I can't decide what nauseated me more, the article or the banner ad above it: Walt Disney World offering a free vacation kit. With a real CD and stuff!
I'm sure the folks at Disney think they're really being helpful. Just as helpful as young Martin Taylor who's known nothing but Microsoft, yet thinks he can counter Linux by competing with Novell.
This is one of the more insightful articles about personal computer history that I've read. With Apple being essentially an innovative hardware company is it any surprise they have had the revolutionary mentality rather than Microsoft's evolutionary mentality?
Apple were never about fitting in with anyone else; Microsoft were prepared to find any niche with any platform to survive. You could say that Apple are invested in their corporate personality, whereas Microsoft never believed having one was useful. And yet it's ironic that both companies are so dependent on the personality of their founders.
All this might sound peripheral but it translates into very real strategy. Apple are addicted to inventing hardware. Microsoft is addicted to destroying competition. There are echoes of their origins in that strategy also: Apples compulsion towards UI design (like those cool iPods), and Microsofts compulsion to outdo IBM (they really have a thing about IBM).
The article's point about Apple successfully avoiding direct competition with Microsoft shouldn't be taken as some sort of ideological cant, either. Look at Adobe (who have had very profitable dealings with Apple not coincidentally), or Cisco. Even when Microsoft decided they were competitors, these companies kept their focus and ultimately kept their mindshare.
Now that the tide is turning again, who will survive into the next decade?
There's a bit of socio-scientific revisionism in the concept of the 'unknown' side of those like Newton. It's bizarre to see this 'unknown' meme pop up again and again, particularly because this side of Newton was most famously pointed out in the bestselling Holy Blood, Holy Grail"twenty years ago.
There's as much resistance to similar evidence about Boyd and Da Vinci, most of it due to ignorance about the 16th century mindset.
Hopefully the Newton Project will do something towards embedding a bit more realism into our historical perspective.
Laura Anderson said, 'We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations.'"
This is the hand
The hand that takes
Here come the chips
They're American chips
Made in Taiwan
Smoking or
Non-smoking
Since when did the sharing of information guarantee that the use of it would be for the good of all? Someone knew and did nothing, how would sharing make a difference?
There have been well-publicised instances where knowledge of a potentially fatal situation was shared by government departments and their contracted private counterparts, and the only difference was that each party blamed the other instead of claiming they had no information. One example of this fresh in many Australian minds is the story of a nursing-home where complaints by staff were ignored at both private and government levels until an incident forced its closure. Then we had the usual committees and assurances, etc. etc. The government claimed the reporting was slipshod. The company claimed cuts in government subsidies. Yet they clearly shared information.
Now that's what I call having your cake and eating it.
The problem is that the general critical reaction hasn't changed. If anything, the prevailing consensus seems to have been passed on from generation to generation much like the general reader's reaction, which suggests some sort of "critics course" in Tolkien. Critics were still quoting Wilson and Muir well into the '60's. Now their attitude seems to pop up in the kind of comments Germaine Greer made.
So the reviews haven't changed much at all. The one review I really want to read was made by some daft english feminist who firmly believed Shelob was a Freudian womb-substitute; sadly this apparently hilarious screed was buried in an obscure compilation and I've only heard of it second-hand. Until this vein of "author inspection" criticism is killed off, we won't have anything intelligent from a critical tradition that cannot accept a fantasy genre as anything but "escapist". BTW, escapist is a perjorative that seems to date from the 1930's and was initially used in literary criticism. See, nothing changes.
To help answer your question (and it's a damn good one), I'd make two observations:
It's more than just one great idea or a collection of great ideas. It's all of those and a synergy between them. To beat it you have to more than replicate, but surpass that kind of synergy. It's a good reason why people have preferred to build on the core ideas rather than replace them.
Very few real resources are being put into OS research any more. Rob Pike put it best,
but in a nutshell, there's no money in it, and it's really hard stuff. Sure, you may fantasize about an OS that allows, say, manipulation of data by pointing at images in the air, but if it can be realized, then it'll be an interface to a UNIX-like OS, because the cost of developing something completely different on the basis of an interface is prohibitive in money and man-hours, at least in the prevailing climate.
Hope that helped some, I appreciate your dilemma though, I think about it a lot myself.
"Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems"
How is this a myth? Nothing prevents me from doing it, whether I want to is my choice. And those that do are always going to be in the minority.
"All software should be free" Aaaagh. How many times do we have to reiterate it, not as in beer? Another "software is manufacture" argument.
"Scratching the personal itch" So the desire to rule out leeching wasn't a valid itch in the case of bittorrent. Or the wish for a fast uncomplicated window manager made blackbox the choice of only programmers. My particular itch has nothing to do with programming. This might have made sense maybe five years ago, now it's laughably easy to shoot down.
"More choice is always better" This is a bad way to put it. "A bunch of bad choices is worse than a few good ones" is a better argument, and has much better application to software.
