Agreed, but I also agree with the article that Microsoft was pragmatic while Apple idealistic. However, the cold truth is, well, being pragmatic is *hard*. Maintaining backward compatibility in XP back to DOS is hard. Having a decent OS on an abritrary combination of hardware components is hard. Microsoft has kicked butt at it, and I doubt Apple could have done better even if they had tried.
Microsoft didn't just happen on their dual Windows/Office monopoly: they worked hard for it, and earned it pretty fairly. OS/2? DesqView? Word Perfect? Lotus 1-2-3? Ami-Pro? Quattro Pro? all out-competed and out-classed. Yes, they abused their monopoly position later, but they earned the right to be up there --and they should have been broken up in the late '90s, but that's another story...
I think reality is much more uncomfortable than these explanations: the late '90s boom essentially invented or expanded several new markets (e-commerce, high speed networking, web content delivery, etc). People rushed into these new markets (hence the stock-market boom and wild speculation), and they did so with primitive tools and knowledge. Almost a decade later now (9 yrs from the Netscape IPO this month) our tools have matured, and more importantly, after the bust they are now affordable.
After the widespread adoption of IT in the '90s, most computer-related jobs were either infrastructure (IT itself or operations support) or computer-based analysis. Well, guess what, our infrastructure tools are now much better and cheaper: it just takes fewer people to administer the same number of machines or put together the same level of in-house apps.
On the other hand, business intelligence software has matured for the same reasons (cost, efficiency, maturity) and it takes fewer analysts to go through the same volume of data.
This trend is not just going to go away: company spending on IT or IT-related fields is going to stabilize (if it hasn't already) and be treated just as any other infrastructure expenditure, same as office space or health insurance. IT has finally become a commodity, and as great that is for society, it kinda sucks for IT workers. There is no escape, other than to get involved in fields whose commoditization is still far into the future, or at least far enough to get you into retirement.
You may wanna try the PDA version of my newsbot: not only it's light-weight itself, but you can customize it to link to light-weight versions of news articles only --plus it's personalized to your interests. Give it a shot...
Well, a login/password on memigo is needed only if you want the more advanced features. At any rate, memigo and sites like it are essentially serendipity agents, they are not meant to be your only source of web news.
But you mentioned the Zaurus, so you will probably like the PDA version of memigo, which was actually the original reason I built the site (not just PDA-formatted, but linking to PDA-formatted articles as well, and customized for you)...
Well, at least one thing that MSN Newsbot dows that Google News doesn't, is that MSN attempts to personalize the news page based on passed clicks. Now, my newsbot has been doing that for almost 3 years now (plus a lot more, like customized XML and PDA feeds, peer networks, etc) with a more varied selection of sources (end of shameless plug:-)
As a provider of personalized, customized RSS feeds, I really do like your idea. Essentially a "Next-Modification" HTTP header that would tie together with the "Last-Modified" header would help greatly. Right now, the best you can do is hope that the RSS client respects 304 error codes, and goes away when you tell it there is no updated content. That doesn't stop it though from coming back 15' later... RFC?:-)
Don't knock Nokia... their strategy has been very conservative from an engineering perspective: 2 or 3 OS versions (Series 40, 60 and 80 (?)) and a limited set of phone "platforms" that get "skinned" for a particular market segment. E.g. their 7210 and 6610 phones are practically identical at the hardware and software level, but have very different looks and marketed to different segments. So "35 phones" are really 35 combinations of OS, phone hardware and "skin"; not too bad from an engineering perspective.
IMHO, Nokia stumbled because of two things: 1) they ignored Bluetooth for the longest time, driving away their loyal business customers (such as myself) who instead opted for the Ericsson T610 (a poor Nokia knockoff, which I own, unfortunately), and 2) they ignored clamshells for far too long.
The T610 in particular is a good example: Nokia didn't have anything to compete with the features of the T610, and people abandoned their 6xxx and 7xxx series in droves, switching to Ericsson. The T610 practically saved SE from bankruptcy (dissolution really). The market was Nokia's to lose and they stumbled badly, but they are coming back and they still make the best OS in the market, so don't count them out.
Well, then check out memigo (my own newsbot) or findory (not affiliated) for interesting experiments on news delivery without Google's infrastructure (both sites are one-man operations, and I only work on memigo on my spare time).
