I find it interesting that the blog is the focus of this concept of "the read-write web", when I think wiki is a much more powerful tool and a better example of collaboration than a blog.
Okay, I'll grant you that he was saying that he looked for his competition and found more of them on Yahoo.
So let me get this straight:
1) build relatively obscure product 2) avoid less popular search enginge 3) use enginge that admittedly lists many more competitors, "hands down" 4) ????? 5) profit
My point was that the perceived quality of a product isn't the only driver of it's utility or usage base. Many companies who misunderstood this concept are now eternally playing catchup or have been bought by competitors (Apple, Informix, Netscape, etc.)
And in my opinion, from using Google, it does seem to constantly get better, whether we're talking plain old search, maps, gmail, or news. I'm not sure which version of Google you're using, or if you're just making your claims to prove a point, but I have to respectfully disagree.
I do think this is interesting to note, but I have to ask you as a business man, what matters more to you, the quality of the search or the number of people using the search engine. From anecdotal evidence, I can tell you that I maybe know of 3 or 4 people who use yahoo to search, and pretty much everybody else uses google or has firefox search toolbar set to google.
I can make a better hamburger than McDonald's can, but you're probably better off investing in them than you are in me.
Wegman's recently moved into my old neighborhood, and I can attest it is one of the most well-run companies I've seen. The stores are huge, the selection is tremendous, and the focus on building a positive customer experience is intense.
Wegman's seems to be a little more serious about their customer database and the quality of data it contains. My mother-in-law tried to use my wife's Wegman's loyalty card, and they checked her ID and wouldn't let her use it. I would really like to see the type of things they're doing with their DW.
I find it interesting that Aldrin is critical of the shuttle program. I know there are a lot of people unhappy with it, but it seems a name as big as Aldrin being critical has quite a bit of meaning. Hopefully this is a sign of a new approach to space travel in the future.
"They produce the lowest quality of software and use their illegally obtained market dominance to shut out any alternatives."
I assume you don't mean the first part of this sentence since I know that I've certainly used lower quality software than *many* of MS's products (at least the newer ones).
Regarding the second part, I'd have to disagree. There are many alternatives to MS software. For instance, I'm not using an MS browser to compose this post,/. is not hosting their site on IIS, when I finally get my ass to work today, I will be writing code in an editor that is NOT named Visual Studio, and I will hopefully be productive enough to commit my code to a repository not named visual source safe. When I deploy my application, it will not be running the.NET framework. I would argue there are many alternatives; perhaps there are not many for the masses of computer users, although even that is debatable these days.
I think the premise of whether it's wrong to love/hate MS is flawed to begin with. Why is it axiomatic that you have to love or hate a company (or perhaps it's products)? I don't love or hate MS any more than I love or hate Apple, BSD, AIX, etc. As a practicioner in the industry, I simply live with these technologies and try to choose the best tool for each job.
Perhaps the feeling of hatred/love is for what the company has supposedly done, whether it be invent the modern PC (as the MS lovers will claim) or destroy the modern PC (as the MS haters will claim). In either case, I still find this argument futile because there are still VERY good alternatives to most of the pieces of software that Microsoft makes. So it's hard to understand where the argument that MS abuses monopoly power is all that strong. I would think that a true monopoly would have prevented software like Apache web server, Linux, Firefox, Eclipse, Java, Oracle, MySQL, etc. from ever coming to market or gaining the wide traction that each of these has.
I'm confused too, although AFAIK, iDen is limited in terms of bandwidth capabilities when compared to 3G versions of CDMA and TDMA.
I also know from having owned a Nextel and a Verizon phone, that the iDen network is fairly limited in terms of coverage across the country, but I've also heard from Spring owners that their network is equally limited.
Does anyone out there know what will happen from a network technology perspective? It seems to me that Nextel's iDen "standard" is entirely incompatible with Sprint. Will Spring just send Nextel customers new Sprint units? Then what happens to Push to Talk?
From TFA: "the blockage occurred at the Internet backbone level, thereby blocking access for other ISPs (and their customers) that use Telus as their provider."
I'm certainly no legal expert, but this seems like it could open the floodgate for litigation. Maybe by the time the regulations arrive the market will have already corrected this problem?
