Just because hundreds of millions of people have it installed, doesn't mean they like it.
Silverlight is probably closer to what Flash's market penetration would be if Flash hadn't become a compulsory install. If it weren't installed by default. SIlverlight is only installed because it blocks the path to content that people want to see. There's no SilverlightTube (yet). Few Silverlight webgames. It's only there because people want access to what it blocks.
When the day comes where it isn't assumed you need Flash player in order to be a good Internet consumer, you can expect to see it's market share plummet.
The numbers also don't account for the amount of frustration Flash causes people who have to use it. It's only been recently (version 10.1.18xxxxxx) that I can run Flash on my MacBook and not have it cripple the performance.
I think they should give it a few years and see what happens. It smells a lot like the same argument that used to be thrown against Firefox when it had only been out a little while versus. IE's market share.
A friend of mine died nine years ago from colon cancer. She had a then 4-year old boy when she passed.
There were a handful of things that she did for her son that were pretty well received as he grew older.
She left letters or recordings for him at various milestones. Graduation. age 21. Age 25. Wedding. Etc. Nothing too specific, but things talking about how she hoped things turned out for him.
A recording of her singing Happy Birthday, that she gave him on CD. He played it every year until he was 12. After that, I don't know if he continued to play it, but it was a nice touchpoint for him as he grew older.
That's really about it. Too much stuff, I think, and the survivors have issues getting over the loss. And too much past stuff, and people seem to feel a little out of touch. It truly makes people think they were loved if their parent thinks about future events before the child even does.
You forgot to add in the salaries of the IT guys. Don't forget their taxes, healthcare, retirement, and other benefits. In the private sector that's generally a 1.8 multiplier on the salary. (someone making $100,000 dollars a year costs the company $180,000 salary inclusive.)
That 360k doesn't go very far if you're paying for a handful of $60,000/year IT techs. It's a little over 3, or two with one making a bit more.
Unless, in the "Everything's Free" economy, people are no longer supposed to get paid. In which case everything's different.
I just graduated from grad school to become one of them.
First, sue. Well, maybe not sue, but notify the company's legal department that your images are being used in an infringing manner and your license terms. They will either stop using the images post haste (in this case, the shit will run down hill straight to the advertising firm that did it, and they'll jump) or pay you for the rights to your image.
Second, make your image license fees reasonable. You are not going to get 150k. Even some of the most famous images don't fetch that from a stock image library. Martin Luther King's image of him giving his famous speech in a national print campaign, with print billboards, etc? $50,000. Ghandi reading on the mat, same rates. Typical stock images of kids playing on the beach? License fees in the hundreds of dollars up to a few thousand if you're lucky.But that's generally if it's running in print and not online. The prices scale based on how famous the image is and what resolution they use. 8.5 x 11 at 300 dpi is a whole lot different than a 3 x 4" 96 dpi image. Really. That's how it's priced. So, send their legal departments a nicely worded letter, with print outs of the ads in question and a reasonable quote for the use of your image. I can definitely say that if you ask for $150k, they're going to laugh in your face and replace the image by tomorrow morning. If you ask for $500, they'll probably just cut you a check since it's cheaper to pay for it than to replace it.
If you think those rates seem low, I'm sorry, that's the way that market works. It's called the Long Tail (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) and it looks like you've stumbled across the way to start building your own.
College isn't about the trade you learn. (that's really what it is, white collar trade school).
College is about the people you meet, the handful of cool projects you complete, and the doors that can be open to you by going to a specific school.
This is one area where the real world trumps the online world. Face-to-face interactions. You'll interact with other people with similar interests. You'll interact with members of the opposite sex. You'll interact with professors. The thing is, the caliber of college you attend is a sorting hat (oblig Harry Potter reference) for the type of people you're going to interact with. If you're not good at interacting with people, in the long term that will become career limiting and college is a good place to get better. It's OK to be a little "off" in college.
You're probably not willing to do what I'm about to suggest but, unless you're married or taking of parents in their dotage, you should move to a city/town with a really good program for what you want to do and attend classes there. Physically attend them. Yes, I understand the convenience of online course, but you miss out on a big part of the college experience that way and many employers see "online university" on your resume (trust me, they know) and discard it. You'll likely meet people that are smarter than you. You'll definitely meet people who have varied backgrounds. You will get a different experience than you think you need.
