If ARM-based netbooks become popular, you will see an ARM port of Win7 in a few months
Not good enough. Even if applications can be ported, very few will. The perceived value of Windows is that a consumer can take any of the zillions of packaged PC-Windows applications out there, and install them on their Atom/WinXP netbook with no modifications. Perhaps the most popular apps will get ported, but that's not relevant -- there are already Linux alternatives to every major Windows application out there. How many potential Linux users do you know who were ready to make the switch but couldn't because of that one little obscure program that was only available for Windows? Happens a lot, right? Well that same silly little program that kept them from switching to Linux will also keep them from switching to an ARM-based Windows.
Personally I'm delighted to see the upcoming wave of "smartbooks." They'll be what netbooks were intended to be. Think "PDA with a larger screen and keyboard" -- not "really small laptop."
In the 1990's I had the interesting experience of speaking with a number of IT folks about why they chose this field. They said that they looked at job listings, found an industry with high-paying job offers listed, and selected it solely on that basis.
If it's leveling off then great! Leave technology to those of us who have a passion for technology. Even better, as we head into middle age, we won't have to worry quite as much about competing for jobs with 20somethings who are willing to work for half as much.
Listen up, paranoid policy people everywhere: setting up a "strong password policy" is NOT the solution. Typically this involves forcing the user to choose a password that's more than ten characters, has punctuation and numbers and mixed case in it, and forces a password change every 30 days.
You know what that does?
It forces people to write their passwords down. On paper.
With the password written down, it's very easy to "crack" because it's sitting there, "in the clear" on a dead tree.
False positives are not that big a deal here. They show why it's actually better to reject spam instead of filter it. When you reject spam, false positives result in the sender getting a bounceback. They know their email didn't reach you. Rejecting spam, not filtering it, ought to be the predominant model.
I just got FiOS installed last week, and let me tell you, it's just the most incredible thing out there. Fiber to the home, plenty of bandwidth, and the best digital television picture I've ever seen. It makes AT&T's U-Verse product look like a pathetic joke by comparison. Free wireless on top of all of that... well that's just more delicious icing on the cake.
Is Microsoft ever lamer than they are when they're badly imitating someone else's success? They can throw as much money as they want at this idea, but the gig is essentially up for The Bill... everyone sees Microsoft as the big, monolithic, boring company that's associated with things like spreadsheet drudgery at the office at best, or slow, buggy, crashing computers at worst. They're not hip and trendy like Apple; they're not grassroots like Linux and Open Source; they're not even gee-whiz cutting edge like some of the cell phone companies. They're Microsoft. I'm sure "The Microsoft Store" will be about as well-received as the Zune. For that matter, who's going to bother walking into a store where someone's going to try to sell you a Zune? Customers are going to keep walking right past the store and go get a Cinna-Bon instead or something.
The open protocol is a BIG win
on
Google Wave Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The biggest deal here, which so far is quite understated, is that the protocol is open. It's based on XMPP (aka Jabber), including the server-to-server protocol. This means no one will be locked into a single site -- not even Google's, although I'm sure Google is counting on a lot of people using their site, and I'm sure they'll find other ways to leverage it to make some money as well. They're good at doing that -- and unintrusively, too.
If this thing catches on, it's going to turn the whole Internet on its head -- in a good way. It's the end of being locked in to walled gardens like Exchange and Facebook -- although either of those products would be able to tie into the global Wave federation if they wanted to.
I'm looking forward to seeing lots of different software and sites that speak Wave protocol. For that matter, I'm looking forward to writing one someday.
"Do you owe $23 quadrillion or more on your credit cards? Well I'm about to tell you a secret that the credit card companies don't want you to know. You can settle your debt for pennies on the dollar and get out of debt fast!"
Thanks for writing that. Not that you're going to be able to penetrate the leftist-atheist Slashdot groupthink using actual facts, but thanks for posting it anyway. It's amazing how many people think that Catholicism == all of Christianity. Weird add-ons like transubstantiation are the reason I became a Protestant, actually.
