"Enhancements" of spreadsheets over the last few years have not involved any substantive improvements in functionality, but have primarily just involved enhancing their "typesetting" capabilities, that is, the ability to change fonts, insert special formatting, and to otherwise make tables look "pretty."
There is damned little incentive for spreadsheet developers or their customers to build a better mousetrap^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spreadsheet (or equivalent modeling tool). When I was at Lotus, strict backward compatibility was a major constraint on successive versions of 1-2-3, for the very good reason that there was a huge installed base of users who wouldn't upgrade if their existing models wouldn't Just Work in the new version. As has been pointed out here, spreadsheet models are even harder to maintain than software written in the worst available programming languages (cough, VB, cough), which have become entrenched for similar reasons.
IMHO, Excel took the spreadsheet business away from Lotus when Microsoft did a better job of a 1-2-3-compatible spreadsheet for Windows; it became the least painful upgrade path for 1-2-3 for DOS users.
Lotus did one of the few and best jobs of an entrenched company challenging its own dominant product by developing Improv, which was a spectacular piece of work. I suspect that the marketing/management types at Lotus let Improv live only because it was being developed for the NExT box, and therefore didn't threaten the DOS product.
Lotus did eventually release Improv for Windows, but neither customers nor Lotus management were comfortable with a non-compatible spreadsheet competitor alongside 1-2-3.
Maybe, just maybe, the XML-ification of Excel will open opportunities for truly innovative software to be cross-compatible with Excel, but I'm not hopeful. Microsoft will not leave open opportunities for true competition, and customers will remain willingly bound to the constraints of the model they've invested all that time in.
A couple of anecdotes (I worked at Lotus for a few years starting in 1983):
There was an issue of PC World that came out in late '83 or '84 that surveyed readers on which applications they used in various categories. Lotus 1-2-3 ranked third (something like 17% of respondents) in the word processing category. (This was not a mistake; it turned out that some users of 1-2-3 found it easier to enter a few paragraphs of text into a column of cells and use the Range Justify command, than to exit 1-2-3, change floppies, and launch WordPerfect.)
When I started at Lotus, my wife was a buyer for a local retail chain. She had to do quarterly plans where she distributed a fixed number of dollars over various styles of merchandise among several branches of stores; she had been doing this in rows and columns with pencil, paper, and eraser. I built a model for her to do this using 1-2-3, and several days work was reduced to hours; her peer buyers would visit us quarterly to take advantage of the new tool.
My model was flawed; I formatted the calculated values to 2 decimal places, and 1-2-3 rounded the displayed values accordingly. As a result, the actual sum of a column of calculated values was not equal to the sum of the displayed values. (A further example of the ongoing weakness of spreadsheets, and of my own carelessness; my numeric methods prof would have been ashamed of me.) (It should also be noted that my wife caught the mistake by eye, without even doing the math herself; I had been so trustful of the tools that I hadn't bothered to challenge the results. Another lesson learned.)
Eventually, the store's IT department rolled out their own application on the division's single 3270 terminal. My wife still prepared her model at home (since time in the 3270 seat was hard to come by), and transcribed the printed results into the terminal at work. The IT application required her to enter not only the table values but the calculated sums at the end of each column and row. If a sum did not match the contents of its row or column, the IT app reported an error, but did not provide the correct value, nor even state which of the thirty-odd values was incorrect!
The ironic thing is that without two things that IBM would view as absolute disasters - the non-exclusive deal Bill Gates and Microsoft cut with IBM to supply DOS, and the arrival of the "clone" market, the IBM PC line might well have been a commercial failure. But once all the clone makers were pushing "IBM compatible" everywhere you turned, computer manufacturers who kept their designs proprietary simply couldn't get and keep the shelf space/mind share they needed to keep their platforms viable.
When the IBM PC was released it had the benefit of a killer app: Lotus 1-2-3. When all the IBM clone and near-clone vendors emerged, one of the key questions asked by buyers was whether a new computer would run 1-2-3. Lotus was besieged by hardware manufacturers seeking ports of 1-2-3 to their machines, and even started a "1-2-3 compatible" certification program.
