You see, when someone starts an argument with something like that, it's Mother Nature's way of leaning over your shoulder and saying in her soft sweet low voice:
"FRUIT LOOP WITH AN AXE TO GRIND ON THE STARBOARD BOW!!"
I think Google is mostly responsible for launching the AJAX trend, ...and when you say AJAX trend, you mean the use of XmlHttpRequest, first thought of and implemented by Microsoft, to create responsive web applications that update only the necessary UI elements rather than the whole page, like Microsoft's Outlook Web, for which AJAX was invented.
Thank goodness there are true innovators like Google to prevent technology from suffocating under the Microsoft Blanket.
I guess I'm old fashioned enough to focus on who 'develops the technology' or just 'has the idea', rather than on who 'launches the trend'.
Brilliant. By partnering with bloated, overprotected, "Hey, our shares cost 3 million yen each so the hoi polloi can't buy them" merchants DoCoMo, inventors of the phone-that-is-mostly-only-big-in-Japan, MS have gained a foothold in the crucial 'things that people actively want to not have' market.
Next up, a partnership with Freddy Krueger to gain a foothold in the 'things that shoot razor blades into your hand when you pick them up market'. Followed by a partnership with the earth's ferrous core (a major player in minerals circles) to get into the 'things that are thousands of miles below the earth's surface and vaporize human flesh on contact' market.
And of course, a strong position in the market for technologies that customers actually pay to avoid could also lead to other key advantages, such as losing money (investors are always suspicios of cash-heavy companies) and being widely ridiculed (a new, positive, clown-like image).
'DRM market space', yeesh. Make some forking products already. Where's my sub $100 tablet PC?
The parent post has been responded to adequately already, but it's such a classic example of the way certain people think -- or rather, fail to do so -- in the Linux/OSS world that I thought it was worth throwing my 2c in as well. So here goes:
Yeah, I'm not impressed with Sony Vaios. It seems like they were designed to run Windows and be really small and light.
Yes, and they do run it, with a few handy usability features that make their small size easier to take advantage of, and they are really small and light. Impressive.
And presumably well suited for what the guy actually wanted to do.
Did this man do any searches for Linux on Vaios?
I guess not; I imagine he just wanted to use the computer for what he actually wanted to do.
Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't try Mandrake/Mandriva for his laptop.
You're surprised that he didn't take a few days to do a general comparison of all Linux distros to isolate the one most suited to his hardware?
Again, key concept: there were particular things he actually wanted to do, research into the cost/benefit profile of Mandrake not being one.
I think the users just have to have the patience to go out there and find the multimedia programs.
No, here's the thing; sure, users _could_ that, but wouldn't it be easier to just sit down and do what you actually want to do?
Some people don't want to climb more than one learning curve in their life.
Thing is, climbing a learning curve doesn't seem to be what he actually wanted to do here.
Those are the people that can't make the switch.
Yeah, there's a tiny number of people that just can't make the switch. Then there's a far, far, larger number for whom making switches, climbing learning curves, googling, consulting websites that tell you where to download nearly-finished source for the driver for the little rocker switch thingy that Vaios have, etc, are just not things that they ACTUALLY WANT TO DO.
What would you think of a vendor who demanded of their customers what you have just demanded of the laptop user? You'd think, 'sell short!' Wouldn't matter how cheap their prices were.
At the risk of plugging my own hopefully interesting page on the subject, I think this is one of the few places left in IT where the Japanese dislike of Unicode is still causing a problem in modern IT.
Ruby programs run in an interpreter written in C/yacc. The interpreter is slow and problematic (threads, unicode, it's all been said). Since ruby is defined by this one interpreter implementation (there's no written standard and the only way to create one would be by _fully_ understanding the interpreter), this tends to form a ceiling on Ruby's scalability.
Adam's name appears a whole chapter before Eve's, for heaven's sake! While I applaud the invention of this rubbery-looking, creepy android, I think the next model is going to have to be able to sort single-digit numbers.
