Re:Sweet Jeesus
on
OS X Hacks
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· Score: 2, Informative
Uh. I don't know what your problem is, exactly...
Well, I saw an opportunitity to troll and took the low road. Regardless, the fact that Office can be ported to a vastly different operating system shows that it, internally, has a layered architecture. Alternatively, Microsoft uses its vast resources to recreate much of Office for the sake of Mac OS X.
Why would the Department of Justice care whether Microsoft sells applications for OS X or any other OS? If Microsoft wanted to drop OS X support tomorrow and sell Office only for Windows, that would absolutely be their right.
Microsoft was shown to have used their monopoly position on the desktop to nearly destroy Netscape with Internet Explorer, while further reinforcing their hold on the desktop market. A similar effect has happend with Word versus other word processors, again reinforcing Microsoft's hold on the desktop. By dropping support for Mac OS X, Microsoft would essentially be telling the world (who is already addicted to MS Office) that their only choice is to buy Windows. Apple would quickly go bankrupt or nearly so. I think the DOJ would probably be very interested in a Windows-only stance regarding Office.
By making Office for a wider variety of operating systems, Microsoft can demonstrate good will, where they are interested in profiting off of Office indpendently of Windows. This would show they are moving beyond their clear position of conflict of interest regarding Windows, which is very significant in reducing their status as an illegal monopoly.
In what other industry would any company be allowed to continue with greater than 90% market share in multiple markets, anyway? Operating systems, office suites, and web browsers are distinct markets within the overal market for software.
Re:Sweet Jeesus
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
MS Office
Given that MS Office and Internet Explorer obviously run in UNIX, now, why doesn't Microsoft widen their potential customer base by porting to Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.? Oh, their Mac support is just a token to keep the DOJ off of their backs? So, that lock-in revenue from the Windows OS really is the motivating factor? Oh, I see.
Re:Reminds me of Linux circa 1994
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 1
The reviewer said "if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them" (emphasis added). That surely is elitism of the worst sort.
In some cases, the word "smart" is actually very appropriate given the drooling bib-wizards that often end up in IT. I agree, though, that it is overly general, in the context of a Mac OS book.
However, how many projects fail, because someone drags some boxes around in a GUI and, then, calls themself a database architects? Being able to competently design, implement, and maintain a database is absolutely non-trivial, and only genuine experts should do it when a business is on the line. If a person relly could not figure out MySQL on their own, I certainly wouldn't hire them.
Great for entering URLs you've visited before or text messaging, but suh-ucks in word processing.
The reason autocomplete sucks for word processing is the constant interruptions in the natural flow of typing. Then, once a person is used to autocomplete, the habits formed totally trash productivity in non-autocomplete environments.
I think the best compromise is the tab-to-complete feature in bash and emacs, for example. It doesn't do anything until the user presses the tab key, and, then, it is pretty natural to begin a new word after a tab.
The Amazon patent, however, is not autocompletion, but smart marketing. By flashing the most popular product name with each character typed, they gain instant attention and better chances at impulse purchases. It's sort of like an electronic version of check-out aisles with all the candy bars and trash magazines leading to the register....I think I finally understand, now, why grocery stores don't use the more efficient single-queue/multiple-registers model for check-out. Forcing customers into the horrendously ineffecient mode of standing in multiple lines increases customer exposure to all the crap they put in the "impulse zone." Damn, marketing people are evil.
But we seem to have exhausted the searches of Google, Alta Vista, etc.
Then what you are looking for doesn't exist. Now kneel down and plead for your soul in front of the almighty Google! Google knows all! Google is the provider!
Just copying the whole record for autit purposes does not help, since we need to assign authorship to the changes, not to the whole record.
You could store a whole new copy of the record along with the set of people responsible for that version. Each author entry can have an associated revision comment. That would probably be enough of a "paper trail" that the group of responsible people is small enough for an investigation to flush out the remaining details.