In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster. This resulted in 10X the level of tile damage since 1997 (when the new foam was implemented) per flight.
I hope this isn't what caused the damage we've seen lately, but if it is, it begs the question, is it worth using CFC-11 for safer shuttle flights given the relatively small number of launches that occur?
In fact I like to think that most great religeous leaders and philosophers would secretely hate and despise their followers. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I thought I read somewhere that Marx at one point late in his life said "I am not a Marxist".
Please don't take these as ad hominem attacks, I'm just trying to point out a few things that jump out at me about this post.
"If it feels good now, do it! " is not a great philosophy. This seems like a straw man argument itself. I've read many of Rand's books, and I really never read anything she wrote that recommends acting on emotion (how it feels), or acting on short range timeframes. A more appropo summation of her philosophy along those lines might be "If you analyze the situation and make value judgments that consider long range benefits, and this is in the long run more beneficial to you than it is costly in the short run, do it".
Sure, in the end everything we do, we do for selfish reasons, but I like helping people. This is an arguable point, and I think this is a common misconception of objectivism. Rand didn't argue that there was no such thing as a selfish act (many people have made this argument, but I think she would have disagreed highly with this). In her writings, she recognized selfless acts; anything that sacrifices a higher level value for a lower level value is a selfless act. In your case, as long as you derive some long range benefit from your kind and charitable acts, then you have acted in your own self interest ie. selfish. There's no negative connotation intended in this usage of the word selfish. Rand wouldn't say this is bad, she would say it was moral and the right choice for you to make. However, if you do these acts and in the long run they offer no benefit to you (say you do them because you feel guilty about your success and end up losing something of value in the long run), then she would say that is a selfless act, and as such it is wrong. She felt that there are many philosophers and politicians calling for true selfless acts in the name of altruism as a goal in itself, and she spoke out against this.
You don't want to help others? Fine. Don't, see if I care, but if you are going to mock me for caring and for acting out of compassion and assign to me the basest of motives, I am for sure going to point out how selfish, egotistical, and short sighted you are. I don't think Rand mocked others for doing what was in their self interest. I read Rand to mock more those who would claim that it is your duty to help others, and that the only way you can enjoy helping others is to not derive any pleasure or benefit from it yourself. I realize I haven't read everything she wrote, but I really don't recall anywhere that she actually mocked those who enjoy helping others.
Ayn Rand and people like her who consider any kind of charity or compassion as selfish egotism are the laziest type of self involved, egotistical, idiots. Again, I don't think she made the argument that charity is inherently selfish, I think she recognized a distinction between the two, but I think she is commonly misquoted in this respect. (Perhaps Nietschze or some other similar philosopher made this argument? I know it showed up on a popular American sitcom at some point).
I often have to make my apps work in both, simply because I find the Firefox DOM inspector to be indispensable for tracking down screwey CSS behavior. It really hasn't been that tough to make the apps work in both IMHO.
This is pretty cool, although from TFA: Only ethernet is missing, currently, as the binary only driver in/usr/ports/net/nvnet fails with an error 5, for some reason. Assistance there would be very welcome.
I suspect this is a feature that would be fairly important to most users.
I maintain my position that $600 for Office is not expensive relative to what you're getting. I understand there are options with a lower price tag out there, but having tried many of these options, they are *not* worth it to me. This does not mean I've been duped or fallen victim to a monopoly, it just means that in real world usage, I've seen many shortcomings in open source offerings for the same thing.
I can see why for hobbiests especially--and ostensibly commercial uses other than what we use office for--there may be truly "cheaper" options out there, but for the way my firm uses Office, to spend whatever our corporate pricing is (let's assume $600 per license), we generate significant revenue from each proposal, presentation, ROI analysis, white paper, etc. If we were to try to use lower cost or no cost software alternatives, I suspect we would run into many compatibility issues. I think the shortcomings of many of the alternatives are well known (Word Perfect and the suite that whoever currently owns them provide or OpenOffice especially)
We do 70% of our development on J2EE platforms runnin on *nix machines, so it's not that we are technically unsavvy or opposed to Linux or open source. It's not that we're ignorant about software or open source. It's simply that for us (and for most of corporate America that I've personally seen), it's much easier to use a solution on the desktop that "just works". The office products integrate with one another seamlessly, the formats are widely in use in the marketplace, and the functionality set is very rich (granted there are a ton of features that are really not all that necessary). This is the value that MS has driven, and while I would 8 times out of 10 recommend an alternative solution in the enterprise to my customers (OpenLDAP over AD, Firebird or PostGres or Oracle over MS SQL, JBoss over.NET, Tibco over MSMQ, Apache over IIS, Eclipse over VS.NET, Subversion over VSS, Linux over NT for most corporate servers, going back a few years, CORBA or EJB over COM+/DCOM), I still think that MS is unmatched for it's office suite.