P.S. Dokdo is Korean territory! Dokdo nun uri ddang! No, wait, I changed my mind. Takeshima is Japanese! Takeshima ha nihon no ryoudo -- no, wait, it's Korean! Man, I love territorial disputes, especially ones in the East Sea. No, I mean the Sea of Japan.
It's Office without the macros, without the plugins, without the Exchange integration, without the underpinnings of COM. It's basically Office without the selling point. If I wanted a spreadsheet to be literally just a grid with formulae, life would be so easy. I don't, of course; I want it to reference other sheets, to populate itself with data from the database, to have the occasional button that makes stuff happen elsewhere on the sheet, to host third party libraries or controls, to do the stuff that spreadsheets do. That's what Excel does, that's the value it delivers, that's what it brings to the table, that's what makes it worth putting up with.
The reason people use Office remains the simple fact that a competing product has not yet appeared. And with ThinkFree's attitude, it won't be them. They didn't include macros because they are 'platform dependant'?? They're not 'platform dependant'; they're just 'something that's harder to do when you decide your Excel clone will be running within a Java application server'. Not the same as 'platform dependant', but I bet the ThinkFree guy that said that has half convinced himself of it already. So I'm bearish on ThinkFree today.
Ok, my comments are cranky. But some overselling is going on here, you know.
Big names won't price themselves out of the market because they are in a different market from 'relatively unknown artists'. The latter are selling music, the former a brand.
Building such brands is a very expensive and complicated undertaking, and it's what the music business is good at. It is unrelated to the creation of music, except insofar as it sometimes funds the creation of music (buying songs from songwriters, incubating new potential stars, etc).
Filesharing has brought about a largish change in the way music spreads and is funded and distributed, and also, in seperate news, a smallish change in how brands are built. The price of a Madonna concert reflects the need to make Madonna appear as a premium brand, the need to have enough people show up that it feels like a success, the need to not have all the tickets vanish on the first day of sales leaving people to get bored, and so on. It's a whole nuther ball game compared to music distribution.
So, Madonna concerts will always be expensive just as BMWs and diamonds will -- if they were cheap, who'd bother?
That was like standing in the middle of a hot, dusty road -- and then suddenly a biplane dumps a barrel of icy-cold buzzwords down your back!
And it was like walking down a long, silent corridor and opening a door -- and behind the door are a hundred advertising executives, and each one is holding a mirror in which are reflected a thousand dull unemployed rich kids, and all hundred thousand plus one hundred are chanting 'NEW MEDIA' in unison!
And it was like looking at a computer screen -- only to find that somewhere behind the screen, a Beast formed of all the jargon, buzzwords, catchphrases and lame gimmicks of all the ages of Mankind is staring back at you!
I salute the writer of the summary.
Unless, of course, any part of the summary or of that 'vodcast/babelcast/media tapestry' crap is serious.
In which case, there are people out there who need to be given real jobs, like ditch digging, ASAP. Really.
which highlights the retarding effect regulation has on technological progress
In other news, today I successfully opened a can of Diet Coke -- which highlights the retarding effect regulation has on quenching thirst. Man, if I'd waited for the government to open that can for me, I'd still be thirsty now!
If only there were a more effective way to highlight the retarding effect that obsessing over the complete works of Ayn Rand has on independant thought...
In production, these machines stayed up about five hours. The band-aid solution was to make one machine reboot all the others every four hours.
I know this kind of post is absolutely no use to anyone, but... honestly, doesn't that suggest that they had deeper problems than just their choice of OS???
I hope the second phase after the band-aid fix was to actually fix the application in question.
If this thing is like a Libretto, or like that ultra-small Vaio than Sony built for a while, then I'd buy one. I'd buy one because I have a lot of word documents, excel spreadsheets, half-finished novels, C# code and so on to work with wherever I am. Can't do it on a PDA, can't yank out a full-sized laptop all the time either.
