1) It was the bank that had you disconnected (it might have been a phishing victim doing the complaining to someone else,
2) It was because you notified them that they had you disconnected (they might have already gotten phishing complains and had the disconnect in the works while you were still gathering the evidence)
I'd like to hear the bank's side of the story.
I know, in/.-think that makes me weird, because we all know it's Yet Another Example of Evil Businesses Keeping the Man Down.
Another way to look at it is that Microsoft and Intel handed the PC platform to IBM, who never knew what to do with it.
IBM never wanted to enter the microcomputer market in the first place. From their point of view they'd have to sell thousands of these little "toy" computers to make the kind of profit that pulled in from the sale of one of their Big Iron machines.
They didn't sell PCs to conquer the market - they sold PCs as a way to get their foot in the door to little mom-and-pop companies that couldn't afford their "real" computers, the idea being that when the M&P grew to the point they'd need to move up to serious processing, there would be brand loyalty sending them to Big Blue.
The immense popularity of their "toy", the tremendous productivity gains that microcomputers gave end users and the eventual "clone" market were things IBM never ever saw coming.
But then, no one else did, either. Everyone knew that the letters I, B, and M were going to sell a bunch of boxes, but no one knew that architecture would dominate to the point of wiping out pretty much everything else and creating a monoculture.
You misunderstood my post. I know Microsoft invented neither BASIC nor ROM. However, prior to IBM's "Entry Level Computing" people asking Bill Gates if he had something for the 8088 platform (and his lying answer of "Oh yeah, sure!"), Microsoft's most widely used products were BASIC interpreters in ROM.
TRS-80, Atari, Spectrum, MSX, Ohio Scientific... these are a few of the systems that had Microsoft BASIC in ROM that I can recall off the top of my head. I'm sure there were many others.
I can whip up a usable, very functional Windows app in seconds.
Jesus. It takes me days, weeks, sometimes months to come up with a usable and functional app - regardless of platform. And you can do it in seconds!
I'll go throw myself off a building now....or were you thinking "Hello World" was a usable and functional app...?
Re:free Puff Piece for Microsoft? Here?
on
Ballmer on Innovation
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The Lotus software was particularly horrid
!!!
You should pray to develop such "horrid" software. There were two primary things that put the IBM PC on desks all over corporate America: 1) The TLA logo and 2) Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus invented the first "Killer App".
Microsoft introduced their first spreadsheet product before Lotus 1-2-3 hit the market (1982 for the former, 1983 the latter). It was such a huge scary success compared to that horrid Lotus crap that nobody can remember it's name ("Multiplan", BTW).
Excel (for Windows, it was originally introduced on some silly fruit computer of some sort) came out in 1987, leaving Lotus to pretty much own the spreadsheet market in the interim.
and swiftly abandoned by nearly everyone that wasn't glued to their memorized 1-2-3 key combos.
You mean like F1 = Help? Yeah, what a goof that was!
This message brought to you by Old Farts Inc, keeping history on track for hundreds if not thousands of years
(Lotus 123 was the name given to VisiCalc when IBM bought it.)
No, "123" was the name Lotus Development Corp. gave to their spreadsheet product, many many years before (a) Microsoft ran 123 out of town with Excel and then (b) IBM bought Lotus primarily for their Notes product. Which was innovative, IMHO.
I have a good number of books in my bookcase at work, and I don't want some busybody no-goodnik pinko commie rat bastard co-worker to waltz in and photocopy one of my treasured tomes - or worse yet, steal the volume outright! Some people even have the nerve to turn to the last part of the book first and spoil the ending for themselves, if you can believe that. Obviously, I want to prevent this from happening.
What bookcases have the best anti-personel features? Would the security of several bear traps near the bookcases be worth the possible civil liability? Does anyone know of a reliable, cheap source for claymore mines on the web?