Also, here's the secret thing I found out. College isn't about the degree you earn. It's about the set of keys you earn that open certain doors. For example, the odds of you working for Apple or Google are slim unless you attend Stanford. If you want to work at IBM, they have feeder colleges too. My undergrad program places a people at Target Corporate HQ (not the stores). Almost all colleges are feeder schools. They all have companies they put potential candidates in front of. Some of these companies you can't get into at all unless you attend the right schools. Some of them you can get into if you don't attend the right schools, but it's harder. But that's the thing that the college paperwork tells you in an oblique manner. They all tell you they'll get you a degree, and you will, but the degree isn't the important part. It's where you go afterwards, and the people you meet along the way.
Which, unfortunately, you can't do online. Go to school in meatspace. It'll be worth it, in the long run and the short run.
Now Comcast (UVerse, etal) can cache the site or do some bandwidth shaping based on site address and make sure that site always gets the highest priority, thereby making it seem like we all have fast connections.
It could also be the precursor to outsourcing your services.
Make you guys wear uniforms until people are used to looking for the uniform, then when they replace the workers, people no longer have to look for you, just the shirt.
As strict as the Apple store is about getting actual useful apps in, and screening all kinds of apps based on one or two system calls, clearly the only way this could have happened is if Storm8 has someone on the Apple App Approval Team who they know. Otherwise, how would something like this have gotten past such a stringent code review?
I gave up an 12 year-old career in IT (check my uid. It's proof). It eventually got to the point where I could see my future, and the future of the industry, and I wasn't that enthused with what I saw. So, I jumped.
Quit my job, enrolled in grad school, and am completely changing careers. I'm finding it's pretty easy to leverage my IT knowledge in another field because I'm able to easily assess what is and isn't possible. There are a lot of industries out there that drank the IT Kool-Aid pretty late in the game, and a number of people who have no idea what it's capable of. Given the current market, anyone who can see through the fog of IT and can suggest actual solutions that make or save money (or both, ideally) can generally make a good go of it.
So, will I miss no longer being in IT, no. Will I always think in IT terms? Probably. I now just apply it in more creative terms.
I don't even miss the money, because I don't think the work/life trade-off was worth whatever supposedly "inflated" salary I had.
I'd be willing to go into more detail, but I don't know what would come of it. I know I'm happier so far.
They're going to need it as a competitive advantage. As more smart phones come out, they're going to have just as much impact on AT&T's network, and then everyone will be contributing to making the network slower.
If they don't upgrade, someone like Verizon is going to see it as a competitive weakness, and capitalize on it once they get their smartphones/iPhones (when the exclusivity contract runs out). The iPhone is just a harbinger of what's to come with mobile devices.
While I understand the benefits of applying an early adopter tax, it also makes AT&T vulnerable in a market that's pretty competitive already.
It's sad that scientists don't read each other's stuff. Then again, both of these articles came out at the same time, so it would have been virtually impossible.
Assumption: People won't upgrade Windows 98 beyond 128 MB of RAM, so we'll design it to run slower if they do. It's not our fault, it's just that we don't understand why you'd want more than that much memory.
Assumption: Windows NT will only be installed on today's hardware, therefore it only works with SCSI.
1) Microsoft overpromises and underdelivers on that promise. Constantly. They can't even get a lot of basic stuff right.
2) I've lost many hours, days, and weekends, trying to get Microsoft stuff to work properly out of the box. Sometimes it works, mostly. Sometimes it works, but only if you configure it in a way you don't want to. Sometimes the only way to get it to work is to use a third party product.
Nothing is more precious to me than my time. I've read through all the MCSE course books. I read through a few of them a few times, because I was trying to get their server product stood up properly. There are things in the book that are outright lies, and vague promises of the way the product is supposed to work.
I remember back when NT Server and BackOffice was the standard load. Somewhere in the install process there was a check box you were not supposed to check. It was supposed to enable was a desirable feature, but if you checked the check box, you pretty much kissed the stability of the system goodbye. Numerous reinstalls later, I finally didn't check the checkbox, and I had a reliable machine. I really wish I could remember what the option was. But when it would take 3 hours to rebuild a server, and I spent a week doing it repeatedly because I couldn't get it to stay up for more than a few hours, I just lost time. Granted, I was a novice admin at the time, and it was something that an experienced admin would have learned by going through the same nightmare process, but the simple fact is that it shouldn't have been a process that we needed to go through at all. There should be no magic invovled in getting the software installed. The magic is supposed to be in configuring it your way once it's installed.
3) Microsoft assumes wrong on behalf of the user.
Assmption: Windows 95 machines will never be kept up longer than 45 days. So we don't need a kernel-level counter that can handle a number longer than 45 days, and if it rolls over, we'll blue screen.