This was lazily written and needed more thought before/. got hold of it. Bad move:)
To put your idea another way, companies are dedicated to one thing: the company. To the extent that they plan the future, the future is the company and nothing else. It really doesn't matter what the company does, as long as it can prosper, it can do anything. In this light, Microsoft has a failure of imagination: with all that money, Microsoft could have gotten into some very profitable businesses if it chose.
But in a larger sense, the quarterly results fixation has an especially bad outcome: companies timeframes are shorter than even political cycles. Given that political cycles mean that any long-term goal is at the mercy of the opposing party, politicians have opted to do things that cannot be readily undone, like selling off assets.
If we're to encourage projects beyond our own longevity, we have to encourage structures to match. You might think we have them already, but there are few non-profit agencies around and for-profit concerns can always be dissolved.
Speaking of poor efforts...
on
IT, Be Free!
·
· Score: 1
1. It's a direct link all right,
2. If PHB's don't understand, what's the point in trying? What is so wrong about putting out a coherent statement about open source goals? Does it threaten you?
3. Granted, IBM invented many of the industry's sharp practices. What other companies haven't appreciated perhaps is their long view, which is that in the end, it hurt more than it helped them. Now, when they realize what network effects you can get from open source, and make serious efforts to get behind OSS developers, they are greeted with cutting remarks by nobodies who think they own the club. I think THAT's a bit rich.
..just to be able to have a version WITH THE F**KING SOUNDTRACK!!! I've yet to find a CD on the planet with the original wavs so I can hear the dialogue! (Yes I bought the reissue and discovered they'd replaced the wav tracks with silence).
Also, (and I think this is hugely important) reading has very limited memetic aspects.
I was going to say, haven't you read any history, then realized you probably haven't. Books have been the most dangerous tool of all time in mimetic terms! It was an alternative book that split Western Christianity. Another one completely threatened Christianity itself. But it's not just religion and science. Look at the popularity of Tolkien (not easy reads) for instance.
Books about history itself are hugely influential even among non-historians. Everytime someone publishes a new "version" of Australian history, it's a major event here. The concepts in all these books are formative for many people whether they read them by choice or had to.
Very few films have the mimetic power of books, because they cannot sustain any idea for long.
So how will they make this fit with the Classic Trek episode Balance of Terror, in which we learned that no human ever saw the face of a Romulan during the Romulan Wars?
You do not see the cunning in this: the US government is being encouraged to enforce the industry's desires in its trade agreements with other countries. Here in Australia, for instance, the proposed FTA would have the effect of enforcing the BSA's agenda against P2P networks via normalization of copyright laws, the DMCA, etc.
The true irony for software here is that the government's ban on R+ rated games would have to be lifted in order to comply with the FTA. No more GTA III hacking:)
what really concerns me is...
on
Hacking Quartz
·
· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
I should take up computer journalism.
I, for one, welcome our new editor overlords!
...make the kid pay off the US foreign debt. It's slightly more constructive. I can't wait till we gets ourselves an FTA and sue him too.
I can't decide what nauseated me more, the article or the banner ad above it: Walt Disney World offering a free vacation kit. With a real CD and stuff!
I'm sure the folks at Disney think they're really being helpful. Just as helpful as young Martin Taylor who's known nothing but Microsoft, yet thinks he can counter Linux by competing with Novell.
But more sickening was Rob Enderle's SCOforum keynote address
This is one of the more insightful articles about personal computer history that I've read. With Apple being essentially an innovative hardware company is it any surprise they have had the revolutionary mentality rather than Microsoft's evolutionary mentality?
Apple were never about fitting in with anyone else; Microsoft were prepared to find any niche with any platform to survive. You could say that Apple are invested in their corporate personality, whereas Microsoft never believed having one was useful. And yet it's ironic that both companies are so dependent on the personality of their founders.
All this might sound peripheral but it translates into very real strategy. Apple are addicted to inventing hardware. Microsoft is addicted to destroying competition. There are echoes of their origins in that strategy also: Apples compulsion towards UI design (like those cool iPods), and Microsofts compulsion to outdo IBM (they really have a thing about IBM).
The article's point about Apple successfully avoiding direct competition with Microsoft shouldn't be taken as some sort of ideological cant, either. Look at Adobe (who have had very profitable dealings with Apple not coincidentally), or Cisco. Even when Microsoft decided they were competitors, these companies kept their focus and ultimately kept their mindshare.
Now that the tide is turning again, who will survive into the next decade?
There's a bit of socio-scientific revisionism in the concept of the 'unknown' side of those like Newton. It's bizarre to see this 'unknown' meme pop up again and again, particularly because this side of Newton was most famously pointed out in the bestselling Holy Blood, Holy Grail" twenty years ago.
There's as much resistance to similar evidence about Boyd and Da Vinci, most of it due to ignorance about the 16th century mindset.
Hopefully the Newton Project will do something towards embedding a bit more realism into our historical perspective.
No no no, that's destruction of data AND installing a trojan!! You want to do life in a fed pen?
Laura Anderson said, 'We felt by adjusting the schedule for the products, we could better meet our customers' volume requirements and their high expectations.'"
