The important thing to note about the Open Source is that it is a new process for the creation of software products. It is more efficient that the traditional means of creating software, so much so that the resulting software products are often free.
Before Henry Ford, there were lots of little companies that built cars by hand. Ford's new process for creating cars made them cheaper. The small car companies at the time said, "But most people will always want hand-built cars, because they are custom built and better quality." They were of course wrong - the more efficient process won in the end. The only way that car manufacturers of the time could survive was by producing cars by the same process, so very few of the companies survived.
Microsoft will try everything they can to stop the progress of open source, but in the long term, the more efficient process will win. Just like the car manufacturers of old, the only way that Microsoft can survive is to start using the new process. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's a loose-loose situation, because the new process is so efficient that it is hardly possible to make a profit from it. So, either way, Microsoft dies. I give it ten years max.
Ten years may not seem like a long time, but remember that it is less than ten years since the launch of Windows 3.1
I've had a complete nightmare having a Dell laptops that I ordered delivered to me. I ordered the laptop over the phone. At that time, I had a horrible address which was:
6 New Court,
New Court Road.
The laptop never came. For ages, nobody at Dell would return my calls. Eventually I got throught and they said that they had already delivered it. They had sent it to 6 New Court Road, which was a kind of pawnbrokers. It was a very rough street and there was no point in going to ask them for it back. Dell blamed the mistake on me at first, and then I talked to another sales rep. and they let slip that they had had the correct address all along and that there had been a screw-up.
After complaining a lot, they agreed to send another laptop. Guess what? They sent it to 6 New Court Road again. Luckily they weren't in to collect it. After telling Dell once again my correct address, they made a third attempt. They delivered it to 6 New Court Road, of course.
I only got it because I happened to be looking out of the window when the FedEx van came, so I could shout to the guy that he was delivering to the wrong address.
It was an expensive laptop paid for with my own money, and the whole thing was a complete nightmare. Especially grating was being accused (twice) of lying by Dell sales reps.
Now they're buying some cool home stereo system and maybe tomorrow, some school stuff for the kids and they are from unique merchants.
But does this really happen? Do you know of anyone who regularly buys stuff from lots of different merchants on the web?
I would have thought that the vast majority will stick to only a couple or three merchants, and even then they will be quite picky about what infomation they give to them.
The problem as I see it is that nobody is going to tell Microsoft what they need to know in order to make.NET useful (to marketeers). And not just because they are Microsoft, but I think that most people are wary about giving any personal info.:
Imagine these scenarios:
a) a telesales person phones you and asks for your date of birth. Average person responds "Go away annoying person!".
b) a rep. comes to your front door and asks your date of birth. Response "P** off".
c) you get a mailshot asking for your date of birth. Response - in the bin.
d) you want to buy a product from a web site. It asks your date of birth. Response: 1/1/1970.
Do they seriously believe that people are going to give them that info?
Re:Small? F***ing huge more like...
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 2
You have a good memory. Yes, I think you are right.
There was a four colour 'high resolution' mode as I remember, and yes, 20K seems about right. But the first few K of system memory was, I remember, full of system configuration info. However, you could use quite a bit of that if you knew what you were doing.
What I don't understand about Microsoft's.NET strategy is
a) Where is the evidence of demand for it?
b) What are the benefits for the customer?
I regularly buy flights on the net, also books. I tend to use the same companies each time. They have my details, I just need to select the product I require and click the accept button. I know that my info. only resides with them, and I trust them not to spread it around.
Where does.NET fit into this?
I am imagining going to a web site, say Amazon. The site asks me "Can Amazon access your hobby list to make recommendations?" Er, sorry, no it can't. "Can Amazon access your calendar so we can find when your birthday is?". Er, nope. "Can Amazon access your address book so we can tell your friends about our great products?" Absolutely not. "Can Amazon access your job profile so we can suggest some business books?". No, and stop asking the dumb questions. The answer is no.
There are lots of, for instance, on-line calendar services available, which can be accessed from any web enabled device or WAP phone. Do people use them that much? What would Microsoft provide that I can't already get? And would it be worth paying for?
Please, someone tell me, I'm dying to know. What is the benefit to me, Joe Consumer, of.NET???
Small? F***ing huge more like...
on
Tiny Apps
·
· Score: 3, Informative
1.44Mb is f***ing huge compared to what it was like in the good old days.
I used to write commercial apps for the BBC Microcomputer. You probably didn't have that in the US, but it was a neat bit of kit in its day (about 1984?) and very popular in the UK.
As I remember it had 32Kbytes of memory, most of which was taken up as screen memory. I think you were left with about 8K to program in. And you had to get everything in there because there was no hard disc or other storage.
