The idea is simple; they've done it before and they'll do it again: say they'll support something, and when people see it supports $otherTech they buy on, thinking what they've been using, or wanting to use, will work. Then Microsoft will break it and say "you should've stuck with all-Microsoft technologies". Meanwhile, anyone using the non-Microsoft technologies will get burned and gun-shy, and be less likely to step off the path in the future (we're thinking of business types here). That's where the "profit" comes in.
1) It's not "developers" it's their developers they care about. Specifically, whichever development platform Microsoft is pushing at the moment..NET and ASP were big at the time (and still are, I suppose) so if you want to do anything and have it work halfway or better, that's your ticket on an all-MS platform. 2) Yup. "I embrace, extend, and extinguish" is the only IEEE Microsoft understands.
My wife takes courses online at PSU. She had to use a Windows computer with 1024x768 or greater resolution to access online -presentations- . This was a problem even at that resolution due to how Silverlight handled the text within the presentations: it would run 'underneath' on the bottom of the presentation/slideshow. It was not scalable at all.
That's not such a problem so much specifically, but it cuts out any netbooks from being used (x600 resolution or so), and almost made x768 difficult. I challenge you to find a laptop out there right now which isn't using an x786 LCD panel that doesn't cost $600+.
Yes, that's right: Silverlight pretty much makes a $500 computer unusable for the display of textual information. Not in all cases, but many. Even flash doesn't do that.
I tend to dislike Microsoft because there's something wrong with their technology; silverlight is a good example of this.
Let's see:
* high system requirements * only works on Windows * high server-side technology curve to implement * proprietary browser plug-in with no alternatives which is a pain in the ass to install (it's a lengthy install for a stupid little plugin, even on a fast computer; hurry up and wait!)
Want to use silverlight? Great, you're stuck on 2-3 platforms which Microsoft support. Good luck 3+ years down the line when you want to provide those videos without further development costs.
There is a very, very good reason why the "web" was conceptualized with open standards, and there have been great efforts to maintain said standards. It's very difficult to keep things working on a keel when you've got different parts which do not talk well with each other, so a monoculture at the infrastructure/standard level is very important.
2010 will not be the year of sandboxing applications. Give that another couple years, I think. System specifications are nowhere near high enough yet to make that a non-tedious infringement upon performance: consumers likely won't stand for it, and they're difficult features to implement (well) anyway. Poorly implemented sandboxing - which could arguably be considered 'infrastructural' to an application - isn't the kind of poorly implemented feature to walk forward with. Poorly implemented features at the infrastructure level = Windows engineering. Please, no.
What I think 2010 will give us: a speedy departure from the Desktop, for both home and business users. The only people still using them predominantly in a couple years will be the geeks, and the setbacks.
To move away from something, there's got to be something to move to... and with that, we've got a whole mess of inexpensive laptops and netbooks, and cellular phones/smartphones.
Most people have very simple Internet "needs". Facebook, email, youtube... that's the Internet to them. Even crappy smartphones (Blackberry, LG) can do that pretty well (albeit somewhat slowly). In the next year we're going to see a slew of smartphones coming out with fast, capable processors, more advanced frontend software, and some pretty impressive specifications.
So my prediction is: 2010 will be the year of smartphone malware and/or use.
I don't think we'll be to the "my cell phone is also my desktop computer" for another couple years, but if someone releases a smartphone with DisplayPort or similar technology, well... could be.
It takes a lot less time to type a dozen characters into a box/console than it does to click through a half dozen menus and panel interfaces to get where you're going.
Does anyone else think its particularly interesting that Google picked a theming for Android (eg. Android, Nexus, etc.) from a dystopian state-run future?
I fail to understand why anybody would work an 80 hour week, really, what were you doing that for?
Are you kidding me? In 1995, working in IT? He was probably doing it for a shitton of money. Probably not a few million from a sale, but probably well over $150,000 a year with options, if he was doing it right.