I'm happy to see this. If the major ISP's start rolling out IPv6 to customers, then we'll really start to see the chicken-and-egg deployment problem get solved. In the US there are really only half a dozen of The [Phone|Cable] Companies that need to get on board to cover the vast majority of Internet users.
Doesn't anyone else see this for what it obviously is: a way for Microsoft to steal market share from Nintendo? Sony and Microsoft battled it out over pixel pushing, while Nintendo actually innovated (something Microsoft talks about a lot but never does) and built something new that people really liked -- something that actually got non-gamers onto the scene.
So now they're trying to build "Wii without the Wiimote." This is a "meeee toooo" play, which is Microsoft's usual way of doing business. YAWN.
Microsoft better not be resting on its laurels and should either be beefing up Windows Mobile or porting Windows 7 to ARM... or they're going to miss out big time again.
Even if Microsoft were to port Windows to ARM, they would still lose. Windows on ARM has the same perceived disadvantage as Linux: it won't run the existing catalog of Windows x86 applications. Microsoft cheated its way into the netbook market by strongarming Asus and others into bulking up their netbooks until they were basically underpowered laptops that were barely good enough to run Windows XP. This time around they won't be able to do that. Even worse: customers who buy Windows-powered ARM netbooks thinking that they'll be able to load their favorite PC-Windows applications, are going to be returning them to the stores in big numbers.
Linux and Android are well positioned to take advantage of ARM-based netbooks. This will be the generation of netbooks that actually look and act like netbooks (very small, very light, many hours of operation on a single charge) rather than underpowered laptops. Netbooks are higher-functioning smartphones, not lower-functioning laptops.
Microsoft's fortunes are tied to x86, period. Microsoft's only hope of getting back into the game at this point is if Intel builds an Atom chip that sips power as daintily as an ARM.
What hoops do I have to jump through to see subject lines on Slashdot again?
The subject lines are fine, perhaps you are overrun by eyeball thetans that are blocking your ability to see them. Only Scientology can restore your ability to see Slashdot subject lines!!
This brilliant "idea" fails to take into consideration the fact that in the winter, sunlight falling on a roof does add to the heat inside the house. If the roof were a light color, that heat would have to be replaced by burning some sort of fuel. So unless you're in a location that never needs heat, the idea doesn't work.
Personally I don't believe there is such a thing as anthropomorphic climate change, but if I did, I would still keep my roof a dark color.
Yes, you are an abuser, and based on the aggressive tone you are taking with me, I suspect you may be abusive on more than one level. The inconvenient, unfortunate truth is that you took the easy way out by zombifying your child with drugs instead of trying to find the root cause of whatever "attention" issue they told you he was having. I feel sorry for him, and I hope someday more parents, teachers, and pediatricians will take the time to understand their children instead of believing what Big Pharma wants them to believe.
Nope, this isn't armchair quarterbacking. I have a child who was misdiagnosed with ADHD (hint: if it's ADHD, it's misdiagnosed, because ADHD doesn't exist). They wanted to pump him full of drugs so they could pretend they "fixed" him. We wrote up the teacher, fired the pediatrician, and got another opinion. We hooked up with a doctor who took the time to get to know him and understand him, and guess what? He just had plain ordinary anxiety issues. When the anxiety was addressed, the symptoms they were calling "ADHD" went away.
And no, this wasn't "oh, I'm glad it worked for you, but my child isn't like that..." Sorry, it doesn't work that way. If you zombified your child with Ritalin or other amphetamines, you took the irresponsible easy way out. Shame on you.
I'm sorry to hear that you have failed as a parent and have bought into the lies Big Pharma has fed to you through their pawns who are your son's teachers.
Seriously. Kids are all different. People are all different. ADHD roughly translates to "Teacher doesn't understand this kid and can't get through to him/her so we're going to use this made-up diagnosis to put him/her in a box and then pump him/her full of drugs to make the problem appear to have gone away."