I remember I wrote an educational program for schools which included an image drawing system that worked in a similar way to Macromedia Flash. Literally every bit of memory was used. In fact, there was 'spare' to store upto 32 images drawn in the format.
Tell that to programmers today, they don't believe you.
I am not aware of any country in Europe where the police can raid your house if you don't pay the tv license. You must have picked that up from some of your NRA propaganda.
Wow, I've just looked at your web site. What fun!I love the section about gun education for children! Brasco (TM) The Liberty Bear Coloring/Story Book sounds great!
I meant that Americans usually use the term 'irony' in the sense that Alanis Morissette uses the word. I did not mean to imply that Alanis Morissette is American.
Irony is what happens when results don't meet expectations. When someone punches you in the nose, and you go to jail instead of the person who hit you, that's irony. If I say "I just LOVE what you've done with your hair" to a woman when she and I both know her hair is a mess, that's sarcasm.
Have you tried looking it up in a dictionary?
Like many words, irony has more than one meaning. One definition of irony is "The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning", which is what Brits often mean when they refer to irony. Americans often use it in another sense "Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs". However, both meanings are correct. Look it up.
Not necessarily. When Earnest gets run over by his pickup truck, I can see that I'm supposed to find him getting flattened humorous. That doesn't mean that I don't get it - which implies that I don't understand the humor - it simply means I don't think it's funny.
Speaking as someone who works with a lot of English people constantly making jokes which they probably think I don't get, which however simply aren't funny.
Humor is relative. If someone says something that they think is funny and you don't, then by definition you don't get it.
Firstly, he's a Brit. They have a sense of humour which is sometimes very subtle and is usually based on 'irony' (as in the saying something different to what you mean, rather than the more American 'Alanis Morissette' use of the word). Some Americans take ironic statements at face value, as is often seen on Slashdot.
Secondly, he's a clever guy. He's being stubborn about this to make a point. If he wasn't stubborn about it, the point wouldn't be made. He is acting correctly according to an unjust law to highlight the danger of it.
He is not being 'dumb' or deliberately annoying, he's highlighting the potential effects of a worrying development in the American legal which could have significant negative impact on all Open Source software developers.
Quick, someone call Bill Gates. These people need to be threatened with legal action as soon as possible. They are obviously not using properly licensed software from Microsoft, and as such are obviously thieving b*stards.
My God, when will people ever learn? I hope Microsoft doesn't let these scum get away easily, like they did with the PCs for Kids project in East Timor.
I didn't say that, I said it was a 'nearly equivalent product'. For a lot of users, that is the case, at least with the latest version of StarOffice.
I may be wrong, but in my experience even in big multinational companies most staff just use MS Office in the most basic way. Perhaps there are some corporations that have essential VBA scripts for use with, for instance, MS Word, but if there are I haven't seen much evidence of it.
I believe that Sun's use of XML as the standard file format for its Office Suite has the potential to be many times more useful for most companies, even the smaller ones, than the glorified macro language that is VBA.
Actually, MS is not making much money from Office. What they ARE making from are the Office format standards -.doc,.xls,.ppt, and so on. This is what the original article was trying to say.
That's just a different way at looking at the same thing. To say MS don't make much money from Office is not true.
Microsoft can force XP (with.net in it) down the throats of its immense user base at any time it chooses to do so. Linux has no such user base, and, therefore, Linux is powerless to set standards which control the information.
I would disagree strongly with this. When MS first woke up to the web, they tried hard to get people to use standards that would lock web sites to IE. They tried as hard as they could (I even had a guy from Microsoft visit promising free software licences if I put special IE-only tags on the popular web site I was maintaining at the time.) But they failed and gave up on that strategy.
Whilst there is a small proportion of people accessing web pages from non-MS platforms (that includes stuff such as handhelds which includes embedded OSes) Microsoft will have a hard time persuading people to lock themselves in. When you have a web site, ten percent of visitors is a lot if your business depends on it. Microsoft's.NET strategy is not as assured as you might think - they've failed many times before with less ambitious projects.
I hadn't seen that name for years. I'd completely forgotten about him. Great game developer, but is he still developing? Anyone know if he has released any games in the last few years.
In 5 to 10 years KDE Office/StarOffice/Gnome will be almost as good as Office.
At the current rate of development I think two to four years. In fact, for the home user, school, charity and many small businesses, it will be good enough within 18 months.
Slashdot Mirror
The important thing to note about the Open Source is that it is a new process for the creation of software products. It is more efficient that the traditional means of creating software, so much so that the resulting software products are often free.
Before Henry Ford, there were lots of little companies that built cars by hand. Ford's new process for creating cars made them cheaper. The small car companies at the time said, "But most people will always want hand-built cars, because they are custom built and better quality." They were of course wrong - the more efficient process won in the end. The only way that car manufacturers of the time could survive was by producing cars by the same process, so very few of the companies survived.
