As others have pointed out, this 'unbundling' could very well translate to 'charging for what used to be for free', while the 'subscription' part translates to 'and you keep paying for it even though the price is the same as before'.
However, this is hardly a new thing. IBM pulled this same trick in the 1960s (back when they were The Empire, before Bill and Paul wrote their first BASIC interpreter), after a 'consent decree' forced them to allow third-party software and hardware on their mainframes. Interesting how times change so much, and yet so little.
Also, people are forgetting that this was the original plan for Vista, too. That plan ran aground of the sheer size of the installed base; they could not convert the whole system to.Net without breaking compatibility for too many popular programs. It still ended up breaking more than they'd wanted. To do this, they would need to re-write virtually the entire codebase for Windows - while still remaining backwards-compatible. I don't see Microsoft finishing that project any time before the heat death of the Universe.
In any case, how much does it matter? Given the way the three major camps in the field are converging, by the time 2010 rolls around the only way the average user would be able to tell the difference between operating systems is to look at the logo. The limits if Windows emulation on Linux and MacOS are, by some not-at-all surprising coincidence, roughly the same as the limits of backwards compatibility on Vista - because on some level, Vista itself is only emulating the older versions of Windows. If the user interfaces and basic tools are all similar and growing moreso, what is to keep the average user - whose only interest in the thing is to write documents, send e-mail, browse porn, etc. and who neither knows nor cares about the geeky details we here love - from jumping from one platform to another when their only concern is whether they can read the right files and run the right videos?
While this has worked in Microsoft's favor in the past - because it meant that there was no incentive to replace Windows with Linux - it has been hurting them ever since XP came out. The only time most people upgrade to a new version is when they replace their hardware, which has become less frequent as the pace of hardware improvements drops, and the relevance of raw power decreases. To most people, it doesn't matter how slow it goes as long as it runs Word without crashing (and just about any modern system will run Word at about the same speed - the major speed limit these days on Windows systems comes from malware infections, not CPU speed or the amount of memory). Now that some of the major hardware vendors are backing Linux in earnest (because they can sell systems for less money while clearing more per sale), it is possible that users will start buying Linux boxen for the lower price without realizing the difference - even after the system is up and running.
Congratulations, you've just re-invented the Network Computer... or the 'thin client'... or was that the 'diskless workstation'? Oh, wait I know what it's called:
The Dumb Terminal.
Locked-down solutions have been tried in the past. They don't suffice, because no two users have [i]quite[/i] the same requirements, because local storage is much faster (and more secure) than remote storage, because and because rental systems are too costly to operate - the technical support and the refurbishing required after return are prohibitively expensive, to the point where rental systems are essentially disposable ones. While I certainly agree that part of the problem with current systems is that focus too much on glitz and gee-whiz and not enough on effectiveness and stability, a locked-down computer that uses the exact same existing software as the general-purpose systems is the wrong answer to the wrong question (and this is not MS bashing - anyone who thinks that *any* of the existing operating systems is acceptable is a fool).
originally, it was made to look like the person had commit suicide (he was in a an otherwise empty hotel room, on the toilet, with just enough bottles of water to prevent himself from dehydrating while he starved, and the current setting so high that he wouldn't notice the pain as he was dying).
However, the investigating officer happened to know him and concluded it was a setup - he insisted that the man in question would be more likely to kill himself by taking a spacecraft out and blowing the fusion engine, rather than go all the way to Earth (he was an asteroid miner) just to kill himself. It turns out the man, while he wasn't an officer himself, he was assisting in a sting operation by another law enforcement agency (IIRC) and got caught; the mobsters drugged him, set him up in the hotel room, and left him there, figuring that anyone investigating would assume he'd killed himself intentionally.
Actually, there are a large number of studies that say the opposite is generally true, even for expert users who know the keystroke commands from memory (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this).
bangs head on keyboard Ugh. That parenthetical remark was supposed to be here:
One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this).
What gets me is that I proofed the posting several times and still missed this.
It is in fact probably the case which is relevant to your data-entry example, as IIRC most DE software of the time simply used the tab key to move from field to field and the return to finish a record (which most Windows DE software will also do, BTW; just because you can use the mouse doesn't necessarily mean you must).
