No, no, no. Wrong! You should use an old IBM clicketyclick keyboard for this! As you can run a truck over them (and have them still work), they've been a sysadmin's favourite way of getting rid of pesky users. "Do you see any weapon, police officer? There's only me and my keyb... eh computer!"
Yeah, right, thanks:-) I kept the article window open when I noticed the site was pretty slow already. Copy-pasted the text once the story went live. Thought to do a bit of a service. Got modded down "redundant" within a few seconds.
I actually landed the second comment, which is *fast*. It's just that somebody else posted the same article text a few milliseconds earlier. I mean, what is the chance of the first two posts being actually useful.
I think you remember the conversation we had recently at this software conference in Dublin. You came up to me and told me how the stuff I was talking about was mostly useless, because it is closed-source, people need to pay for it and that companies charging for software are evil anyways ? especially Microsoft. Unfortunately I don?t have your email, but I am sure this will reach you.
First, I would like to thank you for the interesting conversation that developed and to make sure that none of what was said just fades away, I?ll tell you here once again what I am thinking about what you do, what you think and ? most importantly about your future.
When I was 21 ? like you now ? I was also at university and was pursing a computer science master degree. Back then, I was very enthusiastic about programming and creating stuff that mattered. And thought that I was the best programmer the field has ever seen and everyone else was mostly worthless. And I did indeed write some programs that mattered and made a difference. The program I spent some 3 years writing in Turbo Pascal from when I was 18 was for my father?s business. Because the business he?s in requires a lot of bureaucracy, he and my mother spent about 2-3 daily hours on average doing all of this stuff by hand. When I was done with my program and he started using it, that time went from 3 hours to about 15 minutes a day. That was software that absolutely improved the quality of life for the entire family! And his friends and colleagues loved it, too. I didn?t sell many licenses at that time (I think I had 3 customers), but each one was worth 1500 German Marks and that was a huge heap of money for me. I mean ? I was living at my parent?s house, getting a monthly allowance of 120 German Marks and worked as a cable grip for a couple of TV stations every once in a while ? maybe 2-3 times a month. And if I ever had 400 Marks per month I could really consider myself massively rich at the time and for my age, because I had very minimal additional expenses. So 4500 Marks on top of that? Fantastic. Where did the money go? I can?t really remember where it all went, but I guess ?lot of partying? or ?Girls, Drugs and Rock?n?Roll? would be a reasonably good explanation. Hey, I was 21 and that?s what one is supposed to do at that age, right?
That was in 1990 ? let?s fast forward to 2004 and you. All software that you and your father could possibly be interested in has already been written. That?s probably not true, but it?s hard to think of something, right? Ok, the software may not run on your favorite operation system and may cost money, but what you can immediately think of is likely there. So where do you put all your energy? Into this absolutely amazing open-source project you co-coordinate. I mean, really, the stuff that you and your buddies are doing there is truly impressive. There are a couple of things I?d probably do differently in terms of design and architecture, but it works well and that?s mostly what matters. And you do make an impact as well. I know that hundreds of people and dozens of companies use your stuff. That?s great.
However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are ? out of principle ? not making any money out of this, because it is open-source and you and your buddies insist that it must be absolutely free. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this project for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on.
If someone installs your work from disc 3 of some Linux distro, they couldn?t care less who you are. The whole fame thing you are telling me only works amongst geeks. The good looking, intelligent girl over there at the bar that you?d really like to talk to doesn?t care much whether you are famous amongst a group of geeks and neither does she even remotely fathom why you?d be famous for that stuff in the first place. I mean ? get real here.
So once you get your degree from school, what?s the plan?
Right now, your university education is free like in many places i
I looked at it as I wondered whether the Netherlands (16 million) would win in the spam/capita contest. Nah, canada wins. 3x the spam, 2x the population.
He's got a more generic article about what he means with "edge". It looks to have a bit more generic reading value than the article referenced here on slashdot.
Not that those things have taken off, but this might be an possibility for chorded keyboards. Typing on a projected keyboard on your desk surface won't be so much fun either...
(A chorded keyboard is something you hold in one hand. You have to press a few keys at the same time (just like a piano chord) to get a character. With just a couple of keys you can apparently type pretty well. Perhaps you could fit this in an overlarge pen...)