It seems that if the record is small, then the metadata will dominate, regardless of the strategy employed. However, finding a way to keep everything in the database will pay off, because SQL is so powerful relative to CVS-style diffs and greps. Relational databases also have a very high performance potential relative to flat files (they tend to scale very well).
90% of the difference between PCs and "real computers" can be explained by poor quality hardware.
I disagree. The percentage is probably nearer 5% of the difference. Windows has some real problems due to unmanaged complexity in the software. The opacity of Windows means that most bugs either go unnoticed or unreported, because no one really understands how it works.
Yeah, and by that standard, Linux is pretty crappy too.
Linux really isn't all that bad. It lacks the refinement of Solaris, but it is certainly a useful and reliable OS.
Re:Nearly classical economics
on
Mighty Amazon
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· Score: 1
They, like ebay, are working in as close to a frictionless economy as we are likely to get. If any facet of their business can be done more cheaply by someone else, they're screwed.
I disagree. You are assuming people will always buy the cheapest. However, Amazon still provides something of value even if they aren't the cheapest: low risk and top-notch customer service. Even though it is true that I can get certain things more cheaply at eBay, I still buy from Amazon and others to get a known face on the other side of the transaction. Also, it is harder to get a nominal warranty on used goods from eBay, while many non-eBay second-hand vendors will provide 30-day or 90-day warranties, which has already been useful to me.
The card itself may be targeted at adults, but the ad was clearly targeted at kids: The message was "Nag Mommy enough until she signs up for our card, and you get to go to Disneyland! Everythin she buys gets you closer to Der Maus."
I find those types of cards reprehensible. Even worse than the Disney cards are cards that build up points towards college tuition through buying certain brands of products. Just buying store brands would do much more towards any form of savings, but I guess some people still fall for the marketing and open their wallets to anything well-presented.
Actually, the Open Group's trademark guidelines consider "unix-like" to be inappropriate. They would probably prefer the phrase "a distinct system inspired by UNIX".
NT Workstation wasn't crap. 2000 Professional wasn't crap. So there was a reasonable expectation that XP would turn out OK.
This is from the point of view of a person who worked with PCs their entire lives.
From the point of view of mainframes and UNIX, then, yes, Win NT, Win 2000, and even Win XP are pretty darn crappy. Even in my experience Windows 2000 has had the wierdest behaviors that I have yet to understand--or repeat. Windows is getting less and less transparent with each version, which makes the whole situation even worse.
Second, "two chips in one" is misleading. It will be a CMP chip: multiple cores on one die...
Okay, dual cores is more accurate than dual chip.
Thirdly, the performance gain of doubling the number of cores per die (or the number os CPUs in a system) doesn't mean it can provide twice the throughput.
For a large number of applications, it can, and the Solaris kernel's fine-grained threading improves the odds greatly. For applications that saturate the processor's external bus, then it is certainly possible that one of the CPU cores would not get utilized efficiently.
It's definitely a compromise. However, the idea of a 212-core Sun Fire 15K or even a four-core Sun Blade 2000 is quite enticing.
On a related note, why is it that people who spend their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments, tend to end up with the least spending power?:)
Good point. It's a vicious cycle of bone-headed decisions.
I think a full-semester Finance class in early High School would do a lot to prevent at least some of the bone-headedness. That would catch the kids before they start getting credit cards.
Also, have you noticed where a lot of fast food eateries are? In low income or rural areas.
I hoping your post is simply a generalization. However, it is hard to ignore where the Church's Chicken, cell phone and pager, auto title loan, paycheck loan, bail loan, and shiney wheel cover stores are...
Why is it that the people with the least spending power often end up spending all their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments (car, house, etc.)?
It's a never ending battle between the republican types (who hate government involvement) and the democratic types who want more centralized/governmental control.
This is an old stereotype that doesn't mean much anymore. Republicans are approximately the same as Democrats with similar levels of soft money contributions and an equal amount of separation from their constituants.
Republicans currently want big government through debatable "Homeland Security" causes.
