The problem is that despite the theories about taking over the server space via a desktop monopoly is that it hasn't happened and there's little evidence that it ever will. The effect today is that attacking MS is decreasing competition in Europe in the server space. Since this EU issue was first proposed by MS's competitors, decreased competition or payment of protection money by MS has always been the goal. Given the amount of money that MS has paid out, the strategy is working.
The EU is effectively acting as these companies agent and EU citizens have derived no benefit from it.
It's nice to see that the old BS executives used to spout off about is being replaced by new fresh, think outside-the-box BS. The purpose, however, is the same: to convince people how smart they are and to convince the more lemming-like investors that they are doing something new worth investing in.
It reminds me a bit of a scene in the Hudsucker Proxy:
REPORTER #4 How do you respond to the charges that you're out of ideas? Has Norville Barnes run dry?
NORVILLE Not at all. Why, just this week I came up with several new sweet ideas. A larger model hula hoop for the portly. A battery option for the lazy and handicapped. A model with more sand for hard-of hearing. I'm earning my keep.
to make a few features a little slower and a little harder but they couldn't, they ended up with them "all equally slow and hard to use". Oh well, better luck next time.
"Why SHOULD a director have this so-called right to dictate that others view the precise film he made?"
Why should Eric Raymond mind if I take The Cathedral and the Bazaar and sanitize it for people that don't like open source? I could change the conclusions around so proprietary developers won't be offended or embarrassed by it.
Obviously the reason in both cases is that the artist (writer, director etc) has their name and reputation on the line.
"For each copy of the movie these companies sell, they buy one from Hollywood. Thus, if they sell 1984 copies of Gladiator with the naughty bits omitted, then they buy 1984 copies from the movie production company first. Thus, it can be said they are only reselling the copy of the book that they themselves purchased and from which they ripped out naughty pages."
It may seem that the two cases are the same, but they aren't. If the third party was able to remove content from the orginal disk somehow, but never made a copy of it, then it would be equivalent to tearing out pages of a book. Copyright is violated by making a copy even if the copyright holder doesn't lose money on the practice.
First of all the Sun thin clients are the price they are because Sun makes money on the server you have to buy to make it all work. So the actual price is significantly higher than $300/seat.
Second you haven't answered my question on how the the thin clients are cheaper. You've discussed a theoretical scenario that is supposed to increase the performance of the system should I be able to make a deal with all those neighbors I haven't met, but the price isn't any lower per seat.
The bottom line is that there are technical, social, legal, and evironment issues involved with what you propose. I'm going to wait until at least some of these issues are resolved before betting on such an approach.
"So, for a comparison, many people buy a box for $500 - $1000 (not including the price of the monitor). Cellphones cost about $100 - $300. This is the savings I'm talking about."
Low-end PC's boxes start at about $300, not $500. But merely saying that the cost of a thin client will be comparable to a cellphone's price today proves nothing. It's just an unsubstantiated claim.
What is the basis for your claim that these devices will be $200-$700 cheaper than a PC with comparable capabilities? Keep in mind that any technological advancement or drop in price that could apply to a thin client is likely to be applicable to the PC as well.
"The claims about the local bus bandwidths etc. from the article are a little crazy, but if you squint a little they can be rephrased: the local capacity used by most common apps is lower than the available network bandwidth. Given this assumption it makes a great deal of sense to create an Internet "OS.""
But this argument is a bit like saying that you should get rid of your car because it has wasted capacity sitting in your garage. As a user (or driver) I'm interested in using the full potential when I choose to. The fact that my computer only uses 10% of its bandwidth when I'm reading the screen doesn't mean I want less than 100% when I really need it.
I think your'e wrong. Google is not a commodity computing company, its in the advertising business. You and I are not the customers, we're the product.
Nobody is going to do any real work on a cell phone. You need a full keyboard and a decent size display. The cost of the display isn't going to magically drop just because the device is connected to the network. Many companies already lease their PC's so there's nothing new there either.