If you don't want to pay MS's price, don't. I'm glad there are alternatives out there, but when I'm putting together a proposal for a project that is going to employ myself and 10 of my co-workers for the next 12 months and pay my rent, I gladly fork over the $600 for the products that make my work simpler.
MS does NOT reduce prices, they INCREASE prices drastically and force everyone to pay a premium for software when consumers/corperate could be paying less for better software.
Yes, they drove the price of the browser way up. Or the RDBMS, or the application server (.NET is free), or distributed programming infrastructure (COM+/DCOM were built into the OS), or the transaction processor(see COM+), or the web server (Apache was free long before, but IIS remains free), the list goes on. I'm not an MS fan, but they certainly do drive down the price of software.
Your lack of understanding of the IT industry and the clear role that MS played in it is only too clear based on your pathetic reasoning and emotion-laden posts ("dumbass", ASSumptions, etc.) You're assumption that others are stupid and uneducated is fairly typical of a small-minded pissant.
That's all eh? Luck propelled them to become the largest company in the world and made 3 of the wealthiest 10 men in the world? Quite a lucky streak I must admit, especially given the competition and the stakes....
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I find it interesting that the blog is the focus of this concept of "the read-write web", when I think wiki is a much more powerful tool and a better example of collaboration than a blog.
Okay, I'll grant you that he was saying that he looked for his competition and found more of them on Yahoo.
So let me get this straight:
1) build relatively obscure product
2) avoid less popular search enginge
3) use enginge that admittedly lists many more competitors, "hands down"
4) ?????
5) profit
My point was that the perceived quality of a product isn't the only driver of it's utility or usage base. Many companies who misunderstood this concept are now eternally playing catchup or have been bought by competitors (Apple, Informix, Netscape, etc.)
And in my opinion, from using Google, it does seem to constantly get better, whether we're talking plain old search, maps, gmail, or news. I'm not sure which version of Google you're using, or if you're just making your claims to prove a point, but I have to respectfully disagree.
I do think this is interesting to note, but I have to ask you as a business man, what matters more to you, the quality of the search or the number of people using the search engine. From anecdotal evidence, I can tell you that I maybe know of 3 or 4 people who use yahoo to search, and pretty much everybody else uses google or has firefox search toolbar set to google.
I can make a better hamburger than McDonald's can, but you're probably better off investing in them than you are in me.
"I think the 2 shuttle disasters showed how much managers not grounded in reality can be, well, disastrous."
That is a lesson that many industries would do well to learn.
Wegman's recently moved into my old neighborhood, and I can attest it is one of the most well-run companies I've seen. The stores are huge, the selection is tremendous, and the focus on building a positive customer experience is intense.
Wegman's seems to be a little more serious about their customer database and the quality of data it contains. My mother-in-law tried to use my wife's Wegman's loyalty card, and they checked her ID and wouldn't let her use it. I would really like to see the type of things they're doing with their DW.
I find it interesting that Aldrin is critical of the shuttle program. I know there are a lot of people unhappy with it, but it seems a name as big as Aldrin being critical has quite a bit of meaning. Hopefully this is a sign of a new approach to space travel in the future.
"They produce the lowest quality of software and use their illegally obtained market dominance to shut out any alternatives."
/. is not hosting their site on IIS, when I finally get my ass to work today, I will be writing code in an editor that is NOT named Visual Studio, and I will hopefully be productive enough to commit my code to a repository not named visual source safe. When I deploy my application, it will not be running the .NET framework. I would argue there are many alternatives; perhaps there are not many for the masses of computer users, although even that is debatable these days.