Democrats currently want big government through naive "feed the poor" causes.
Both are equally misguided and equally wasteful. Call 'em Republocrats or Demolicans--it really doesn't matter.
It is a good time for a third or fourth party to become significant enough to sway votes in congress. Only, then, will the stupidity and polarity of the Bill Clinton impeachment vote, for example, get resolved. Does anyone have the guts to not vote the party line, anymore?
If the records are so small, just create your own database schema that allows keeping a whole copy of each version of each record along with appropriate metadata tags (version, author, etc.).
This isn't very difficult, and anyone with data modeling experience can pull it off. As far as free software goes, just use PostgreSQL or MySQL and a PERL or PHP or JSP front end. Problem solved.
...kids who ought to move with lunatic energy of youth now move with the high purpose of the worker bee.
What is so sad about this, is that children are being forced to make decisions more frequently and more often before they are ready. One side-effect of this is that the kids might start realizing the arbitrarity of the decisions and get burnt-out, depressed, or dug into a deep hole they can't get out. As an adult, I happily blow off the alternatives, but a kid just looks at the alternatives without fully understanding trade-offs and consequences and picks what they percieve as the best at that time. The culmination of all this is when kids go to colleges "of their choice" without knowing or caring how to pay for them. Ten years after college and still paying the minimum on their loans...maybe, then, they'll "get it". (and, no, this isn't the story of my life, just my observations)
The demise of cartoons was when they started writing 'em not for adults, but rather for what they THINK appeals to kids.
Animaniacs is the last good adult-and-child-oriented cartoon I can think of. It's telling that Animanics didn't last very long, even though it was entertaining. The current lot of adult-oriented cartoons, e.g., The Simpsons and South Park, are also entertaining for their own reasons, but they are not nearly so universal. I shudder to think young kids actually watch South Park. I saw one dad take his kid to the South Park movie...I bet he regretted that! ("Daddy, what is a -insert explicative/reproductive organ-?")
Wide-audience cartoons are essentially dead, in my opinion. Now, cartoons are targetted to very narrow age groups. There's infant-specific cartoons (Telletubbies), toddler-specific cartoons (Barney), post-toddler cartoons (the ones on PBS), pre-teen cartoons (Scooby, X-Men, etc.)...a void...and then there's adult cartoons (South Park).
I agree that cartoons are written to be what is thought to be appropriate, and, then, the outcome can be disturbing. I saw a mainstream cartoon (forget which), where a young girl told a repairman, essentially, "You are too slow, I'll do it myself," which is totally disrespectful and sets a bad example. It appears some cartoons just regurgitate typical childish behavior regardless of whether it is appropriate.
The actual cartoon was on The Daily Show a while back. Among the funniest things I've seen. I couldn't find it on the Comedy Central website, but, perhaps, I'm just stupid.
(although I keep seeing them referred to as "stinkpads" for some reason)
Their laptops have a good reputation (I have an old Pentium 75 one still going strong). "Stinkpad" is probably a pet name assigned by people who have had chance bad experiences. It's sort of like "Slowaris," even though Solaris' performance is very acceptable.
I hope they're the ones to buy Sun if it gets sold...
Another option would be Fujitsu, who sell arguably better servers than Sun and have an investment in SPARC v9 and Solaris. Fujitsu also tends to dominate several benchmark categories, in spite of their low clockrate CPUs. They could absorb Sun's peripheral and chip engineering and Sun's relationships with TI. That wouldn't be too bad, unless Fujitsu's management style is so different that it puts of people in the U.S.
I agree that IBM opening up Java to spite Microsoft is plausible. It depends on which half of IBM's psyche makes the decision. Linux on IBM mainframes is a good example of the unexpected happening; however, the mainframes themselves are gool ol' IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh. I don't know what your problem is, exactly...