Hertel not only conceived of the study and carried it out, he was one of eight participants. "To control as many variables as possible, we selected eight individuals who were strict macrobiotic diet participants from the Macrobiotic Institute at Kientel, Switzerland," Hertel explained. "We were all housed in the same hotel environment for eight weeks. There was no smoking, no alcohol and no sex." One can readily see that this protocol makes sense....and sorta lost interest.
I have a small sticker that when applied to your laptop will block all harmful RF energies!!. But wait! There's more! Apply one to your gas tank and you'll see a 30 horsepower increase!! as well as getting an extra 15 miles per gallon!!
How much would you pay for this small miracle? Three hundred? Two hundred? NO! Today only I am ready to sell you this modern wonder of technology for a mere six payments of $19.99!!!
I disagree - I think the older games inherently had better gameplay simply because there wasn't anything else to devote resources to devloping. "Here's your tools: 16k of RAM, a 1.77 MgHz processor, 240x120 pixels in eight different colors. Go nuts!"
To make an analogy, if your board and gamepieces are essentialy a piece of dirt, a sharp stick and a handful of pebbles, the game you come up with had better have some damned good play value if you expect anyone to play it.
Case in point: How many people can remember all the secret doors on the umpteenth map in Quake 2, vs how many people can remember to get the Babel Fish in Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? And when all is said and done, which was more satisfying to beat?
When the technology becomes such that no human can beat a computer at chess (and I recon that'll be any minute now), a large number of folks will go "Oh. Well. Computers can now beat humans at chess."
And then they'll simply lose interest. I don't think there's any reasonable person that would argue that computers will never beat humans at chess - it's just a matter of "when". And when that question is answered, Ho Hum, let's go play chess with a person, because that's fun.
A computer can certainly spell better than a human. Yet that hasn't stopped spelling bees:)
And I think Reversi (Othello) has been "solved", but that doesn't mean people have stopped playing it.
Wouldn't a hybrid solution be the best of all possible worlds? There's got to be tons of stuff on your hard drive that (a) you update very infrequently and (b) have to have there all the time. The obvious candidates would be the OS itself, and applications. How about you put that stuff in Flash, and keep the hard drive around stuff that's changing all the time?
How cool would it be to boot a system and load a basic suite of apps - without spinning up the spindles until it was time to save your current project?
I just saw "Revenge of the Silt" or whatever it's called, and I didn't like it one bit. I don't see wy everyone is carrying around light sticks when phasers are clearly superior, and what's with that short green dude? Is he some sort of third Klingon race? He's got the forehead right, but the skin color and the height are major issues for me.
And what's with this "Force" thing? I guess everyone is now hopped up on that chemical from "Plato's Shepchildren" and it's flying' furniture everywhere! I though that only worked on the one planet...?
And haven't these people heard of Transporters? I mean gag me with a tribble! My advice: Stay as far away from this movie as you can.
Wing Commander: Somewhere in there actually developing a sense of relation with the other pilots... very odd.
I remember finding my wingmen to be a bunch of useless ninnies by and large, to the point that I'd save myself the aggravation and just blow them up myself as soon as we cleared the launch bay. That way I could concentrate on killing the kitties.
Alas, the sequals didn't let you get away with this eutenasia.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that -
/.-think that makes me weird, because we all know it's Yet Another Example of Evil Businesses Keeping the Man Down.
1) It was the bank that had you disconnected (it might have been a phishing victim doing the complaining to someone else,
2) It was because you notified them that they had you disconnected (they might have already gotten phishing complains and had the disconnect in the works while you were still gathering the evidence)
I'd like to hear the bank's side of the story.
I know, in
Jeezuz, I never said Excel was better, I simply pointed out it won in the market.
Now go boot Amipro and try to calm down.
Another way to look at it is that Microsoft and Intel handed the PC platform to IBM, who never knew what to do with it.
IBM never wanted to enter the microcomputer market in the first place. From their point of view they'd have to sell thousands of these little "toy" computers to make the kind of profit that pulled in from the sale of one of their Big Iron machines.
