i've been reading/. for around 8 years now. this is the worst piece of tin-foil-hat shit i've ever read. it's been a fairly decent 8 years, but - quite frankly - this article has turned me off for good.
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't x86 one of the cheaper - if not cheapeast - price:performance architectures? Doesn't Google run hundreds of thousands of really cheap x86 boxes with their clustering flavour as opposed to say a few hundred really large scale Sun boxes?
And, furthermore, what's the problem with being tied to a completely open architecture as opposed to a proprietary architecture? (heaven forbid! this is/., right or did I accidently stumble upon a Mac site that looks exactly like/.?)
In London, the going rate is about £1/hour. So that would be about $23 for 13 hours of super fast broadband. And London is expensive compared to the rest of Europe. I was doing a little searching, and you guys in the States get well ripped off here. In particular New York. Like $1/min in some places or $25/hour in others. I don't understand it! I was under the impression that London property is more expensive, London salaries were higher, the cost of living here is higher. What the hell?!
I'm not really comfortable with this Flock thing. Firefox is making slow and steady progress and now this comes along and I think distracts people from a viable alternative. You need a strong brand to go head-head with IE, and having multiple-spin offs from Mozilla source imho weakens Firefox's position in the market.
A few thoughts on Flock itself.
The UI is better looking than FF
Picture drag & drop is a total hoax. I thought they were maybe doing something really cunning, so I tested it out in our wiki and all it did was upload a file to Flickr (pretty good integration) and then added normal HTML into the textarea. Of course, wiki doesn't understand this HTML. So it's easy drag & drop of pictures only works for services that actually interpret HTML.
What I would really like to see happening here is these guys working with FireFox to make one really good browser. It seems to me they are riding Web 2.0 hype and looking for a bit of early traction and then probably an acquisition by Yahoo! as the Yahoo! browser.
Regarding your comment: Translation: "We don't know how to support Linux, so it's Linux's fault."
I do actually think there is an element of truth here. Supporting a product is about an ecosystem. It's not just having a bunch of man files and some forums out there. It's about having an abundance of talent (e.g. MCSEs - yes, I know I said talent...). It's about having really simple documentation to follow, not neccessarily incredibly comprehensive - note it's not a case of either/or - you can have simple, comprehensive documentation but it takes a lot of time, revisions and experience to get there.
Let's face it, MS have been supporting software in enterprises longer than any Linux disto (save for Novell, but to them it's still new, right) and so their organisation is probably better equiped right now that anyone else.
But coming back to the main point, I do think it's the fault of "Linux" - you need to be able to make it EASY for your customers to support your products. Go ask any Entperprise software vendor - 50% of their business is probably focused on support.
Yeah... a beta of something that needs to support god-knows-how-many combinations of hardware and pretty much takes care of running your whole computer vs a beta of something that works across a few browsers and shows you some maps.
Come on, let's try compare *cough* apples with apples...
Skype have addressed this in the Beta of 2.5 - by adding a really easy to use dialing wizard/dialpad thing. It does a few things,
1) It automatically detects what country you are in and pre-populates all calls with that dialing code - unless you override it yourself 2) It provides a drop-down list of every country, their flag and international dialing code on the dialpad to help you dial properly.
So looks like they've addressed this problem - and hopefully 2.5 will come out of Beta quite soon and everyone else can benefit from this easy international dialing thing. For us in Europe, where Skype is based, we are so used to international dialing it probably didn't occur to them that not everyone else was...
"The other issue is that Apple is heavily consumer-based and therefore can totally focus on quick-turnarounds and user-centric features..."
Good post.
You list a number of other areas of business that Microsoft have to focus on, and I think it actually boils down to just one: Business. For consumers to have to upgrade every 5 years is one thing. To get a corporate to do it across 1,000 desktops, hey 10, 000 desktops is a huge operation. Not just in cost but logistics, and so on. So generally they don't. So MS in many ways have to slow down their release cycle to get a bigger upgrade footprint. Great example is Office, most large corps skip versions and only upgrade every 2nd one.
Another point is that in the corporate space, there is a lot of custom built software and whoever wrote it many years ago is long-gone. So if there are underlying structures in the OS that this software relied on and it got changed, then they are screwed. So MS have to keep like their whole platform backwards compat back to 95. With Apple I'd say this is less of a problem and the only people they piss off are software developers - who can actually use this as an opportunity to bring out a new version and make a little cash. Corps don't make cash from overhauling their systems...
To answer your question from personal experience...
I took a pay-cut from a role I had been in for 4 years. The company was doing the same stuff as before and I went to join a new innovative company that was about 1.5 yrs into startup.