I assume you don't mean the first part of this sentence since I know that I've certainly used lower quality software than *many* of MS's products (at least the newer ones).
Regarding the second part, I'd have to disagree. There are many alternatives to MS software. For instance, I'm not using an MS browser to compose this post,
I think the premise of whether it's wrong to love/hate MS is flawed to begin with. Why is it axiomatic that you have to love or hate a company (or perhaps it's products)? I don't love or hate MS any more than I love or hate Apple, BSD, AIX, etc. As a practicioner in the industry, I simply live with these technologies and try to choose the best tool for each job.
Perhaps the feeling of hatred/love is for what the company has supposedly done, whether it be invent the modern PC (as the MS lovers will claim) or destroy the modern PC (as the MS haters will claim). In either case, I still find this argument futile because there are still VERY good alternatives to most of the pieces of software that Microsoft makes. So it's hard to understand where the argument that MS abuses monopoly power is all that strong. I would think that a true monopoly would have prevented software like Apache web server, Linux, Firefox, Eclipse, Java, Oracle, MySQL, etc. from ever coming to market or gaining the wide traction that each of these has.
I agree it's fairly useless for individuals, but the appeal of push to talk was mostly to companies that manage remote fleets.
I'm confused too, although AFAIK, iDen is limited in terms of bandwidth capabilities when compared to 3G versions of CDMA and TDMA.
I also know from having owned a Nextel and a Verizon phone, that the iDen network is fairly limited in terms of coverage across the country, but I've also heard from Spring owners that their network is equally limited.
Does anyone out there know what will happen from a network technology perspective? It seems to me that Nextel's iDen "standard" is entirely incompatible with Sprint. Will Spring just send Nextel customers new Sprint units? Then what happens to Push to Talk?
Slow news day?
From TFA: "the blockage occurred at the Internet backbone level, thereby blocking access for other ISPs (and their customers) that use Telus as their provider."
I'm certainly no legal expert, but this seems like it could open the floodgate for litigation. Maybe by the time the regulations arrive the market will have already corrected this problem?
Very original
I noticed it until version 5, when I switched to Firefox
But what about when they're old enough that not everybody is constantly online or near an IM client...... oh, wait, never mind.
Look how fast it loads all those pop up and pop under ads too!
I also wonder how fast IE runs after 3 months of using it with all of the malware that accumulates on the machine of average users.
In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster. This resulted in 10X the level of tile damage since 1997 (when the new foam was implemented) per flight.
I hope this isn't what caused the damage we've seen lately, but if it is, it begs the question, is it worth using CFC-11 for safer shuttle flights given the relatively small number of launches that occur?
In fact I like to think that most great religeous leaders and philosophers would secretely hate and despise their followers. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I thought I read somewhere that Marx at one point late in his life said "I am not a Marxist".
Please don't take these as ad hominem attacks, I'm just trying to point out a few things that jump out at me about this post.
"If it feels good now, do it! " is not a great philosophy. This seems like a straw man argument itself. I've read many of Rand's books, and I really never read anything she wrote that recommends acting on emotion (how it feels), or acting on short range timeframes. A more appropo summation of her philosophy along those lines might be "If you analyze the situation and make value judgments that consider long range benefits, and this is in the long run more beneficial to you than it is costly in the short run, do it".
Sure, in the end everything we do, we do for selfish reasons, but I like helping people. This is an arguable point, and I think this is a common misconception of objectivism. Rand didn't argue that there was no such thing as a selfish act (many people have made this argument, but I think she would have disagreed highly with this). In her writings, she recognized selfless acts; anything that sacrifices a higher level value for a lower level value is a selfless act. In your case, as long as you derive some long range benefit from your kind and charitable acts, then you have acted in your own self interest ie. selfish. There's no negative connotation intended in this usage of the word selfish. Rand wouldn't say this is bad, she would say it was moral and the right choice for you to make. However, if you do these acts and in the long run they offer no benefit to you (say you do them because you feel guilty about your success and end up losing something of value in the long run), then she would say that is a selfless act, and as such it is wrong. She felt that there are many philosophers and politicians calling for true selfless acts in the name of altruism as a goal in itself, and she spoke out against this.