They didn't sell PCs to conquer the market - they sold PCs as a way to get their foot in the door to little mom-and-pop companies that couldn't afford their "real" computers, the idea being that when the M&P grew to the point they'd need to move up to serious processing, there would be brand loyalty sending them to Big Blue.
The immense popularity of their "toy", the tremendous productivity gains that microcomputers gave end users and the eventual "clone" market were things IBM never ever saw coming.
But then, no one else did, either. Everyone knew that the letters I, B, and M were going to sell a bunch of boxes, but no one knew that architecture would dominate to the point of wiping out pretty much everything else and creating a monoculture.
I miss my Amiga. Dammit.
You misunderstood my post. I know Microsoft invented neither BASIC nor ROM. However, prior to IBM's "Entry Level Computing" people asking Bill Gates if he had something for the 8088 platform (and his lying answer of "Oh yeah, sure!"), Microsoft's most widely used products were BASIC interpreters in ROM.
TRS-80, Atari, Spectrum, MSX, Ohio Scientific... these are a few of the systems that had Microsoft BASIC in ROM that I can recall off the top of my head. I'm sure there were many others.
Clippy?
More accurately, Microsoft Bob, the abyss from which Clippy and his demonic bretheren were spawned.
Bob actually was innovative. IMHO.
I can whip up a usable, very functional Windows app in seconds.
...or were you thinking "Hello World" was a usable and functional app...?
Jesus. It takes me days, weeks, sometimes months to come up with a usable and functional app - regardless of platform. And you can do it in seconds!
I'll go throw myself off a building now.
The Lotus software was particularly horrid
!!!
You should pray to develop such "horrid" software. There were two primary things that put the IBM PC on desks all over corporate America: 1) The TLA logo and 2) Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus invented the first "Killer App".
Microsoft introduced their first spreadsheet product before Lotus 1-2-3 hit the market (1982 for the former, 1983 the latter). It was such a huge scary success compared to that horrid Lotus crap that nobody can remember it's name ("Multiplan", BTW).
Excel (for Windows, it was originally introduced on some silly fruit computer of some sort) came out in 1987, leaving Lotus to pretty much own the spreadsheet market in the interim.
and swiftly abandoned by nearly everyone that wasn't glued to their memorized 1-2-3 key combos.
You mean like F1 = Help? Yeah, what a goof that was!
This message brought to you by Old Farts Inc, keeping history on track for hundreds if not thousands of years
(Lotus 123 was the name given to VisiCalc when IBM bought it.)
No, "123" was the name Lotus Development Corp. gave to their spreadsheet product, many many years before (a) Microsoft ran 123 out of town with Excel and then (b) IBM bought Lotus primarily for their Notes product. Which was innovative, IMHO.
It's kind of ludicrous for Microsoft to claim that IBM hasn't been an innovator.
You're assuming Microsoft has a corporate memory that goes farther back than the last quarter.
If it weren't for IBM, Microsoft would be best known as the company that wrote ROM BASICs.
Hey Steve! That MSX platform, now that was some innovation! Boy howdy!
You can't "cram" to be a helicopter pilot.
"The Matrix" lied?!? Gasp!
Old Hotness: A 12AX7 necklace.
Nothing says "Geek Sophisticate" like analog.
"Wanna come up and look and look at my Mcintosh, sweetheart? If you're good, I might let you play with my Moog."
I have a good number of books in my bookcase at work, and I don't want some busybody no-goodnik pinko commie rat bastard co-worker to waltz in and photocopy one of my treasured tomes - or worse yet, steal the volume outright! Some people even have the nerve to turn to the last part of the book first and spoil the ending for themselves, if you can believe that. Obviously, I want to prevent this from happening.
What bookcases have the best anti-personel features? Would the security of several bear traps near the bookcases be worth the possible civil liability? Does anyone know of a reliable, cheap source for claymore mines on the web?
Signed,
Worry R. Wart
I got this far in the article you linked to:
...and sorta lost interest.
