People have been saying that forever and MS's lead has never fawltered.
First, people haven't been saying that forever, in the 90's "people" still believed that Microsoft will be everywhere. It looked like they were going to replace Unix on the server, it looked like they were going to replace Palm on PDAs, Apple was weak and declining - in general it looked like MS would dominate all computing.
Now, people who leave Unix go to Linux, not Windows and a couple of Windows-servers are also replaced by Linux. They might succeed in replacing Palm on PDAs, too bad for them that PDAs are replaced by smartphones where MS has lower single-digit marketshare with no signs of improvement.
And just look at the latest "record quarter". Revenue is up 6% compared to last year, however the dollar lost a lot of value in this same year (IIRC 26%), so even if we assume only half of MS' revenue outside the dollar, this plus 6% actually turns red.
And look how MS has cut their R&D budget in half to increase profits. Of course R&D is an investment in the future, why doesn't MS do that investment?
Finally look at their stock price, it doesn't seem to move up at all.
Sure, MS is still very powerful, but they have had their zenith already.
This is exactly what I was thinking, this is just a shortcut (well, actually &&!= are 4 letters and isNot are 4 letters, but you know what I mean...), since when can you patent shortcuts?
With the sales markup that's over 10$ increase in sales price.
Of course it depends on the product, but if the product costs less than $200, this will hurt profits quite a bit.
in quantity.
Yes, in quantity. But who guarantees that you will sell the product in that quantity? No one. So with Windows, you are forced to take more risk. And don't forget all the paperwork associated with licensing.
Linux isn't free either. You will likely need a RTLinux commercial distro to get anything of signifigance working.
Acutally I work on a power analyzer that runs 100% on freely available software, we use PicoGUI. Anyway, it depends a lot on what you do, but most Linux-developers don't use anything that causes royalties. It's quite common to use commercial development tools, but those don't cause any royalties on a per-unit basis, they are usually a one-time cost. Commercial support is also available, again with no effect on your per-unit costs.
Microsoft might be able to match small startup-companies like Palm or Netscape with brute force (read: pay your way into the market or use the existing influence you have), but that won't work with giants like Nokia or Motorola.
So far, all bigger tries of Windows-based smartphones have either failed due to unreliability (both T-Mobile and Orange have discontinued their Windows-smartphones over a year ago IIRC) and there is no positive trend in sight.
Symbian is established but costs royalties.
Linux is free but isn't established.
Windows is neither established nor free.
Those who want to play it save go for Symbian. Those you are willing to take a risk go for Linux (which offers being free as a reward for that risk).
Why the hell should anybody take the risk of using Windows on a smartphone? It just doesn't make any sense.
When Windows has a huge installed base and tons of 3rd party support (like on the desktop or on PDAs), it offers quite some advantages because of that.
However in the embedded market, these things are either not the case or don't really matter. Please note that I exclude PDAs here.
So in the long term, Windows-devices will have a hard time because while royalties make up just a small amount at the beginning of the lifetime (paying the developers is more expensive), the longer the product (or the product-line) is sold, the less new developments are needed and the royalties become more and more important. Also market pressure usually forces the sales price down which also causes that the royalties make up a larger share compared to revenue.
Also, Linux offers a rich software library which is readily available and just needs to be recompiled.
So while some WinCE-solutions might have some small success, they are pretty much doomed in the long term because they just can't compete in a matureing market.
The W3C Standards exist for a reason and many are devised by people who, lets face it, are waaaay smarter than both you and I.
The GP may be a troll, but he has a point.
You know what's great about HTML? It's putting the content into a form that can be displayed optimally on all resolutions, browsers, etc. with the preferences the user wants.
However, the CSS-layout simply isn't doing this very good, CSS is more optimized on those terrible pixel-based fixed-everything layout.
Just go to css zen-garden (Google will find it for you) and you will realize that well over 90% of all these CSS-designs are fixed at 800 pixel-width and are thus simply worthless crap.
I once tried to design a webpage with CSS-layout which should have a menu which should have a minimum width of 100 pixels but should grow as needed and should never overlap with the actual content.
I just wasn't able to do it with CSS, it never worked. As soon as you played with the browser window and/or font-sizes, the menu and the content would overlap and form an unreadable mess. (Before posting any wiseguy-responses, try your solution with a really narrow window, like only 100 pixels wide - it will almost certainly overlap.