The paycut was around 10%. For me, the fortunate situation was that I didn't have to compromise my spending habits too much - so I still have the same quality of life I did before. I'm maybe putting a little less into my savings. I also got an options package, that wasn't overly great, but has already given me some extra cash and when I finally cash them all out I'll have basically made up the shortfall.
So, my advice in a nutt-shell If you have to really compromise your life style because of the pay-cut - think twice. If you are bored, leave your existing job and find another that pays in a similar bracket - even if it's the same role. Sometimes just a change of scenery is a breath of fresh air. If you don't have to compromise your life-style - totally take it.
So, um, if they are out of touch with technology, things like SOA, WinFS, XML quite frankly mean nothing to them. Those things mean nothing to my mother, she is a consumer. If a little application that takes your picture and does silly little special effects excites these reporters, or if a good looking and thinner (yes, thinner - hey it's THINNER) gets their hands all clammy - then, well, is that not a measure of a similar impact amongst other "out of touch" consumers?
You should take a look at U3. It's a platform that stores and runs software, and looking at their software listings, under Security they seem to have some encryption packages available. It also runs Skype, so I can carry it around and use it on stupid internet cafe's that don't have it installed.
Thanks for the recommendation - believe it or not, to access any page other than the front page on the Koss web site (yes, product information material!) you have to register on their site!
a little OT, but as an audiophile, can you recommend another one - my quite comforts got stolen recently and i'm still looking to replace them with something. what i didn't like about the qc's was the fact that they felt a bit nausiating with constant pressure to the ear.
i've tried the shure e2c's and was a) frustrated by having these manky wax coated foam things lying around - if i want someone else to listen to my tunes it's a bit gross! and b) annoyed that they broke - some connection must have come loose and i treated them very well (well, i didn't throw them at people).
a friend of mine tried the entymonics and they obviously have not heard of bass over there. maybe if you want to listen to vanessa may in the dark - but they didn't seem to scale to genre's of music that have a bit more thump to them.
the article mentions "working around computers" - not just the one sitting in your study. one thing i feel is drastically needed are silent keyboards and mice. i share open-plan desk space with like 6 people - when they are all furiously typing and clicking away, the noise can be rather distracting. i must distract the crap out of them because I am a "CR-basher".
hmm...all previous screenshots of longhorn had that big old sidebar on the right hand side, which now appears to have gone. personally i'm quite happy to see it go as it seemed like a really big waste of real estate - especially considering that office xp and 2003 have task panels that take up a fair amount of horizontal real estate. i was just imagining trying to work in 1024x768...
You are also very wrong about your idea that Google is a small company that doesn't buy up every other corporation:Google acquisitions
Furthermore they are poaching top technologists from all over the sector. Yes, they continue to innovate, but if they aren't going to be bringing out an OS sometime soon, are we losing really good engineers who could innovate in other areas of technology to Google?
What's next you say? Hopefully they will get rid of this idea that music, videos and pictures are NOT documents and shouldn't live inside the "Documents" folder.
all you really need is a speaker and a microphone. my thinkpad has both of them built in, so i just talk straight at it. you can also just use the regular headphone and microphone inputs and outputs on your soundcard.
skype have also teamed up with a number of 3rd parties to bring, as you mention, usb-based handsets & headsets out that support Skype. you can find them here. the headsets may look a bit ridorkulous, but a colleague (developer) at the office here uses one and swears by it. he can code and talk at the same time without getting shoulder cramp from holding a headset to his ear. just checking now, they have a "Starter Kit" for like £4.50 which includes a hands-free thing as well as some free SkypeOut credit. i may even get one!
in terms of what Skype does, it's a really well designed and easy to use PC-based VOIP solution. you install it and it just works. skype-to-skype calls are 100% free, but obviously the SkypeOut calls to traditional phone systems are paid-for. i've been using SkypeOut myself for a few months and i find it's cheaper than most of the other low-cost phone thingies. friends of mine have got SkypeIn and Skype Voice Mail going on (also paid-for) and rave about them.
the problem is, is that the IE control itself is embedded into many 3rd party applications. those apps generally don't ship it themselves and require it to be on the operating system. therefore, a COMPLETE remove of the application would have a substantial knock-on effect to other applications - so would probably be a bad idea.
personally, i just use firefox as default and have removed IE icon from my desktop. unfortunately, i still have to use IE every now and then for certain web sites - sure you can in some way blame microsoft for these web sites because they aren't standards compliant blah blah blah and IE renders them fine - whatever, fact, they exist and sometimes it is neccessary to use IE (my online banking, for example). so, there's another case not to totally remove it.
Slashdot Mirror
i've been reading /. for around 8 years now. this is the worst piece of tin-foil-hat shit i've ever read. it's been a fairly decent 8 years, but - quite frankly - this article has turned me off for good.
so long, and thanks for all the phish.