When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?
Actually, there are a large number of studies that say the opposite is generally true, even for expert users who know the keystroke commands from memory (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this). The time 'saved' by keeping your hands on the home row is more than wasted by the time that it takes to recall a key-combination. It doesn't seem that way because you are actively thinking about the command, so your time sense is focused on the activity, whereas the time spent mousing around is more or less 'blank time', since the hand-eye coordination needed to match the pointer to the pointed item is more or less 'handled in hardware' once the decision of which command to use is made.
Naturally, there are several cases where keyboard commands are faster than menus, however. One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos. Another is in the case of an expert user entering a complex, multi-operation command line, versus having to gesture the same actions; however, a case such as that is generally complex enough that the real optimal solution is to create a script of the command, even for a single use instance (some systems, such as Oberon, facilitate this by allowing you to invoke any arbitrary selected text as a script - indeed, in Oberon a menu item is nothing more than a section of text that is pinned to a given location and 'pre-selected' so that it activates on a single click). Third, multi-level menus require the user to select and target successive items, which is the same cause of slow-down in keystroke commands. Fourth, there are many cases of poorly considered 'graphical' tools that require multiple passes to home in on the target (Raskin's example of a 'visual thermometer' that requires you to adjust the height of the 'mercury' column versus simply entering the degrees into a textbox, comes to mind). Finally, 'adaptive' menus are invariably worse than keystrokes, because the changes disrupt the pattern of actions. In each of these last three cases, the reason the mouse is slower is because the layout of the UI stymies the ability of the user to habituate to them, making it a matter of design rather than a flaw with pointing devices themselves.
Ironically enough, given all the 'quick bars' around in certain systems, the worst response time in most cases is for using icons. The problem is that you have to associate the icon with not only the image it represents, but also the action it causes, and the connection between them is not always as obvious to a user as it was to the developers. The difficulty increases rapidly with the number if icons on the screen, especially if there are two or more similar icon images that need to be differentiated. Many design theorists today argue that icons should only be used sparingly, and only to represent specific physical devices (i.e., a disk drive).
What we really need are more designers who understand usability analysis, and actually use it to determine how much effort a given design takes to use.
Ok, so it's a piece of crap that only loads a tiny little snippet of code, which just prints a line of text and returns to the loader... but it's a boot loader, damn it. It's only meant to demonstrate how it's done, really. If anyone was wondering, it's written for Netwide Assembler, which handles some things differently from MASM. I would have posted it in my message, but apparently the lameness filter is itself too lame to tell the difference between code and spam.
Interesting stuff, chitosan. It's a family of oligosaccarides, not a single chemical, and until recently was mostly consider a waste product. Leately though, it's apparently become some sort of fad diet aid as well, one of those alleged 'fat blockers' that are probably total BS. It also used as an emulsifier (an additive which keeps different liquid parts of the food from separating), as a livestock feed. In addition to the clotting action, it supposedly has some anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties, though how much so isn't said.
While it is mostly derived from seafood shell left from food processing, it can also be extracted from certain fungi, which actually produce it in much larger quantities. This means that it probably will be cheaper in the long run to synthesize it industrially using the fungi rather than harvesting it from shellfish, though unless the market for (or populations of) shrimp and crab suddenly nosedives, they'll probably keep doing that as well (they have to do something with the shells, after all).
There are more than two alternatives, even on the PC platform. Admittedly, none are as widespread or as well supported, but they do exist.
To me, the real quesiton is why people consider any of the existing operating systems acceptable at all. Given the current 'state of the art', anyone who is not a complete computer addict (such as myself, admittedly) would be better off avoiding computers entirely; they consume far more time and effort than the save. The entire computer field remains nothing but hype.
Bah. How careless of me. I could have sworn I'd hit 'Preview', not 'Submit', but apparently I was mistaken. As a result, a number of typos and other errors crept in. Specifically, in the last paragraph, it should have read,
"The only era in which a substantial percentage of the population (perhaps as much as 10%) received an adequate education was from 1958 to 1968. The only result of this was that large numbers of book-smart but naive students realized that most of this society's fixations were nonsense and tried to replace them; unfortunately, the ideas that they tried to replace them with proved to be even worse, and in the end most of them simply got back in line with society's demands."