This was not limited to 1-2-3, of course. dBase was an important business app, of course (but had fewer compatibility issues); Flight Simulator was another big compatibility benchmark.
Application compatibility had a significant impact on the monitor and graphics card vendors as well.
Newsflash, they have made a lot of mistakes and set the tech industry back quite a ways by destroying innovation with subpar crap, but they also did a great deal to advance us.
Sigh. The whole point here is that they destroyed innovation by wielding their influence as a major player in the industry to starve potentially competitive emerging technologies of support by threatening companies (like Intel in this case) that were otherwise inclined to support it.
You can't "destroy innovation with subpar crap." You can certainly flood the market with crap, but that has relatively little effect on someone else's ability to create something better. Market dominance can certainly make it more difficult for someone to overtake you, but it's not impossible.
The point many of us make is that Microsoft has, in fact, done relatively little to "advance us." (Exactly what has it done, by the way?) Instead, it has abused its relationships with other companies to obfuscate and intimidate, stifling emerging technologies until they (MSFT) can move into the space. Every time it is successful at this, it gains even more power to throw around the next time.
Take a closer look at Go. They chose to build a new platform in part because they judged that they could create a more effective pen-based experience by starting from scratch around a new design center. Rather than tolerate an emerging new platform, Microsoft intimidated potential partners and, according to the emerging evidence, made and violated agreements with Go to take their ideas for Pen Windows. Now, years later, people will point to pen computing as one of the many things Microsoft supposedly did "to advance us."
Microsoft created nothing here; they just bullied and destroyed.
As a Mac user, are you proud of Novell's current support for Mac? Do you expect your opinion to change in the future?
Fair question, AC. As a Mac user/developer, Novell was, at best, barely relevant to me in the past. When I worked in a Mac-based office of a mostly-Wintel software house several years ago, the IT department's insistence on Novell servers was something of an annoyance, given their marginal Mac support.
Although Mac support is not the highest priority at Novell right now (although there have been some recent announcements in that direction), I can tell you that Novell's intranet has become much more Mac-friendly lately, if only as a by-product of embracing open standards (and open source) instead of Windows as the default desktop; Apple's (e.g., Safari's) moves in this direction are also a factor. Looking forward, I'm hopeful, if only because of the common *nix ground between the Mac and Linux; it's a far more comfortable fit than WIndows. We haven't quite reached the stage where I could justify a Mac as my development machine, but it's not inconceivable...
In case you're wondering, I'm currently doing Java development for Novell.
I work at Novell; I have installed OpenOffice.org, uninstalled MSOffice, and my laptop dual-boots Suse and XP (only until I can eliminate the last few dependencies caused by my development requirements).
I am a Mac user at home, and I am so psyched that I am this close to a zero-Microsoft environment!
I just know I'm going to get every partisan in the place foamed up by saying this, but the Clinton DOJ was actually pursuing the MS antitrust case, and the Bush people dropped it like a hot rock.
IANAL either, and I can be get pretty worked up about how much I detest Microsoft, but as much as I wanted Microsoft to lose, it was pretty obvious the antitrust case was going nowhere. The process moved way too slowly, and the business conditions were changing out from under it (i.e., the companies Microsoft strangled were all dead).
IMNSHO, the DOJ weakened their case by trying to simplify it. They picked one or two issues to concentrate on, for somewhat rational reasons, but, as a result, failed to convey just how pervasive Microsoft's anti-competitive actions were. All Microsoft had to do was cast doubt on whether the few actions that were highlighted were all that egregious, or whether other market dynamics contributed to the result, and there was nothing left to pursue.
Furthermore, all the stuff the DOJ omitted is now old news; it would be hard to use it in a new case, because the question would be asked as to why it wasn't brought up before.