AFAIK, the issue is the DOM/JS integration for individual browsers --essentially you need a standard way to talk back to the server from within the DOM of a page instance, which doesn't exist. Now, there is an excellent JS library that does exactly that, abstracting away the browser-specific hacks (works on IE, Gecko, KHTML and Opera at least). For a demo, go to my site in my.sig: that's how the automatic ratings work, w/o re-loading the page.
I've seen massive (multi-million USD) ERP projects succeed and I've seen equally massive ERP projects crash and burn. This is nothing new, and it has nothing to do with Stanford (yes, I am a Stanford grad): it has everything to do with how you approach the installation. Rules to live by when you re-platform ERP:
Find out what your business/organization want to do; what is the benefit of the change and what you are aiming for.
Find out what consequences your chosen platform has to your business: what things you can do better than before, what you can only do worse and what you can do that you could not do at all before.
Communicate the above to every department and every level in your organization. Have them re-thing their business processes along the new platform so that they maximize their benefit. In the process, they will "debug" a lot of the assumptions that were put in to the ERP specs and things will pop out before actual deployment.
Big-bang roll-outs are a recipe for failure: deploy the new systems in parallel for as long as you can, or if that's not possible, deploy in only some portions of the business. Absorb the cost of building temporary interfaces to your old platform as testing (which it is).
Yes, you're right, you have to escape them. But in RSS's description tag, because of tradition (not because of the spec) you have to assume that the content is always escaped HTML. So, if you don't have HTML in your description tag and you put in say the string " big <small", then an otherwise fine RSS parser will assume that the latter part of that string is really a not properly enclosed <small> tag, and may or may not chop off the rest of the entity. Ugly.
Because I always hated/.'s RSS myself, I ended up building this newsbot to get my news fix: memigo will scrape HTML and read RSS and it will rank articles based on user ratings and the "reputation" that each source builds up over time. More interestingly (and on-topic), memigo will produce custom RSS feeds with just your recommended news articles --you basically get a special URL to get custom RSS from, or even custom PDA-optimized feeds if you want.
As far as I understand things, besides personality issues, the Atom folks were looking for more i18n and for a more-specific standard --there are tags in RSS who are being (mis)used differently by different content-producers exactly because the spec was not very clear from the beginning.
As an RSS producer/consumer myself, the one thing I've always hated about RSS was the encoding of the description tag: some feeds escape any HTML included in description, some make the whole tag a big CDATA entity, and in any case there is no information provided as to the encoding of the included HTML. One of the side effects has been that if you are parsing RSS, you have to assume that description includes HTML. So, if you happen to have > or < or any other HTML-looking entities within description, your content will be mangled by the RSS-consuming code.
I know only a little bit about GSM, but I can tell you that SMSs are nearly free: they are not time-sensitive and they travel along the "control channel" that GSM requires between the phone and the base station, plus they compress down to practically nothing. As far as going from company to company goes, GSM carriers are networked together already (to enable roaming, IMEI blocking, etc), so the data channels are there anyway. SMSs travel over free capacity essentially. So, no, an SMS shouldn't be costing them more than fractions of a penny...
This is basically already true outside of the US where home broadband and home PCs are much less widespread than in North America. This is due to many reasons IMHO, from a different work ethic --where you don't bring work home with you, and thus you have less reason for a home PC-- to cost to lifestyle differences to infrastructure (simply put, GSM phones are much more reliable and sometimes cheaper than regular PSTN lines).
This extends to other products as well: PDAs and portable game consoles are also much less common than cell phones and phones are taking over those niches too. Nokia is a much bigger threat to Windows than Linux internationally:-)
So, the article is not really news, it's just US being behind the curve on this one.
You maybe interested in memigo (shameless plug). Memigo attempts to complete automate the slashdot process: anyone can submit an article, but a) the site code does the QA of the article itself automatically, and b) the users rate each and every article, in effect moderating the front page. As an added bonus, memigo is context-sensitive (so you can monitor topics you're interested in) and of course Amazon-like collaborative filtering. Check it out...
Behind all the buzzwords, there is real value in knowledge management, if it's done right. As an example: what do you do if you want to debug an OSS app and the docs (if there are any) aren't much help? you go to Google Groups, right? well, that is a KM application right there: the "knowledge" for an OSS application is usually the help given by experienced users to others in mailing lists or newsgroups, and if you're lucky that help gets archived by something as nice and helpful as GG.
Well, for internal enterprise apps, or any other enterprise effort that requires specialized knowledge, it would be nice if you could fire up GG and try to find an answer that only some super-user knows. That's knowledge management and it's tremendously useful.