Administering neurotoxins to healthy children is child abuse and should be treated as such.
The funny thing is, so many people say "oh yes, you're right, 99% of ADHD diagnoses are really just misunderstood children" but then their "ADHD" child always seems to be part of that last 1 percent. Nope, sorry, doesn't work that way, no exceptions. If you label a child "ADHD" you are an incompetent parent or teacher. Period.
Those calls are so much fun! When they call, I tell them that I want to renew the extended warranty on my 1974 Dodge Dart. And I don't take no for an answer. Everytime they say something about why they can't do that I reply as if they said yes. I keep asking them what the renewal fee is, and then "ok, so let's go ahead and renew the warranty on the '74 Dodge," etc. etc. Sometimes the calls go on for five or six minutes. It's exhilarating to actually get a telespammer to hang up on you!
How is Google's javascript engine in terms of loose coupling? Mozilla uses a javascript engine called SpiderMonkey which has all sorts of uses beyond web browsers. In fact, it's a really really good way to use JavaScript as a language for application extension/scripting. (Forget what you know about "JavaScript sucks"... the things you hate are all browser/DOM related; the language itself is elegant and beautiful.) I'd hate to see this nice piece of embeddable code fall into disrepair.
While I hope the Linux thing is real, let's follow two different scenarios and see which one is cheaper to implement:
1. Buy laptops with Windows installed 2. Pay lots of money
or...
1. Announce plans to buy laptops with Linux 2. Raise the attention of Microsoft 3. Get free or super-cheap Windows from Microsoft, who's willing to lose money on this deal in order to keep their monopoly entrenched and give bad press to Linux
Hold on a second people... SCO loves to trumpet the fact that their unix product runs the POS systems at McDonald's! We need the computers at McDonald's to stay up and running! How the hell am I going to buy a Big Mac without SCO Unix?!!
This reminds me of Novell buying Word Perfect. Paid over a billion dollars, couldn't sell for $100m just years later if their life depended on it.Ok, so they couldn't sell off the word processor for a big amount, but you're forgetting that with the WordPerfect acquisition they also picked up the product that later became GroupWise -- something they did quite well with. (Hell, it still beats Exchange in a lot of ways... although that's not exactly difficult to accomplish.) I'd say they definitely got their money's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Not good enough. Even if applications can be ported, very few will. The perceived value of Windows is that a consumer can take any of the zillions of packaged PC-Windows applications out there, and install them on their Atom/WinXP netbook with no modifications. Perhaps the most popular apps will get ported, but that's not relevant -- there are already Linux alternatives to every major Windows application out there. How many potential Linux users do you know who were ready to make the switch but couldn't because of that one little obscure program that was only available for Windows? Happens a lot, right? Well that same silly little program that kept them from switching to Linux will also keep them from switching to an ARM-based Windows.
Personally I'm delighted to see the upcoming wave of "smartbooks." They'll be what netbooks were intended to be. Think "PDA with a larger screen and keyboard" -- not "really small laptop."
In the 1990's I had the interesting experience of speaking with a number of IT folks about why they chose this field. They said that they looked at job listings, found an industry with high-paying job offers listed, and selected it solely on that basis.
If it's leveling off then great! Leave technology to those of us who have a passion for technology. Even better, as we head into middle age, we won't have to worry quite as much about competing for jobs with 20somethings who are willing to work for half as much.
Listen up, paranoid policy people everywhere: setting up a "strong password policy" is NOT the solution. Typically this involves forcing the user to choose a password that's more than ten characters, has punctuation and numbers and mixed case in it, and forces a password change every 30 days.
You know what that does?
It forces people to write their passwords down. On paper.
With the password written down, it's very easy to "crack" because it's sitting there, "in the clear" on a dead tree.
I'm sure they'd fail at that too. In fact, it might be the first time in history that they didn't suck.
False positives are not that big a deal here. They show why it's actually better to reject spam instead of filter it. When you reject spam, false positives result in the sender getting a bounceback. They know their email didn't reach you. Rejecting spam, not filtering it, ought to be the predominant model.