First off, who says that computers have improved efficiency in the workplace? Who says anyone *wants* them to? Efficient businesses make for inefficient economies, as they employ fewer people and consume fewer products. The computer is the tool of *in*efficiency par excellance, which is why it was (for a while anyway) good for the economy (t was terrible for business, especially those built around the idea that it could make the company more productive, which is why it ceased to be good for the economy).
More to the point: anyone who thinks that schooling in the US has anything at all to do with education is deluded. US schools serve two purposes: to force students to interact with each other so the at they learn how to play by the rules of society, and to act as a holding pen for 'non-productive' children until they are old enough to be squeezed out into the workforce like so much sausage meat. With the schools in their current state, we would be better off dropping the pretense of 'education' and simply forcung minors to live in barracks until they are old enough to join the workforce.
Furthermore, no amount of 'education' reform will ever succeed because, at the end of the day, this society doesn't *want* people to be educated. The only era in which a substantial percentage of the population (perhaps as much as 10%) received an adequate education, large numbers of the book-smart but naive students realized that most of this society's fixations were nonsense and tried to replace them; unfortunately, the ideas that they tried to replace them with proved to be even worse, and in the end most of them simply got back in line.
No one, it seems, has worked out the logical conclusion of this treaty: that programming itself would be thus illegal, as security and stability testing is a part of the development of any non-trivial program. This suggests a test case in which a programmer is arrested for 'hacking' a program he or she wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have pointed out, this 'unbundling' could very well translate to 'charging for what used to be for free', while the 'subscription' part translates to 'and you keep paying for it even though the price is the same as before'.
.Net without breaking compatibility for too many popular programs. It still ended up breaking more than they'd wanted. To do this, they would need to re-write virtually the entire codebase for Windows - while still remaining backwards-compatible. I don't see Microsoft finishing that project any time before the heat death of the Universe.
However, this is hardly a new thing. IBM pulled this same trick in the 1960s (back when they were The Empire, before Bill and Paul wrote their first BASIC interpreter), after a 'consent decree' forced them to allow third-party software and hardware on their mainframes. Interesting how times change so much, and yet so little.
Also, people are forgetting that this was the original plan for Vista, too. That plan ran aground of the sheer size of the installed base; they could not convert the whole system to
In any case, how much does it matter? Given the way the three major camps in the field are converging, by the time 2010 rolls around the only way the average user would be able to tell the difference between operating systems is to look at the logo. The limits if Windows emulation on Linux and MacOS are, by some not-at-all surprising coincidence, roughly the same as the limits of backwards compatibility on Vista - because on some level, Vista itself is only emulating the older versions of Windows. If the user interfaces and basic tools are all similar and growing moreso, what is to keep the average user - whose only interest in the thing is to write documents, send e-mail, browse porn, etc. and who neither knows nor cares about the geeky details we here love - from jumping from one platform to another when their only concern is whether they can read the right files and run the right videos?
While this has worked in Microsoft's favor in the past - because it meant that there was no incentive to replace Windows with Linux - it has been hurting them ever since XP came out. The only time most people upgrade to a new version is when they replace their hardware, which has become less frequent as the pace of hardware improvements drops, and the relevance of raw power decreases. To most people, it doesn't matter how slow it goes as long as it runs Word without crashing (and just about any modern system will run Word at about the same speed - the major speed limit these days on Windows systems comes from malware infections, not CPU speed or the amount of memory). Now that some of the major hardware vendors are backing Linux in earnest (because they can sell systems for less money while clearing more per sale), it is possible that users will start buying Linux boxen for the lower price without realizing the difference - even after the system is up and running.
Congratulations, you've just re-invented the Network Computer... or the 'thin client'... or was that the 'diskless workstation'? Oh, wait I know what it's called:
The Dumb Terminal.