While tables are not perfect and it's really annoying to define which columns should expand and which shouldn't, it just works and once you got it right, it works reliably - and it works in all browsers.
That said, CSS has many great uses as a way to reduce redundancy (through classes, etc.).
Actually I've never downloaded Firefox 1.0, but I've installed SuSE9.2 for 3 people who all use Firefox with it. (I personally use Konqueror and good old Mozilla)
I agree that the 25 million figure is pretty meaningless, however, there could be much more users than that - and given the fact that I already get about 15% of hits from Firefox, I'm pretty sure there are more than 25 million of users - simply because 15% of the Internet is more than 25 million...
Actually, I'm not really impressed by the downloads, but I am by the number of websites linking to Firefox.
On all websites I have access to logfiles, I see Mozilla (including Firefox) from somewhere between 5% and 40%.
More is better because it is ending the days of sites specially crafted for a single browser. Actually the success of KHTML (as both Konqueror and Safari) and Opera (on cellphones) will make sure we'll never see the web dominated by one single implementation. And that's a very, very good thing.
Instead of the present situation where oil companies periodically announce the discovery of new, vast oil fields?
For the last decades we have used up around 4 times as much oil as we have discovered.
Well, the price for oil would rise (only this time, wouldn't come down) to a point where alternative fuel sources are profitable.
Naive.
The whole agriculture is dependent on oil. (Not just the machines need fuel, even more importantly the fertilizers and pestizides are made out of oil) So yeah, "alternative fuel sources will become profitable", no question about that. However, even in the 1st world, there will be hunger.
Science has yet to show a causal relationship between second hand smoke and cancer.
So essentially you believe that the smoke from cigarettes is dangerous when inhaled through a filter (like most smokers do) but may be harmless when inhaled without filter (second hand smoke).
Don't you think that's pretty stupid?
The only reason why there is not such a clear "causality" is because almost everybody is a "second-hand" smoker (so it's really hard to get a comparison group) and usually you aren't affected by second-hand smoke all the time.
However, it's a fact that the risk of Asthma is several times higher for smoker's children than for non-smoker's children. So unless Asthma is caused by stupidity, it has to be second hand smoke.
Sure the US might gain some short-term benefits, but as Oil becomes more and more rare, it will turn out that those nations that prepared for it (by actually *gasp* conserving energy) will be at a huge advantage.
Just look at some random street, the vast majority of minivans, SUVs, pickups, etc. have just one single person in them. Would it really be so terrible if those would drive compacts instead? (Maybe with a trailer on those rare occasions where you really need to take so much stuff with you) Would that really reduce the living standard?
When gas prices become higher and higher, wouldn't you have a higher standard of living with a more economic car? (Or are you living for your car? Is your only purpose in live to keep your car running?)
And I didn't even start to talk about pollution...
Even if you think this whole pollution (global warming, cancer from tiny dust particles, cancer from polluted water, etc. etc.) is just an invention of the liberal media, conserving energy makes sense from a purely 100% economic point of view.
The difference is that with information, communism works - and mostly works better than capitalism, while with real, normal goods, capitalism works - and mostly better than communism.
The soviets tried to force a communistic system on real material goods - that worked only as long as they had an opressive state that kept everyone in line. Humans have a natural desire to own material things. They don't want to "share" their car with strangers.
The Americans (especially Microsoft and the **AAs) now try to force a capitalistic system on information (or "intellectual property") - and that works only as long as you have opressive IP-laws. (DMCA, etc.) Humans have a natural desire to share information. They don't mind "sharing" their elelectronic (= non-material) music-collection with strangers. Actually, a normal, non-sociopath individual will want to share it. (How often did you hear: "Hey, check that out!")
Both systems fail because the energy needed to keep them running, far exceeds any benefits. The systems tried to work against human nature with laws that were (seen as) opressive and unjust.
Just look at Microsoft: The marketing costs, costs to ship little boxes with little plastic discs around the world, the cost to store those boxes and the markup outweight the development costs by far. Similar with music. Only movies still have usually more money in production than in the retail channel.
Even if you don't admit it, Linux is gaining marketshare and influence. By the time Longhorn and IE7 ships, I'd estimate over 5% Linux desktop users.
IE7 won't be available on the Mac, which adds another 3-5% to the "not able to run IE"-list. Also the Mac Mini is likely to increase Mac marketshare a little bit.