As you point out, CUPS is behind OS X (Panther) printing, but the UI renders it invisible and the things people do with printers 90% of the time are managed quite simply.
On the other hand, point your browser at http://localhost:631 and CUPS is there for your geek enjoyment and/or needs. Or open the Terminal and poke around. When I had trouble sharing my Mac's printer with my Windows laptop via the conventional UIs (yes, it does happen), a short excursion into the CUPS documentation solved the problem.
This duality of Apple's traditional simplicity with the breadth of *nix's capabilities exists throughout OS X; another example is web serving, where Apache can be started or stopped with a single button, but is fully open to those who know where to look under the covers.
Raymond has a point, but I would refine it by urging the OSS community to look beyond Microsoft toward OS X for inspiration about how to reach more users.
P.S. It will surprise nobody that I am a Mac user/developer by choice, but I am eagerly embracing Linux as an alternative to Windows at work, in advance of a mandate from my employer. I have no regrets about leaving Windows behind, but from my recent experiences, I can conclude that Linux will not be replacing my home OS X desktops any time soon.
Actually, on my PM 7500 (upgraded to a G3 card), I have installed Jaguar (in one try) on an external SCSI drive (via XPostFacto), and it's doing fine. Panther won't install (yet), due to a known problem that is slated to be addressed, and I know (from running both on a Rev. A iMac) that Panther will perform even better.
On the same machine, I have set aside an internal hard drive for Linux, and neither Mandrake nor YellowDog will install. The Mandrake installer can't seem to figure out the 7500's original video HW (with a VRAM upgrade), and YDL just dies in mid-install.
I have had marginally better luck installing SUSE on the 2nd drive in my employer-provided (and more current) Dell laptop; it installed after multiple attempts, but it's not yet supporting the full resolution of the display nor recognizing the 802.11b card.
I want Linux to work (it will replace Windows on my work laptop sooner rather than later), but it is going to be far more demanding of my time than even unsupported installations of OS X.
Given that we're having so much trouble figuring out what the human eye would see (w.r.t. color), I probably shouldn't even bother to ask, but does anyone know how bright Martian daylight would appear to the naked eye? Insufficiently bright for sunglasses, for example? How (un)comfortable would it be looking at the sun?
I know the human eye is fairly adaptive in this regard, but I'm curious about the qualitative answer to this question. (Quantitative answers expressed in lumens or whatever won't quite do it for me.)
Only trouble is, we need either all the facilities to construct these things on the moon... or to launch them all from Earth, which rather ruins the cost/benefit ratio.
Unless we can synthesize (or extract) fuel and oxygen from the moon, which saves the cost of lifting it out of Earth's gravity well. In addition, there may be circumstances where it would make more sense to lift modular components of a deep-space craft off Earth, rather than trying to lift it all at once. (Like the ISS.)
Then he came out of a meeting the other day and found the screen frozen with an immobile mouse cursor- the thing had locked up spontaneously while he was gone. So he did some Googling and found a lot of people complaining about a problem with the G5 motherboards.
I'm suspicious. I do suffer occasional screen lockups (on my 400MHz G3 PowerBook), but I find that ssh teaches me more than Google: usually, the logic board (and the rest of the hardware) is running fine, and only the UI processes are somehow locked up. Not good, but...
I'm sure that (a) shutting down; (b) replacing the logic board; and (c) restarting would fix the problem, but I find step (c) alone to be much quicker.
Back to the original topic: having failed in at least 10 attempts each at installing Mandrake and Yellow Dog on a G3-upgraded PowerMac 7500, I am not at all guilty about continuing to use OS X 10.2 on it (via XPostFacto).
Ah, the Monza. As I recall, this was actually a Vega reconfigured for a Wankel (sp?) rotary engine, until GM gave up on the rotary.
In 1977, I got a deal on a new Monza with a 5-liter V8 (packed into a Vega body, remember). It would max out the 80-MPH speedometer in 2nd gear on its 3-speed automatic. Unfortunately, it ate front tires (it must have had a 65-35 front/rear weight ratio), and the engine block had to be lifted off the mounts to change the two rear spark plugs.