You don't want to help others? Fine. Don't, see if I care, but if you are going to mock me for caring and for acting out of compassion and assign to me the basest of motives, I am for sure going to point out how selfish, egotistical, and short sighted you are. I don't think Rand mocked others for doing what was in their self interest. I read Rand to mock more those who would claim that it is your duty to help others, and that the only way you can enjoy helping others is to not derive any pleasure or benefit from it yourself. I realize I haven't read everything she wrote, but I really don't recall anywhere that she actually mocked those who enjoy helping others.
Ayn Rand and people like her who consider any kind of charity or compassion as selfish egotism are the laziest type of self involved, egotistical, idiots. Again, I don't think she made the argument that charity is inherently selfish, I think she recognized a distinction between the two, but I think she is commonly misquoted in this respect. (Perhaps Nietschze or some other similar philosopher made this argument? I know it showed up on a popular American sitcom at some point).
I often have to make my apps work in both, simply because I find the Firefox DOM inspector to be indispensable for tracking down screwey CSS behavior. It really hasn't been that tough to make the apps work in both IMHO.
This is pretty cool, although from TFA: Only ethernet is missing, currently, as the binary only driver in /usr/ports/net/nvnet fails with an error 5, for some reason. Assistance there would be very welcome.
I suspect this is a feature that would be fairly important to most users.
I maintain my position that $600 for Office is not expensive relative to what you're getting. I understand there are options with a lower price tag out there, but having tried many of these options, they are *not* worth it to me. This does not mean I've been duped or fallen victim to a monopoly, it just means that in real world usage, I've seen many shortcomings in open source offerings for the same thing.
.NET, Tibco over MSMQ, Apache over IIS, Eclipse over VS.NET, Subversion over VSS, Linux over NT for most corporate servers, going back a few years, CORBA or EJB over COM+/DCOM), I still think that MS is unmatched for it's office suite.
I can see why for hobbiests especially--and ostensibly commercial uses other than what we use office for--there may be truly "cheaper" options out there, but for the way my firm uses Office, to spend whatever our corporate pricing is (let's assume $600 per license), we generate significant revenue from each proposal, presentation, ROI analysis, white paper, etc. If we were to try to use lower cost or no cost software alternatives, I suspect we would run into many compatibility issues. I think the shortcomings of many of the alternatives are well known (Word Perfect and the suite that whoever currently owns them provide or OpenOffice especially)
We do 70% of our development on J2EE platforms runnin on *nix machines, so it's not that we are technically unsavvy or opposed to Linux or open source. It's not that we're ignorant about software or open source. It's simply that for us (and for most of corporate America that I've personally seen), it's much easier to use a solution on the desktop that "just works". The office products integrate with one another seamlessly, the formats are widely in use in the marketplace, and the functionality set is very rich (granted there are a ton of features that are really not all that necessary). This is the value that MS has driven, and while I would 8 times out of 10 recommend an alternative solution in the enterprise to my customers (OpenLDAP over AD, Firebird or PostGres or Oracle over MS SQL, JBoss over
If you don't want to pay MS's price, don't. I'm glad there are alternatives out there, but when I'm putting together a proposal for a project that is going to employ myself and 10 of my co-workers for the next 12 months and pay my rent, I gladly fork over the $600 for the products that make my work simpler.
MS does NOT reduce prices, they INCREASE prices drastically and force everyone to pay a premium for software when consumers/corperate could be paying less for better software.
Yes, they drove the price of the browser way up. Or the RDBMS, or the application server (.NET is free), or distributed programming infrastructure (COM+/DCOM were built into the OS), or the transaction processor(see COM+), or the web server (Apache was free long before, but IIS remains free), the list goes on. I'm not an MS fan, but they certainly do drive down the price of software.
Your lack of understanding of the IT industry and the clear role that MS played in it is only too clear based on your pathetic reasoning and emotion-laden posts ("dumbass", ASSumptions, etc.) You're assumption that others are stupid and uneducated is fairly typical of a small-minded pissant.
That's all eh? Luck propelled them to become the largest company in the world and made 3 of the wealthiest 10 men in the world? Quite a lucky streak I must admit, especially given the competition and the stakes....