Poor, poor huble. Getting scrapped by Nasa. You can just see he's getting really depressed. He already has a black outlook on life, all that dark energy...
Well, it's his own fault now, giving us back such negative waves.
Reading the article (yes, I did:-), it didn't seem so clear-cut to me. In the article, ebxml and bcf are placed in front of eachother as direct competitors.
The first item, services, seems to do some of the same things as soap, uddl, etc, the webservices stuff (1). This seems to be the major area where IBM and MS try to convince people to use their (webservices) solutions instead of the ebxml solutions.
The second item , the high-level xml specifications, seems to lack a few things that weren't included in ebxml proper, like the "UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology -- Meta Model". These (or solutions based on it) are now developed separately by the UN under the name of BCF. But this is more of a layer building upon the existing ebxml work.
So: ebxml's services see some flak from webservices (ibm+ms) and the UN acknowledges that this is a possible alternative implementation. On the other hand, the UN builds upon ebxml by adding the BCF layer, making it more useful.
At least, that's my guess from the info!
Reinout
p.s. 1): for REST-proponents: I like the REST approach more than the SOAP one:-)
A 1942 book by Joseph Schumpeter (excerpt here) provides some background info on this.
[Capitalism] incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in....
The idea is that capitalism and innovation are almost linked. By doing something better, handier, cheaper, you can make more money than the other companies. So there is an incentive to do something new.
Seen over a long time, the biggest threat for companies is not so much the competition in the existing market, but the landslide next year when something entirely new just chops down existing, nicely ordered, markets.
Digital photography is such a "creative destruction" development. Suddenly the demand for ordinary kodak camera rolls drops down. Not even the best product in it's category will sell really well when the entire market moves to different products. (Kodak is not just camera rolls, also photographic paper etc, but this is the general idea).
An historical analogy: the dreadnought was the first all-big-gun battleship, completed in 1906. Great Brittain and Germany (and others) were engaged in a huge shipbuilding arms race. A lot of "ordinary" battleships were being build (one year later they were called "pre-dreadnoughts"...). That one single first dreadnought, prototype of the modern battleship, made every single fleet on earth obsolete. Brittain and Germany effectively had to start from scratch, 0 vs. 0. (Or, more rather 1 vs. 0:-) Talking about creative destruction...
Disney is, of course, well-known. Big company, earning a lot of cash.
For comcast I (I'm from Europe) had to visit their website. Looks like a run-of-the-mill cable company. Telephone, internet and television over standard cable. They're probably big, but big enough to take on Disney...
Perhaps their stock price is way up so they can pay for this with stocks only... Stuff likes this just seems so artificial, just like there 's no real money involved. (Which probably is the case...)
Not being able to reply to an old, archived news message in Google Groups doesn't seem so strange/bad to me:
Google groups is basically only an interface/archive to the existing internet newsgoup mechanism. If you'd reply to a year-old message in some newsgroup that got archived in google groups... you would be sending a reply to the newsgroup itself, thereby giving the whole readership of that newsgroup (let's say some 200 people) an answer to a year-old question.
Seen in this light, I wouldn't count this against google.
On Guido's weblog you can read that he's made a wager on parrot's speed:
And let's not forget the opening lightning talk, which I presented together with Dan Sugalski: the Great Python Parrot Challenge. Dan believes that at OSCON 2004, Parrot will be able to execute Python bytecode faster than CPython can. I don't give him a chance. Dan bets me ten bucks, a round of drinks, and a pie at ten paces.
So the power of parrot against the regular python-interpreter-written-in-c. Nice wager, though!
On another note: sometimes something simple can go a long way in making the 'locals' happy when you're a tourist. For example, in France, when you visit a restaurant for your meal: first order a 'pastise' (the 'i' sounds like 'bEEp'). It's a drink made of anice seeds. You'll immediately rank higher than 'average tourist'. I've noticed waiters looking pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion!
And in Greece you'll have to order an Ouzo. (Also anice-based).
Probably a lot of countries have such local customs that foreigners normally don't know of. On the other hand, I can't think of such a custom in the Netherlands...:-)
A friend of mine made a small website for a Dutch garage that fixes up old citroen 2CV cars. A few months later they didn't advertise in magazines anymore as the website brought in more than enough work for them.