As opposed to some user id and account based upon a throw away email address?
Someone with a UID under 100,000 probably isn't considering the address a throw-away, on account of their UID being from pre-dotcom bust... and boom. Or, at least, close to it.
personally it depends on how well I can concentrate on my work, and how driven I am on a given day.
Four hours of effective work seems about right for the average. However, I'll also have useless days, and days where I do 12 hours of what I feel to be good, useful work - then promptly pass TFO after some hasty nourishment. It all depends on the tasks.
The irony is, the submitter is likely being viewed as the slacker, not the other way around.
If you're visible, moving about, talking to people, the perception from higher-ups is that you're getting things done. If you're sitting there not talking, staring at the computer, you're being viewed as antisocial and thus, ineffective.
So yeah, keep your mouth shut and keep your head down, you're the one that's likely to be singled out for poor performance. (Or pipe up and interact, you'll get along better.)
Also, might want to put your resume out again. This office environment is evidently the wrong kind of IT shop for you.
Piracy or fraud in-game is one thing: that's part of the game world. But service interruption resulting in in-game loss is something entirely different. It's not like with piracy or fraud where someone's gaining something; the only thing that is going to happen is you're goign to lose something, and the other parties involved are going to get the (unsatisfying) feeling of destroying an empty fleet.
Every once in a while I'll give other browsers a shot, just to see how everyone's doing.
About the time that Firefox 3.5 came out, I gave the latest Opera a try (think it was 10). Its UI is decent, and it is fast. But it didn't perform as well as Firefox on a system with 512Mb, not by a long shot.
I seem to be able to consistently crash IE8 on a Windows 7 virtual machine I've got. It's also painfully slow at loading pages, opening new tabs, responding to keyboard input, and the like - whereas Firefox 3.5 in the same VM performs just fine (almost as fast as FF 3.5 on the host machine). IE8 also seems to have to access disk much more often than Firefox (even with the VM not running out of RAM), which is likely part of the fault of the slowness and why IE8 uses less memory than FF. (I'll take the RAM use to slowness, thanks.)
Really, the only browser which competes with Firefox is Chrome (on Windows), as far as I'm concerned. And I'll stick with Firefox for its extensions and the fact that it's got over a decade of bookmarks at this point.
Multiprocess Firefox is something I've been looking forward to for some time. On a low-end system (ie single core) it may not perform as well as the single-process Firefox, but we will see.
The fact that Chrome is not open source, and Google's global dominance and Big Brother type information hiding are reasons enough for me to be suspicious about it.
What anon said is useful: change your swappiness. Having a higher swappiness can be useful for a server, but on a desktop, I've found it really isn't. I've been waiting for a 'dynamic swappiness allocator' for some time now; recall reading about it on the KML but nothing yet.
I typically have mine set to "10", though 0 works just as well, I suppose.
# To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
And what did a person do about unparked heads?
# Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
This is a feature I do not understand, conceptually - unless you are referring to something like OSX's Expose or the Awesome window manager's tags. Screenshot?
# Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
Something like:
ls -m --color=never | festival --tts
Does the trick just fine. Or was Amiga really all that hot that it made TTS not sound like someone with a puckered asshole?
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
What? Is this even a valid complaint? I've got a drawer under my computer desk where my keyboard hides. It fits the qualified description.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
You're going to have to be more specific - for those of us who have never seen an Amiga.
Personally, what you're describing to me sounds like a buggy video card being able to overwrite my disk due to a leak in the driver, or some such thing. I don't care for that.
What bothers me is not so much undocumented code, but undocumented functions and/or blocks of code. Main should be well documented, and a function should have a line or two explaining its function, but unless its particularly obtuse code, I don't want/need documentation.
In other news, people have personal preferences, just as they do in the literary world. Some people like Ayn Rand, others hate her. Some like Stephen King, others hate him. Not so much their stories, but their writing styles.
Snowcrash is an awesome story; one many can appreciate, but most people couldn't get through his writing style to finish the book.
