You are correct in all that you say here. The question still comes down to market share and whether MS was willing to devote the support and development resources to a product (Alpha based systems) that at the time was less than 1% of the total market. Could they ever have turned a profit in that scenario? Not likely.
Like so many other instances, quality does not always win over quantity I suppose. Alpha was a better platform, I have no doubt, but that wasn't enough to make it a winner. Power and MIPS were also solid platforms at the time with some aspects superior to Intel, but no one was buying them, so similar end result.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/s...
But seriously, give Walmart et al direct access to my bank account using 40 year old ACH technology? And trust them to have no security holes, fraud protection that credit cards provide on individual transactions, etc. etc. etc.
I think not.
The only reason NT on Alpha failed was market share driven by DEC's hardware prices (the only source of Alpha based servers at the time) was about three times the equivalent i386 server from Dell or Compaq. I ran a shop fully populated with Alpha's running NT 3.1, 3.51 and NT4 at first, we switched to Dell i386 servers because of this.
The DEC Alpha's did have very good availability and uptime, but for three times the cost, and very limited to non-existent third party software (backup software, security software, etc.). It was very hard to justify the expense. Not to mention being locked in to DEC for auxiliary hardware like NICs and RAID controllers which limited the selection severely, and again at triple the cost per unit.
DEC Alpha's running NT were great runners, but their hardware pricing, selection and availability is what did it in, not weakness of the OS on that platform.
Methinks you should get your facts and root causes for the failures in the market of the Alpha/NT product straight before you spout off.
Also not to mention that MS produced it's first "smart watches" in the mid 90's (Timex Datalink) in cooperation with Timex, and also the SPOT watches from middle of the last decade. Not exactly market success, especially the second one. But MS was working with watches, tablets, PDA's etc. back when Apple was a just few dollars away from collapse and bankruptcy
Timex data link watch (developed in partnership with MS, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) that had synchronization capabilities with Outlook/Schedule+ in the early 90's, sync'd up via barcodes flashed on the screen of the PC.
In the previous decade, SPOT watches ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) that offered limited data and IM capabilities through FM radio sub carrier signals.
I owned on of the datalink watches for years, worked very well and reliably. Handy. The SPOT watches looked interesting to me tech wise, but couldn't justify the service cost.
We should remember that even though they weren't exactly world beaters or "killer apps", that MS has more experience with watches than any of the large tech vendors, including partnerships with existing conventional watchmakers.
They could very well be the first to get something close to the right balance here, and the fact that they appear to be making it compatible with ALL of the major smartphone platforms is an encouraging sign.
We shall see.
(former Navy nuc operator here) Although the direct technical skills from my time really don't apply. The idea of the "block diagram level" knowledge in your mind and the basic troubleshooting process instlled in me there in my training has served me VERY well over the course of my IT career. Not to mention the broad (not necessarily deep) mechanical system knowledge of things like power, HVAC, emergency generators, UPSs, etc. Data center infrastructure has a lot of similarity (at a smaller scale) to safety systems at a nuc plant.
Yeah, not broad based the way the article says, but for my more specific part it worked for me!
Sometime in the late 70's, government's started bribing large companies using huge tax breaks, relaxation of regulations, land grants, etc. using taxpayer money. This has led to very little except badness and a culture of auctioning business locations to the highest (or lowest?) bidder. Nothing good has come of that atmosphere and it's continuing to get worse. How to stop it though?
In some way every third party vendor does this. Anything that can potentially complicate their installation or support gets eliminated, rather than configured in a way that is appropriate or best practices. It reduces their support cost and increases their profits. Overspecing hardware and network resources for their app is another area where this is done.
Good point, remembering back now. Was also the source of a lot of instability because of crappy video drivers especially early. That's what drove a lot of the unidriver model or generic low level driver stuff that kinda became the plumbing of "plug and play", took a while to get there in away that worked decently. I for one was very happy when they got print drivers out of kernel mode, so many stability problems there too.
Chicago was what became Windows 95, DOS was present as something vaguely like a "kernel" although that definition doesn't fit well. The 32 bit mode stuff was layered on top of DOS. NT4 was the first shipping version that used the NT kernel with the Win95 interface, that was codenamed "Cairo" and was really mostly a shell update using the NT 3.51 underpinnings.
This really isn't much different than what nature would have ultimately done with the water right? Just accelerated mechanically. Not much different than what we would have to do for long duration space travel or colonization either.
All sorts of automated security updates and patches during the regularly scheduled maintenance window.