Why anyone would buy this kind of thing for the same niche as a PDA or mobile phone, though, I can't begin to imagine. I can foresee a future in which I am the only one with an Origami. The question is whether I can foresee a future in which Microsoft stop creating Next Big Things and go back to doing useful stuff.
Re:In a comparison, Ruby suffers for one big reaso
on
Exploring Active Record
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, Ruby and it's author have an interesting attitude to string representation in general and Unicode in particular. It's partly what inspired me to write this:
It's really been a very interesting struggle between people's psychological and I.T. needs -- a struggle that's pretty well over now, but has left behind things like Ruby's way of doing things.
Of course if big business would get involved and internationalize it a bit, and by that I mean replace the 50,000 places that all go something like
if(char == '.' || char == '!' || char == '?') {sentenceEnd = true;}...with proper character classes that are defined in one place and aren't limited to ASCII, then I would be very grateful.
Look, whatever the ideal solution here might be in technical terms, if you are making decisions for these people on the basis of what you find 'abhorrent', then you should stop.
People are trusting you to make an informed technical choice, and you are presumably presenting yourself as someone who adds value in the form of technical knowledge and ability, right? You can't turn around and lead these people down a path determined by the fact that you have a personal emotional issue with some software. It's professionally irresponsible, bad for the school, and it makes you a weirdo.
In a slightly seperate issue, I wonder how people manage to work themselves up so much that they find a particular brand or product 'abhorrent' rather that just 'unsuitable'.
On second thoughts, I guess I do almost nearly feel that way about the Hummer 2, and ESPECIALLY the Hummer 3. I mean have you _seen_ the awful awful awful embarrassing fake chrome bits on those things? That's abhorrent! Shiny, dumb-looking, unstable, but also abhorrent.
By analogy with 'less-travelled' etc., it should really be 'less-known'. However, for whatever reason, 'lesser known' (hyphen optional) is the standard form when known is an adjective -- not when it is a verb. Thus it is correct to say:
The lesser-known option is, of course, less known than the alternatives.
"Lesser used", again, is just about acceptable as an attributative phrase ("the lesser used construction is 'lesser used'") but not really as a predicate ("'lesser used' is the less used construction").
This goes back to the fact that 'lesser' is an adjective and 'less' an adverb.
You are fully familiar with cases concerning OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson aren't you, dear reader?
Yeah, I'm familiar with how one guy was acquitted because the case against him was horribly mismanaged and distorted by clearly corrupt police, and I'm familiar with how the other guy was acquitted because the evidence against him basically amounted to 'look at him, he's weird'.
Not every trial _has_ to end in a conviction. The idea is to find _whether_ it can be _proved_ that the defendant is guilty.
As Python, Ruby, Lua are all the same and closely related to Java
Shh! I am getting near my target... the greatest of all game, the beast I have hunted all my adult life... the Complete and Total Idiot!
Many times in the past I thought I had found him -- but now, now I am sure. Mere ignorance alone _cannot_ explain the statement above! The most awe-inspiring thing is the inclusion of Lua, which is so utterly unlike both Python and Ruby in one way and Java in another way! Without the Lua, it would just be factually wrong, and a bit stooopid. Adding Lua, though -- that takes it to a whole nuther level!
Python, Ruby and Lua. All the same. And all closely related to Java.
because either "I don't like Perl!" or "Numbnuts wrote this code in Object Intercal 95, which doesn't have a compiler/interpreter on the platform I need."
Hrm... but these are both perfectly good reasons!
Admittedly, in the second example he could in theory be asked to implement Object Intercal 95 on the platform in question. But the first example is pretty much unarguable:)
Slashdot Mirror
'enhertiently' is my new favorite made-up word.
Incidentally, if you meant 'inherently', it doesn't make sense before 'intrinsic'.