Assumption: Windows 98 runs slower if you upgrade the memory past a certain point.
Assumption: Windows NT will only be installed on today's software, therefore it only works with SCSI.
Assumption: Windows XP assumes that if you're logging on to a domain, you're using roaming profiles. I'm not saying they're not a good thing, but the majority of people moving to/deploying XP when the product first shipped weren't even thinking of roaming profiles, they were thinking of just getting away from that POS called 95/98/Me. Then, to turn it off, you have to do a fairly basic hack to fix it. And still, even now, there aren't many people out there using them because they're hard to deploy properly. This should be simple.
Their lack of ability to look forward in time leds to some bizarre inexplicable problems that are impossible to troubleshoot. The user's home directory sprays files all over the place, and none of it makes sense. It should be self contained in a nice neat little folder that's not 4 levels deep in the OS.
4) The registry. You can have tons of redundant hardware, and failover systems, and anythign else you want. If the registry gets corrupted, the machine is down. Not part of it. The whole freaking machine. One. Single. Point. Of. Failure. All the MS books tell you to get rid of them, but that one you can't get rid of. It's engineered in. And this is before.dll hell kicks in.
4a).dll hell. An installer shouldn't be able to blithely overwrite a.dll with an older version. On the other side,.dlls should contain all previous versions within them, so there's no need to overwrite them, just add to them.
5) Microsoft assumes the user has no idea what the user wants. I want to look in the program files directory. There's a warning saying I can screw stuff up if I go in there.
5a) if you have to put up that level of warning, then it tells me your system is fragile, and can't be trusted.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because hundreds of millions of people have it installed, doesn't mean they like it.
Silverlight is probably closer to what Flash's market penetration would be if Flash hadn't become a compulsory install. If it weren't installed by default. SIlverlight is only installed because it blocks the path to content that people want to see. There's no SilverlightTube (yet). Few Silverlight webgames. It's only there because people want access to what it blocks.
When the day comes where it isn't assumed you need Flash player in order to be a good Internet consumer, you can expect to see it's market share plummet.
The numbers also don't account for the amount of frustration Flash causes people who have to use it. It's only been recently (version 10.1.18xxxxxx) that I can run Flash on my MacBook and not have it cripple the performance.
I think they should give it a few years and see what happens. It smells a lot like the same argument that used to be thrown against Firefox when it had only been out a little while versus. IE's market share.
Look where that wound up.
If you can find an open source implementation of Bonjour. I'm pretty sure there is one, the name escapes me.
A friend of mine died nine years ago from colon cancer. She had a then 4-year old boy when she passed.
There were a handful of things that she did for her son that were pretty well received as he grew older.
She left letters or recordings for him at various milestones. Graduation. age 21. Age 25. Wedding. Etc. Nothing too specific, but things talking about how she hoped things turned out for him.
A recording of her singing Happy Birthday, that she gave him on CD. He played it every year until he was 12. After that, I don't know if he continued to play it, but it was a nice touchpoint for him as he grew older.
That's really about it. Too much stuff, I think, and the survivors have issues getting over the loss. And too much past stuff, and people seem to feel a little out of touch. It truly makes people think they were loved if their parent thinks about future events before the child even does.
That's all I have.
You forgot to add in the salaries of the IT guys. Don't forget their taxes, healthcare, retirement, and other benefits. In the private sector that's generally a 1.8 multiplier on the salary. (someone making $100,000 dollars a year costs the company $180,000 salary inclusive.)
That 360k doesn't go very far if you're paying for a handful of $60,000/year IT techs. It's a little over 3, or two with one making a bit more.
Unless, in the "Everything's Free" economy, people are no longer supposed to get paid. In which case everything's different.
I just graduated from grad school to become one of them.
First, sue. Well, maybe not sue, but notify the company's legal department that your images are being used in an infringing manner and your license terms. They will either stop using the images post haste (in this case, the shit will run down hill straight to the advertising firm that did it, and they'll jump) or pay you for the rights to your image.
Second, make your image license fees reasonable. You are not going to get 150k. Even some of the most famous images don't fetch that from a stock image library. Martin Luther King's image of him giving his famous speech in a national print campaign, with print billboards, etc? $50,000. Ghandi reading on the mat, same rates. Typical stock images of kids playing on the beach? License fees in the hundreds of dollars up to a few thousand if you're lucky.But that's generally if it's running in print and not online. The prices scale based on how famous the image is and what resolution they use. 8.5 x 11 at 300 dpi is a whole lot different than a 3 x 4" 96 dpi image. Really. That's how it's priced. So, send their legal departments a nicely worded letter, with print outs of the ads in question and a reasonable quote for the use of your image. I can definitely say that if you ask for $150k, they're going to laugh in your face and replace the image by tomorrow morning. If you ask for $500, they'll probably just cut you a check since it's cheaper to pay for it than to replace it.
