost, low IT infrastructure small-to-mid sized business crowd, that will be dependent on continuing Desktop evolution on the Tux platforms AND
2. As Moore's Law continues to trash cost-per-cycle ratios and as MP and overall scalability improve on the LINUX platform, hit the mid-range SPARC and low end HPUX and AIX server markets.
If RH and other distro vendors maintain Tux's cost advantages this will play directly into what the CRN article was focused on: deployment cost.
this is effectively and 'end run' around MS desktop control, which is not going away any time soon...
this plays to the STRENGTHS of the LINUX platform and the weaknesses of MS current marketing plan...MS keeps looking to get more customers on the higher end, high TPC/D business (because they are generally well-heeled corps who won't object to the endlessly increasing Windows licensing prices)
This is a substantial weakness in MS' current bix model, and should be exploited as they would do it, ruthlessly.
here is yet another sign of the time, the Matsushita/Panasonic's of the world, don't jump into markets unless their market intelligence tells them there's real money to be made there...the overhead of these MegaCorps is so high, "niche" markets are just too expensive for them to play around in...
SO, the handheld market has just rec'd a ***BIG*** validation as to its future prominence and viabliity.....
OTOH, PALMOS just got ***ANOTHER*** kick in the butt, i've been alternating between my Vx and my iPaq lately and WinCE has come a long way...(yes, CE took the same type of hit, but CE is only a fractional market player at this point, 12 mos from now?????)
ANOTHER MARKET INDICATOR; just how about those Panasonic desktop PC's and Windows Notebooks, eh?
seems like Panasonic has placed its bet...and PalmOS and WinCE were nowhere to be found....
if anyone takes on Wintel, it will be the Global 100 Megacorps...Panasonic, NEC, NTT, et al...and it will be in a space like handhelds were this is no dominant giant already there???
with Linux here and quickly evoling as a mid-range platform, ANYBODY'S paid-per-license OS is IMHO, over the mid-to-long term a "wasting asset" in mid-range enterprise computing (the desktop PC is a ho' 'nother story)......
Re:6 to 8 Weeks.....SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
on
New Linux PDA Available
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"...makes me wonder if it is real or not...."
and here, brothers and sisters, is as succinctly as it could be said, the reason why trying to crack an existing market in technolgy products is so tough....
i (and all my friends) usually expect our "devices" to have a major brand name on them...
whether that name is Sony or Palm or Compaq or Casio or Nintendo or Atari
it's up to us to take a chance, roll the dice on the $89, and if it's cool or even just usuable...
Slashdot Mirror
FOR THE RECORD:
1. i use mozilla
2. i like mozilla (mostly more than exploder 6)
3. i hope mozilla succeeds past ALL our wildest expectations
BUT.
the news we NEED to hear isn't about release candidates
THE NEWS WE ALL NEED TO HEAR ABOUT MOZILLA IS THAT AOL AND/OR SUN AND/OR IBM AND/OR EARTHLINK AND/OR the EU AND/OR CHINA or ???????
is going to adopt mozilla as its mandatory standard, at the expense of other browsers...
'cause other than that we're all a bunch of ICU nurses/doctors playing a Dead Pool bet
sorry!
REALITY BITES!
......
"What made the novel truely disturbing was the alienation that the soldiers experienced upon returning home."
And that was the essence of what the book was about.....
I read the book the week it was published (still have that copy), I was very impressed with Haldeman's treatment of the cultural and psychological aspects of isolation and alientation on soldiers as time passed in their societies "back home".
And from a craft point of view, I still think that it is Haldeman's best book.
However, "Forever War", for me, fairly light on the "s" portion of s/f.
Also, any comparison to Starship Troopers (the book), is merely superficial resemblance.
Johnny Rico, in ST, is the device Heinlein uses to show us the effects of a "limitless war" upon both people and societies, when confronted with an enemy so inhuman that they are merely "Bugs" (a device Scott Card has also used and improved upon in his "Enders" series).....
However, in FW, William Mandela IS the story. His POV dominates the entire book (as was Haldeman's intention).
We never see a maturation curve on Johnny Rico. Sure, he gets older and wiser and tougher as his combat time accumulates, but we don't get to see into his mind the way we do with William Mandela.
Haldeman does a great job with the soldier's POV and his own personal experiences in "Nam ring out nicely in the book, BUT...
"Forever War" is a book that looks within and Starship Troopers is a book that looks without....
s/f has ALWAYS had a wide range of treatment of science and technology, from the wild-but-nonscientific "raygun and mind control" pennings of Doc Smith and his "Lensmen" series to the scientifically carefully crafted work of Charles Sheffield.
Forever War is stong on the story and characters and the resulting insights, but if you are expecting some "kick ass" or unique treatment of relativistic effects, you'll be somewhat disappointed, not much science is being committed.
YMMV
....
Earthlink is NOT buying OmniSky out of altrusim, its buying OmniSky to "lock in" as many revenue streams as possible.
That's why MS wants Stinger (and MSN) to suceed SO badly, that they just pulled Maritz off the Project and put Steve in charge of it. Kinda strange the MS CEO taking direct responsibility for a project, isnt it?
Same reason for the shakeups at AOLTIMEWARNER, and for the recent OpenSource-ish(?) attempts in the Symbian/WAP/wireless crowd...