IE7 doesn't run on older versions of Windows. It took Windows XP several years (IIRC 3 or 4) to gain 50% of users, Longhorn will take even longer to get that because the computer desktop is essentially done and the upgrade circly is slowing. Of course it will run on XPSP2, which reduces the effect of this, but if you have to download a browser anyway, IE lost the "preinstalled"-advantage on XP.
Mobile phones might really get off the ground and a significant number of users are also not able to use IE with their cellphones.
Playstation 3 is going to sell to millions of people and will run a non-IE browser.
And last but not least, IE7 will still be crap compared to Mozilla plus extensions. IE7 might be able to slow the migration to Mozilla, but once you really know Mozilla I think it's unlikely they will go back to IE.
With all the above combined, I'd say that IE will drop below 70% within 3-4 years and never be able to go above 70% again.
And 30% is way too many users to ignore. IE-only websites are already dissappearing and they will never come back (of course intranet-sites excluded where everything is possible)
I agree with you at the sound, tough. That's the only thing that's really new about the XBox.
Fact is, Microsoft built a console out of PC-parts, it bought a PC-gaming company (Bungie) and released PC-like games (FPS like Halo) and brought along a lot of PC-gamers.
Now, if XBox2 isn't backwards compatible, they are dead, IMO. If they are, things might get a little more interesting, however Sony has a couple of advantages: First they can react on XBox2 and make sure the PS3 beats it on every account. Then they have hardware that is much better suited (the cell which is half-CPU half-DSP) while the XBox2 will use a general-purpose CPU (again, but at least no x86), so Sony will be able to deliver much more performance at a lower price. Thirdly, Sony still has a much larger gaming library. 4th, XBox is dead in Japan, which will make it very hard for XBox2 to gain any ground there.
(3) Creationism and the banning of evolution in schoolbooks? I think by now the USA has the worst schoolbooks in the world, AFAIK it's the only country in the world that allows creationism in it's schools.
Suppose you are just walking in the streets when someone suddenly shoves a camera to your face and takes a picture. The flashlight blinds you momentarily, so you can't pursue him. He disappears into the crowd with a picture of your retinas in his camera.
Why so complicated?
If retina-biometrics is in widespread use, retina-scanners will also be widespread.
So the security guard will have access to all retinas of all employees. The shopkeeper will have access to all customer's retinas. The bank will have access to everybody who's ever used an ATM.
It's pretty similar to today's credit-card numbers, except you can't change them...
Slashdot Mirror
First, people haven't been saying that forever, in the 90's "people" still believed that Microsoft will be everywhere. It looked like they were going to replace Unix on the server, it looked like they were going to replace Palm on PDAs, Apple was weak and declining - in general it looked like MS would dominate all computing.
Now, people who leave Unix go to Linux, not Windows and a couple of Windows-servers are also replaced by Linux. They might succeed in replacing Palm on PDAs, too bad for them that PDAs are replaced by smartphones where MS has lower single-digit marketshare with no signs of improvement.
And just look at the latest "record quarter". Revenue is up 6% compared to last year, however the dollar lost a lot of value in this same year (IIRC 26%), so even if we assume only half of MS' revenue outside the dollar, this plus 6% actually turns red.
And look how MS has cut their R&D budget in half to increase profits. Of course R&D is an investment in the future, why doesn't MS do that investment?
Finally look at their stock price, it doesn't seem to move up at all.
Sure, MS is still very powerful, but they have had their zenith already.
I can hear it already: "But an insane patent law creates jobs!"
This is exactly what I was thinking, this is just a shortcut (well, actually &&!= are 4 letters and isNot are 4 letters, but you know what I mean...), since when can you patent shortcuts?
In the "real" world, however, on embedded systems outside PDAs, there isn't much Windows at all.
With the sales markup that's over 10$ increase in sales price.
Of course it depends on the product, but if the product costs less than $200, this will hurt profits quite a bit.
in quantity.
Yes, in quantity. But who guarantees that you will sell the product in that quantity? No one. So with Windows, you are forced to take more risk. And don't forget all the paperwork associated with licensing.
Linux isn't free either. You will likely need a RTLinux commercial distro to get anything of signifigance working.