They're in a specialist business with a lot of people willing to do some searching on the net, so that makes this a bit different case from the four-in-every-town small shops, but nontheless.
If you read this other article you get the distinct impression that scientists in this field want to make the results of these big key reseaches freely available. They even say in these changing times, probably referring to the increased expected opennes prompted by the internet. (And possibly open source as well).
You see the same "changing times" with the journals. In my research field they found out that a paper that's freely available on the internet gets quoted at least three times as often as a paper that's "locked away" in a "proprietary" journal... (Couldn't find the link I was searching for for that figure, sorry).
You should spend half a day on Belbins teamroles with your team. Probably you can say to your personel department that you want to do a belbin course with your team, they'll hapily hire someone for a day to guide you through it.
The generic idea is that there are 8 or 9 roles that surface time and again in teams. You've got someone sprouting ideas like there's no tomorrow. You've got some finishers that want to get the job done.
Every role contributes something to the team process
If a role isn't filled in the team, it creates certain problems (some are bearable, some disastrous)
A role can go awry and will exhibit known irritating behaviour.
Once you know what roles are available in your team, you can start some serious thinking. You might miss the 'bitching' type that rightfully shoots wrong ideas before they're implemented. You might have too many captains on one ship. Etc.
From what you say, it sounds like you're perhaps missing one or two roles in your team. It's very possible that one of the existing team members is perfectly capable of fulfilling that role (but doesn't know it or doesn't dare it). After such a session you at least know what's available and what's missing.
Bloat means heaping unneeded functionality upon unneeded functionality. I'll assume instead that you'd put the same functionality in the c and in the python/ruby/whatever mail client. So it isn't a fair comparison, "higher level language" = "M$ bloat philosophy".
Secondly, C is high level compared to assembly or machine code. But everyone programs in C or higher and only uses assembly for the 1% in the code where it does matter (if any). Likewise you could do everything in python and just code the small performance-critical part in C. Parts of python are already programmed themselves in C, like hash tables and xml parsers. So they've probably already taken care of that 1% of your code that could benefit from C.
Likewise, people are calling xml (with all those tags) bloat compared to a binary format. On the one hand you can compress it (into binary...) like there's no tomorrow. On the other hand it is needless optimisation to try to squize half a kilobyte of an xml message when you're downloading 3 iso's full of movies at the same time. Optimise where needed.
For the open source and python lovers: the same thing is provided by Zope. Object database, in-memory objects from the programmers' point of view, transactions.
They don't advertise it enough as an object database imho, but it's there.
It looks very much like a journaling filesystem. That one basically also stores the commands executed in a log file. If you've had a crash with ReiserFS for instance, you can see messages like "replaying log for...." at startup.
Now they're doing the same for in-memory object data structures. Might be a nice idea.
On a different note: the objectdatabase behind zope has perhaps the same net effect. To the programmer, everything is in-memory. The object database reads stuff from disk if needed and keeps things in memory when much-requested. And also with a list of transactions which can be replayed or rolled back.
So: it looks nice, but I'm curious to the net results!
I suspect there's one thing wrong though: hardware and software being mixed up. The theory is right in seeing the PC hardware creeping slowly up the ladder, gaining an ever higher place in the food chain. I mean, a badass big google that runs on more or less ordinary PC hardware... Sun et al would have laughed at that 10 years ago. Now it's reality.
On the software side, dos/windows + pc hardware was a fixed combo for quite a long time. So windows also was creeping up the ladder, but on the pc hardware's back imho.
Unix, the software partner of the sun et al hardware has sprouted linux. I get the impression that it's being poured down the ladder, boiling windows slowly and painfully off the pc hardware's back!
So: the hardware keeps on climbing, but it's unix/linux that doesn't really care. It runs everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Stani explained the way he made the coin at a Dutch python user group meeting in Amsterdam. Everyone attending was really enthousiastic about it. http://reinout.vanrees.org/weblog/archive/2008/09/12/python-calculated-coin
Good to see that he's written an article himself with the full explanation and graphs! Nicely done.
No, no, no. Wrong! You should use an old IBM clicketyclick keyboard for this! As you can run a truck over them (and have them still work), they've been a sysadmin's favourite way of getting rid of pesky users. "Do you see any weapon, police officer? There's only me and my keyb... eh computer!"