EVERY company that has a "customer base" wants to convert that base to "subscription" or to "even more subscription" (that's why so many wireless providers are eyeing the Docomo services model with such unabashed avarice in their eyes)
this will spell big trouble for both openess and transparency on the Internet, you'll have a AOL-based content control model that will only get more and more restrictive as time goes by...
this will also crowd marginal players out of the market altogether, as they are forced to spend capital trying to match the Big Guys "service for service, feature for feature"...
it will also lead to more revenue tying between the big companies, as they insist on a cut of each others pass through traffic (seen it all before with the telcos, both globally and nationally), leading to a consolidation of content creators, distributors and technology providers...(in english, 2-5 Global Giant Megalopolies (regulated by a global bureaucracy) who provide the technology and the content to much/most of the developed world). From the OmniSky Website ( http://www.omnisky.com )
Dear Valued OmniSky Customer, Today we announced that OmniSky has agreed to sell its subscriber base and key technology assets to Atlanta-based EarthLink, a leading Internet service provider.
We are very excited about the prospects of this agreement and what it means for you...
(off topic?) Guess we now know that i'm not kharma whoring, since some narrow minded Moderator/writer has mod'd me down twice for having an opinion that disagrees with theirs...let's go for 3 why don't we?..and let's give a big "Thank You" to this same person(s) for tolerance and reason and trying to further the breadth and depth of rational discussion on /. THANKS! for YOUR contribution to the /. Community.
when ***YOU*** are paying $200.00/month for content controlled and regulated connectivity and can't choose your access methods without becoming a "subscription slave" to one of the 2-5 Global Big Media/Content/Access companies, who will "legally" control or own the content on YOUR computer, please remember this post.
Ditto -- the next time you bitch about the quality of discussion on a topic and the quantity of the asci art and 11-year old trolls. Thanks again for your tolerance, reason and understanding.
earthlink ALSO purchased Cidco a mfgr of wireless appliances, here's their link
http://www.cidco.com/products/mailstation.html
i also get lots of marketing from Earthlink about two way pagers and handheld wireless.
So, AOL is building their own "turnkey" services n/w, from desktop to pager, broadband to analog
So is Earthlink
So is Microsoft
So is Nokia
So are some of the RBOCs
So are some of the cellular phone companies
So are some of the cable/broadband companies
ALL of whom want to make sure you use only their gateways and their network specific hardware....
"Have It MY Way, Have It MY Way", the new Internet Motto?
...
...the "Vendor Lock In" Internet
"(I've heard of many other cities that suffer from these conditions, in places ranging from SoCal to NoVa)"
/. has pointed out -- 802.11A rocks and it's subtantially faster than Ricochet...
Here in SoCal there ARE a number of neighborhoods "stranded" without DSL, some are high income, some aren't. Mostly PacBell gives you the "we haven't received enough requests to deploy a DSL switch in that area." OR "The CO in that area doesn't have the ability to deploy a DSL switch" answers. Then if you call(ed) Covad/Verizon/??? or any of the other DSL competitors, you received yet another run around.
Aerie Networks will ONLY be able to make this work if they can get most of Ricochets customers back (i was a HUGE Ricochet fan) and due to the fact that they bought Metricom's assets for around 8 cents/dollar (good for them).
"To avoid the $4 to $10 fees Metricom paid on each pole-top transmitter, Aerie is negotiating with municipalities to exchange free service for pole space. This represents major potential savings: 10,300 radios sit on the utility poles of Los Angeles alone, according to Aaronson"
great plan, but in El Lay, where i live, we already have a ton of wireless in the municipal infrastructre (most city workers have city bought/paid for cell phones), i hope our retarded City Council goes for it, but we have BIG budget problems and traditionally they'd rather "take the money and run"...
However, many future deployments of NEW capacity are still likely going to cost Aerie the same that they cost Metricom, and the user h/w (the Merlin and AirCard 300/400) is still fairly expensive...
so, it sounds like they can revive the old Metricom network (though i've heard number of the pole top local transmitters have, UM, disappeared under strange circumstances)...
BUT, will they be able to deploy additional capacity fast enough to compete with other wireless technologies?
as
there have already been articles about some people assembing 802.11B networks in remote/rural areas and intentionally using "edge bleed" to connect their wireless networks into hybrid WANs ("Build Your Own Local Wireless ISP/VoIP Phone Company")....as wireless bridges become cheaper and faster, is Ricochet going to retain its appeal??...Metricom always pitched it at "IBM ad" mobile workers...who is Aerie going to make its "key customer"...
Normally, I do not respond to AC posters, however your post dumps so much dis-information into the /. channel, and we don't want to ruin young minds, SO, proceeding with the following assumptions;
/. handle. Which demonstrates that you don't even believe your own lies and that's what causes you to resort to anonymous character assassination
1. That you are either an attorney or have some other close association (due to the fact the garbage that you've spouted is right out of the ABA (American Bar Associaton) Public Relations Handbook)
2. And that you lack either/both the character and integrity to provide even the minimal personal ID of a
I'll deal with just a couple of the most egregious pieces of disinformation you're sprouting.
TO WIT:
"On the other hand, whenever those SAME Americans are called in for jury duty, they're the ones determining the amount of the damages. Funny, eh."