Hertel not only conceived of the study and carried it out, he was one of eight participants. "To control as many variables as possible, we selected eight individuals who were strict macrobiotic diet participants from the Macrobiotic Institute at Kientel, Switzerland," Hertel explained. "We were all housed in the same hotel environment for eight weeks. There was no smoking, no alcohol and no sex." One can readily see that this protocol makes sense.
But you do NOT have a 40 watt microwave emitter in your lap.
More's the pity, I'd love to get "Worked All States" while wardriving.
I have a small sticker that when applied to your laptop will block all harmful RF energies!!. But wait! There's more! Apply one to your gas tank and you'll see a 30 horsepower increase!! as well as getting an extra 15 miles per gallon!!
How much would you pay for this small miracle? Three hundred? Two hundred? NO! Today only I am ready to sell you this modern wonder of technology for a mere six payments of $19.99!!!
Act now! Operators are standing by!
Huh? WTF is a Megagram Hertz?
;)
It means when you switched it on, the streetlights dimmed. You kids today wouldn't know a classic computer if you walked into one and got lost.
Whippersnappers.
I disagree - I think the older games inherently had better gameplay simply because there wasn't anything else to devote resources to devloping. "Here's your tools: 16k of RAM, a 1.77 MgHz processor, 240x120 pixels in eight different colors. Go nuts!"
To make an analogy, if your board and gamepieces are essentialy a piece of dirt, a sharp stick and a handful of pebbles, the game you come up with had better have some damned good play value if you expect anyone to play it.
Case in point: How many people can remember all the secret doors on the umpteenth map in Quake 2, vs how many people can remember to get the Babel Fish in Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? And when all is said and done, which was more satisfying to beat?
"Hunt the Wumpus" never gets old for me.
...all four hooves are off the ground at once!
I've got pictures to prove it!
When the technology becomes such that no human can beat a computer at chess (and I recon that'll be any minute now), a large number of folks will go "Oh. Well. Computers can now beat humans at chess."
:)
And then they'll simply lose interest. I don't think there's any reasonable person that would argue that computers will never beat humans at chess - it's just a matter of "when". And when that question is answered, Ho Hum, let's go play chess with a person, because that's fun.
A computer can certainly spell better than a human. Yet that hasn't stopped spelling bees
And I think Reversi (Othello) has been "solved", but that doesn't mean people have stopped playing it.
And so on, and so on...
Wouldn't a hybrid solution be the best of all possible worlds? There's got to be tons of stuff on your hard drive that (a) you update very infrequently and (b) have to have there all the time. The obvious candidates would be the OS itself, and applications. How about you put that stuff in Flash, and keep the hard drive around stuff that's changing all the time?
How cool would it be to boot a system and load a basic suite of apps - without spinning up the spindles until it was time to save your current project?
Dvorak has an interesting editorial up,
Pull the other one.
Didn't he get spoofed in benchmarking some "new hotness" machine because the people giving the demo slowed down the mobo's RTC?
Since then (and that was in the 80's IIRC) I haven't paid much attention to what Mr. Dvorak. I daresay I haven't missed much.
I just saw "Revenge of the Silt" or whatever it's called, and I didn't like it one bit. I don't see wy everyone is carrying around light sticks when phasers are clearly superior, and what's with that short green dude? Is he some sort of third Klingon race? He's got the forehead right, but the skin color and the height are major issues for me.
And what's with this "Force" thing? I guess everyone is now hopped up on that chemical from "Plato's Shepchildren" and it's flying' furniture everywhere! I though that only worked on the one planet...?
And haven't these people heard of Transporters? I mean gag me with a tribble! My advice: Stay as far away from this movie as you can.
When Google Weather (beta) finally goes live, they will present it it four dimensions.
That should be terribly useful for people planning to picnic in tesseracts.
Wing Commander: Somewhere in there actually developing a sense of relation with the other pilots... very odd.
I remember finding my wingmen to be a bunch of useless ninnies by and large, to the point that I'd save myself the aggravation and just blow them up myself as soon as we cleared the launch bay. That way I could concentrate on killing the kitties.
Alas, the sequals didn't let you get away with this eutenasia.