Boingo isn't exclusively a Windows offering. Here's a link to Boingo's announcement of a Linux client.
... well that's just more delicious icing on the cake.
I just got FiOS installed last week, and let me tell you, it's just the most incredible thing out there. Fiber to the home, plenty of bandwidth, and the best digital television picture I've ever seen. It makes AT&T's U-Verse product look like a pathetic joke by comparison. Free wireless on top of all of that
Is Microsoft ever lamer than they are when they're badly imitating someone else's success? They can throw as much money as they want at this idea, but the gig is essentially up for The Bill ... everyone sees Microsoft as the big, monolithic, boring company that's associated with things like spreadsheet drudgery at the office at best, or slow, buggy, crashing computers at worst. They're not hip and trendy like Apple; they're not grassroots like Linux and Open Source; they're not even gee-whiz cutting edge like some of the cell phone companies. They're Microsoft. I'm sure "The Microsoft Store" will be about as well-received as the Zune. For that matter, who's going to bother walking into a store where someone's going to try to sell you a Zune? Customers are going to keep walking right past the store and go get a Cinna-Bon instead or something.
The biggest deal here, which so far is quite understated, is that the protocol is open. It's based on XMPP (aka Jabber), including the server-to-server protocol. This means no one will be locked into a single site -- not even Google's, although I'm sure Google is counting on a lot of people using their site, and I'm sure they'll find other ways to leverage it to make some money as well. They're good at doing that -- and unintrusively, too.
If this thing catches on, it's going to turn the whole Internet on its head -- in a good way. It's the end of being locked in to walled gardens like Exchange and Facebook -- although either of those products would be able to tie into the global Wave federation if they wanted to.
I'm looking forward to seeing lots of different software and sites that speak Wave protocol. For that matter, I'm looking forward to writing one someday.
"Do you owe $23 quadrillion or more on your credit cards? Well I'm about to tell you a secret that the credit card companies don't want you to know. You can settle your debt for pennies on the dollar and get out of debt fast!"
Thanks for writing that. Not that you're going to be able to penetrate the leftist-atheist Slashdot groupthink using actual facts, but thanks for posting it anyway. It's amazing how many people think that Catholicism == all of Christianity. Weird add-ons like transubstantiation are the reason I became a Protestant, actually.
I'm happy to see this. If the major ISP's start rolling out IPv6 to customers, then we'll really start to see the chicken-and-egg deployment problem get solved. In the US there are really only half a dozen of The [Phone|Cable] Companies that need to get on board to cover the vast majority of Internet users.
Doesn't anyone else see this for what it obviously is: a way for Microsoft to steal market share from Nintendo? Sony and Microsoft battled it out over pixel pushing, while Nintendo actually innovated (something Microsoft talks about a lot but never does) and built something new that people really liked -- something that actually got non-gamers onto the scene.
So now they're trying to build "Wii without the Wiimote." This is a "meeee toooo" play, which is Microsoft's usual way of doing business. YAWN.
Even if Microsoft were to port Windows to ARM, they would still lose. Windows on ARM has the same perceived disadvantage as Linux: it won't run the existing catalog of Windows x86 applications. Microsoft cheated its way into the netbook market by strongarming Asus and others into bulking up their netbooks until they were basically underpowered laptops that were barely good enough to run Windows XP. This time around they won't be able to do that. Even worse: customers who buy Windows-powered ARM netbooks thinking that they'll be able to load their favorite PC-Windows applications, are going to be returning them to the stores in big numbers.
Linux and Android are well positioned to take advantage of ARM-based netbooks. This will be the generation of netbooks that actually look and act like netbooks (very small, very light, many hours of operation on a single charge) rather than underpowered laptops. Netbooks are higher-functioning smartphones, not lower-functioning laptops.
Microsoft's fortunes are tied to x86, period. Microsoft's only hope of getting back into the game at this point is if Intel builds an Atom chip that sips power as daintily as an ARM.