Well, it would be funny if lawyers didn't routine seek to dismiss anyone from a jury with real education, most esp advanced sci/tech degrees or military service, all of which will be routinely be dismissed as potential jurors by preemptory challenges. Best way to get off a jury? Be an average American between 25-55, have some education and pay your bills regularly, You're GONE! SA, The OJ Criminal Jury The 12 Stupidest People in the World
"Furthermore, you're way off-base with regards to contingency fees. First, they're capped in many states, generally around 30%... sometimes less. Second, if a plaintiff doesn't want to pay their lawyer on a contingency basis, they don't have to! It is entirely the choice of the plaintiff. The alternative of course, would be paying up front, but a lot of people couldn't afford that, EVEN THOUGH they have what would otherwise turn out to be successful claims. Third, lawyers assume a risk on contingency: they can easily not get paid at all, should they lose. Or if they don't win enough for their client, they'll wind up losing. (plaintiffs paying on a contingent basis suffer no risk, remember)"
That isn't merely a lie, it's a STINKING lie, by omission. You forgot to mention the "plus expenses" part of that. The nationwide average lawyer's contingency cut is roughly 1/3 of the settlement/judgement PLUS EXPENSES, I believe in the multi-million dollar plus liability cases, it averages to around 42% of the take from their crime. You also forgot to mention that many times the lawyer will loan poor clients living expenses during the trial period, and then charge them MAXIMUM LEGAL INTEREST ON THOSE LIVING EXPENSE LOANS.....can you say, "Shylocking"? Factors don't make as much money.
Also, the cases are not chosen by their merit to either society or a group or by the actual damages done thereto. The cases are chosen by HOW DEEP THE POCKETS OF THE DEFENDANT AND HOW STUPID A JURY CAN BE EMPANELED...anyone reading this can go to Google and Google the publications of the AmericanTrialLawyers association and check out litigation strategies, there and elsewhere on the web.
Although you must remember: one of the GOALS of tort law, which has a lovely history dating back to the better part of a millennium, is to spread costs, and to put costs on those who can bear them. McD's can bear paying the plaintiff's medical expenses FAR better than she can. And McD's customers, should prices have to go up, et al, can bear the very widely spread damages even better.
i'm sure you didn't mean to, but you actually told the truth here (in a sideways fashion)
Corporations DON'T PAY these judgements, these costs are passed right on to their customers (twice, lost tax revenues from deductions from gross income for the Corp lower their taxes). Frivolous product liability suits exist because, lawyers can pick the pockets of EVERY PERSON THAT BUYS THAT PRODUCT/SERVICE of a large natinal/mulitnational corporation, Because they would rather settle a bullshit lawsuit, than HAVE THE BAD PUBLICITY...when anyone but lawyers or the government does this, it's called EXTORTION. It's legal when lawyers do it.
There are many good lawyers doing good work in civil rights, criminal justice and even class action where there is real harm...but the number of bottom feeding, scum-sucking, sub human, ambulance chasers robbing Americans by holding up large corporations on frivolous liability suits is LEGION...people like you, advertently or otherwise, are brainlessly repeating the self-serving lies that these blood suckers use to "ennoble" themselves in the eyes of the uneducated and unsophisticated public (so they can CONTINUE buying their Beemers and luxury homes, of course).
.......
not just "feminist" issues are covered in LHOD, she takes a pretty good swipe at sexual and racial indentification and sterotyping, too
i ?U rsula_K._Le_Guin
remember, the book was written in 1968/1969
here's a pretty good bio/biblio page
http://www.sfsite.com/isfdb-bin/exact_author.cg
she was way ahead of her time, as Heinlein was with "I Will Fear No Evil", when Heinlein's protagonist "he" becomes a "she" and has "her" first orgasm, many reviewers had strokes over the "smut"...In LHOD, LeGuin's approaches the subject much more subtlely and makes her points very effectively, just as Varley did with Scirocco Jones in the Demon Trilogy
...
"Actually, that McDonald's case you're so quick to dismiss is exactly like this."
/.'rs are stupid. The DOI/Indian Trust case is about the DOI failing to exercise due diligence in the handling of the Indian Trust, to wit, the irresponsible and deleterious handling of both trust fiduciary assets and confidential trust data on its participants and beneficiaries Its ***NOT*** about Bottom Feeding Contingent Liability Lawyers who are sucking this country dry. I hope the Judge in the DOI case breaks it off at the knee in the DOI.
...the "us" you were talking about. There is NO "McDonald's". The judgement was also paid for by McD's shareholders.
since you seem to be defending a legal system that perceived as rampantly irresponsible by most Americans (in poll after poll*n)...to be precise, i wasn't dismising the McDonald's lawsuit, I was ridiculing it for illustrative purposes.
The DOI/Indian Trust case is not a product/contingent liabilty civil suit, you must think that all
People who support extremely irresponsible and irrational jury decisions, such as the McDonald's case, are costing everybody in America both money and opportunity, here's why:
1."McDonald's profit on coffee sales for two days. That is hardly a burdensome amount - enough to get your attention, but probably something like $20-$50 for us..."
THE SETTLEMENT DIDN'T COST MCDONALD'S ONE NICKEL, IT WAS PAID FOR BY MCDONALD'S ***CUSTOMERS***,
2. By encouraging people like that the person that sued McD, you create a society that values litigation over common sense.
I don't WANT to be on the road with someone who doesn't grasp that "coffee is hot". Like Stella Liebeck. I hope Stella (and her blood sucking attorney) remain objects of ridicule for every day of the rest of their lives. I also don't want to be on the road with someone who can't identify and manage simple threats to their personal safety.
"Consumer" Lawyers (contingent liability bottomfeeders specifically -- there are many lawyers who contribute to society and do great work for the poor and the needy) create an environment that discourages innovation and makes everyone American intelligent enough to grasp the (scalding liquids = personal danger) equation feel like the legal system is a bad joke designed for morons and con-artists.