Yeah, right, thanks :-) I kept the article window open when I noticed the site was pretty slow already. Copy-pasted the text once the story went live. Thought to do a bit of a service. Got modded down "redundant" within a few seconds.
:-)
I actually landed the second comment, which is *fast*. It's just that somebody else posted the same article text a few milliseconds earlier. I mean, what is the chance of the first two posts being actually useful.
Ah, being redundant with the second comment
Reinout
Dear Aiden,
I think you remember the conversation we had recently at this software conference in Dublin. You came up to me and told me how the stuff I was talking about was mostly useless, because it is closed-source, people need to pay for it and that companies charging for software are evil anyways ? especially Microsoft. Unfortunately I don?t have your email, but I am sure this will reach you.
First, I would like to thank you for the interesting conversation that developed and to make sure that none of what was said just fades away, I?ll tell you here once again what I am thinking about what you do, what you think and ? most importantly about your future.
When I was 21 ? like you now ? I was also at university and was pursing a computer science master degree. Back then, I was very enthusiastic about programming and creating stuff that mattered. And thought that I was the best programmer the field has ever seen and everyone else was mostly worthless. And I did indeed write some programs that mattered and made a difference. The program I spent some 3 years writing in Turbo Pascal from when I was 18 was for my father?s business. Because the business he?s in requires a lot of bureaucracy, he and my mother spent about 2-3 daily hours on average doing all of this stuff by hand. When I was done with my program and he started using it, that time went from 3 hours to about 15 minutes a day. That was software that absolutely improved the quality of life for the entire family! And his friends and colleagues loved it, too. I didn?t sell many licenses at that time (I think I had 3 customers), but each one was worth 1500 German Marks and that was a huge heap of money for me. I mean ? I was living at my parent?s house, getting a monthly allowance of 120 German Marks and worked as a cable grip for a couple of TV stations every once in a while ? maybe 2-3 times a month. And if I ever had 400 Marks per month I could really consider myself massively rich at the time and for my age, because I had very minimal additional expenses. So 4500 Marks on top of that? Fantastic. Where did the money go? I can?t really remember where it all went, but I guess ?lot of partying? or ?Girls, Drugs and Rock?n?Roll? would be a reasonably good explanation. Hey, I was 21 and that?s what one is supposed to do at that age, right?
That was in 1990 ? let?s fast forward to 2004 and you. All software that you and your father could possibly be interested in has already been written. That?s probably not true, but it?s hard to think of something, right? Ok, the software may not run on your favorite operation system and may cost money, but what you can immediately think of is likely there. So where do you put all your energy? Into this absolutely amazing open-source project you co-coordinate. I mean, really, the stuff that you and your buddies are doing there is truly impressive. There are a couple of things I?d probably do differently in terms of design and architecture, but it works well and that?s mostly what matters. And you do make an impact as well. I know that hundreds of people and dozens of companies use your stuff. That?s great.
However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are ? out of principle ? not making any money out of this, because it is open-source and you and your buddies insist that it must be absolutely free. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this project for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on.
If someone installs your work from disc 3 of some Linux distro, they couldn?t care less who you are. The whole fame thing you are telling me only works amongst geeks. The good looking, intelligent girl over there at the bar that you?d really like to talk to doesn?t care much whether you are famous amongst a group of geeks and neither does she even remotely fathom why you?d be famous for that stuff in the first place. I mean ? get real here.
So once you get your degree from school, what?s the plan?
Right now, your university education is free like in many places i
Canada's population is 31.6 million (2003).
I looked at it as I wondered whether the Netherlands (16 million) would win in the spam/capita contest. Nah, canada wins. 3x the spam, 2x the population.
Reinout
He's got a more generic article about what he means with "edge". It looks to have a bit more generic reading value than the article referenced here on slashdot.
Reinout
I found a link to that story (Bill writing the software that put him in the same class with lots of girls).
I also googled with "myth" and "urban legend" but I couldn't find anything that quickly. (Doesn't prove it's true, though!)
Reinout
Not that those things have taken off, but this might be an possibility for chorded keyboards. Typing on a projected keyboard on your desk surface won't be so much fun either...