The subject lines are fine, perhaps you are overrun by eyeball thetans that are blocking your ability to see them. Only Scientology can restore your ability to see Slashdot subject lines!!
Indeed I was. [[slaps self]] Ok, that was silly.
This brilliant "idea" fails to take into consideration the fact that in the winter, sunlight falling on a roof does add to the heat inside the house. If the roof were a light color, that heat would have to be replaced by burning some sort of fuel. So unless you're in a location that never needs heat, the idea doesn't work.
Personally I don't believe there is such a thing as anthropomorphic climate change, but if I did, I would still keep my roof a dark color.
Yes, you are an abuser, and based on the aggressive tone you are taking with me, I suspect you may be abusive on more than one level. The inconvenient, unfortunate truth is that you took the easy way out by zombifying your child with drugs instead of trying to find the root cause of whatever "attention" issue they told you he was having. I feel sorry for him, and I hope someday more parents, teachers, and pediatricians will take the time to understand their children instead of believing what Big Pharma wants them to believe.
Nope, this isn't armchair quarterbacking. I have a child who was misdiagnosed with ADHD (hint: if it's ADHD, it's misdiagnosed, because ADHD doesn't exist). They wanted to pump him full of drugs so they could pretend they "fixed" him. We wrote up the teacher, fired the pediatrician, and got another opinion. We hooked up with a doctor who took the time to get to know him and understand him, and guess what? He just had plain ordinary anxiety issues. When the anxiety was addressed, the symptoms they were calling "ADHD" went away.
And no, this wasn't "oh, I'm glad it worked for you, but my child isn't like that..." Sorry, it doesn't work that way. If you zombified your child with Ritalin or other amphetamines, you took the irresponsible easy way out. Shame on you.
I'm sorry to hear that you have failed as a parent and have bought into the lies Big Pharma has fed to you through their pawns who are your son's teachers.
Seriously. Kids are all different. People are all different. ADHD roughly translates to "Teacher doesn't understand this kid and can't get through to him/her so we're going to use this made-up diagnosis to put him/her in a box and then pump him/her full of drugs to make the problem appear to have gone away."
Administering neurotoxins to healthy children is child abuse and should be treated as such.
The funny thing is, so many people say "oh yes, you're right, 99% of ADHD diagnoses are really just misunderstood children" but then their "ADHD" child always seems to be part of that last 1 percent. Nope, sorry, doesn't work that way, no exceptions. If you label a child "ADHD" you are an incompetent parent or teacher. Period.
Those calls are so much fun! When they call, I tell them that I want to renew the extended warranty on my 1974 Dodge Dart. And I don't take no for an answer. Everytime they say something about why they can't do that I reply as if they said yes. I keep asking them what the renewal fee is, and then "ok, so let's go ahead and renew the warranty on the '74 Dodge," etc. etc. Sometimes the calls go on for five or six minutes. It's exhilarating to actually get a telespammer to hang up on you!
How is Google's javascript engine in terms of loose coupling? Mozilla uses a javascript engine called SpiderMonkey which has all sorts of uses beyond web browsers. In fact, it's a really really good way to use JavaScript as a language for application extension/scripting. (Forget what you know about "JavaScript sucks" ... the things you hate are all browser/DOM related; the language itself is elegant and beautiful.) I'd hate to see this nice piece of embeddable code fall into disrepair.
While I hope the Linux thing is real, let's follow two different scenarios and see which one is cheaper to implement:
1. Buy laptops with Windows installed
2. Pay lots of money
or...
1. Announce plans to buy laptops with Linux
2. Raise the attention of Microsoft
3. Get free or super-cheap Windows from Microsoft, who's willing to lose money on this deal in order to keep their monopoly entrenched and give bad press to Linux
Seems like an easy choice.
Hold on a second people ... SCO loves to trumpet the fact that their unix product runs the POS systems at McDonald's! We need the computers at McDonald's to stay up and running! How the hell am I going to buy a Big Mac without SCO Unix?!!