Liability insurance add huge dollars to the cost of ***EVERY PRODUCT WE BUY***, it adds enormous costs to every startup company that wants to produce a item for public consumption/operation. When I bought my first Honda Interceptor I was trolling through the Owner's Manual and there in 20pt "Liability Lawyer Bold" was an instruction NOT TO DRINK THE BATTERY ACID!
Bob Heinlein used to have some of his literary characters joke that the standard you should have to meet in order to be allowed to reproduce was the ability to grasp and perform rudimentary integral calculus....I wonder what Bob would think about people who had be instructed that "hot coffee is hot" or "don't drink lethal chemicals"?
BONUS ROUND: Last year/b4 in Canada, some poor kid, during finals, had been on a classic "study to you drop" push, after a particular exam (Math???), he went on a drinking binge with his friends, got good and tanked (hadn't had much sleep/food for a coupla days)...sometime, early AM, he went to get a Coke from the dorm vending machine, he didn't have any change, so he shook the machine to loosen a Coke...didn't work too well, the machine fell over and crushed him to death (suffocation)....
his parents are sueing (Coke and the College) for big $$$$, claiming that Coca-Cola hadn't met the Canadian labeling laws for "dangerous machinery", by not providing an instructional label....they parents are angry and grief stricken and some a'hole attorney is looking to collect his 40-50% on their grief...Let's see; drunk, stealing a coke, shaking a several hundred pound vending machine with no one in sight, couldn't get out of the way in time...yeah, sure sounds like Coke's fault to me
.....
"In a sweeping action with far-reaching but unclear ramifications, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted the emergency request, which was brought on behalf of 300,000 American Indians whose assets are housed on a computer infrastructure so easily penetrable that a court investigator and his team of security experts were able to break in and repeatedly access, modify and even create trust data -- all without raising a response from the government."
/. wants to see liability extended to the same absurd levels of product and contingent liability that have been demonstrated in the McDonalds and other Python-esque liability cases, BUT...
it's actually well past time for the courts to hold organizations whose systems are busted by 12 year old scriddies running "canned scripts" from Toolz sites
how would you feel if this were your families' or your companie's sensitive and/or private information??? Information about your 502 or your daughter's rape, or your son's juvenille arrest for possessing underage TeleTubbie Pr0n?
"Coupled with the judge's action were criticisms from members of Congress about the security failures. "The GAO told us five years ago that the fund was in shambles," said Rep. Jim Hansen (R-Utah,) chairman of the House Resources Committee, which has jurisdiction over Indian affairs. "Now we learn that a computer security system deployed in 1999 is virtually worthless," he said."
i don't think anyone on
...isn't it about time the direct creators, distributors and managers of dangerously insecure computer systems have at least SOME small legal responsible (and limited accompanying monetary liability)????
If the facts on the Indian Trust website ARE true, DOI (and Congress) have long been aware of the problems and have been ducking the bullet on fixing it...if this were my money/info, I'd sure be upset...
BUT, even the SFGate article says"
"The reasons for that, boiled down, revolve around the costs involved in small telecom companies trying to do too many things all at once."
i haven't read the study in depth yet, but looking at the TOC and skimming the section heads, they seem to ignore a POLITICAL reality....
The Telcos ***DON'T WANT*** to solve the LastMileProblem.
The Telcos had, up until the construction of the fiber backbone, ARPANET and courts' decision that made telcos open the backbone up to competitors, a REALLY SWEET business model
strictly "Cost Plus, Plus" and very cozy relationships with their Fed/State regulators, many of whom were telco execs doing the "Public Service" tour of duty...which made the telco business a "name your own rates" kinda business
the more broadband deployed, the less value switched circuits have, and the more value packets acquire
the Telcos would much rather sell analog switched, retail priced voice services (where they created the business model and still control it), than...
...packet based, circuit-less (or virtual circuits, if you prefer) communications, where they cannot charge per packet and have to share their packet revenues with broadband providers...
i'm routing, uh, rooting, for the ADCOs, but, if you will recall, CLEC's were also supposed to solve at least part of the problem, and before them the RBOC's (soon to be "The RBOC or So")were going to wire the "bridge to the future"...
as a engineer geek, it sounds to me like the ADCOs can solve acutally solve the deployment of high speed fiber to the businesses and homes in the local loop (though you'll probably end up with a very limited number of very big ADCOs, economies of scale being very real)....
but, what about a business model that will allow broadband providers to survive w/o the consumer being charged "per packet" (like Docomo) or "per bandwidth" like fractional T?
Switched circuits are wasting assets, telcos and analog voice are doomed businesses,BUT...
..so far, no successful new business model has emerged to replace them
...
Uhm, no. The thing would have to project different views to different perspectives
i'm not saying that the 1stGen of this will be "adaptive", it won't...as you implied, that's way beyond anything we understand now about perspective presentation
it will "mimic" specific local surrounds, so you'll take on textures, colors, backgrounds, prob with user input, this will basically be a "nighttime" technology, where a SpecOp/Sniper will select his own "localized" camo...mimic a local; tree, bush, rock, whatever
the ghillie suit is designed to break up those "regular, symmetrical shapes" (which form the base of nightime vision for humans), this will be a ghillie suit that's somewhat more adaptable to local surroundings...it will NOT adaptively morph with movement, that's still sci-fi
1. Advertisings displays out of BRunner and Neuromancer, entire urban Downtowns morphed into 24/7 streaming video walls
This will definitly come to be - specially if producing large surfaces of e-paper is cheap enough. Then again, having moving images all around you might be a bit of a sensory overload ...