Acutally I work on a power analyzer that runs 100% on freely available software, we use PicoGUI. Anyway, it depends a lot on what you do, but most Linux-developers don't use anything that causes royalties. It's quite common to use commercial development tools, but those don't cause any royalties on a per-unit basis, they are usually a one-time cost. Commercial support is also available, again with no effect on your per-unit costs.
So far, all bigger tries of Windows-based smartphones have either failed due to unreliability (both T-Mobile and Orange have discontinued their Windows-smartphones over a year ago IIRC) and there is no positive trend in sight.
Symbian is established but costs royalties.
Linux is free but isn't established.
Windows is neither established nor free.
Those who want to play it save go for Symbian. Those you are willing to take a risk go for Linux (which offers being free as a reward for that risk).
Why the hell should anybody take the risk of using Windows on a smartphone? It just doesn't make any sense.
However in the embedded market, these things are either not the case or don't really matter. Please note that I exclude PDAs here.
So in the long term, Windows-devices will have a hard time because while royalties make up just a small amount at the beginning of the lifetime (paying the developers is more expensive), the longer the product (or the product-line) is sold, the less new developments are needed and the royalties become more and more important. Also market pressure usually forces the sales price down which also causes that the royalties make up a larger share compared to revenue.
Also, Linux offers a rich software library which is readily available and just needs to be recompiled.
So while some WinCE-solutions might have some small success, they are pretty much doomed in the long term because they just can't compete in a matureing market.
Maybe, just maybe a Service Pack isn't the right place to put new features or anything that breaks backwards compatibility?
I don't think anybody would complain if MS would have just released a completely new version.
The GP may be a troll, but he has a point.
You know what's great about HTML? It's putting the content into a form that can be displayed optimally on all resolutions, browsers, etc. with the preferences the user wants.
However, the CSS-layout simply isn't doing this very good, CSS is more optimized on those terrible pixel-based fixed-everything layout.
Just go to css zen-garden (Google will find it for you) and you will realize that well over 90% of all these CSS-designs are fixed at 800 pixel-width and are thus simply worthless crap.
I once tried to design a webpage with CSS-layout which should have a menu which should have a minimum width of 100 pixels but should grow as needed and should never overlap with the actual content.
I just wasn't able to do it with CSS, it never worked. As soon as you played with the browser window and/or font-sizes, the menu and the content would overlap and form an unreadable mess. (Before posting any wiseguy-responses, try your solution with a really narrow window, like only 100 pixels wide - it will almost certainly overlap.
While tables are not perfect and it's really annoying to define which columns should expand and which shouldn't, it just works and once you got it right, it works reliably - and it works in all browsers.
That said, CSS has many great uses as a way to reduce redundancy (through classes, etc.).
What danger?
Australia wasn't affected by the Tsunami, so there simply was no danger for any aborigin.
You just described essentially the SuSE setup process.
However on Windows you need:
Step 5: Install virus scanner
.
.
.
.
Step 6: Install Office
Step 7: Install Instant Messenger
Step 8: Install Firefox (you don't want to keep that IE-junk, do you?)
Step 9: Install drivers
I agree that the 25 million figure is pretty meaningless, however, there could be much more users than that - and given the fact that I already get about 15% of hits from Firefox, I'm pretty sure there are more than 25 million of users - simply because 15% of the Internet is more than 25 million...
On all websites I have access to logfiles, I see Mozilla (including Firefox) from somewhere between 5% and 40%.
More is better because it is ending the days of sites specially crafted for a single browser. Actually the success of KHTML (as both Konqueror and Safari) and Opera (on cellphones) will make sure we'll never see the web dominated by one single implementation. And that's a very, very good thing.
For the last decades we have used up around 4 times as much oil as we have discovered.
Well, the price for oil would rise (only this time, wouldn't come down) to a point where alternative fuel sources are profitable.
Naive.
The whole agriculture is dependent on oil. (Not just the machines need fuel, even more importantly the fertilizers and pestizides are made out of oil) So yeah, "alternative fuel sources will become profitable", no question about that. However, even in the 1st world, there will be hunger.
So essentially you believe that the smoke from cigarettes is dangerous when inhaled through a filter (like most smokers do) but may be harmless when inhaled without filter (second hand smoke).
Don't you think that's pretty stupid?
The only reason why there is not such a clear "causality" is because almost everybody is a "second-hand" smoker (so it's really hard to get a comparison group) and usually you aren't affected by second-hand smoke all the time.