Microsoft will try everything they can to stop the progress of open source, but in the long term, the more efficient process will win. Just like the car manufacturers of old, the only way that Microsoft can survive is to start using the new process. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's a loose-loose situation, because the new process is so efficient that it is hardly possible to make a profit from it. So, either way, Microsoft dies. I give it ten years max.
Ten years may not seem like a long time, but remember that it is less than ten years since the launch of Windows 3.1
Yes, but my whole point is, whilst it sounds great, does it really reflect reality? For most people, are the benefits really there?
I've had a complete nightmare having a Dell laptops that I ordered delivered to me. I ordered the laptop over the phone. At that time, I had a horrible address which was:
6 New Court,
New Court Road.
The laptop never came. For ages, nobody at Dell would return my calls. Eventually I got throught and they said that they had already delivered it. They had sent it to 6 New Court Road, which was a kind of pawnbrokers. It was a very rough street and there was no point in going to ask them for it back. Dell blamed the mistake on me at first, and then I talked to another sales rep. and they let slip that they had had the correct address all along and that there had been a screw-up.
After complaining a lot, they agreed to send another laptop. Guess what? They sent it to 6 New Court Road again. Luckily they weren't in to collect it. After telling Dell once again my correct address, they made a third attempt. They delivered it to 6 New Court Road, of course.
I only got it because I happened to be looking out of the window when the FedEx van came, so I could shout to the guy that he was delivering to the wrong address.
It was an expensive laptop paid for with my own money, and the whole thing was a complete nightmare. Especially grating was being accused (twice) of lying by Dell sales reps.
Now they're buying some cool home stereo system and maybe tomorrow, some school stuff for the kids and they are from unique merchants.
But does this really happen? Do you know of anyone who regularly buys stuff from lots of different merchants on the web?
I would have thought that the vast majority will stick to only a couple or three merchants, and even then they will be quite picky about what infomation they give to them.
The problem as I see it is that nobody is going to tell Microsoft what they need to know in order to make .NET useful (to marketeers). And not just because they are Microsoft, but I think that most people are wary about giving any personal info.:
Imagine these scenarios:
a) a telesales person phones you and asks for your date of birth. Average person responds "Go away annoying person!".
b) a rep. comes to your front door and asks your date of birth. Response "P** off".
c) you get a mailshot asking for your date of birth. Response - in the bin.
d) you want to buy a product from a web site. It asks your date of birth. Response: 1/1/1970.
Do they seriously believe that people are going to give them that info?
You have a good memory. Yes, I think you are right.
There was a four colour 'high resolution' mode as I remember, and yes, 20K seems about right. But the first few K of system memory was, I remember, full of system configuration info. However, you could use quite a bit of that if you knew what you were doing.
What I don't understand about Microsoft's .NET strategy is
.NET fit into this?
.NET???
a) Where is the evidence of demand for it?
b) What are the benefits for the customer?
I regularly buy flights on the net, also books. I tend to use the same companies each time. They have my details, I just need to select the product I require and click the accept button. I know that my info. only resides with them, and I trust them not to spread it around.
Where does
I am imagining going to a web site, say Amazon. The site asks me "Can Amazon access your hobby list to make recommendations?" Er, sorry, no it can't. "Can Amazon access your calendar so we can find when your birthday is?". Er, nope. "Can Amazon access your address book so we can tell your friends about our great products?" Absolutely not. "Can Amazon access your job profile so we can suggest some business books?". No, and stop asking the dumb questions. The answer is no.
There are lots of, for instance, on-line calendar services available, which can be accessed from any web enabled device or WAP phone. Do people use them that much? What would Microsoft provide that I can't already get? And would it be worth paying for?
Please, someone tell me, I'm dying to know. What is the benefit to me, Joe Consumer, of
1.44Mb is f***ing huge compared to what it was like in the good old days.
I used to write commercial apps for the BBC Microcomputer. You probably didn't have that in the US, but it was a neat bit of kit in its day (about 1984?) and very popular in the UK.
As I remember it had 32Kbytes of memory, most of which was taken up as screen memory. I think you were left with about 8K to program in. And you had to get everything in there because there was no hard disc or other storage.
I remember I wrote an educational program for schools which included an image drawing system that worked in a similar way to Macromedia Flash. Literally every bit of memory was used. In fact, there was 'spare' to store upto 32 images drawn in the format.
Tell that to programmers today, they don't believe you.
I am not aware of any country in Europe where the police can raid your house if you don't pay the tv license. You must have picked that up from some of your NRA propaganda.
Wow, I've just looked at your web site. What fun!I love the section about gun education for children! Brasco (TM) The Liberty Bear Coloring/Story Book sounds great!