You've baked alot of assumptions in your argument, but even if all of those assumptions were true, what is the net effect? You're still going to end up buying a hardware device that is either going to be neutered PC that will be $50 cheaper at best, or a specialized thin-client machine that will probably cost more than a PC. All for a device that turns into a lump of coal if your Internet connection fails. No thanks.
Hey, that guy that doesn't understand what the Overrated moderation means is back on Slashdot today. Rather than tell him RTFFAQ I'll be nice and spoon-feed him:
Overrated -- Sometimes you'll run into a comment which for whatever reason has been moderated out of proportion -- this probably means several moderators saw it at nearly the same time, thought it was Funny, Insightful etc, and their scores added together exaggerate its relative merit. (A knock-knock joke at +5, Funny) Such a comment is Overrated. It's not knocking the original poster to say so, but it's probably better to spend your mod points on comments which are deserving of being moderated up.
You see "Overrated" is a mod you use when others have given a comment too much credit. If nobody has modded the comment up, it can't be overrated. Get it?
You can still use Troll or something if you disagree with my comment. I just hate to have you embarrass yourself this way.
My point was that it doesn't make much sense for nerdy UNIX types to switch to OS X if they didn't have any use for the orginal Mac OS. The less UNIX-like OS X is, the stronger my case.
So I doubt the claim that the Mac's demographics has changed all that much.
Most computer geeks you know probably didn't touch the classic Mac OS during its heyday simply because they were still in diapers.
If someone can't find any value in the old Mac OS it's hard imagine they'd find much unique value in OS X. OS X is really just UNIX + a Mac style GUI. If you don't like the GUI, you'd be happier with some other UNIX derivative.
"PowerPoint is so widely used that "PowerPoint Presentation" has become a more or less generic expression that people tend to use even when (as in this case) we have no clue what's used inside NASA"
Sorry, no sale. If the author merely wanted to talk about bullet-point presentations, he could have just put that in the title. In fact most of the article talks specifically about the PowerPoint product and not generic presentation software.
"Had the GP even looked at the article in question, he would've seen that in the first paragraph Tufte mentions that this bullet-point presentation culture was witnessed and commented on by Feynman after Challenger"
Yes, the article claims that Feynman commented on "slideware-style presentation", but doesn't cite where.
Feynman's primary concern was NASA's inability or unwillingness to analyze risk in a scientific manner. In fact Feynman's "Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident" doesn't mention bullet-points or slideware-style presentation at all despite the fact that he commented extensively on NASA's management culture, so he apparently didn't think it was all that significant even if he commented on it elsewhere.
NASA commited itself to solving the foam problem but when it turned out to be difficult they decided they didn't have to solve it. So they found evidence that the problem wasn't solved. How could this be in any way surprising?
So your claim is that no engineers at NASA had ever expressed concern about the O-rings except a few days before launch. What is your documentation for this claim?
Take a look at "What Do You Care What Other People Think" by Richard Feynman and read what he had to say about the first shuttle disaster. NASA has had problems facing reality long before PowerPoint was available.
I don't dispute that needs of a graphics package and word processor are different, but I don't believe that font rendering required secret APIs. As I recall WordPerfect avoided a lot of standard, well documented approaches to Windows in favor of their own legacy approach (e.g. printer drivers).
I don't buy the idea that they couldn't work on OS/2 and Windows at the same. They could have simply hired some experienced Windows developers. In any event, they should have been at least investigating Windows long before OS/2 was an issue.
It really doesn't matter whether programmers use copy/paste, trial and error, or genius to achieve their goals as long as the application is good. I've seen hacked-up code that was very succesfull and I've seen companies go under because the programmers spent too much time worrying about the flexiblity of a future they insured would never happen.
Frankly, I find elitism tedious. Create a great application and I'll sing your praises. Write a bad one and I'll avoid it. Either way, I don't give a shit what methodology you used.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that despite the theories about taking over the server space via a desktop monopoly is that it hasn't happened and there's little evidence that it ever will. The effect today is that attacking MS is decreasing competition in Europe in the server space. Since this EU issue was first proposed by MS's competitors, decreased competition or payment of protection money by MS has always been the goal. Given the amount of money that MS has paid out, the strategy is working.