"Any company with the cash to buy YouTube is going to decide in the long run it isn't worth it."
Er... Rupert Murdoch? Any large media organisation who's business it is to buy and sell rights.
Forgive my ignorance, but isn't x86 one of the cheaper - if not cheapeast - price:performance architectures? Doesn't Google run hundreds of thousands of really cheap x86 boxes with their clustering flavour as opposed to say a few hundred really large scale Sun boxes?
/., right or did I accidently stumble upon a Mac site that looks exactly like /.?)
And, furthermore, what's the problem with being tied to a completely open architecture as opposed to a proprietary architecture? (heaven forbid! this is
In London, the going rate is about £1/hour. So that would be about $23 for 13 hours of super fast broadband. And London is expensive compared to the rest of Europe. I was doing a little searching, and you guys in the States get well ripped off here. In particular New York. Like $1/min in some places or $25/hour in others. I don't understand it! I was under the impression that London property is more expensive, London salaries were higher, the cost of living here is higher. What the hell?!
A few thoughts on Flock itself.
What I would really like to see happening here is these guys working with FireFox to make one really good browser. It seems to me they are riding Web 2.0 hype and looking for a bit of early traction and then probably an acquisition by Yahoo! as the Yahoo! browser.
Regarding your comment: Translation: "We don't know how to support Linux, so it's Linux's fault."
I do actually think there is an element of truth here. Supporting a product is about an ecosystem. It's not just having a bunch of man files and some forums out there. It's about having an abundance of talent (e.g. MCSEs - yes, I know I said talent...). It's about having really simple documentation to follow, not neccessarily incredibly comprehensive - note it's not a case of either/or - you can have simple, comprehensive documentation but it takes a lot of time, revisions and experience to get there.
Let's face it, MS have been supporting software in enterprises longer than any Linux disto (save for Novell, but to them it's still new, right) and so their organisation is probably better equiped right now that anyone else.
But coming back to the main point, I do think it's the fault of "Linux" - you need to be able to make it EASY for your customers to support your products. Go ask any Entperprise software vendor - 50% of their business is probably focused on support.
"That said once a server is setup and in production why the heck will a lack of documentation bring it down ?"
It doesn't. But it does increase the chances of it staying down for longer - which in turn affects the uptime %.
Yeah... a beta of something that needs to support god-knows-how-many combinations of hardware and pretty much takes care of running your whole computer vs a beta of something that works across a few browsers and shows you some maps.
Come on, let's try compare *cough* apples with apples...
Skype have addressed this in the Beta of 2.5 - by adding a really easy to use dialing wizard/dialpad thing. It does a few things,
1) It automatically detects what country you are in and pre-populates all calls with that dialing code - unless you override it yourself
2) It provides a drop-down list of every country, their flag and international dialing code on the dialpad to help you dial properly.
So looks like they've addressed this problem - and hopefully 2.5 will come out of Beta quite soon and everyone else can benefit from this easy international dialing thing. For us in Europe, where Skype is based, we are so used to international dialing it probably didn't occur to them that not everyone else was...
Yeah I also just got this - very weird!
"The other issue is that Apple is heavily consumer-based and therefore can totally focus on quick-turnarounds and user-centric features..."
Good post.
You list a number of other areas of business that Microsoft have to focus on, and I think it actually boils down to just one: Business. For consumers to have to upgrade every 5 years is one thing. To get a corporate to do it across 1,000 desktops, hey 10, 000 desktops is a huge operation. Not just in cost but logistics, and so on. So generally they don't. So MS in many ways have to slow down their release cycle to get a bigger upgrade footprint. Great example is Office, most large corps skip versions and only upgrade every 2nd one.
Another point is that in the corporate space, there is a lot of custom built software and whoever wrote it many years ago is long-gone. So if there are underlying structures in the OS that this software relied on and it got changed, then they are screwed. So MS have to keep like their whole platform backwards compat back to 95. With Apple I'd say this is less of a problem and the only people they piss off are software developers - who can actually use this as an opportunity to bring out a new version and make a little cash. Corps don't make cash from overhauling their systems...
To answer your question from personal experience...
I took a pay-cut from a role I had been in for 4 years. The company was doing the same stuff as before and I went to join a new innovative company that was about 1.5 yrs into startup.
The paycut was around 10%. For me, the fortunate situation was that I didn't have to compromise my spending habits too much - so I still have the same quality of life I did before. I'm maybe putting a little less into my savings. I also got an options package, that wasn't overly great, but has already given me some extra cash and when I finally cash them all out I'll have basically made up the shortfall.