Well, I saw an opportunitity to troll and took the low road. Regardless, the fact that Office can be ported to a vastly different operating system shows that it, internally, has a layered architecture. Alternatively, Microsoft uses its vast resources to recreate much of Office for the sake of Mac OS X.
Why would the Department of Justice care whether Microsoft sells applications for OS X or any other OS? If Microsoft wanted to drop OS X support tomorrow and sell Office only for Windows, that would absolutely be their right.
Microsoft was shown to have used their monopoly position on the desktop to nearly destroy Netscape with Internet Explorer, while further reinforcing their hold on the desktop market. A similar effect has happend with Word versus other word processors, again reinforcing Microsoft's hold on the desktop. By dropping support for Mac OS X, Microsoft would essentially be telling the world (who is already addicted to MS Office) that their only choice is to buy Windows. Apple would quickly go bankrupt or nearly so. I think the DOJ would probably be very interested in a Windows-only stance regarding Office.
By making Office for a wider variety of operating systems, Microsoft can demonstrate good will, where they are interested in profiting off of Office indpendently of Windows. This would show they are moving beyond their clear position of conflict of interest regarding Windows, which is very significant in reducing their status as an illegal monopoly.
In what other industry would any company be allowed to continue with greater than 90% market share in multiple markets, anyway? Operating systems, office suites, and web browsers are distinct markets within the overal market for software.
MS Office
Given that MS Office and Internet Explorer obviously run in UNIX, now, why doesn't Microsoft widen their potential customer base by porting to Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, etc.? Oh, their Mac support is just a token to keep the DOJ off of their backs? So, that lock-in revenue from the Windows OS really is the motivating factor? Oh, I see.
The reviewer said "if you can't figure out how to install them from the documentation then you aren't smart enough to use them" (emphasis added). That surely is elitism of the worst sort.
In some cases, the word "smart" is actually very appropriate given the drooling bib-wizards that often end up in IT. I agree, though, that it is overly general, in the context of a Mac OS book.
However, how many projects fail, because someone drags some boxes around in a GUI and, then, calls themself a database architects? Being able to competently design, implement, and maintain a database is absolutely non-trivial, and only genuine experts should do it when a business is on the line. If a person relly could not figure out MySQL on their own, I certainly wouldn't hire them.
Great for entering URLs you've visited before or text messaging, but suh-ucks in word processing.
...I think I finally understand, now, why grocery stores don't use the more efficient single-queue/multiple-registers model for check-out. Forcing customers into the horrendously ineffecient mode of standing in multiple lines increases customer exposure to all the crap they put in the "impulse zone." Damn, marketing people are evil.
The reason autocomplete sucks for word processing is the constant interruptions in the natural flow of typing. Then, once a person is used to autocomplete, the habits formed totally trash productivity in non-autocomplete environments.
I think the best compromise is the tab-to-complete feature in bash and emacs, for example. It doesn't do anything until the user presses the tab key, and, then, it is pretty natural to begin a new word after a tab.
The Amazon patent, however, is not autocompletion, but smart marketing. By flashing the most popular product name with each character typed, they gain instant attention and better chances at impulse purchases. It's sort of like an electronic version of check-out aisles with all the candy bars and trash magazines leading to the register.
But we seem to have exhausted the searches of Google, Alta Vista, etc.
Then what you are looking for doesn't exist. Now kneel down and plead for your soul in front of the almighty Google! Google knows all! Google is the provider!
Just copying the whole record for autit purposes does not help, since we need to assign authorship to the changes, not to the whole record.
You could store a whole new copy of the record along with the set of people responsible for that version. Each author entry can have an associated revision comment. That would probably be enough of a "paper trail" that the group of responsible people is small enough for an investigation to flush out the remaining details.
It seems that if the record is small, then the metadata will dominate, regardless of the strategy employed. However, finding a way to keep everything in the database will pay off, because SQL is so powerful relative to CVS-style diffs and greps. Relational databases also have a very high performance potential relative to flat files (they tend to scale very well).
90% of the difference between PCs and "real computers" can be explained by poor quality hardware.