Am I glad I live in Europe.
One of each of the complete set!
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=1, Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Underrated=1, Total=5.
Do I win a prize?
Why has this been modded as flamebait? It is a serious question.
Just because you don't agree with it or don't like what it says, doesn't mean it is flamebait.
Why is so much of the innovation in the Open Source field taking place outside the USA?
Why is it that it is European governments that are considering moving to Open Source, and not USA governments?
Why is it that it is big companies in the UK that are grouping together to fight Microsoft's restrictive licensing, and not the USA?
Is the USA in danger of losing its lead in the technology sector?
I meant that Americans usually use the term 'irony' in the sense that Alanis Morissette uses the word. I did not mean to imply that Alanis Morissette is American.
Irony is what happens when results don't meet expectations. When someone punches you in the nose, and you go to jail instead of the person who hit you, that's irony. If I say "I just LOVE what you've done with your hair" to a woman when she and I both know her hair is a mess, that's sarcasm.
Have you tried looking it up in a dictionary?
Like many words, irony has more than one meaning. One definition of irony is "The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning", which is what Brits often mean when they refer to irony. Americans often use it in another sense "Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs". However, both meanings are correct. Look it up.
Not necessarily. When Earnest gets run over by his pickup truck, I can see that I'm supposed to find him getting flattened humorous. That doesn't mean that I don't get it - which implies that I don't understand the humor - it simply means I don't think it's funny.
;-)
You sound pretty humourless to me
Speaking as someone who works with a lot of English people constantly making jokes which they probably think I don't get, which however simply aren't funny.
Humor is relative. If someone says something that they think is funny and you don't, then by definition you don't get it.
realize
That's the American spelling. I'm a Brit. I say realise.
Firstly, he's a Brit. They have a sense of humour which is sometimes very subtle and is usually based on 'irony' (as in the saying something different to what you mean, rather than the more American 'Alanis Morissette' use of the word). Some Americans take ironic statements at face value, as is often seen on Slashdot.
Secondly, he's a clever guy. He's being stubborn about this to make a point. If he wasn't stubborn about it, the point wouldn't be made. He is acting correctly according to an unjust law to highlight the danger of it.
He is not being 'dumb' or deliberately annoying, he's highlighting the potential effects of a worrying development in the American legal which could have significant negative impact on all Open Source software developers.
I assume the guy was being sarcastic, as I was in my original email.
Quick, someone call Bill Gates. These people need to be threatened with legal action as soon as possible. They are obviously not using properly licensed software from Microsoft, and as such are obviously thieving b*stards.
My God, when will people ever learn? I hope Microsoft doesn't let these scum get away easily, like they did with the PCs for Kids project in East Timor.
No. In fact, they regularly threaten schools and charities with legal action for licence infringement.
StarOffice is just as good as Microsoft Office?
I didn't say that, I said it was a 'nearly equivalent product'. For a lot of users, that is the case, at least with the latest version of StarOffice.
I may be wrong, but in my experience even in big multinational companies most staff just use MS Office in the most basic way. Perhaps there are some corporations that have essential VBA scripts for use with, for instance, MS Word, but if there are I haven't seen much evidence of it.
I believe that Sun's use of XML as the standard file format for its Office Suite has the potential to be many times more useful for most companies, even the smaller ones, than the glorified macro language that is VBA.
Actually, MS is not making much money from Office. What they ARE making from are the Office format standards - .doc, .xls, .ppt, and so on. This is what the original article was trying to say.
.net in it) down the throats of its immense user base at any time it chooses to do so. Linux has no such user base, and, therefore, Linux is powerless to set standards which control the information.
.NET strategy is not as assured as you might think - they've failed many times before with less ambitious projects.
That's just a different way at looking at the same thing. To say MS don't make much money from Office is not true.
Microsoft can force XP (with
I would disagree strongly with this. When MS first woke up to the web, they tried hard to get people to use standards that would lock web sites to IE. They tried as hard as they could (I even had a guy from Microsoft visit promising free software licences if I put special IE-only tags on the popular web site I was maintaining at the time.) But they failed and gave up on that strategy.
Whilst there is a small proportion of people accessing web pages from non-MS platforms (that includes stuff such as handhelds which includes embedded OSes) Microsoft will have a hard time persuading people to lock themselves in. When you have a web site, ten percent of visitors is a lot if your business depends on it. Microsoft's
I hadn't seen that name for years. I'd completely forgotten about him. Great game developer, but is he still developing? Anyone know if he has released any games in the last few years.
In 5 to 10 years KDE Office/StarOffice/Gnome will be almost as good as Office.
At the current rate of development I think two to four years. In fact, for the home user, school, charity and many small businesses, it will be good enough within 18 months.