The EU is effectively acting as these companies agent and EU citizens have derived no benefit from it.
I suspect that a well-tanned nose would keep you in the top 10%.
It's nice to see that the old BS executives used to spout off about is being replaced by new fresh, think outside-the-box BS. The purpose, however, is the same: to convince people how smart they are and to convince the more lemming-like investors that they are doing something new worth investing in.
It reminds me a bit of a scene in the Hudsucker Proxy:
REPORTER #4
How do you respond to the charges
that you're out of ideas? Has
Norville Barnes run dry?
NORVILLE
Not at all. Why, just this week
I came up with several new sweet
ideas. A larger model hula hoop
for the portly. A battery option
for the lazy and handicapped. A
model with more sand for hard-of hearing.
I'm earning my keep.
to make a few features a little slower and a little harder but they couldn't, they ended up with them "all equally slow and hard to use". Oh well, better luck next time.
"The entire point of Copyright is that the artists are compensated for their works."
That might be the point, but it's not the law.
"Why SHOULD a director have this so-called right to dictate that others view the precise film he made?"
Why should Eric Raymond mind if I take The Cathedral and the Bazaar and sanitize it for people that don't like open source? I could change the conclusions around so proprietary developers won't be offended or embarrassed by it.
Obviously the reason in both cases is that the artist (writer, director etc) has their name and reputation on the line.
"For each copy of the movie these companies sell, they buy one from Hollywood. Thus, if they sell 1984 copies of Gladiator with the naughty bits omitted, then they buy 1984 copies from the movie production company first. Thus, it can be said they are only reselling the copy of the book that they themselves purchased and from which they ripped out naughty pages."
It may seem that the two cases are the same, but they aren't. If the third party was able to remove content from the orginal disk somehow, but never made a copy of it, then it would be equivalent to tearing out pages of a book. Copyright is violated by making a copy even if the copyright holder doesn't lose money on the practice.
First of all the Sun thin clients are the price they are because Sun makes money on the server you have to buy to make it all work. So the actual price is significantly higher than $300/seat.
Second you haven't answered my question on how the the thin clients are cheaper. You've discussed a theoretical scenario that is supposed to increase the performance of the system should I be able to make a deal with all those neighbors I haven't met, but the price isn't any lower per seat.
The bottom line is that there are technical, social, legal, and evironment issues involved with what you propose. I'm going to wait until at least some of these issues are resolved before betting on such an approach.
"So, for a comparison, many people buy a box for $500 - $1000 (not including the price of the monitor). Cellphones cost about $100 - $300. This is the savings I'm talking about."
Low-end PC's boxes start at about $300, not $500. But merely saying that the cost of a thin client will be comparable to a cellphone's price today proves nothing. It's just an unsubstantiated claim.
What is the basis for your claim that these devices will be $200-$700 cheaper than a PC with comparable capabilities? Keep in mind that any technological advancement or drop in price that could apply to a thin client is likely to be applicable to the PC as well.
"The claims about the local bus bandwidths etc. from the article are a little crazy, but if you squint a little they can be rephrased: the local capacity used by most common apps is lower than the available network bandwidth. Given this assumption it makes a great deal of sense to create an Internet "OS.""
But this argument is a bit like saying that you should get rid of your car because it has wasted capacity sitting in your garage. As a user (or driver) I'm interested in using the full potential when I choose to. The fact that my computer only uses 10% of its bandwidth when I'm reading the screen doesn't mean I want less than 100% when I really need it.
I think your'e wrong. Google is not a commodity computing company, its in the advertising business. You and I are not the customers, we're the product.
Nobody is going to do any real work on a cell phone. You need a full keyboard and a decent size display. The cost of the display isn't going to magically drop just because the device is connected to the network. Many companies already lease their PC's so there's nothing new there either.