Couple of key things that make it work: 1. A valid and representative DEV environment or host(s) to vet and test deploy the updates using the same methods as production hosts. 2. A solid alerting system for when the inevitable couple of hosts fail and needs help to get running again. 3. A qualified and responsive on call person to review the results at or near the end of the maintenance window to make sure everything came back online properly and take action where necessary.
It doesn't so much eliminate the after hours work as to reduce the volume of the after hours work to a level manageable by a single qualified tech.
Ensure true available choices and competition among consumer level ISPs and nearly all of these problems take care of themselves. Allow local monopolies on a broad scale as we have now and we give the power to do this to those ISPs because you have no choice to take your business elsewhere.
The "Libertarian" self regulating market can work, but only if monopolies are not allowed.
They can still virtually follow you, build a case, use the information to connect you to others, use it to indicate where to look for other evidence, etc. The location data just can't be admitted as "evidence", doesn't mean they can't and won't continue to use the information otherwise.
Small incremental progress, but definitely not a full block on use of the data.
whether he is guilty or not is not a subject of voting and opinion polls. The percentages in favor or not have nothing to do with whether he guilty of committing a crime, whether the laws used to prosecute him are appropriate and constitutional, whether the governments efforts at pursuing a conviction are proper and correct, whether the public service and expression of rights done by Snowden overrides the intent of the law, etc. etc. All having nothing to do with a focus group or opinion poll
I think that it's really not about open or closed source. It's about monoculture, the whole net is more resilient if we didn't do that. So many warned about that issue with the desktop/laptop running Windows, and that risk is there and real still, but while worrying about that we built it anyway in an a non-OS specific way on servers too
I know that if I were to remove an antenna from a police cruiser that I would be in jail, quickly, likely bruised and beaten during the trip too. Why should it be different for the officers? Criminal vandalism charges, destruction of public property, obstruction, etc. etc. let the charges flow. Oh, wait, these are police, they're never (or at least very rarely) convicted of criminal charges for their actions, sorry for wasting your time....
Europe has far more diesels in passenger car use than is typical in the US, the particulate and Nitrogen Oxides are not nearly as much a problem for gasoline engines as diesel. While diesel gets (typically) better mileage, it comes with other costs.
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100,000 Model T's will beat a 100 Cadillacs in the car business every time.
You are correct in all that you say here. The question still comes down to market share and whether MS was willing to devote the support and development resources to a product (Alpha based systems) that at the time was less than 1% of the total market. Could they ever have turned a profit in that scenario? Not likely. Like so many other instances, quality does not always win over quantity I suppose. Alpha was a better platform, I have no doubt, but that wasn't enough to make it a winner. Power and MIPS were also solid platforms at the time with some aspects superior to Intel, but no one was buying them, so similar end result.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/s... But seriously, give Walmart et al direct access to my bank account using 40 year old ACH technology? And trust them to have no security holes, fraud protection that credit cards provide on individual transactions, etc. etc. etc. I think not.
The only reason NT on Alpha failed was market share driven by DEC's hardware prices (the only source of Alpha based servers at the time) was about three times the equivalent i386 server from Dell or Compaq. I ran a shop fully populated with Alpha's running NT 3.1, 3.51 and NT4 at first, we switched to Dell i386 servers because of this. The DEC Alpha's did have very good availability and uptime, but for three times the cost, and very limited to non-existent third party software (backup software, security software, etc.). It was very hard to justify the expense. Not to mention being locked in to DEC for auxiliary hardware like NICs and RAID controllers which limited the selection severely, and again at triple the cost per unit. DEC Alpha's running NT were great runners, but their hardware pricing, selection and availability is what did it in, not weakness of the OS on that platform. Methinks you should get your facts and root causes for the failures in the market of the Alpha/NT product straight before you spout off.
actually, go back to 1994! Timex Datalink
Also not to mention that MS produced it's first "smart watches" in the mid 90's (Timex Datalink) in cooperation with Timex, and also the SPOT watches from middle of the last decade. Not exactly market success, especially the second one. But MS was working with watches, tablets, PDA's etc. back when Apple was a just few dollars away from collapse and bankruptcy
Timex data link watch (developed in partnership with MS, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) that had synchronization capabilities with Outlook/Schedule+ in the early 90's, sync'd up via barcodes flashed on the screen of the PC. In the previous decade, SPOT watches ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) that offered limited data and IM capabilities through FM radio sub carrier signals. I owned on of the datalink watches for years, worked very well and reliably. Handy. The SPOT watches looked interesting to me tech wise, but couldn't justify the service cost.
We should remember that even though they weren't exactly world beaters or "killer apps", that MS has more experience with watches than any of the large tech vendors, including partnerships with existing conventional watchmakers. They could very well be the first to get something close to the right balance here, and the fact that they appear to be making it compatible with ALL of the major smartphone platforms is an encouraging sign. We shall see.