If you replace the software with guns,
You see, when someone starts an argument with something like that, it's Mother Nature's way of leaning over your shoulder and saying in her soft sweet low voice:
"FRUIT LOOP WITH AN AXE TO GRIND ON THE STARBOARD BOW!!"
I think Google is mostly responsible for launching the AJAX trend,
Thank goodness there are true innovators like Google to prevent technology from suffocating under the Microsoft Blanket.
I guess I'm old fashioned enough to focus on who 'develops the technology' or just 'has the idea', rather than on who 'launches the trend'.
Brilliant. By partnering with bloated, overprotected, "Hey, our shares cost 3 million yen each so the hoi polloi can't buy them" merchants DoCoMo, inventors of the phone-that-is-mostly-only-big-in-Japan, MS have gained a foothold in the crucial 'things that people actively want to not have' market.
Next up, a partnership with Freddy Krueger to gain a foothold in the 'things that shoot razor blades into your hand when you pick them up market'. Followed by a partnership with the earth's ferrous core (a major player in minerals circles) to get into the 'things that are thousands of miles below the earth's surface and vaporize human flesh on contact' market.
And of course, a strong position in the market for technologies that customers actually pay to avoid could also lead to other key advantages, such as losing money (investors are always suspicios of cash-heavy companies) and being widely ridiculed (a new, positive, clown-like image).
'DRM market space', yeesh. Make some forking products already. Where's my sub $100 tablet PC?
The parent post has been responded to adequately already, but it's such a classic example of the way certain people think -- or rather, fail to do so -- in the Linux/OSS world that I thought it was worth throwing my 2c in as well. So here goes:
Yeah, I'm not impressed with Sony Vaios. It seems like they were designed to run Windows and be really small and light.
Yes, and they do run it, with a few handy usability features that make their small size easier to take advantage of, and they are really small and light. Impressive.
And presumably well suited for what the guy actually wanted to do.
Did this man do any searches for Linux on Vaios?
I guess not; I imagine he just wanted to use the computer for what he actually wanted to do.
Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't try Mandrake/Mandriva for his laptop.
You're surprised that he didn't take a few days to do a general comparison of all Linux distros to isolate the one most suited to his hardware?
Again, key concept: there were particular things he actually wanted to do, research into the cost/benefit profile of Mandrake not being one.
I think the users just have to have the patience to go out there and find the multimedia programs.
No, here's the thing; sure, users _could_ that, but wouldn't it be easier to just sit down and do what you actually want to do?
Some people don't want to climb more than one learning curve in their life.
Thing is, climbing a learning curve doesn't seem to be what he actually wanted to do here.
Those are the people that can't make the switch.
Yeah, there's a tiny number of people that just can't make the switch. Then there's a far, far, larger number for whom making switches, climbing learning curves, googling, consulting websites that tell you where to download nearly-finished source for the driver for the little rocker switch thingy that Vaios have, etc, are just not things that they ACTUALLY WANT TO DO .
What would you think of a vendor who demanded of their customers what you have just demanded of the laptop user? You'd think, 'sell short!' Wouldn't matter how cheap their prices were.
At the risk of plugging my own hopefully interesting page on the subject, I think this is one of the few places left in IT where the Japanese dislike of Unicode is still causing a problem in modern IT.
Ruby programs run in an interpreter written in C/yacc. The interpreter is slow and problematic (threads, unicode, it's all been said). Since ruby is defined by this one interpreter implementation (there's no written standard and the only way to create one would be by _fully_ understanding the interpreter), this tends to form a ceiling on Ruby's scalability.
Adam's name appears a whole chapter before Eve's, for heaven's sake! While I applaud the invention of this rubbery-looking, creepy android, I think the next model is going to have to be able to sort single-digit numbers.
P.S. Dokdo is Korean territory! Dokdo nun uri ddang! No, wait, I changed my mind. Takeshima is Japanese! Takeshima ha nihon no ryoudo -- no, wait, it's Korean! Man, I love territorial disputes, especially ones in the East Sea. No, I mean the Sea of Japan.