Locked-down solutions have been tried in the past. They don't suffice, because no two users have [i]quite[/i] the same requirements, because local storage is much faster (and more secure) than remote storage, because and because rental systems are too costly to operate - the technical support and the refurbishing required after return are prohibitively expensive, to the point where rental systems are essentially disposable ones. While I certainly agree that part of the problem with current systems is that focus too much on glitz and gee-whiz and not enough on effectiveness and stability, a locked-down computer that uses the exact same existing software as the general-purpose systems is the wrong answer to the wrong question (and this is not MS bashing - anyone who thinks that *any* of the existing operating systems is acceptable is a fool).
Actually, the story went rather differently...
SPOILERS FOLLOW
*
*
*
*
*
originally, it was made to look like the person had commit suicide (he was in a an otherwise empty hotel room, on the toilet, with just enough bottles of water to prevent himself from dehydrating while he starved, and the current setting so high that he wouldn't notice the pain as he was dying).
However, the investigating officer happened to know him and concluded it was a setup - he insisted that the man in question would be more likely to kill himself by taking a spacecraft out and blowing the fusion engine, rather than go all the way to Earth (he was an asteroid miner) just to kill himself. It turns out the man, while he wasn't an officer himself, he was assisting in a sting operation by another law enforcement agency (IIRC) and got caught; the mobsters drugged him, set him up in the hotel room, and left him there, figuring that anyone investigating would assume he'd killed himself intentionally.
Who will be the test subjects? Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore?
bangs head on keyboard Ugh. That parenthetical remark was supposed to be here:
One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this).
What gets me is that I proofed the posting several times and still missed this.
It is in fact probably the case which is relevant to your data-entry example, as IIRC most DE software of the time simply used the tab key to move from field to field and the return to finish a record (which most Windows DE software will also do, BTW; just because you can use the mouse doesn't necessarily mean you must).
Oh, and the first link should have been:
Usability in Website and Software Design
When will interface designers learn that it's faster if you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard every three seconds?
Actually, there are a large number of studies that say the opposite is generally true, even for expert users who know the keystroke commands from memory (indeed, one could argue that the letter and symbol keys on a keyboard are all examples of this). The time 'saved' by keeping your hands on the home row is more than wasted by the time that it takes to recall a key-combination. It doesn't seem that way because you are actively thinking about the command, so your time sense is focused on the activity, whereas the time spent mousing around is more or less 'blank time', since the hand-eye coordination needed to match the pointer to the pointed item is more or less 'handled in hardware' once the decision of which command to use is made.
Naturally, there are several cases where keyboard commands are faster than menus, however. One is when there is a very common operation which has a permanently assigned action key, with no key-combos. Another is in the case of an expert user entering a complex, multi-operation command line, versus having to gesture the same actions; however, a case such as that is generally complex enough that the real optimal solution is to create a script of the command, even for a single use instance (some systems, such as Oberon, facilitate this by allowing you to invoke any arbitrary selected text as a script - indeed, in Oberon a menu item is nothing more than a section of text that is pinned to a given location and 'pre-selected' so that it activates on a single click). Third, multi-level menus require the user to select and target successive items, which is the same cause of slow-down in keystroke commands. Fourth, there are many cases of poorly considered 'graphical' tools that require multiple passes to home in on the target (Raskin's example of a 'visual thermometer' that requires you to adjust the height of the 'mercury' column versus simply entering the degrees into a textbox, comes to mind). Finally, 'adaptive' menus are invariably worse than keystrokes, because the changes disrupt the pattern of actions. In each of these last three cases, the reason the mouse is slower is because the layout of the UI stymies the ability of the user to habituate to them, making it a matter of design rather than a flaw with pointing devices themselves.
Ironically enough, given all the 'quick bars' around in certain systems, the worst response time in most cases is for using icons. The problem is that you have to associate the icon with not only the image it represents, but also the action it causes, and the connection between them is not always as obvious to a user as it was to the developers. The difficulty increases rapidly with the number if icons on the screen, especially if there are two or more similar icon images that need to be differentiated. Many design theorists today argue that icons should only be used sparingly, and only to represent specific physical devices (i.e., a disk drive).
What we really need are more designers who understand usability analysis, and actually use it to determine how much effort a given design takes to use.