Almost every space mission has brought back spectacular new findings, complete surprises and incredible images... Think of Voyager, the amazing pictures of the big planets, Apollo bringing back samples to determine the origin of the Moon, Giotto looking at Halley, Venera bringing back pictures from Venus, and so on...
I still remember some of the first probes to the moon (Ranger?), which were sent to simply crash on the moon and transmit photos on the way down. In those days, a letter to NASA would get you a thick envelope of 8x10 prints of the images. In its day, just as exciting as viewing these new images on my G5.
Thanks and congrats to the folks at NASA/JPL, then and now! Looking forward to much more!
What made this project impressive is that they tunneled under the elevated highway without disrupting traffic on that highway. They also had to re-route utilities (electric, sewer, steam, water, etc.) and thread the tunnels among existing rapid transit tunnels.
I drove into Boston during much of this project, and can testify that succeeded in accommodating existing traffic without much interruption. The rest of the time, I used mass transit and was able to observe some of the work from sidewalks and subway stations.
Yes, there were cost overruns, but I'm not terribly surprised by the escalations (especially aftet accounting for inflation over 15+ years). And I don't expect to live to see a software project run any better (and I've been observing those for even longer).
Please. Iris and Ray do deserve credit for pushing Notes before the platform was really ready for it, but the implementation got sloppy over time (as rapidly evolving software tends to do), and by the time Lotus undertook a significant overhaul of the UI (v4? v5?), the underlying architecture constrained the effort.
Besides, IIRC, Notes is derivative of some work done at DEC (transplanted to a new platform).
By contrast, the original Improv (as implemented on NeXT by Pito Salas, et. al.), not the followon Windows version) was remarkably innovative and elegant in its very first release. Improv is almost the only genuinely innovative project born at Lotus after the original 1-2-3.
Please don't use Notes and Improv in the same sentence.
Jean-Louis Gassee addressed Apple developers at their World Wide Developers Conference several years ago (after he had left Apple, IIRC), and he touched on this topic then.
To summarize his points, the platform is made richer by creative people writing system enhancements, but don't be surprised if Apple (or any other system vendor) provides those enhancements in a future version of the OS; just move on to another good idea.
...worked around the issue on the 80286 that there was no way to switch back to "real" (16-bit segmented addressing) mode from "protected" mode.
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/computing/protect ed +mode
IIRC, the IBM PC AT (which first used the '286 and implemented protected mode operations) would send a signal to the keyboard, which in turn reset the CPU (the only way to get back to real mode) and somehow got the machine to proceed with what it was doing.
After learning about that, I switched to the Mac and never looked back (even if the 68000 did have its own quirks...)
Slashdot Mirror
There is damned little incentive for spreadsheet developers or their customers to build a better mousetrap^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spreadsheet (or equivalent modeling tool). When I was at Lotus, strict backward compatibility was a major constraint on successive versions of 1-2-3, for the very good reason that there was a huge installed base of users who wouldn't upgrade if their existing models wouldn't Just Work in the new version. As has been pointed out here, spreadsheet models are even harder to maintain than software written in the worst available programming languages (cough, VB, cough), which have become entrenched for similar reasons.
IMHO, Excel took the spreadsheet business away from Lotus when Microsoft did a better job of a 1-2-3-compatible spreadsheet for Windows; it became the least painful upgrade path for 1-2-3 for DOS users.
Lotus did one of the few and best jobs of an entrenched company challenging its own dominant product by developing Improv, which was a spectacular piece of work. I suspect that the marketing/management types at Lotus let Improv live only because it was being developed for the NExT box, and therefore didn't threaten the DOS product.
Lotus did eventually release Improv for Windows, but neither customers nor Lotus management were comfortable with a non-compatible spreadsheet competitor alongside 1-2-3.