I disagree. The percentage is probably nearer 5% of the difference. Windows has some real problems due to unmanaged complexity in the software. The opacity of Windows means that most bugs either go unnoticed or unreported, because no one really understands how it works.
Yeah, and by that standard, Linux is pretty crappy too.
Linux really isn't all that bad. It lacks the refinement of Solaris, but it is certainly a useful and reliable OS.
They, like ebay, are working in as close to a frictionless economy as we are likely to get. If any facet of their business can be done more cheaply by someone else, they're screwed.
I disagree. You are assuming people will always buy the cheapest. However, Amazon still provides something of value even if they aren't the cheapest: low risk and top-notch customer service. Even though it is true that I can get certain things more cheaply at eBay, I still buy from Amazon and others to get a known face on the other side of the transaction. Also, it is harder to get a nominal warranty on used goods from eBay, while many non-eBay second-hand vendors will provide 30-day or 90-day warranties, which has already been useful to me.
US$20 XP.
The card itself may be targeted at adults, but the ad was clearly targeted at kids: The message was "Nag Mommy enough until she signs up for our card, and you get to go to Disneyland! Everythin she buys gets you closer to Der Maus."
I find those types of cards reprehensible. Even worse than the Disney cards are cards that build up points towards college tuition through buying certain brands of products. Just buying store brands would do much more towards any form of savings, but I guess some people still fall for the marketing and open their wallets to anything well-presented.
"unix-like operating system"
Actually, the Open Group's trademark guidelines consider "unix-like" to be inappropriate. They would probably prefer the phrase "a distinct system inspired by UNIX".
NT Workstation wasn't crap. 2000 Professional wasn't crap. So there was a reasonable expectation that XP would turn out OK.
This is from the point of view of a person who worked with PCs their entire lives.
From the point of view of mainframes and UNIX, then, yes, Win NT, Win 2000, and even Win XP are pretty darn crappy. Even in my experience Windows 2000 has had the wierdest behaviors that I have yet to understand--or repeat. Windows is getting less and less transparent with each version, which makes the whole situation even worse.
Second, "two chips in one" is misleading. It will be a CMP chip: multiple cores on one die...
Okay, dual cores is more accurate than dual chip.
Thirdly, the performance gain of doubling the number of cores per die (or the number os CPUs in a system) doesn't mean it can provide twice the throughput.
For a large number of applications, it can, and the Solaris kernel's fine-grained threading improves the odds greatly. For applications that saturate the processor's external bus, then it is certainly possible that one of the CPU cores would not get utilized efficiently.
It's definitely a compromise. However, the idea of a 212-core Sun Fire 15K or even a four-core Sun Blade 2000 is quite enticing.
On a related note, why is it that people who spend their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments, tend to end up with the least spending power? :)
Good point. It's a vicious cycle of bone-headed decisions.
I think a full-semester Finance class in early High School would do a lot to prevent at least some of the bone-headedness. That would catch the kids before they start getting credit cards.
Also, have you noticed where a lot of fast food eateries are? In low income or rural areas.
I hoping your post is simply a generalization. However, it is hard to ignore where the Church's Chicken, cell phone and pager, auto title loan, paycheck loan, bail loan, and shiney wheel cover stores are...
Why is it that the people with the least spending power often end up spending all their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments (car, house, etc.)?
It's a never ending battle between the republican types (who hate government involvement) and the democratic types who want more centralized/governmental control.
This is an old stereotype that doesn't mean much anymore. Republicans are approximately the same as Democrats with similar levels of soft money contributions and an equal amount of separation from their constituants.
Republicans currently want big government through debatable "Homeland Security" causes.
Democrats currently want big government through naive "feed the poor" causes.
Both are equally misguided and equally wasteful. Call 'em Republocrats or Demolicans--it really doesn't matter.