In a sense, i cheated here, most downtowns are already chock a block with video, in store windows and on the tops and sides of buildings, neon, spot lighted displays and Mitsu Jumbotrons and local merchants using LED/LCD displays for their own purposes...epaper will just help organize and increase the deployment rate, as it is less intrusive than putting up a jumbotron....the sensory overload is already bad in some american cities, yes, it will get worse
2. Guess, Gap, Gucci, Hillfiger, Lauren, et al incorporating streaming logo displays in clothing
Transparent clothing with smoothly moving semi-transparent areas ....
as the costs of this stuff scales down, you will have clothing with lots of panel and not much fabric, you can use the panels to mimic fabrics and other textures; scales, skin from other creatures, your desktop wallpaper, your grandbaby's face, whatever...imagine the lawsuits that are gonna happen with this technology
3. Functional PDA's that are wearable and shapeable to specialized applications
The problem here is how to input data and give commands to the PDA. An actual flexible screen is probably a no-no for most applications (imagine reading your newspaper with no hands - not very practical)
certain people are aleady working on various types of virtual keyboards (one of these companies won a "Best of COMDEX" Award last month, the Virtutech Simics - Way Cool http://www.virtutech.com -- you could have a wrist bracelet PDA screen with the processor/hardware in a bracelet watch combo connected with wireless
4. Rooms that can be turned in SensorySurround MM experiences with 5.1 or DTS or DolbyPro, throw in a DVD or IMAX experience, talk about "Immersive"!!
If the wide e-paper surfaces are made cheaply maybe. The problem here is either big pixels (small number of pixels - big surface) or lack of storage and bandwidth (lots of pixels, lots of data - to keep the same pixel-size, the number of pixels increases roughly with the square of the diagonal, and so does the ammount of data)
Absolutely True --- a combination of Moore's Law and "spoofing" background textures they way games do now will provide some solutions here, until such environments can determine your "area of focus"..you don't need great detail in those areas behind/to the side of you
5. Genuine combat gear (ala "Predator") that can mimic the surrounding environment..the ultimate "Ghillie Suit" for snipers and SpecOps
If you can get good enough sensors to feed the screens plus color screens, then yes, this is a very realistic possibility.
and currently being worked on in the NL's, it won't be "invisibility" or anything like it, but, even in the 1stGen products it will take tactical camoflage to new levels of effectives (and drive the overhead's CRAZY)..imagine a "tarp" of this stuff covering a tank or a combat fuel depot, mimicing the surrounding terrain, with the tarp also being an emi/rfi shield???
6. Completely accurate training environments for many, many "environmentally difficult" training situations from fire/rescue, law enforcement, combat, flight, driving, to Wall Street Trading Floor Simulations...WHOO DOGGIE!
Preparing for high-stress situations wich happen in non-controled environments (an airplane cockpit is a controled environment) requires not only quality imaging but also other inputs such as sound, smell, temperature - imagine training fireman - some of the most inportant inputs for an experienced fireman come from the senses of smell (smoke), sound (a wooden beam starting to break) and touch (feeling burning hot air coming from a certain direction).
the modern commerical flight simulators already provide most of the necessary environmental factors and when you consider the military flight training sims for the Shuttle and fighter craft (i've heard the F-18 and F-117A sims are remarkably life like), we pretty much have most of this paradigm defined and explored, once epaper is delivered, it's up to the biz types to deliver viable products
in your excellent firefighting example, using the "projection" type of training rooms already in existence for law enforcement and the military, how hard would it be for a company like WED (Disney Imageneering) to add many of the olfactory and tactile elements as they do right now in their theme parks?
perfect???? of course not, but quite a bit better than what we have now....a step forward is just that
this is the kind of advance that shows how far the Kingdoms of the Sun and the Soft are out of it...
The NextGen of Tech may well go to the device manufacturers and the consumer megalopolies who actually try to deliver what customers want...
Imagine the Gibsonian uses for this stuff...
1. Advertisings displays out of BRunner and Neuromancer, entire urban Downtowns morphed into 24/7 streaming video walls
2. Guess, Gap, Gucci, Hillfiger, Lauren, et al incorporating streaming logo displays in clothing
3. Functional PDA's that are wearable and shapeable to specialized applications
4. Rooms that can be turned in SensorySurround MM experiences with 5.1 or DTS or DolbyPro, throw in a DVD or IMAX experience, talk about "Immersive"!!
5. Genuine combat gear (ala "Predator") that can mimic the surrounding environment..the ultimate "Ghillie Suit" for snipers and SpecOps
6. Completely accurate training environments for many, many "environmentally difficult" training situations from fire/rescue, law enforcement, combat, flight, driving, to Wall Street Trading Floor Simulations...WHOO DOGGIE!
7.??????????????
Gibson, Shirley, Bova, Vinge, Cadigan...Your World and Welcome to it!
......
in the just completed (rather dull) Fall COMDEX, i spoke to a number of people who had iPod's, they all loved them, BUT, about half of them were using them as portable storage, in addition to their MP3 duties....
/.r's come up with????
most popular use was transferring movies to your iPod for viewing through your (apple, obviously) notebook.....
at 10GB and 250$, this also becomes a good alternative for the Wintel crowd as a "Personal Storage Device"...
you could put a movie file, some MP3/WMA's, TeleTubbie Pr0n, etc on this, your backups of key programs, data, etc...
for the money this is a LOT cheaper (if slower -- til USB 2) then the 1394 external drives people (including me) have been buying and much more portable....
what other uses can
......