So, my advice in a nutt-shell
If you have to really compromise your life style because of the pay-cut - think twice. If you are bored, leave your existing job and find another that pays in a similar bracket - even if it's the same role. Sometimes just a change of scenery is a breath of fresh air. If you don't have to compromise your life-style - totally take it.
I don't think they even made enough for there to be 10's of thousands of 360's period! ;)
According to this link: http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=392599 14% are defective. I know it's by no means scientific nor hard fact, but 14% is a pretty bad early indication.
So, um, if they are out of touch with technology, things like SOA, WinFS, XML quite frankly mean nothing to them. Those things mean nothing to my mother, she is a consumer. If a little application that takes your picture and does silly little special effects excites these reporters, or if a good looking and thinner (yes, thinner - hey it's THINNER) gets their hands all clammy - then, well, is that not a measure of a similar impact amongst other "out of touch" consumers?
You should take a look at U3. It's a platform that stores and runs software, and looking at their software listings, under Security they seem to have some encryption packages available. It also runs Skype, so I can carry it around and use it on stupid internet cafe's that don't have it installed.
in 1999 it was only 8 year olds who knew how to use laptops....
*sigh*
Thanks for the recommendation - believe it or not, to access any page other than the front page on the Koss web site (yes, product information material!) you have to register on their site!
That's one sure fire way to lose business!
a little OT, but as an audiophile, can you recommend another one - my quite comforts got stolen recently and i'm still looking to replace them with something. what i didn't like about the qc's was the fact that they felt a bit nausiating with constant pressure to the ear.
i've tried the shure e2c's and was a) frustrated by having these manky wax coated foam things lying around - if i want someone else to listen to my tunes it's a bit gross! and b) annoyed that they broke - some connection must have come loose and i treated them very well (well, i didn't throw them at people).
a friend of mine tried the entymonics and they obviously have not heard of bass over there. maybe if you want to listen to vanessa may in the dark - but they didn't seem to scale to genre's of music that have a bit more thump to them.
any thoughts - maybe on the Sennheisers perhaps?
the article mentions "working around computers" - not just the one sitting in your study. one thing i feel is drastically needed are silent keyboards and mice. i share open-plan desk space with like 6 people - when they are all furiously typing and clicking away, the noise can be rather distracting. i must distract the crap out of them because I am a "CR-basher".
hmm...all previous screenshots of longhorn had that big old sidebar on the right hand side, which now appears to have gone. personally i'm quite happy to see it go as it seemed like a really big waste of real estate - especially considering that office xp and 2003 have task panels that take up a fair amount of horizontal real estate. i was just imagining trying to work in 1024x768...
You are also very wrong about your idea that Google is a small company that doesn't buy up every other corporation:Google acquisitions
Furthermore they are poaching top technologists from all over the sector. Yes, they continue to innovate, but if they aren't going to be bringing out an OS sometime soon, are we losing really good engineers who could innovate in other areas of technology to Google?
What's next you say? Hopefully they will get rid of this idea that music, videos and pictures are NOT documents and shouldn't live inside the "Documents" folder.
all you really need is a speaker and a microphone. my thinkpad has both of them built in, so i just talk straight at it. you can also just use the regular headphone and microphone inputs and outputs on your soundcard.
skype have also teamed up with a number of 3rd parties to bring, as you mention, usb-based handsets & headsets out that support Skype. you can find them here. the headsets may look a bit ridorkulous, but a colleague (developer) at the office here uses one and swears by it. he can code and talk at the same time without getting shoulder cramp from holding a headset to his ear. just checking now, they have a "Starter Kit" for like £4.50 which includes a hands-free thing as well as some free SkypeOut credit. i may even get one!
in terms of what Skype does, it's a really well designed and easy to use PC-based VOIP solution. you install it and it just works. skype-to-skype calls are 100% free, but obviously the SkypeOut calls to traditional phone systems are paid-for. i've been using SkypeOut myself for a few months and i find it's cheaper than most of the other low-cost phone thingies. friends of mine have got SkypeIn and Skype Voice Mail going on (also paid-for) and rave about them.
anyway, an interesting company to watch.
the problem is, is that the IE control itself is embedded into many 3rd party applications. those apps generally don't ship it themselves and require it to be on the operating system. therefore, a COMPLETE remove of the application would have a substantial knock-on effect to other applications - so would probably be a bad idea.
personally, i just use firefox as default and have removed IE icon from my desktop. unfortunately, i still have to use IE every now and then for certain web sites - sure you can in some way blame microsoft for these web sites because they aren't standards compliant blah blah blah and IE renders them fine - whatever, fact, they exist and sometimes it is neccessary to use IE (my online banking, for example). so, there's another case not to totally remove it.