I think that if more people wrote code (or, for that matter, books) like George Orwell wrote his books, code (and books) would be generally more readable: shorter sentences (lines of code) which convey a single meaning (function), strung together into short paragraphs (code blocks), chained together into a larger cohesive whole.
So basically, the article says netbooks are going to fail because of:
* rising netbook costs * smartphones increasing in functionality * ARM preeminence on the horizon * specialized devices (ie Kindle and kin) serving people's needs
Basically, what it boils down to, is "Netbooks are too expensive now due to Windows".
Frankly, I think the article is full of crap. The netbook isn't going anywhere; in fact, I think we'll see netbooks getting more features in the coming year, reducing their cost and/or increasing their diversity. Namely:
* That Pixel Qi or whatever screen which is viewable in direct sunlight we've been hearing about. Who needs a Kindle (for only $100 less) which is a crippled device, when you can get a full computer? * "Convertible" displays (ie tablets), again challenging the Kindle * Touchscreens
Granted, if ARM based devices can get into the market in the sub-$300 range and have all of those above features, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to "compete" with Intel based machines - x86 Windows and x86 apps included.
Personally, I've been waiting for better part of a decade for what is, essentially, a modern ARM tablet with a low-power display (loooong use) which is also similar to the NEC MobilePro 790 and/or 900. Might actually have a chance of that at some point. Surfing the internet from the top of a mountain after weeks of being there, via packet radio, would be so cool...
Most people cold-boot their computers. Why? Drivers don't properly support suspend (eg. it fails), operating systems and applications leak memory and crash, and generally, the experience becomes unpleasant.
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Then you'll have people with gluten allergies bitching about the same thing this woman is - almost nothing.
Someone flag this bitch as a potential terrorist for spending so much time on the john during the flight.
The idea is simple; they've done it before and they'll do it again: say they'll support something, and when people see it supports $otherTech they buy on, thinking what they've been using, or wanting to use, will work. Then Microsoft will break it and say "you should've stuck with all-Microsoft technologies". Meanwhile, anyone using the non-Microsoft technologies will get burned and gun-shy, and be less likely to step off the path in the future (we're thinking of business types here). That's where the "profit" comes in.
1) It's not "developers" it's their developers they care about. Specifically, whichever development platform Microsoft is pushing at the moment. .NET and ASP were big at the time (and still are, I suppose) so if you want to do anything and have it work halfway or better, that's your ticket on an all-MS platform.
2) Yup. "I embrace, extend, and extinguish" is the only IEEE Microsoft understands.
My wife takes courses online at PSU. She had to use a Windows computer with 1024x768 or greater resolution to access online -presentations- . This was a problem even at that resolution due to how Silverlight handled the text within the presentations: it would run 'underneath' on the bottom of the presentation/slideshow. It was not scalable at all.
That's not such a problem so much specifically, but it cuts out any netbooks from being used (x600 resolution or so), and almost made x768 difficult. I challenge you to find a laptop out there right now which isn't using an x786 LCD panel that doesn't cost $600+.
Yes, that's right: Silverlight pretty much makes a $500 computer unusable for the display of textual information. Not in all cases, but many. Even flash doesn't do that.
I tend to dislike Microsoft because there's something wrong with their technology; silverlight is a good example of this.
Let's see:
* high system requirements
* only works on Windows
* high server-side technology curve to implement
* proprietary browser plug-in with no alternatives which is a pain in the ass to install (it's a lengthy install for a stupid little plugin, even on a fast computer; hurry up and wait!)
Want to use silverlight? Great, you're stuck on 2-3 platforms which Microsoft support. Good luck 3+ years down the line when you want to provide those videos without further development costs.
There is a very, very good reason why the "web" was conceptualized with open standards, and there have been great efforts to maintain said standards. It's very difficult to keep things working on a keel when you've got different parts which do not talk well with each other, so a monoculture at the infrastructure/standard level is very important.