Normally, i don't respond to AC posters, but you weren't obnoxious and you seemed to be actually trying to deal with my points, so, out of courtesy (can i say that on /.?), here's a rather abbreviated response (prob still 2 long for lameness)
/. kinda way, but actually i did, i appreciate your literalism, but, i've been dealing with these kind of coders for a long time (and in large teams), so my reaction is about 70% to Joel's words and about 30% to what i've SEEN when you design/code his way:
....and each of them getting bloatier, your hardware vendor has lost his ability to do any major redesign of the h/w without either breaking his h/w or your computer. As someone pointed out earlier in this thread, that leads, for example, to the microcode solution (and in devices, shimware). The best example of this is both Transmeta and Intel, both of whom have to mask more efficent cpu designs under an inefficient microcode layer in order not to break the installed base. Transmeta (bless them) is at least doing it by design.
"I don't think you read it very closely. "
Not to be pissy in that
eliminating our agreements, here's my response
1. More features are always better features
Ok, but
2. Coders are not responsible for optimization
YOU: "He didn't say that. He said that most memory "optimization" doesn't actually help much, which is true."
I wasn't referring to his quote about memory optimization, I was referring to his repeated statements about "bloatware" and "features". Optimization is not merely about reducing run times or footprint, it also is about choosing the right design and architecture. If you have a program where a given feature is used >1% of the time by >1% of the users and you keep it in new version, you have "non-optimized" code. Giving marketing droids free reign to include features leads to bloatware products like Word and Excel, where even MS acknowledges that most users NEVER use most features. I think Joel makes it pretty clear right here with "For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner". That's a defintion of the ESSENCE of non-optimized software design.
3. Hardware vendors must not change h/w designs that would break installed base, even to improve their architecture
YOU: "He didn't say that at all."
No, he sure didn't SAY it. Because essential to Joel's thinking on code/design is that you "fix it in the next version". He makes that perfectly clear in numerous places in the interview. Well, if you have version after version
4. Your s/w is SOOOO... important that shipping delays for optimization/tuning/additional debugging are not to be accepted
YOU: "You threw in that "additional debugging". He never advocated shipping bugs. As for optimization and tuning... he didn't say that there are no circumstances under which you can delay the software for optimization. He did say that it's not generally a good idea... and he's right. Generally, it's better to ship something correct but slow on time, and release updates, so that you at least have something on the market, unless the thing is so unbearably slow that it's unusable. "
WHOA! "Generally, it's better to ship something correct but slow on time", REALLY? better for WHO? Certainly NOT the user (Wordperfect Windows 6, dBase Windows 1, Access 1.0 and the 1.1 release are perfect examples of this) who ends up paying $$$$$ for crap and then hope the vendor is going to get around to fixing it. And on your/his point about "it's not generally a good idea.." to delay RTM/ship for additional optimization, if you've lead a commericial software team (even a small one) you know "it's not a good idea..." from managment, will turn into "Don't". by the time it gets to your coders.
6. There's never a reason to rewrite extent code, EVER...(here's my nominee for that reason -- Microsoft Outlook)
YOU: "No, he said there's never a reason for a ground-up rewrite --- and he's right. Refactoring, on the other hand, is great: rewriting extant code a bit at a time."
Now, it's YOU who are taking him out of context (as you have accused me of doing). NOT ONCE does he mention "refactoring" code. The closest he comes to it is suggesting that if something is really broken, you can rewrite it a little bit at a time.
There are actually LOTS of reasons to do a ground up rewrite. I wasn't being sarcastic when i mentioned Outlook, nor was i bashing MS, i know and like a lot of them and respect many of their products. Many Softies are terminally embarassed by Outlook and all the problems it has caused.
The architectural design of Outlook is so poor that it has led to billions of dollars of lost data and systems damage. Yet, because of all of the things that Joel has promoted (and MS' ego), they keep recreating that program, version after version. The mistakes of the earlier versions are retained and the new version have new exploits created as a consequence of the old architecture
7. Architecture is secondary to UI, maintanence of the UI experience is the MOST important standard
YOU:"I don't recall him saying that either, but maybe I missed it."
I can see how, if you don't do a lot of design or architecture, how that would be non-obivous.
Simply put, if you can't ever change the base code, you can't ever effectively change the UI, as the integration between the UI and base code is (or should be) the tightest of all the design bindings in the entire OS or App. Witness "Windows Explorer", it's a clunky, ugly, non-effective piece of crap because it is bound to the files systems design and the UI. Everyone hates it (incl many Softies), but you can't do much, if anything, about it.
8. Any problems caused by #7 above should never be fixed by redesign, but instead should be prioritized and patched by response to User problems.
YOU: "Yeah, that is redesign, regardless of whether you want to use some derogatory term like "patching" or not."
NOPE, sorry, these are both very clear "terms of art" with five decades of clear definition and usage behind them. You don't "design" a patch they way you "redesign" a app, system or even a feature.
Patches fix things that are broken. Usu with a "one patch" to "one problem" ratio, unless you really messed up your design and QC (if you want to see what happens when you attempt to "redesign" by "patch" -- see the NT4 "Service Pack of Death").
"Redesign" is not done at the "support" or "QC" level, but at the "architectural" level, redesign consists of stepping back from the extent product and saying "how can we do this better next time?" NOT "How can we save ourselves some future design time by using this patch to throw in additional features?"
........
"Joel: Don't get me started! If you're a software company, there are lots of great business reasons to love bloatware. For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make users' lives better (if they use them) and don't usually hurt (if they don't). As a user, if your software vendor stops, before shipping, and spends two months squeezing the code down to make it 50% smaller, the net benefit to you is going to be imperceptible, but you went for two months without new features that you needed, and THAT hurt."