In practical terms though, KM is not needed by very small shops (as the KM is done by the experts themselves directly) and very large shops enforce KM sort of indirectly by requiring audit trails, documentation, etc. There exists though an unhappy medium of companies where experts are too spread out or unknown and where the processes aren't in place to enforce documentation that could really use KM. So, don't knock it.
I agree with that, but your list is actually a bit off: biology and chemistry (really, physics before any specialization) was within the knowledge-universe of Classic-age Greeks. I don't believe that framing the differences in terms of technology does that era any justice: technology progresses, slowly or quickly regardless of era.
What you are missing from your list is that the Classical Greeks really did not have a pre-defined set of morals, i.e. a religion in the modern Western sense (no, the Pantheon doesn't count, the Olympic Gods were more of a soap opera and a ritual to be observed than enforcers of accepted morality). Socrates or Plato do not speak of capital-G God, they speak of capital-M Man (albeit in a veiled way to not offend their contemporaries) and what Man's duties and responsibilities are. That alone is a huge leap forward from where other cultures where at the time, and is truly IMNSHO the foundation of the Western way of thinking. The expansion of Western territory and technological know how in later centuries was but a by-product of the humanistic approach of the Greeks.
Very good point... they have to pay for the development of this app and the support. Although they could just tie your "local" results back to google.com proper (very cool by itself) which would give them more ad views indirectly...
Let me just point out there are other ways to make more interactive web apps: JSRS is a free JavaScript Remote Scripting library that lets client-side JS communicate with the server: think listboxes or menus that get populated based on button clicks or check-boxes in the web page, without re-loading the page. It works here and now, and on IE, Gecko, KHTML and Opera (not a plug, just a happy developer).
You can see JSRS in action on my newsbot, where it lets you rate articles dynamically without re-loading the web page or submitting forms (in my example the server-side solution is Python Webware, but JSRS is simple enough to get to work with anything, and in fact there are already libraries for PHP, Perl, ASP, etc).
This is cool and all, but FYI the Concorde had something very similar for decades: the cross section of the wing (or of a good part of the wing) would change thickness to accommodate supersonic flight (thinner wing->better supersonic performance).
A company that decides to treat half their employees below average is a company that is doomed to fail, especially if the value created by the company is mainly created by employees (i.e. software, services, etc).
I know that by definition that ~50% of employees will be below average, but what counts is performance of these employees against the industry average, not against their immediate peers. That's what counts in the market anyways...
Yes, he has a vested interest, but there are also a few precedents that support his position: namely mobile phones and game consoles. The hardware is not truly free but the software (incl. the service associated with the device) isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, but I also agree with the article that Microsoft was pragmatic while Apple idealistic. However, the cold truth is, well, being pragmatic is *hard*. Maintaining backward compatibility in XP back to DOS is hard. Having a decent OS on an abritrary combination of hardware components is hard. Microsoft has kicked butt at it, and I doubt Apple could have done better even if they had tried.
Microsoft didn't just happen on their dual Windows/Office monopoly: they worked hard for it, and earned it pretty fairly. OS/2? DesqView? Word Perfect? Lotus 1-2-3? Ami-Pro? Quattro Pro? all out-competed and out-classed. Yes, they abused their monopoly position later, but they earned the right to be up there --and they should have been broken up in the late '90s, but that's another story...
I think reality is much more uncomfortable than these explanations: the late '90s boom essentially invented or expanded several new markets (e-commerce, high speed networking, web content delivery, etc). People rushed into these new markets (hence the stock-market boom and wild speculation), and they did so with primitive tools and knowledge. Almost a decade later now (9 yrs from the Netscape IPO this month) our tools have matured, and more importantly, after the bust they are now affordable.
After the widespread adoption of IT in the '90s, most computer-related jobs were either infrastructure (IT itself or operations support) or computer-based analysis. Well, guess what, our infrastructure tools are now much better and cheaper: it just takes fewer people to administer the same number of machines or put together the same level of in-house apps.
On the other hand, business intelligence software has matured for the same reasons (cost, efficiency, maturity) and it takes fewer analysts to go through the same volume of data.
This trend is not just going to go away: company spending on IT or IT-related fields is going to stabilize (if it hasn't already) and be treated just as any other infrastructure expenditure, same as office space or health insurance. IT has finally become a commodity, and as great that is for society, it kinda sucks for IT workers. There is no escape, other than to get involved in fields whose commoditization is still far into the future, or at least far enough to get you into retirement.
Well, at least as far as Google News goes, you can try my newsbot, which actually pre-dates GN...