It's Office without the macros, without the plugins, without the Exchange integration, without the underpinnings of COM. It's basically Office without the selling point. If I wanted a spreadsheet to be literally just a grid with formulae, life would be so easy. I don't, of course; I want it to reference other sheets, to populate itself with data from the database, to have the occasional button that makes stuff happen elsewhere on the sheet, to host third party libraries or controls, to do the stuff that spreadsheets do. That's what Excel does, that's the value it delivers, that's what it brings to the table, that's what makes it worth putting up with.
The reason people use Office remains the simple fact that a competing product has not yet appeared. And with ThinkFree's attitude, it won't be them. They didn't include macros because they are 'platform dependant'?? They're not 'platform dependant'; they're just 'something that's harder to do when you decide your Excel clone will be running within a Java application server'. Not the same as 'platform dependant', but I bet the ThinkFree guy that said that has half convinced himself of it already. So I'm bearish on ThinkFree today.
Ok, my comments are cranky. But some overselling is going on here, you know.
Big names won't price themselves out of the market because they are in a different market from 'relatively unknown artists'. The latter are selling music, the former a brand.
Building such brands is a very expensive and complicated undertaking, and it's what the music business is good at. It is unrelated to the creation of music, except insofar as it sometimes funds the creation of music (buying songs from songwriters, incubating new potential stars, etc).
Filesharing has brought about a largish change in the way music spreads and is funded and distributed, and also, in seperate news, a smallish change in how brands are built. The price of a Madonna concert reflects the need to make Madonna appear as a premium brand, the need to have enough people show up that it feels like a success, the need to not have all the tickets vanish on the first day of sales leaving people to get bored, and so on. It's a whole nuther ball game compared to music distribution.
So, Madonna concerts will always be expensive just as BMWs and diamonds will -- if they were cheap, who'd bother?
That was like standing in the middle of a hot, dusty road -- and then suddenly a biplane dumps a barrel of icy-cold buzzwords down your back!
And it was like walking down a long, silent corridor and opening a door -- and behind the door are a hundred advertising executives, and each one is holding a mirror in which are reflected a thousand dull unemployed rich kids, and all hundred thousand plus one hundred are chanting 'NEW MEDIA' in unison!
And it was like looking at a computer screen -- only to find that somewhere behind the screen, a Beast formed of all the jargon, buzzwords, catchphrases and lame gimmicks of all the ages of Mankind is staring back at you!
I salute the writer of the summary.
Unless, of course, any part of the summary or of that 'vodcast/babelcast/media tapestry' crap is serious.
In which case, there are people out there who need to be given real jobs, like ditch digging, ASAP. Really.
I have a spare shovel, actually.
which highlights the retarding effect regulation has on technological progress
In other news, today I successfully opened a can of Diet Coke -- which highlights the retarding effect regulation has on quenching thirst. Man, if I'd waited for the government to open that can for me, I'd still be thirsty now!
If only there were a more effective way to highlight the retarding effect that obsessing over the complete works of Ayn Rand has on independant thought...
Looks like there's a libertarian around with a lot of mod points
Never mind, the moral victory is yours.
In production, these machines stayed up about five hours. The band-aid solution was to make one machine reboot all the others every four hours.
I know this kind of post is absolutely no use to anyone, but... honestly, doesn't that suggest that they had deeper problems than just their choice of OS???
I hope the second phase after the band-aid fix was to actually fix the application in question.
If this thing is like a Libretto, or like that ultra-small Vaio than Sony built for a while, then I'd buy one. I'd buy one because I have a lot of word documents, excel spreadsheets, half-finished novels, C# code and so on to work with wherever I am. Can't do it on a PDA, can't yank out a full-sized laptop all the time either.