You've baked alot of assumptions in your argument, but even if all of those assumptions were true, what is the net effect? You're still going to end up buying a hardware device that is either going to be neutered PC that will be $50 cheaper at best, or a specialized thin-client machine that will probably cost more than a PC. All for a device that turns into a lump of coal if your Internet connection fails. No thanks.
Hey, that guy that doesn't understand what the Overrated moderation means is back on Slashdot today. Rather than tell him RTFFAQ I'll be nice and spoon-feed him:
Overrated -- Sometimes you'll run into a comment which for whatever reason has been moderated out of proportion -- this probably means several moderators saw it at nearly the same time, thought it was Funny, Insightful etc, and their scores added together exaggerate its relative merit. (A knock-knock joke at +5, Funny) Such a comment is Overrated. It's not knocking the original poster to say so, but it's probably better to spend your mod points on comments which are deserving of being moderated up.
You see "Overrated" is a mod you use when others have given a comment too much credit. If nobody has modded the comment up, it can't be overrated. Get it?
You can still use Troll or something if you disagree with my comment. I just hate to have you embarrass yourself this way.
My point was that it doesn't make much sense for nerdy UNIX types to switch to OS X if they didn't have any use for the orginal Mac OS. The less UNIX-like OS X is, the stronger my case.
So I doubt the claim that the Mac's demographics has changed all that much.
Hey if these guys were using Macs as early as a year before they were first available, that is impressive. How do they like Apple's 2007 products?
Most computer geeks you know probably didn't touch the classic Mac OS during its heyday simply because they were still in diapers.
If someone can't find any value in the old Mac OS it's hard imagine they'd find much unique value in OS X. OS X is really just UNIX + a Mac style GUI. If you don't like the GUI, you'd be happier with some other UNIX derivative.
"PowerPoint is so widely used that "PowerPoint Presentation" has become a more or less generic expression that people tend to use even when (as in this case) we have no clue what's used inside NASA"
Sorry, no sale. If the author merely wanted to talk about bullet-point presentations, he could have just put that in the title. In fact most of the article talks specifically about the PowerPoint product and not generic presentation software.
"Had the GP even looked at the article in question, he would've seen that in the first paragraph Tufte mentions that this bullet-point presentation culture was witnessed and commented on by Feynman after Challenger"
Yes, the article claims that Feynman commented on "slideware-style presentation", but doesn't cite where.
Feynman's primary concern was NASA's inability or unwillingness to analyze risk in a scientific manner. In fact Feynman's "Appendix to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident" doesn't mention bullet-points or slideware-style presentation at all despite the fact that he commented extensively on NASA's management culture, so he apparently didn't think it was all that significant even if he commented on it elsewhere.
NASA commited itself to solving the foam problem but when it turned out to be difficult they decided they didn't have to solve it. So they found evidence that the problem wasn't solved. How could this be in any way surprising?
So your claim is that no engineers at NASA had ever expressed concern about the O-rings except a few days before launch. What is your documentation for this claim?
Give it a rest.
Take a look at "What Do You Care What Other People Think" by Richard Feynman and read what he had to say about the first shuttle disaster. NASA has had problems facing reality long before PowerPoint was available.
I don't dispute that needs of a graphics package and word processor are different, but I don't believe that font rendering required secret APIs. As I recall WordPerfect avoided a lot of standard, well documented approaches to Windows in favor of their own legacy approach (e.g. printer drivers).
I don't buy the idea that they couldn't work on OS/2 and Windows at the same. They could have simply hired some experienced Windows developers. In any event, they should have been at least investigating Windows long before OS/2 was an issue.
It really doesn't matter whether programmers use copy/paste, trial and error, or genius to achieve their goals as long as the application is good. I've seen hacked-up code that was very succesfull and I've seen companies go under because the programmers spent too much time worrying about the flexiblity of a future they insured would never happen.
Frankly, I find elitism tedious. Create a great application and I'll sing your praises. Write a bad one and I'll avoid it. Either way, I don't give a shit what methodology you used.
In other words the waterfall method is more of a straw man than a real methodology.