This is the hand
The hand that takes
Here come the chips
They're American chips
Made in Taiwan
Smoking or
Non-smoking
Grovels to laurie anderson for a lame joke
Since when did the sharing of information guarantee that the use of it would be for the good of all? Someone knew and did nothing, how would sharing make a difference?
There have been well-publicised instances where knowledge of a potentially fatal situation was shared by government departments and their contracted private counterparts, and the only difference was that each party blamed the other instead of claiming they had no information. One example of this fresh in many Australian minds is the story of a nursing-home where complaints by staff were ignored at both private and government levels until an incident forced its closure. Then we had the usual committees and assurances, etc. etc. The government claimed the reporting was slipshod. The company claimed cuts in government subsidies. Yet they clearly shared information.
Now that's what I call having your cake and eating it.
The problem is that the general critical reaction hasn't changed. If anything, the prevailing consensus seems to have been passed on from generation to generation much like the general reader's reaction, which suggests some sort of "critics course" in Tolkien. Critics were still quoting Wilson and Muir well into the '60's. Now their attitude seems to pop up in the kind of comments Germaine Greer made.
So the reviews haven't changed much at all. The one review I really want to read was made by some daft english feminist who firmly believed Shelob was a Freudian womb-substitute; sadly this apparently hilarious screed was buried in an obscure compilation and I've only heard of it second-hand. Until this vein of "author inspection" criticism is killed off, we won't have anything intelligent from a critical tradition that cannot accept a fantasy genre as anything but "escapist". BTW, escapist is a perjorative that seems to date from the 1930's and was initially used in literary criticism. See, nothing changes.
You don't like research , do you? Take a look at his posting list and tell me again where he went.
Can't have them inconvenient facts ruin a good debating strategy, no siree.
To help answer your question (and it's a damn good one), I'd make two observations:
Hope that helped some, I appreciate your dilemma though, I think about it a lot myself.
"Open Source software allows you to get under the hood and fix problems"
How is this a myth? Nothing prevents me from doing it, whether I want to is my choice. And those that do are always going to be in the minority.
"All software should be free"
Aaaagh. How many times do we have to reiterate it, not as in beer? Another "software is manufacture" argument.
"Scratching the personal itch"
So the desire to rule out leeching wasn't a valid itch in the case of bittorrent. Or the wish for a fast uncomplicated window manager made blackbox the choice of only programmers. My particular itch has nothing to do with programming. This might have made sense maybe five years ago, now it's laughably easy to shoot down.
"More choice is always better"
This is a bad way to put it. "A bunch of bad choices is worse than a few good ones" is a better argument, and has much better application to software.
This was lazily written and needed more thought before /. got hold of it. Bad move :)
To put your idea another way, companies are dedicated to one thing: the company. To the extent that they plan the future, the future is the company and nothing else. It really doesn't matter what the company does, as long as it can prosper, it can do anything. In this light, Microsoft has a failure of imagination: with all that money, Microsoft could have gotten into some very profitable businesses if it chose.
But in a larger sense, the quarterly results fixation has an especially bad outcome: companies timeframes are shorter than even political cycles.
Given that political cycles mean that any long-term goal is at the mercy of the opposing party, politicians have opted to do things that cannot be readily undone, like selling off assets.
If we're to encourage projects beyond our own longevity, we have to encourage structures to match. You might think we have them already, but there are few non-profit agencies around and for-profit concerns can always be dissolved.
1. It's a direct link all right,
2. If PHB's don't understand, what's the point in trying? What is so wrong about putting out a coherent statement about open source goals? Does it threaten you?
3. Granted, IBM invented many of the industry's sharp practices. What other companies haven't appreciated perhaps is their long view, which is that in the end, it hurt more than it helped them. Now, when they realize what network effects you can get from open source, and make serious efforts to get behind OSS developers, they are greeted with cutting remarks by nobodies who think they own the club. I think THAT's a bit rich.
..just to be able to have a version WITH THE F**KING SOUNDTRACK!!! I've yet to find a CD on the planet with the original wavs so I can hear the dialogue! (Yes I bought the reissue and discovered they'd replaced the wav tracks with silence).
i sure won't since i won't be running it in anything else but linux son of a flatulent baboon!
...Severed Heads. 'nuff said. Also extremely listenable whilst shooting things in 3D.
1 gig ram, nVIDIA 5700LE, HDD gigs to spare, and a 2.5GHz AMD chip. So far, so good.
Linux support out of the box? No. That's what matters to me.
it's the perfect disinformation channel!
...as Communications Minister in the Australian government any day now
You do not see the cunning in this: the US government is being encouraged to enforce the industry's desires in its trade agreements with other countries. Here in Australia, for instance, the proposed FTA would have the effect of enforcing the BSA's agenda against P2P networks via normalization of copyright laws, the DMCA, etc.
The true irony for software here is that the government's ban on R+ rated games would have to be lifted in order to comply with the FTA. No more GTA III hacking :)
where do i get hold of a plasma-ball?