2010 will not be the year of sandboxing applications. Give that another couple years, I think. System specifications are nowhere near high enough yet to make that a non-tedious infringement upon performance: consumers likely won't stand for it, and they're difficult features to implement (well) anyway. Poorly implemented sandboxing - which could arguably be considered 'infrastructural' to an application - isn't the kind of poorly implemented feature to walk forward with. Poorly implemented features at the infrastructure level = Windows engineering. Please, no.
What I think 2010 will give us: a speedy departure from the Desktop, for both home and business users. The only people still using them predominantly in a couple years will be the geeks, and the setbacks.
To move away from something, there's got to be something to move to... and with that, we've got a whole mess of inexpensive laptops and netbooks, and cellular phones/smartphones.
Most people have very simple Internet "needs". Facebook, email, youtube... that's the Internet to them. Even crappy smartphones (Blackberry, LG) can do that pretty well (albeit somewhat slowly). In the next year we're going to see a slew of smartphones coming out with fast, capable processors, more advanced frontend software, and some pretty impressive specifications.
So my prediction is: 2010 will be the year of smartphone malware and/or use.
I don't think we'll be to the "my cell phone is also my desktop computer" for another couple years, but if someone releases a smartphone with DisplayPort or similar technology, well... could be.
It takes a lot less time to type a dozen characters into a box/console than it does to click through a half dozen menus and panel interfaces to get where you're going.
.... oh shit.
I was wondering about this.
Does anyone else think its particularly interesting that Google picked a theming for Android (eg. Android, Nexus, etc.) from a dystopian state-run future?
I fail to understand why anybody would work an 80 hour week, really, what were you doing that for?
Are you kidding me? In 1995, working in IT? He was probably doing it for a shitton of money. Probably not a few million from a sale, but probably well over $150,000 a year with options, if he was doing it right.
As opposed to some user id and account based upon a throw away email address?
Someone with a UID under 100,000 probably isn't considering the address a throw-away, on account of their UID being from pre-dotcom bust... and boom. Or, at least, close to it.
personally it depends on how well I can concentrate on my work, and how driven I am on a given day.
Four hours of effective work seems about right for the average. However, I'll also have useless days, and days where I do 12 hours of what I feel to be good, useful work - then promptly pass TFO after some hasty nourishment. It all depends on the tasks.
The irony is, the submitter is likely being viewed as the slacker, not the other way around.
If you're visible, moving about, talking to people, the perception from higher-ups is that you're getting things done. If you're sitting there not talking, staring at the computer, you're being viewed as antisocial and thus, ineffective.
So yeah, keep your mouth shut and keep your head down, you're the one that's likely to be singled out for poor performance. (Or pipe up and interact, you'll get along better.)
Also, might want to put your resume out again. This office environment is evidently the wrong kind of IT shop for you.
Piracy or fraud in-game is one thing: that's part of the game world. But service interruption resulting in in-game loss is something entirely different. It's not like with piracy or fraud where someone's gaining something; the only thing that is going to happen is you're goign to lose something, and the other parties involved are going to get the (unsatisfying) feeling of destroying an empty fleet.
Oh yeah, this was me. Not sure how it posted Anon, must've mis-clicked.
(If I was using lynx, this wouldn't have happened!)
I don't know about that.
Every once in a while I'll give other browsers a shot, just to see how everyone's doing.
About the time that Firefox 3.5 came out, I gave the latest Opera a try (think it was 10). Its UI is decent, and it is fast. But it didn't perform as well as Firefox on a system with 512Mb, not by a long shot.
I seem to be able to consistently crash IE8 on a Windows 7 virtual machine I've got. It's also painfully slow at loading pages, opening new tabs, responding to keyboard input, and the like - whereas Firefox 3.5 in the same VM performs just fine (almost as fast as FF 3.5 on the host machine). IE8 also seems to have to access disk much more often than Firefox (even with the VM not running out of RAM), which is likely part of the fault of the slowness and why IE8 uses less memory than FF. (I'll take the RAM use to slowness, thanks.)