Usability in Website and Software Design
AskTog Interaction Design Section
The Raskin Center for User Interface Design
Human-Computer Interface Institute at CMU
Human-Computer Interaction Resources on the Net
Bibliography of Human-Computer Interface Studies
Usability Tips and Tricks
Overiview of GOMS Analysis
Us
Ok, so it's a piece of crap that only loads a tiny little snippet of code, which just prints a line of text and returns to the loader... but it's a boot loader, damn it. It's only meant to demonstrate how it's done, really. If anyone was wondering, it's written for Netwide Assembler, which handles some things differently from MASM. I would have posted it in my message, but apparently the lameness filter is itself too lame to tell the difference between code and spam.
Interesting stuff, chitosan. It's a family of oligosaccarides, not a single chemical, and until recently was mostly consider a waste product. Leately though, it's apparently become some sort of fad diet aid as well, one of those alleged 'fat blockers' that are probably total BS. It also used as an emulsifier (an additive which keeps different liquid parts of the food from separating), as a livestock feed. In addition to the clotting action, it supposedly has some anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties, though how much so isn't said.
While it is mostly derived from seafood shell left from food processing, it can also be extracted from certain fungi, which actually produce it in much larger quantities. This means that it probably will be cheaper in the long run to synthesize it industrially using the fungi rather than harvesting it from shellfish, though unless the market for (or populations of) shrimp and crab suddenly nosedives, they'll probably keep doing that as well (they have to do something with the shells, after all).
There are more than two alternatives, even on the PC platform. Admittedly, none are as widespread or as well supported, but they do exist.
To me, the real quesiton is why people consider any of the existing operating systems acceptable at all. Given the current 'state of the art', anyone who is not a complete computer addict (such as myself, admittedly) would be better off avoiding computers entirely; they consume far more time and effort than the save. The entire computer field remains nothing but hype.
Bah. How careless of me. I could have sworn I'd hit 'Preview', not 'Submit', but apparently I was mistaken. As a result, a number of typos and other errors crept in. Specifically, in the last paragraph, it should have read,
"The only era in which a substantial percentage of the population (perhaps as much as 10%) received an adequate education was from 1958 to 1968. The only result of this was that large numbers of book-smart but naive students realized that most of this society's fixations were nonsense and tried to replace them; unfortunately, the ideas that they tried to replace them with proved to be even worse, and in the end most of them simply got back in line with society's demands."
First off, who says that computers have improved efficiency in the workplace? Who says anyone *wants* them to? Efficient businesses make for inefficient economies, as they employ fewer people and consume fewer products. The computer is the tool of *in*efficiency par excellance, which is why it was (for a while anyway) good for the economy (t was terrible for business, especially those built around the idea that it could make the company more productive, which is why it ceased to be good for the economy).
More to the point: anyone who thinks that schooling in the US has anything at all to do with education is deluded. US schools serve two purposes: to force students to interact with each other so the at they learn how to play by the rules of society, and to act as a holding pen for 'non-productive' children until they are old enough to be squeezed out into the workforce like so much sausage meat. With the schools in their current state, we would be better off dropping the pretense of 'education' and simply forcung minors to live in barracks until they are old enough to join the workforce.
Furthermore, no amount of 'education' reform will ever succeed because, at the end of the day, this society doesn't *want* people to be educated. The only era in which a substantial percentage of the population (perhaps as much as 10%) received an adequate education, large numbers of the book-smart but naive students realized that most of this society's fixations were nonsense and tried to replace them; unfortunately, the ideas that they tried to replace them with proved to be even worse, and in the end most of them simply got back in line.
That should have read "renamed the Morgaine worm." Sorry, I'm surprised I didn't catch that in preview.
Might I suggest that this be named the Morgaine worm? ;-)
Or perhaps the class of worms could be called 'Changeling' worms, with individual ones given names like Ivrel, Shiuan, etc.
No one, it seems, has worked out the logical conclusion of this treaty: that programming itself would be thus illegal, as security and stability testing is a part of the development of any non-trivial program. This suggests a test case in which a programmer is arrested for 'hacking' a program he or she wrote.