Can you spot the "seat of the pants/never piss of the installed base"-oriented design fallicies just in that one paragraph:
1. More features are always better features
2. Coders are not responsible for optimization
3. Hardware vendors must not change h/w designs that would break installed base, even to improve their architecture
4. Your s/w is SOOOO... important that shipping delays for optimization/tuning/additional debugging are not to be accepted
further from the rest of the interview;
6. There's never a reason to rewrite extent code, EVER...(here's my nominee for that reason -- Microsoft Outlook)
7. Architecture is secondary to UI, maintanence of the UI experience is the MOST important standard
8. Any problems caused by #7 above should never be fixed by redesign, but instead should be prioritized and patched by response to User problems.
i could go on, but i think i've gotten the highlights, did i miss any???
Gee, can anybody figure out a s/w product(s) family that seems to be a living demo of (my phrase) "Design By Release Date, Redesign by User Complaints" School of coding????
i'll even agree with Joel that you should be very careful with "scratch" redesigns, and too many people would rather rewrite viable code than fix it....
BUT JEEZ, should you hold on to a payroll system written in FORTRAN69 (or LISP or ALGOL or FORTH...), just because it works, even if you have NO OTHER apps in FORTRAN and don't have one single FORTRAN programmer working for you????
.....
the most ***important*** sentence in the article
"The sober truth is that although consumers are bothered by multiple user IDs and passwords, most consumers don't see much relative value in having one credential to navigate the Web," Avivah Litan, vice president and research director for Gartner, said in a statement.
before "single sign on" becomes useful, let's consider just some of things that don't exist now, that are needed to make it useful/valuable/necessary...to Joe/Jane Average
1. micropayments - we've been talking about them for years..still no standards, still no positive participation from the major central banking systems..PayPal has had to fight to get as far as it has
2. user authentication - biometrics are coming along nicely, but they have no useful installed base to speak off, and the first gen laptops with biometric user control has no way to "authenticate" the user
3. encryption - no agreement on standards, with the US Gov fighting ANY kind of suggestion to implement standard encryption of email, and pushing for "back doors" in every type of system they can
4. trust - who do you want to have access to ALL your confidential info - Armey, Bush, Case, Daschle, Ellison, Gates, Gephardt, Levin, McNealy, Murdoch, Rather, Redstone?????? All of these individuals (and their respective orgs) have been repeatedly shown to be driven by, UH, "goal achieveing orientation" and NOT by "philosophical/ethical/moral orientation"
5. Systems Security - even if you perceive that you trust the above folk to know that you peruse "Teletubbie FreakySex Sites" or "Death, The Beginning of your New Love Life" newsgroups,
ALL of these orgs have systems with major security flaws...so even with the "best of intentions"...chances are the whole world will find out what you did with that purple teletubbie doll...(and if you keep the video in "My Pictures" we can probably all watch it, too).
i just attended MS Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, where PassPort "single sign on" was a BIG push by the MS marketeers...most of the attendees couldn't have cared less
it's much more likely that after all the members of the "Billionaire Boyz Klub" are done with wrangling over "single sign on" as a way to insure "vendor lock in", that the G will step in, and shove their vision of this down ***EVERYBODIES" throats..."for our own good", of course
In the late 19th century, Albert A Michelson, according to many the "Greatest" physicist of his time (and winner of the first Nobel prize in Physics (1907), decided to measure the speed of light...in 1878, he did so accurately for the first time, he was using about $10.00 of lab equipment, btw...his passion for accuracy and precision led to his teaming up with Edward W. Morley, in 1878 to prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", through the....
e du/lectures/michelson.html.....there's also a great page on Michelson here;....http://hum.amu.edu.pl/~zbzw/ph/sci/aam.ht m
Michelson-Morley Experiment. Michelson's career had been golden, and he was widely regarded as the best physicist of the 19th century. So, everyone "knew" that he would successfully prove the existence of the cosmic "ether", which would be the finally block in the edifice of Classical Newtonian physics...
instead, the experiment went completeley wrong, conclusively proved the lack of the cosmic ether, and Newton was kicked to the gutter (as an explanation for sub-macroscopic events)...
here's a link to a pretty good, non-technical account of this from U of Va....http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.
In the 1950's, in the particle chambers of UCLA, strange traces were seen on the photograpic plates of particle collisions....physics of the time couldn't account for this particle, so the postdocs and the grad students waggishly nicknamed the unknown particle the "what-on", and many ignored it for over 20 years...
as instumentation and our undestanding of sub-nuclear particles became better, some other grad students, looking for new frontiers (and new dissertation topics), started researching the "what-on"...it has become....
The Quark and is now the center of the posh new "String Theory", which is yet another attempt to explain overall particle to particle interaction,and from the standpoint of "Classical Quantum Dynamics", Superstring theory kicks QD to the curb....here we go again.....
here's a good page on String Theory
http://superstringtheory.com/
the point being...these things we are discussing are so far beyond our abilities to directly sense or measure them, it's like the old story of the scientists examining an elephant in a lightless, closed room...
one scientist grabs the tail and thinks its a thin, long snake, another scientist grabs a tusk and thinks its a rhino, another grabs the trunk and thinks its a python...
since we have no ability to directly "view" or "measure" these things, we are using inference and deduction to provide us with our theories, yet as every generation of instrumentation improves and gives us new "information" we take that info and rework it...
face it, we could come up with a "Unified Theory" that completely explains our current "knowledge" about physics, to the satisfaction of 99% of the scientists on the face of the earth and....
it could be kicked over by some new experiment, just the way that Michelson-Morely kicked over "Classical" Physics...