If you think those rates seem low, I'm sorry, that's the way that market works. It's called the Long Tail (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html) and it looks like you've stumbled across the way to start building your own.
A four digit UI on the other hand, is a completely different story.
Go to a real school.
College isn't about the trade you learn. (that's really what it is, white collar trade school).
College is about the people you meet, the handful of cool projects you complete, and the doors that can be open to you by going to a specific school.
This is one area where the real world trumps the online world. Face-to-face interactions. You'll interact with other people with similar interests. You'll interact with members of the opposite sex. You'll interact with professors. The thing is, the caliber of college you attend is a sorting hat (oblig Harry Potter reference) for the type of people you're going to interact with. If you're not good at interacting with people, in the long term that will become career limiting and college is a good place to get better. It's OK to be a little "off" in college.
You're probably not willing to do what I'm about to suggest but, unless you're married or taking of parents in their dotage, you should move to a city/town with a really good program for what you want to do and attend classes there. Physically attend them. Yes, I understand the convenience of online course, but you miss out on a big part of the college experience that way and many employers see "online university" on your resume (trust me, they know) and discard it. You'll likely meet people that are smarter than you. You'll definitely meet people who have varied backgrounds. You will get a different experience than you think you need.
Also, here's the secret thing I found out. College isn't about the degree you earn. It's about the set of keys you earn that open certain doors. For example, the odds of you working for Apple or Google are slim unless you attend Stanford. If you want to work at IBM, they have feeder colleges too. My undergrad program places a people at Target Corporate HQ (not the stores). Almost all colleges are feeder schools. They all have companies they put potential candidates in front of. Some of these companies you can't get into at all unless you attend the right schools. Some of them you can get into if you don't attend the right schools, but it's harder. But that's the thing that the college paperwork tells you in an oblique manner. They all tell you they'll get you a degree, and you will, but the degree isn't the important part. It's where you go afterwards, and the people you meet along the way.
Which, unfortunately, you can't do online. Go to school in meatspace. It'll be worth it, in the long run and the short run.
Is your constitutional right more important than a hundred lives you endanger?
Sadly, yes, it is.
Now Comcast (UVerse, etal) can cache the site or do some bandwidth shaping based on site address and make sure that site always gets the highest priority, thereby making it seem like we all have fast connections.
Dammit.
I'm pretty sure that's the idea.
It could also be the precursor to outsourcing your services.
Make you guys wear uniforms until people are used to looking for the uniform, then when they replace the workers, people no longer have to look for you, just the shirt.
As strict as the Apple store is about getting actual useful apps in, and screening all kinds of apps based on one or two system calls, clearly the only way this could have happened is if Storm8 has someone on the Apple App Approval Team who they know. Otherwise, how would something like this have gotten past such a stringent code review?
Pen and paper got me through my math classes in school. Then I'd transcribe the equations later into digital form.
I gave up an 12 year-old career in IT (check my uid. It's proof). It eventually got to the point where I could see my future, and the future of the industry, and I wasn't that enthused with what I saw. So, I jumped.
Quit my job, enrolled in grad school, and am completely changing careers. I'm finding it's pretty easy to leverage my IT knowledge in another field because I'm able to easily assess what is and isn't possible. There are a lot of industries out there that drank the IT Kool-Aid pretty late in the game, and a number of people who have no idea what it's capable of. Given the current market, anyone who can see through the fog of IT and can suggest actual solutions that make or save money (or both, ideally) can generally make a good go of it.
So, will I miss no longer being in IT, no. Will I always think in IT terms? Probably. I now just apply it in more creative terms.
I don't even miss the money, because I don't think the work/life trade-off was worth whatever supposedly "inflated" salary I had.
I'd be willing to go into more detail, but I don't know what would come of it. I know I'm happier so far.
They're going to need it as a competitive advantage. As more smart phones come out, they're going to have just as much impact on AT&T's network, and then everyone will be contributing to making the network slower.
If they don't upgrade, someone like Verizon is going to see it as a competitive weakness, and capitalize on it once they get their smartphones/iPhones (when the exclusivity contract runs out). The iPhone is just a harbinger of what's to come with mobile devices.