(former Navy nuc operator here) Although the direct technical skills from my time really don't apply. The idea of the "block diagram level" knowledge in your mind and the basic troubleshooting process instlled in me there in my training has served me VERY well over the course of my IT career. Not to mention the broad (not necessarily deep) mechanical system knowledge of things like power, HVAC, emergency generators, UPSs, etc. Data center infrastructure has a lot of similarity (at a smaller scale) to safety systems at a nuc plant. Yeah, not broad based the way the article says, but for my more specific part it worked for me!
I had thought Slashdot was a bastion for the (mostly) technically competent and (mostly) intelligent. Thanks for dragging it down mods....
No, government doesn't create the problem, but they allowed it to start and allow it to continue
Sometime in the late 70's, government's started bribing large companies using huge tax breaks, relaxation of regulations, land grants, etc. using taxpayer money. This has led to very little except badness and a culture of auctioning business locations to the highest (or lowest?) bidder. Nothing good has come of that atmosphere and it's continuing to get worse. How to stop it though?
In some way every third party vendor does this. Anything that can potentially complicate their installation or support gets eliminated, rather than configured in a way that is appropriate or best practices. It reduces their support cost and increases their profits. Overspecing hardware and network resources for their app is another area where this is done.
Good point, remembering back now. Was also the source of a lot of instability because of crappy video drivers especially early. That's what drove a lot of the unidriver model or generic low level driver stuff that kinda became the plumbing of "plug and play", took a while to get there in away that worked decently. I for one was very happy when they got print drivers out of kernel mode, so many stability problems there too.
Chicago was what became Windows 95, DOS was present as something vaguely like a "kernel" although that definition doesn't fit well. The 32 bit mode stuff was layered on top of DOS. NT4 was the first shipping version that used the NT kernel with the Win95 interface, that was codenamed "Cairo" and was really mostly a shell update using the NT 3.51 underpinnings.
Um, Win95 predated NT4 by a pretty significant amount of time. I remember beta'ing the wn95 interface on the released NT 3.51 though
This really isn't much different than what nature would have ultimately done with the water right? Just accelerated mechanically. Not much different than what we would have to do for long duration space travel or colonization either.
All sorts of automated security updates and patches during the regularly scheduled maintenance window. Couple of key things that make it work: 1. A valid and representative DEV environment or host(s) to vet and test deploy the updates using the same methods as production hosts. 2. A solid alerting system for when the inevitable couple of hosts fail and needs help to get running again. 3. A qualified and responsive on call person to review the results at or near the end of the maintenance window to make sure everything came back online properly and take action where necessary. It doesn't so much eliminate the after hours work as to reduce the volume of the after hours work to a level manageable by a single qualified tech.
Ensure true available choices and competition among consumer level ISPs and nearly all of these problems take care of themselves. Allow local monopolies on a broad scale as we have now and we give the power to do this to those ISPs because you have no choice to take your business elsewhere. The "Libertarian" self regulating market can work, but only if monopolies are not allowed.
It's either actual incompetence and an accident, or it's feigned incompetence with a purpose. Either answer is bad for citizens.
They can still virtually follow you, build a case, use the information to connect you to others, use it to indicate where to look for other evidence, etc. The location data just can't be admitted as "evidence", doesn't mean they can't and won't continue to use the information otherwise. Small incremental progress, but definitely not a full block on use of the data.
whether he is guilty or not is not a subject of voting and opinion polls. The percentages in favor or not have nothing to do with whether he guilty of committing a crime, whether the laws used to prosecute him are appropriate and constitutional, whether the governments efforts at pursuing a conviction are proper and correct, whether the public service and expression of rights done by Snowden overrides the intent of the law, etc. etc. All having nothing to do with a focus group or opinion poll
I think that it's really not about open or closed source. It's about monoculture, the whole net is more resilient if we didn't do that. So many warned about that issue with the desktop/laptop running Windows, and that risk is there and real still, but while worrying about that we built it anyway in an a non-OS specific way on servers too
I know that if I were to remove an antenna from a police cruiser that I would be in jail, quickly, likely bruised and beaten during the trip too. Why should it be different for the officers? Criminal vandalism charges, destruction of public property, obstruction, etc. etc. let the charges flow. Oh, wait, these are police, they're never (or at least very rarely) convicted of criminal charges for their actions, sorry for wasting your time....
Europe has far more diesels in passenger car use than is typical in the US, the particulate and Nitrogen Oxides are not nearly as much a problem for gasoline engines as diesel. While diesel gets (typically) better mileage, it comes with other costs.