You may wanna try the PDA version of my newsbot: not only it's light-weight itself, but you can customize it to link to light-weight versions of news articles only --plus it's personalized to your interests. Give it a shot...
Well, a login/password on memigo is needed only if you want the more advanced features. At any rate, memigo and sites like it are essentially serendipity agents, they are not meant to be your only source of web news.
But you mentioned the Zaurus, so you will probably like the PDA version of memigo, which was actually the original reason I built the site (not just PDA-formatted, but linking to PDA-formatted articles as well, and customized for you)...
Well, at least one thing that MSN Newsbot dows that Google News doesn't, is that MSN attempts to personalize the news page based on passed clicks. Now, my newsbot has been doing that for almost 3 years now (plus a lot more, like customized XML and PDA feeds, peer networks, etc) with a more varied selection of sources (end of shameless plug :-)
As a provider of personalized, customized RSS feeds, I really do like your idea. Essentially a "Next-Modification" HTTP header that would tie together with the "Last-Modified" header would help greatly. Right now, the best you can do is hope that the RSS client respects 304 error codes, and goes away when you tell it there is no updated content. That doesn't stop it though from coming back 15' later... RFC? :-)
Don't knock Nokia... their strategy has been very conservative from an engineering perspective: 2 or 3 OS versions (Series 40, 60 and 80 (?)) and a limited set of phone "platforms" that get "skinned" for a particular market segment. E.g. their 7210 and 6610 phones are practically identical at the hardware and software level, but have very different looks and marketed to different segments. So "35 phones" are really 35 combinations of OS, phone hardware and "skin"; not too bad from an engineering perspective.
IMHO, Nokia stumbled because of two things: 1) they ignored Bluetooth for the longest time, driving away their loyal business customers (such as myself) who instead opted for the Ericsson T610 (a poor Nokia knockoff, which I own, unfortunately), and 2) they ignored clamshells for far too long.
The T610 in particular is a good example: Nokia didn't have anything to compete with the features of the T610, and people abandoned their 6xxx and 7xxx series in droves, switching to Ericsson. The T610 practically saved SE from bankruptcy (dissolution really). The market was Nokia's to lose and they stumbled badly, but they are coming back and they still make the best OS in the market, so don't count them out.
Well, then check out memigo (my own newsbot) or findory (not affiliated) for interesting experiments on news delivery without Google's infrastructure (both sites are one-man operations, and I only work on memigo on my spare time).
AFAIK, the issue is the DOM/JS integration for individual browsers --essentially you need a standard way to talk back to the server from within the DOM of a page instance, which doesn't exist. Now, there is an excellent JS library that does exactly that, abstracting away the browser-specific hacks (works on IE, Gecko, KHTML and Opera at least). For a demo, go to my site in my .sig: that's how the automatic ratings work, w/o re-loading the page.
Another thing not mentioned in the post: Yahoo has stopped counting Junk mail towards the quota. So 100MB of actual real e-mail is pretty good.
Yes, you're right, you have to escape them. But in RSS's description tag, because of tradition (not because of the spec) you have to assume that the content is always escaped HTML. So, if you don't have HTML in your description tag and you put in say the string " big <small", then an otherwise fine RSS parser will assume that the latter part of that string is really a not properly enclosed <small> tag, and may or may not chop off the rest of the entity. Ugly.
Because I always hated /.'s RSS myself, I ended up building this newsbot to get my news fix: memigo will scrape HTML and read RSS and it will rank articles based on user ratings and the "reputation" that each source builds up over time. More interestingly (and on-topic), memigo will produce custom RSS feeds with just your recommended news articles --you basically get a special URL to get custom RSS from, or even custom PDA-optimized feeds if you want.
As far as I understand things, besides personality issues, the Atom folks were looking for more i18n and for a more-specific standard --there are tags in RSS who are being (mis)used differently by different content-producers exactly because the spec was not very clear from the beginning.
As an RSS producer/consumer myself, the one thing I've always hated about RSS was the encoding of the description tag: some feeds escape any HTML included in description, some make the whole tag a big CDATA entity, and in any case there is no information provided as to the encoding of the included HTML. One of the side effects has been that if you are parsing RSS, you have to assume that description includes HTML. So, if you happen to have > or < or any other HTML-looking entities within description, your content will be mangled by the RSS-consuming code.