While I understand the benefits of applying an early adopter tax, it also makes AT&T vulnerable in a market that's pretty competitive already.
Only in your dreams.
Your UID isn't low enough to be that old.
You're lucky your keyboards had keys. We had to mash the letters into the paper by hand, with a hammer.
-R
It probably already was.
Isaac Asimov wrote one a number of years ago. It's called Nightfall. Enjoy.
And since Best Buy records the serial number of every piece of electronics sold (it's frequently on your receipt), it's easy to find out who has what.
I'm pretty sure that, at the least, it'll tell time as fast as Vista.
I read every day. Just don't post often. Sometimes I even moderate.
It's sad that scientists don't read each other's stuff. Then again, both of these articles came out at the same time, so it would have been virtually impossible.
0 7/2221256
But the parent article refers to a phenomenon mentioned in a slashdot article about the Industrial Revolution less than a day ago. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/
Now the key is to see if the two groups catch on.
Wow. I'm tired.
Edits. Insert above.
Assumption: People won't upgrade Windows 98 beyond 128 MB of RAM, so we'll design it to run slower if they do. It's not our fault, it's just that we don't understand why you'd want more than that much memory.
Assumption: Windows NT will only be installed on today's hardware, therefore it only works with SCSI.
Sorry folks.
1) Microsoft overpromises and underdelivers on that promise. Constantly. They can't even get a lot of basic stuff right.
.dll hell kicks in.
.dll hell. An installer shouldn't be able to blithely overwrite a .dll with an older version. On the other side, .dlls should contain all previous versions within them, so there's no need to overwrite them, just add to them.
2) I've lost many hours, days, and weekends, trying to get Microsoft stuff to work properly out of the box. Sometimes it works, mostly. Sometimes it works, but only if you configure it in a way you don't want to. Sometimes the only way to get it to work is to use a third party product.
Nothing is more precious to me than my time. I've read through all the MCSE course books. I read through a few of them a few times, because I was trying to get their server product stood up properly. There are things in the book that are outright lies, and vague promises of the way the product is supposed to work.
I remember back when NT Server and BackOffice was the standard load. Somewhere in the install process there was a check box you were not supposed to check. It was supposed to enable was a desirable feature, but if you checked the check box, you pretty much kissed the stability of the system goodbye. Numerous reinstalls later, I finally didn't check the checkbox, and I had a reliable machine. I really wish I could remember what the option was. But when it would take 3 hours to rebuild a server, and I spent a week doing it repeatedly because I couldn't get it to stay up for more than a few hours, I just lost time. Granted, I was a novice admin at the time, and it was something that an experienced admin would have learned by going through the same nightmare process, but the simple fact is that it shouldn't have been a process that we needed to go through at all. There should be no magic invovled in getting the software installed. The magic is supposed to be in configuring it your way once it's installed.
3) Microsoft assumes wrong on behalf of the user.
Assmption: Windows 95 machines will never be kept up longer than 45 days. So we don't need a kernel-level counter that can handle a number longer than 45 days, and if it rolls over, we'll blue screen.
Assumption: Windows 98 runs slower if you upgrade the memory past a certain point.
Assumption: Windows NT will only be installed on today's software, therefore it only works with SCSI.
Assumption: Windows XP assumes that if you're logging on to a domain, you're using roaming profiles. I'm not saying they're not a good thing, but the majority of people moving to/deploying XP when the product first shipped weren't even thinking of roaming profiles, they were thinking of just getting away from that POS called 95/98/Me. Then, to turn it off, you have to do a fairly basic hack to fix it. And still, even now, there aren't many people out there using them because they're hard to deploy properly. This should be simple.
Their lack of ability to look forward in time leds to some bizarre inexplicable problems that are impossible to troubleshoot. The user's home directory sprays files all over the place, and none of it makes sense. It should be self contained in a nice neat little folder that's not 4 levels deep in the OS.
4) The registry. You can have tons of redundant hardware, and failover systems, and anythign else you want. If the registry gets corrupted, the machine is down. Not part of it. The whole freaking machine. One. Single. Point. Of. Failure. All the MS books tell you to get rid of them, but that one you can't get rid of. It's engineered in. And this is before
4a)
5) Microsoft assumes the user has no idea what the user wants. I want to look in the program files directory. There's a warning saying I can screw stuff up if I go in there.
5a) if you have to put up that level of warning, then it tells me your system is fragile, and can't be trusted.
6) Microsoft