It is a good time for a third or fourth party to become significant enough to sway votes in congress. Only, then, will the stupidity and polarity of the Bill Clinton impeachment vote, for example, get resolved. Does anyone have the guts to not vote the party line, anymore?
If the records are so small, just create your own database schema that allows keeping a whole copy of each version of each record along with appropriate metadata tags (version, author, etc.).
This isn't very difficult, and anyone with data modeling experience can pull it off. As far as free software goes, just use PostgreSQL or MySQL and a PERL or PHP or JSP front end. Problem solved.
thats because this was on the Simpsons
I distinctly remember seeing it on the Daily Show. Comedy Central may have just gotten permission from Fox to play it.
I bet they'll carge $7,000 for the power adapter.
micro-rebooting; using better tools to pinpoint problems in multicomponent systems; build an "undo" function...
:). I don't program in Lisp, but have seen people who are very good at it. Quite impressive.
I think they just invented Lisp
...kids who ought to move with lunatic energy of youth now move with the high purpose of the worker bee.
What is so sad about this, is that children are being forced to make decisions more frequently and more often before they are ready. One side-effect of this is that the kids might start realizing the arbitrarity of the decisions and get burnt-out, depressed, or dug into a deep hole they can't get out. As an adult, I happily blow off the alternatives, but a kid just looks at the alternatives without fully understanding trade-offs and consequences and picks what they percieve as the best at that time. The culmination of all this is when kids go to colleges "of their choice" without knowing or caring how to pay for them. Ten years after college and still paying the minimum on their loans...maybe, then, they'll "get it". (and, no, this isn't the story of my life, just my observations)
The demise of cartoons was when they started writing 'em not for adults, but rather for what they THINK appeals to kids.
Animaniacs is the last good adult-and-child-oriented cartoon I can think of. It's telling that Animanics didn't last very long, even though it was entertaining. The current lot of adult-oriented cartoons, e.g., The Simpsons and South Park, are also entertaining for their own reasons, but they are not nearly so universal. I shudder to think young kids actually watch South Park. I saw one dad take his kid to the South Park movie...I bet he regretted that! ("Daddy, what is a -insert explicative/reproductive organ-?")
Wide-audience cartoons are essentially dead, in my opinion. Now, cartoons are targetted to very narrow age groups. There's infant-specific cartoons (Telletubbies), toddler-specific cartoons (Barney), post-toddler cartoons (the ones on PBS), pre-teen cartoons (Scooby, X-Men, etc.)...a void...and then there's adult cartoons (South Park).
I agree that cartoons are written to be what is thought to be appropriate, and, then, the outcome can be disturbing. I saw a mainstream cartoon (forget which), where a young girl told a repairman, essentially, "You are too slow, I'll do it myself," which is totally disrespectful and sets a bad example. It appears some cartoons just regurgitate typical childish behavior regardless of whether it is appropriate.
I'm an amendment to be, yes an amendment to be...
The actual cartoon was on The Daily Show a while back. Among the funniest things I've seen. I couldn't find it on the Comedy Central website, but, perhaps, I'm just stupid.
(although I keep seeing them referred to as "stinkpads" for some reason)
Their laptops have a good reputation (I have an old Pentium 75 one still going strong). "Stinkpad" is probably a pet name assigned by people who have had chance bad experiences. It's sort of like "Slowaris," even though Solaris' performance is very acceptable.
I hope they're the ones to buy Sun if it gets sold...
Another option would be Fujitsu, who sell arguably better servers than Sun and have an investment in SPARC v9 and Solaris. Fujitsu also tends to dominate several benchmark categories, in spite of their low clockrate CPUs. They could absorb Sun's peripheral and chip engineering and Sun's relationships with TI. That wouldn't be too bad, unless Fujitsu's management style is so different that it puts of people in the U.S.
What do you think?
I agree that IBM opening up Java to spite Microsoft is plausible. It depends on which half of IBM's psyche makes the decision. Linux on IBM mainframes is a good example of the unexpected happening; however, the mainframes themselves are gool ol' IBM.