Really, the only browser which competes with Firefox is Chrome (on Windows), as far as I'm concerned. And I'll stick with Firefox for its extensions and the fact that it's got over a decade of bookmarks at this point.
Multiprocess Firefox is something I've been looking forward to for some time. On a low-end system (ie single core) it may not perform as well as the single-process Firefox, but we will see.
The fact that Chrome is not open source, and Google's global dominance and Big Brother type information hiding are reasons enough for me to be suspicious about it.
What anon said is useful: change your swappiness. Having a higher swappiness can be useful for a server, but on a desktop, I've found it really isn't. I've been waiting for a 'dynamic swappiness allocator' for some time now; recall reading about it on the KML but nothing yet.
I typically have mine set to "10", though 0 works just as well, I suppose.
In modern parlance, sounds to me like you're describing a tiling window manager, or maybe something like Awesome.
# To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
And what did a person do about unparked heads?
# Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
This is a feature I do not understand, conceptually - unless you are referring to something like OSX's Expose or the Awesome window manager's tags. Screenshot?
# Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
Something like:
ls -m --color=never | festival --tts
Does the trick just fine. Or was Amiga really all that hot that it made TTS not sound like someone with a puckered asshole?
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
What? Is this even a valid complaint? I've got a drawer under my computer desk where my keyboard hides. It fits the qualified description.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
You're going to have to be more specific - for those of us who have never seen an Amiga.
Personally, what you're describing to me sounds like a buggy video card being able to overwrite my disk due to a leak in the driver, or some such thing. I don't care for that.
Yeah, I re-read it after writing it and hitting submit. It's horrible. My apologies!
The irony is that I'm not a coder. I'm an (unemployed!) sysadmin. I hate coding, but I'm at least not a festooned idiot. :P
What bothers me is not so much undocumented code, but undocumented functions and/or blocks of code. Main should be well documented, and a function should have a line or two explaining its function, but unless its particularly obtuse code, I don't want/need documentation.
In other news, people have personal preferences, just as they do in the literary world. Some people like Ayn Rand, others hate her. Some like Stephen King, others hate him. Not so much their stories, but their writing styles.
Snowcrash is an awesome story; one many can appreciate, but most people couldn't get through his writing style to finish the book.
I think that if more people wrote code (or, for that matter, books) like George Orwell wrote his books, code (and books) would be generally more readable: shorter sentences (lines of code) which convey a single meaning (function), strung together into short paragraphs (code blocks), chained together into a larger cohesive whole.
So basically, the article says netbooks are going to fail because of:
* rising netbook costs
* smartphones increasing in functionality
* ARM preeminence on the horizon
* specialized devices (ie Kindle and kin) serving people's needs
Basically, what it boils down to, is "Netbooks are too expensive now due to Windows".
Frankly, I think the article is full of crap. The netbook isn't going anywhere; in fact, I think we'll see netbooks getting more features in the coming year, reducing their cost and/or increasing their diversity. Namely:
* That Pixel Qi or whatever screen which is viewable in direct sunlight we've been hearing about. Who needs a Kindle (for only $100 less) which is a crippled device, when you can get a full computer?
* "Convertible" displays (ie tablets), again challenging the Kindle
* Touchscreens
Granted, if ARM based devices can get into the market in the sub-$300 range and have all of those above features, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to "compete" with Intel based machines - x86 Windows and x86 apps included.
Personally, I've been waiting for better part of a decade for what is, essentially, a modern ARM tablet with a low-power display (loooong use) which is also similar to the NEC MobilePro 790 and/or 900. Might actually have a chance of that at some point. Surfing the internet from the top of a mountain after weeks of being there, via packet radio, would be so cool...
Most people cold-boot their computers. Why? Drivers don't properly support suspend (eg. it fails), operating systems and applications leak memory and crash, and generally, the experience becomes unpleasant.