Why anyone would buy this kind of thing for the same niche as a PDA or mobile phone, though, I can't begin to imagine. I can foresee a future in which I am the only one with an Origami. The question is whether I can foresee a future in which Microsoft stop creating Next Big Things and go back to doing useful stuff.
Yes, Ruby and it's author have an interesting attitude to string representation in general and Unicode in particular. It's partly what inspired me to write this:
Psychology of Unicode in Japan
It's really been a very interesting struggle between people's psychological and I.T. needs -- a struggle that's pretty well over now, but has left behind things like Ruby's way of doing things.
I think the relative strength of the British and American health system has a lot to do with this.
Just sayin'.
Of course if big business would get involved and internationalize it a bit, and by that I mean replace the 50,000 places that all go something like
if(char == '.' || char == '!' || char == '?') {sentenceEnd = true;}
Look, whatever the ideal solution here might be in technical terms, if you are making decisions for these people on the basis of what you find 'abhorrent', then you should stop.
People are trusting you to make an informed technical choice, and you are presumably presenting yourself as someone who adds value in the form of technical knowledge and ability, right? You can't turn around and lead these people down a path determined by the fact that you have a personal emotional issue with some software. It's professionally irresponsible, bad for the school, and it makes you a weirdo.
In a slightly seperate issue, I wonder how people manage to work themselves up so much that they find a particular brand or product 'abhorrent' rather that just 'unsuitable'.
On second thoughts, I guess I do almost nearly feel that way about the Hummer 2, and ESPECIALLY the Hummer 3. I mean have you _seen_ the awful awful awful embarrassing fake chrome bits on those things? That's abhorrent! Shiny, dumb-looking, unstable, but also abhorrent.
Offtopic, I know, but:
By analogy with 'less-travelled' etc., it should really be 'less-known'. However, for whatever reason, 'lesser known' (hyphen optional) is the standard form when known is an adjective -- not when it is a verb. Thus it is correct to say:
The lesser-known option is, of course, less known than the alternatives.
"Lesser used", again, is just about acceptable as an attributative phrase ("the lesser used construction is 'lesser used'") but not really as a predicate ("'lesser used' is the less used construction").
This goes back to the fact that 'lesser' is an adjective and 'less' an adverb.
You are fully familiar with cases concerning OJ Simpson and Michael Jackson aren't you, dear reader?
Yeah, I'm familiar with how one guy was acquitted because the case against him was horribly mismanaged and distorted by clearly corrupt police, and I'm familiar with how the other guy was acquitted because the evidence against him basically amounted to 'look at him, he's weird'.
Not every trial _has_ to end in a conviction. The idea is to find _whether_ it can be _proved_ that the defendant is guilty.
The USA is real good at solving these problems.
Oh, yeah, the USA is great at solving energy problems. It's really led the world in that area.
Yup.
What's really adorable, though, is that in 2006 you think 28mpg is good mileage!
As Python, Ruby, Lua are all the same and closely related to Java
Shh! I am getting near my target... the greatest of all game, the beast I have hunted all my adult life... the Complete and Total Idiot!
Many times in the past I thought I had found him -- but now, now I am sure. Mere ignorance alone _cannot_ explain the statement above! The most awe-inspiring thing is the inclusion of Lua, which is so utterly unlike both Python and Ruby in one way and Java in another way! Without the Lua, it would just be factually wrong, and a bit stooopid. Adding Lua, though -- that takes it to a whole nuther level!
Python, Ruby and Lua. All the same. And all closely related to Java.
Magnificent.
because either "I don't like Perl!" or "Numbnuts wrote this code in Object Intercal 95, which doesn't have a compiler/interpreter on the platform I need."
Hrm... but these are both perfectly good reasons!
Admittedly, in the second example he could in theory be asked to implement Object Intercal 95 on the platform in question. But the first example is pretty much unarguable
This is a group that developed the first operational jet fighters
Lockheed made planes for Hitler???