Maybe, just maybe, the XML-ification of Excel will open opportunities for truly innovative software to be cross-compatible with Excel, but I'm not hopeful. Microsoft will not leave open opportunities for true competition, and customers will remain willingly bound to the constraints of the model they've invested all that time in.
There was an issue of PC World that came out in late '83 or '84 that surveyed readers on which applications they used in various categories. Lotus 1-2-3 ranked third (something like 17% of respondents) in the word processing category. (This was not a mistake; it turned out that some users of 1-2-3 found it easier to enter a few paragraphs of text into a column of cells and use the Range Justify command, than to exit 1-2-3, change floppies, and launch WordPerfect.)
When I started at Lotus, my wife was a buyer for a local retail chain. She had to do quarterly plans where she distributed a fixed number of dollars over various styles of merchandise among several branches of stores; she had been doing this in rows and columns with pencil, paper, and eraser. I built a model for her to do this using 1-2-3, and several days work was reduced to hours; her peer buyers would visit us quarterly to take advantage of the new tool.
My model was flawed; I formatted the calculated values to 2 decimal places, and 1-2-3 rounded the displayed values accordingly. As a result, the actual sum of a column of calculated values was not equal to the sum of the displayed values. (A further example of the ongoing weakness of spreadsheets, and of my own carelessness; my numeric methods prof would have been ashamed of me.) (It should also be noted that my wife caught the mistake by eye, without even doing the math herself; I had been so trustful of the tools that I hadn't bothered to challenge the results. Another lesson learned.)
Eventually, the store's IT department rolled out their own application on the division's single 3270 terminal. My wife still prepared her model at home (since time in the 3270 seat was hard to come by), and transcribed the printed results into the terminal at work. The IT application required her to enter not only the table values but the calculated sums at the end of each column and row. If a sum did not match the contents of its row or column, the IT app reported an error, but did not provide the correct value, nor even state which of the thirty-odd values was incorrect!
When the IBM PC was released it had the benefit of a killer app: Lotus 1-2-3. When all the IBM clone and near-clone vendors emerged, one of the key questions asked by buyers was whether a new computer would run 1-2-3. Lotus was besieged by hardware manufacturers seeking ports of 1-2-3 to their machines, and even started a "1-2-3 compatible" certification program.
This was not limited to 1-2-3, of course. dBase was an important business app, of course (but had fewer compatibility issues); Flight Simulator was another big compatibility benchmark.
Application compatibility had a significant impact on the monitor and graphics card vendors as well.
Sigh. The whole point here is that they destroyed innovation by wielding their influence as a major player in the industry to starve potentially competitive emerging technologies of support by threatening companies (like Intel in this case) that were otherwise inclined to support it.
You can't "destroy innovation with subpar crap." You can certainly flood the market with crap, but that has relatively little effect on someone else's ability to create something better. Market dominance can certainly make it more difficult for someone to overtake you, but it's not impossible.
The point many of us make is that Microsoft has, in fact, done relatively little to "advance us." (Exactly what has it done, by the way?) Instead, it has abused its relationships with other companies to obfuscate and intimidate, stifling emerging technologies until they (MSFT) can move into the space. Every time it is successful at this, it gains even more power to throw around the next time.
Take a closer look at Go. They chose to build a new platform in part because they judged that they could create a more effective pen-based experience by starting from scratch around a new design center. Rather than tolerate an emerging new platform, Microsoft intimidated potential partners and, according to the emerging evidence, made and violated agreements with Go to take their ideas for Pen Windows. Now, years later, people will point to pen computing as one of the many things Microsoft supposedly did "to advance us."
Microsoft created nothing here; they just bullied and destroyed.
Fair question, AC. As a Mac user/developer, Novell was, at best, barely relevant to me in the past. When I worked in a Mac-based office of a mostly-Wintel software house several years ago, the IT department's insistence on Novell servers was something of an annoyance, given their marginal Mac support.