(A chorded keyboard is something you hold in one hand. You have to press a few keys at the same time (just like a piano chord) to get a character. With just a couple of keys you can apparently type pretty well. Perhaps you could fit this in an overlarge pen...)
Reinout
Cool, finally a computer I can chew on!
Reinout
Poor, poor huble. Getting scrapped by Nasa. You can just see he's getting really depressed. He already has a black outlook on life, all that dark energy...
Well, it's his own fault now, giving us back such negative waves.
Reinout
Reading the article (yes, I did :-), it didn't seem so clear-cut to me. In the article, ebxml and bcf are placed in front of eachother as direct competitors.
:-)
From an ebXML Business Process Specification Schema announcement and a BCF faq I figured that ebxml provides a number of services (like repositories) and a number of high-level xml specifications.
The first item, services, seems to do some of the same things as soap, uddl, etc, the webservices stuff (1). This seems to be the major area where IBM and MS try to convince people to use their (webservices) solutions instead of the ebxml solutions.
The second item , the high-level xml specifications, seems to lack a few things that weren't included in ebxml proper, like the "UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology -- Meta Model". These (or solutions based on it) are now developed separately by the UN under the name of BCF. But this is more of a layer building upon the existing ebxml work.
So: ebxml's services see some flak from webservices (ibm+ms) and the UN acknowledges that this is a possible alternative implementation. On the other hand, the UN builds upon ebxml by adding the BCF layer, making it more useful.
At least, that's my guess from the info!
Reinout
p.s. 1): for REST-proponents: I like the REST approach more than the SOAP one
A 1942 book by Joseph Schumpeter (excerpt here) provides some background info on this.
[Capitalism] incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in....
The idea is that capitalism and innovation are almost linked. By doing something better, handier, cheaper, you can make more money than the other companies. So there is an incentive to do something new.
Seen over a long time, the biggest threat for companies is not so much the competition in the existing market, but the landslide next year when something entirely new just chops down existing, nicely ordered, markets.
Digital photography is such a "creative destruction" development. Suddenly the demand for ordinary kodak camera rolls drops down. Not even the best product in it's category will sell really well when the entire market moves to different products. (Kodak is not just camera rolls, also photographic paper etc, but this is the general idea).
An historical analogy: the dreadnought was the first all-big-gun battleship, completed in 1906. Great Brittain and Germany (and others) were engaged in a huge shipbuilding arms race. A lot of "ordinary" battleships were being build (one year later they were called "pre-dreadnoughts"...). That one single first dreadnought, prototype of the modern battleship, made every single fleet on earth obsolete. Brittain and Germany effectively had to start from scratch, 0 vs. 0. (Or, more rather 1 vs. 0 :-) Talking about creative destruction...
Reinout
Article on speed-to-market that's necessary in some markets. Gives a different view than amazon=traditional (or at least a different aspect).
Reinout
Disney is, of course, well-known. Big company, earning a lot of cash.
For comcast I (I'm from Europe) had to visit their website. Looks like a run-of-the-mill cable company. Telephone, internet and television over standard cable. They're probably big, but big enough to take on Disney...
Perhaps their stock price is way up so they can pay for this with stocks only... Stuff likes this just seems so artificial, just like there 's no real money involved. (Which probably is the case...)
Reinout
Not being able to reply to an old, archived news message in Google Groups doesn't seem so strange/bad to me:
Google groups is basically only an interface/archive to the existing internet newsgoup mechanism. If you'd reply to a year-old message in some newsgroup that got archived in google groups... you would be sending a reply to the newsgroup itself, thereby giving the whole readership of that newsgroup (let's say some 200 people) an answer to a year-old question.
Seen in this light, I wouldn't count this against google.
Reinout
On Guido's weblog you can read that he's made a wager on parrot's speed:
And let's not forget the opening lightning talk, which I presented together with Dan Sugalski: the Great Python Parrot Challenge. Dan believes that at OSCON 2004, Parrot will be able to execute Python bytecode faster than CPython can. I don't give him a chance. Dan bets me ten bucks, a round of drinks, and a pie at ten paces.
So the power of parrot against the regular python-interpreter-written-in-c. Nice wager, though!