Apple has led the educational market for many years, and 38K laptops is certainly a big win for them....
However, with M$ and the ***Billion Dollar*** Settlement offer still floating around (looking however less politically viable everday)
What can Apple do to keep their educational position?
they need to be putting Apple products into the big city K-12 school systems....
New York, Chi Town, El Lay, Don't forget the Motor City...these school systems have orders of magnitude more students in them than the entire state of Maine..many future developers and other technologists will come from the Big City school districts...
One of the edges that MS has being a software centric company, is that "giving away" products like WinOS and Office and Visual Studio involves only trivial duplication costs...MS could burn "collections" of educationally aimed software on to DVD's and have "per byte" costs that are microscopic
Apple has to cough up genuine hardware that represents real (and very non-trivial) capital and production costs, which in its current market position is not an attractive proposition...
What will Maine (or any other state) do if MS comes along and offers them 50,000 low-cost XP laptops (bullied out of Compaq or Gateway or some other Wintel mfgr with big inventory excess problems) with Office, FlightSim, and Visual Studio pre-loaded for net net cost????
Maine would probably dump their Apple order in a second......
This is what happens when you have a monopoly position....
QuickTime is a PERFECT example of something Apple got ***WAY RIGHT***
they treated it as multiplatform product, ignrored what the competition was doing, updated it frequently to accomodate new technology and changing hardware/software bases, didn't try to make a fortune off of it, and worked with their user/developer base to make sure they got what they needed to deploy it, and treated it as an "open standard" to a large degree
QT has the most stable and best rendering collection of COCDEC's of any of the video players, and for quality of presentation, QT 3D is still way ahead of the competition...
the number and variety of the CODEC's available for QT show a mature platform that can do just about anything possible with the hardware available
i'm associated with a web design company that has done over 200 commercial web sites, including record artists and film sites....
and 3 years ago everyone of the media companies we did business with always wanted QT, NOW, when we get new "Developer Guidelines", they almost always ask for Real or WindowsMedia...
we've continued to push QT, but just finished a film site that we were ordered to use WindowsMedia "or else"
at this rate, WindowsMedia and REAL will not be leaving much room for a competitive product in the next 18-36 months
Hey Apple, how about QT for LINUX???? can it save the day????
or is QT going to be another "stranded" product???
the key quote for LINUX's prosperity and survival was "After constructing a practical solution, the Test Center reached the following conclusion: Linux and associated Linux applications can accomplish many of the same tasks as the Wintel standard at a much lower initial cost,in this case, for 93 percent less than the software cost of a similar Windows-based network,and without many of the licensing hassles presented by traditional software platforms."
MS' business models have always included lowballing the competition, either with pricing and/or features.
LINXU needs to pitch itself to two major markets.
1. The low cost, low IT infrastructure small-to-mid sized business crowd, that will be dependent on continuing Desktop evolution on the Tux platforms AND
2. As Moore's Law continues to trash cost-per-cycle ratios and as MP and overall scalability improve on the LINUX platform, hit the mid-range SPARC and low end HPUX and AIX server markets.
If RH and other distro vendors maintain Tux's cost advantages this will play directly into what the CRN article was focused on: deployment cost.
this is effectively and 'end run' around MS desktop control, which is not going away any time soon...
this plays to the STRENGTHS of the LINUX platform and the weaknesses of MS current marketing plan...MS keeps looking to get more customers on the higher end, high TPC/D business (because they are generally well-heeled corps who won't object to the endlessly increasing Windows licensing prices)
This is a substantial weakness in MS' current bix model, and should be exploited as they would do it, ruthlessly.
apparently even Sol feels like throwing up when he sees the way supposedly sentient creatures treat each other....
"if they do this in a green tree...."
now, if we could only steer this stuff towards Northern Afghanistan....?????
Damn It! Where's Bruce Willis when we NEED him????
here is yet another sign of the time, the Matsushita/Panasonic's of the world, don't jump into markets unless their market intelligence tells them there's real money to be made there...the overhead of these MegaCorps is so high, "niche" markets are just too expensive for them to play around in...
SO, the handheld market has just rec'd a ***BIG*** validation as to its future prominence and viabliity.....
OTOH, PALMOS just got ***ANOTHER*** kick in the butt, i've been alternating between my Vx and my iPaq lately and WinCE has come a long way...(yes, CE took the same type of hit, but CE is only a fractional market player at this point, 12 mos from now?????)
ANOTHER MARKET INDICATOR; just how about those Panasonic desktop PC's and Windows Notebooks, eh?
seems like Panasonic has placed its bet...and PalmOS and WinCE were nowhere to be found....
if anyone takes on Wintel, it will be the Global 100 Megacorps...Panasonic, NEC, NTT, et al...and it will be in a space like handhelds were this is no dominant giant already there???
with Linux here and quickly evoling as a mid-range platform, ANYBODY'S paid-per-license OS is IMHO, over the mid-to-long term a "wasting asset" in mid-range enterprise computing (the desktop PC is a ho' 'nother story)......
"...makes me wonder if it is real or not...."
and here, brothers and sisters, is as succinctly as it could be said, the reason why trying to crack an existing market in technolgy products is so tough....
i (and all my friends) usually expect our "devices" to have a major brand name on them...
whether that name is Sony or Palm or Compaq or Casio or Nintendo or Atari
it's up to us to take a chance, roll the dice on the $89, and if it's cool or even just usuable...
WE HAVE TO TELL EVERYONE WE KNOW