Although Mac support is not the highest priority at Novell right now (although there have been some recent announcements in that direction), I can tell you that Novell's intranet has become much more Mac-friendly lately, if only as a by-product of embracing open standards (and open source) instead of Windows as the default desktop; Apple's (e.g., Safari's) moves in this direction are also a factor. Looking forward, I'm hopeful, if only because of the common *nix ground between the Mac and Linux; it's a far more comfortable fit than WIndows. We haven't quite reached the stage where I could justify a Mac as my development machine, but it's not inconceivable...
In case you're wondering, I'm currently doing Java development for Novell.
I work at Novell; I have installed OpenOffice.org, uninstalled MSOffice, and my laptop dual-boots Suse and XP (only until I can eliminate the last few dependencies caused by my development requirements).
I am a Mac user at home, and I am so psyched that I am this close to a zero-Microsoft environment!
IANAL either, and I can be get pretty worked up about how much I detest Microsoft, but as much as I wanted Microsoft to lose, it was pretty obvious the antitrust case was going nowhere. The process moved way too slowly, and the business conditions were changing out from under it (i.e., the companies Microsoft strangled were all dead).
IMNSHO, the DOJ weakened their case by trying to simplify it. They picked one or two issues to concentrate on, for somewhat rational reasons, but, as a result, failed to convey just how pervasive Microsoft's anti-competitive actions were. All Microsoft had to do was cast doubt on whether the few actions that were highlighted were all that egregious, or whether other market dynamics contributed to the result, and there was nothing left to pursue.
Furthermore, all the stuff the DOJ omitted is now old news; it would be hard to use it in a new case, because the question would be asked as to why it wasn't brought up before.
Uh oh, if it blocks the ads, it won't be long before somebody asserts that air pollution is A Good Thing.
Isn't a Good Thing that the liquid absorbs the heat? At least it's contained, and we do know how to use heated liquid to generate power...
On the other hand, point your browser at http://localhost:631 and CUPS is there for your geek enjoyment and/or needs. Or open the Terminal and poke around. When I had trouble sharing my Mac's printer with my Windows laptop via the conventional UIs (yes, it does happen), a short excursion into the CUPS documentation solved the problem.
This duality of Apple's traditional simplicity with the breadth of *nix's capabilities exists throughout OS X; another example is web serving, where Apache can be started or stopped with a single button, but is fully open to those who know where to look under the covers.
Raymond has a point, but I would refine it by urging the OSS community to look beyond Microsoft toward OS X for inspiration about how to reach more users.
P.S. It will surprise nobody that I am a Mac user/developer by choice, but I am eagerly embracing Linux as an alternative to Windows at work, in advance of a mandate from my employer. I have no regrets about leaving Windows behind, but from my recent experiences, I can conclude that Linux will not be replacing my home OS X desktops any time soon.
IIRC, the interest on those tax-free bonds is reported to the IRS, even if it is not taxed.
Actually, on my PM 7500 (upgraded to a G3 card), I have installed Jaguar (in one try) on an external SCSI drive (via XPostFacto), and it's doing fine. Panther won't install (yet), due to a known problem that is slated to be addressed, and I know (from running both on a Rev. A iMac) that Panther will perform even better.
On the same machine, I have set aside an internal hard drive for Linux, and neither Mandrake nor YellowDog will install. The Mandrake installer can't seem to figure out the 7500's original video HW (with a VRAM upgrade), and YDL just dies in mid-install.
I have had marginally better luck installing SUSE on the 2nd drive in my employer-provided (and more current) Dell laptop; it installed after multiple attempts, but it's not yet supporting the full resolution of the display nor recognizing the 802.11b card.
I want Linux to work (it will replace Windows on my work laptop sooner rather than later), but it is going to be far more demanding of my time than even unsupported installations of OS X.
Given that we're having so much trouble figuring out what the human eye would see (w.r.t. color), I probably shouldn't even bother to ask, but does anyone know how bright Martian daylight would appear to the naked eye? Insufficiently bright for sunglasses, for example? How (un)comfortable would it be looking at the sun?