Well, thank you! (I'm Dutch :-)
:-)
On another note: sometimes something simple can go a long way in making the 'locals' happy when you're a tourist. For example, in France, when you visit a restaurant for your meal: first order a 'pastise' (the 'i' sounds like 'bEEp'). It's a drink made of anice seeds. You'll immediately rank higher than 'average tourist'. I've noticed waiters looking pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion!
And in Greece you'll have to order an Ouzo. (Also anice-based).
Probably a lot of countries have such local customs that foreigners normally don't know of. On the other hand, I can't think of such a custom in the Netherlands...
Reinout van Rees
A friend of mine made a small website for a Dutch garage that fixes up old citroen 2CV cars. A few months later they didn't advertise in magazines anymore as the website brought in more than enough work for them.
They're in a specialist business with a lot of people willing to do some searching on the net, so that makes this a bit different case from the four-in-every-town small shops, but nontheless.
Reinout
Exactly the right paper, thanks.
Reinout
If you read this other article you get the distinct impression that scientists in this field want to make the results of these big key reseaches freely available. They even say in these changing times, probably referring to the increased expected opennes prompted by the internet. (And possibly open source as well).
You see the same "changing times" with the journals. In my research field they found out that a paper that's freely available on the internet gets quoted at least three times as often as a paper that's "locked away" in a "proprietary" journal... (Couldn't find the link I was searching for for that figure, sorry).
Reinout
The generic idea is that there are 8 or 9 roles that surface time and again in teams. You've got someone sprouting ideas like there's no tomorrow. You've got some finishers that want to get the job done.
Once you know what roles are available in your team, you can start some serious thinking. You might miss the 'bitching' type that rightfully shoots wrong ideas before they're implemented. You might have too many captains on one ship. Etc.
From what you say, it sounds like you're perhaps missing one or two roles in your team. It's very possible that one of the existing team members is perfectly capable of fulfilling that role (but doesn't know it or doesn't dare it). After such a session you at least know what's available and what's missing.
Good luck!
reinout
A higher level language doesn't mean "bloat".
Bloat means heaping unneeded functionality upon unneeded functionality. I'll assume instead that you'd put the same functionality in the c and in the python/ruby/whatever mail client. So it isn't a fair comparison, "higher level language" = "M$ bloat philosophy".
Secondly, C is high level compared to assembly or machine code. But everyone programs in C or higher and only uses assembly for the 1% in the code where it does matter (if any). Likewise you could do everything in python and just code the small performance-critical part in C. Parts of python are already programmed themselves in C, like hash tables and xml parsers. So they've probably already taken care of that 1% of your code that could benefit from C.
Likewise, people are calling xml (with all those tags) bloat compared to a binary format. On the one hand you can compress it (into binary...) like there's no tomorrow. On the other hand it is needless optimisation to try to squize half a kilobyte of an xml message when you're downloading 3 iso's full of movies at the same time. Optimise where needed.
Reinout
For the open source and python lovers: the same thing is provided by Zope. Object database, in-memory objects from the programmers' point of view, transactions.
They don't advertise it enough as an object database imho, but it's there.
Reinout
It looks very much like a journaling filesystem. That one basically also stores the commands executed in a log file. If you've had a crash with ReiserFS for instance, you can see messages like "replaying log for...." at startup.
Now they're doing the same for in-memory object data structures. Might be a nice idea.
On a different note: the objectdatabase behind zope has perhaps the same net effect. To the programmer, everything is in-memory. The object database reads stuff from disk if needed and keeps things in memory when much-requested. And also with a list of transactions which can be replayed or rolled back.
So: it looks nice, but I'm curious to the net results!
Nice theory!
I suspect there's one thing wrong though: hardware and software being mixed up. The theory is right in seeing the PC hardware creeping slowly up the ladder, gaining an ever higher place in the food chain. I mean, a badass big google that runs on more or less ordinary PC hardware... Sun et al would have laughed at that 10 years ago. Now it's reality.
On the software side, dos/windows + pc hardware was a fixed combo for quite a long time. So windows also was creeping up the ladder, but on the pc hardware's back imho.
Unix, the software partner of the sun et al hardware has sprouted linux. I get the impression that it's being poured down the ladder, boiling windows slowly and painfully off the pc hardware's back!
So: the hardware keeps on climbing, but it's unix/linux that doesn't really care. It runs everywhere.