However, it's a fact that the risk of Asthma is several times higher for smoker's children than for non-smoker's children. So unless Asthma is caused by stupidity, it has to be second hand smoke.
Sure the US might gain some short-term benefits, but as Oil becomes more and more rare, it will turn out that those nations that prepared for it (by actually *gasp* conserving energy) will be at a huge advantage.
Just look at some random street, the vast majority of minivans, SUVs, pickups, etc. have just one single person in them. Would it really be so terrible if those would drive compacts instead? (Maybe with a trailer on those rare occasions where you really need to take so much stuff with you) Would that really reduce the living standard?
When gas prices become higher and higher, wouldn't you have a higher standard of living with a more economic car? (Or are you living for your car? Is your only purpose in live to keep your car running?)
And I didn't even start to talk about pollution...
Even if you think this whole pollution (global warming, cancer from tiny dust particles, cancer from polluted water, etc. etc.) is just an invention of the liberal media, conserving energy makes sense from a purely 100% economic point of view.
The soviets tried to force a communistic system on real material goods - that worked only as long as they had an opressive state that kept everyone in line. Humans have a natural desire to own material things. They don't want to "share" their car with strangers.
The Americans (especially Microsoft and the **AAs) now try to force a capitalistic system on information (or "intellectual property") - and that works only as long as you have opressive IP-laws. (DMCA, etc.) Humans have a natural desire to share information. They don't mind "sharing" their elelectronic (= non-material) music-collection with strangers. Actually, a normal, non-sociopath individual will want to share it. (How often did you hear: "Hey, check that out!")
Both systems fail because the energy needed to keep them running, far exceeds any benefits. The systems tried to work against human nature with laws that were (seen as) opressive and unjust.
Just look at Microsoft: The marketing costs, costs to ship little boxes with little plastic discs around the world, the cost to store those boxes and the markup outweight the development costs by far. Similar with music. Only movies still have usually more money in production than in the retail channel.
With all the above combined, I'd say that IE will drop below 70% within 3-4 years and never be able to go above 70% again.
And 30% is way too many users to ignore. IE-only websites are already dissappearing and they will never come back (of course intranet-sites excluded where everything is possible)
They can patent in the USA all they want anyway, no relocation to the USA needed.
For patent purposes, it's irrelevant where it was developed.
PCs had online connectivitiy since when?
HD games
PCs had better resolution than TVs since when?
hard drive
Yet another PC-feature.
I agree with you at the sound, tough. That's the only thing that's really new about the XBox.
Fact is, Microsoft built a console out of PC-parts, it bought a PC-gaming company (Bungie) and released PC-like games (FPS like Halo) and brought along a lot of PC-gamers.
Now, if XBox2 isn't backwards compatible, they are dead, IMO. If they are, things might get a little more interesting, however Sony has a couple of advantages: First they can react on XBox2 and make sure the PS3 beats it on every account. Then they have hardware that is much better suited (the cell which is half-CPU half-DSP) while the XBox2 will use a general-purpose CPU (again, but at least no x86), so Sony will be able to deliver much more performance at a lower price. Thirdly, Sony still has a much larger gaming library. 4th, XBox is dead in Japan, which will make it very hard for XBox2 to gain any ground there.
(3) Creationism and the banning of evolution in schoolbooks? I think by now the USA has the worst schoolbooks in the world, AFAIK it's the only country in the world that allows creationism in it's schools.
The whole point of biometrics is to have scanners for some distinguishable feature.
So in general it's very well understood and known how these scanners work.
It's not that hard to make replicas that can fool these scanners.
Because we are talking about biometrics, the tolerances have to be pretty high, which makes it even easier.
Why so complicated?
If retina-biometrics is in widespread use, retina-scanners will also be widespread.
So the security guard will have access to all retinas of all employees. The shopkeeper will have access to all customer's retinas. The bank will have access to everybody who's ever used an ATM.
It's pretty similar to today's credit-card numbers, except you can't change them...
Why is it that everybody is so pessimistic about that?
Everytime Microsoft badmouths Linux, more PHBs realize that this Linux-thing can't be so bad when it's such a huge threat to Windows.
Why exactly is that a problem?
With Linux I get all patches for (almost) all programs from one source, with Windows I have to go hunting for every single application.