I know the human eye is fairly adaptive in this regard, but I'm curious about the qualitative answer to this question. (Quantitative answers expressed in lumens or whatever won't quite do it for me.)
Unless we can synthesize (or extract) fuel and oxygen from the moon, which saves the cost of lifting it out of Earth's gravity well. In addition, there may be circumstances where it would make more sense to lift modular components of a deep-space craft off Earth, rather than trying to lift it all at once. (Like the ISS.)
I'm suspicious. I do suffer occasional screen lockups (on my 400MHz G3 PowerBook), but I find that ssh teaches me more than Google: usually, the logic board (and the rest of the hardware) is running fine, and only the UI processes are somehow locked up. Not good, but...
I'm sure that (a) shutting down; (b) replacing the logic board; and (c) restarting would fix the problem, but I find step (c) alone to be much quicker.
Back to the original topic: having failed in at least 10 attempts each at installing Mandrake and Yellow Dog on a G3-upgraded PowerMac 7500, I am not at all guilty about continuing to use OS X 10.2 on it (via XPostFacto).
In 1977, I got a deal on a new Monza with a 5-liter V8 (packed into a Vega body, remember). It would max out the 80-MPH speedometer in 2nd gear on its 3-speed automatic. Unfortunately, it ate front tires (it must have had a 65-35 front/rear weight ratio), and the engine block had to be lifted off the mounts to change the two rear spark plugs.
But it had its moments...
I still remember some of the first probes to the moon (Ranger?), which were sent to simply crash on the moon and transmit photos on the way down. In those days, a letter to NASA would get you a thick envelope of 8x10 prints of the images. In its day, just as exciting as viewing these new images on my G5.
Thanks and congrats to the folks at NASA/JPL, then and now! Looking forward to much more!
Interesting, since the Chooser was, by consensus of everyone I have read or spoke to, the single worst UI element of the classic Mac interface.
Not that I believe in such absolutes, myself. Your comment is just another indication that a lot of these UI design viewpoints are subjective.
I think Tog is very much worth listening to as an exercise in critical analysis, but one doesn't have to take everything as gospel.
Maybe this time they swapped metric for English in the other direction and landed on Arrakis?
I drove into Boston during much of this project, and can testify that succeeded in accommodating existing traffic without much interruption. The rest of the time, I used mass transit and was able to observe some of the work from sidewalks and subway stations.
Yes, there were cost overruns, but I'm not terribly surprised by the escalations (especially aftet accounting for inflation over 15+ years). And I don't expect to live to see a software project run any better (and I've been observing those for even longer).
Besides, IIRC, Notes is derivative of some work done at DEC (transplanted to a new platform).
By contrast, the original Improv (as implemented on NeXT by Pito Salas, et. al.), not the followon Windows version) was remarkably innovative and elegant in its very first release. Improv is almost the only genuinely innovative project born at Lotus after the original 1-2-3.
Please don't use Notes and Improv in the same sentence.
Jean-Louis Gassee addressed Apple developers at their World Wide Developers Conference several years ago (after he had left Apple, IIRC), and he touched on this topic then.
To summarize his points, the platform is made richer by creative people writing system enhancements, but don't be surprised if Apple (or any other system vendor) provides those enhancements in a future version of the OS; just move on to another good idea.
...worked around the issue on the 80286 that there was no way to switch back to "real" (16-bit segmented addressing) mode from "protected" mode.
t ed +mode
http://www.hyperdictionary.com/computing/protec
IIRC, the IBM PC AT (which first used the '286 and implemented protected mode operations) would send a signal to the keyboard, which in turn reset the CPU (the only way to get back to real mode) and somehow got the machine to proceed with what it was doing.
After learning about that, I switched to the Mac and never looked back (even if the 68000 did have its own quirks...)
And if we do follow the rules and don't play the odds, then we are figured to be suckers.
Speak for yourself.
Well, maybe you've been able to avoid it, but I think it is an apt description of corporate America and, by the way, NASA.