I know only a little bit about GSM, but I can tell you that SMSs are nearly free: they are not time-sensitive and they travel along the "control channel" that GSM requires between the phone and the base station, plus they compress down to practically nothing. As far as going from company to company goes, GSM carriers are networked together already (to enable roaming, IMEI blocking, etc), so the data channels are there anyway. SMSs travel over free capacity essentially. So, no, an SMS shouldn't be costing them more than fractions of a penny...
This is basically already true outside of the US where home broadband and home PCs are much less widespread than in North America. This is due to many reasons IMHO, from a different work ethic --where you don't bring work home with you, and thus you have less reason for a home PC-- to cost to lifestyle differences to infrastructure (simply put, GSM phones are much more reliable and sometimes cheaper than regular PSTN lines).
:-)
This extends to other products as well: PDAs and portable game consoles are also much less common than cell phones and phones are taking over those niches too. Nokia is a much bigger threat to Windows than Linux internationally
So, the article is not really news, it's just US being behind the curve on this one.
You maybe interested in memigo (shameless plug). Memigo attempts to complete automate the slashdot process: anyone can submit an article, but a) the site code does the QA of the article itself automatically, and b) the users rate each and every article, in effect moderating the front page. As an added bonus, memigo is context-sensitive (so you can monitor topics you're interested in) and of course Amazon-like collaborative filtering. Check it out...
Behind all the buzzwords, there is real value in knowledge management, if it's done right. As an example: what do you do if you want to debug an OSS app and the docs (if there are any) aren't much help? you go to Google Groups, right? well, that is a KM application right there: the "knowledge" for an OSS application is usually the help given by experienced users to others in mailing lists or newsgroups, and if you're lucky that help gets archived by something as nice and helpful as GG.
Well, for internal enterprise apps, or any other enterprise effort that requires specialized knowledge, it would be nice if you could fire up GG and try to find an answer that only some super-user knows. That's knowledge management and it's tremendously useful.
In practical terms though, KM is not needed by very small shops (as the KM is done by the experts themselves directly) and very large shops enforce KM sort of indirectly by requiring audit trails, documentation, etc. There exists though an unhappy medium of companies where experts are too spread out or unknown and where the processes aren't in place to enforce documentation that could really use KM. So, don't knock it.
(not a KM expert, just have an interest)
I agree with that, but your list is actually a bit off: biology and chemistry (really, physics before any specialization) was within the knowledge-universe of Classic-age Greeks. I don't believe that framing the differences in terms of technology does that era any justice: technology progresses, slowly or quickly regardless of era.
:-)
What you are missing from your list is that the Classical Greeks really did not have a pre-defined set of morals, i.e. a religion in the modern Western sense (no, the Pantheon doesn't count, the Olympic Gods were more of a soap opera and a ritual to be observed than enforcers of accepted morality). Socrates or Plato do not speak of capital-G God, they speak of capital-M Man (albeit in a veiled way to not offend their contemporaries) and what Man's duties and responsibilities are. That alone is a huge leap forward from where other cultures where at the time, and is truly IMNSHO the foundation of the Western way of thinking. The expansion of Western territory and technological know how in later centuries was but a by-product of the humanistic approach of the Greeks.
(Yes, I am Greek, so I am biased
Very good point... they have to pay for the development of this app and the support. Although they could just tie your "local" results back to google.com proper (very cool by itself) which would give them more ad views indirectly...
Let me just point out there are other ways to make more interactive web apps: JSRS is a free JavaScript Remote Scripting library that lets client-side JS communicate with the server: think listboxes or menus that get populated based on button clicks or check-boxes in the web page, without re-loading the page. It works here and now, and on IE, Gecko, KHTML and Opera (not a plug, just a happy developer).
You can see JSRS in action on my newsbot, where it lets you rate articles dynamically without re-loading the web page or submitting forms (in my example the server-side solution is Python Webware, but JSRS is simple enough to get to work with anything, and in fact there are already libraries for PHP, Perl, ASP, etc).
This is cool and all, but FYI the Concorde had something very similar for decades: the cross section of the wing (or of a good part of the wing) would change thickness to accommodate supersonic flight (thinner wing->better supersonic performance).
A company that decides to treat half their employees below average is a company that is doomed to fail, especially if the value created by the company is mainly created by employees (i.e. software, services, etc).
I know that by definition that ~50% of employees will be below average, but what counts is performance of these employees against the industry average, not against their immediate peers. That's what counts in the market anyways...
Yes, he has a vested interest, but there are also a few precedents that support his position: namely mobile phones and game consoles. The hardware is not truly free but the software (incl. the service associated with the device) isn't.