I didn't say quality software. There's more to opening up a market than quality software. I think usable, affordable software is a better way to put it. As far as your examples of Commodore et. al, I would hardly call their sales volumes an explosion compared to what happened after DOS and especially after Windows 95.
Your shit talking makes me laugh, do you really take an online forum that seriously? Your ad hominem attacks are all the more pathetic based on the fact that you're making them against an alias on a message board. Grow up, and thanks for the chuckle.
You're right, I forgot, all you need is fast chips to drive the level of demand required to support the production volumes that enable Moore's law to be practical from a business perspective.
As far as the cost of hiring a secretary, that's what it would require for me to create the documents that I'm able to create in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and to continue to do my work. Generally speaking, a good way to value a product is to compare the pricing of your alternatives. Most of the world ostensibly does this and decides that it's cheaper to buy an Office license than it is to buy a secretary who knows how to format typewritten documents and prepare financial reports. There are other alternatives in the computer world, but for whatever reason those aren't chosen very often (otherwise Office wouldn't be the cash cow it is today)
$600 for Office is not a lot of money, try hiring a personal secretary to do what you're able to do with the Office tools. $300 for an OS? Do you have any idea what OS's used to cost before MS came out? There are a lot of things not to like about MS, but I really don't think anyone can claim they've done anything but drive prices down to the point where computers are affordable for the masses.
Wow, a respectful and erudite disagreement on/.:-)
I can see where running KDE on a desktop could increase the utility of the Zaurus. Thanks again for the polite disagreement, I can see where other situations than mine would call for a Zaurus. As it was, I got plenty of value out of showing it to the other developers in my company; there's nothing out there with quite the "cool" factor.
I owned one and found it to be the coolest palm device I ever owned, but too limited to be practical. IMO, the most important aspect of a palm is to carry around reminders, calendars, and for checking emails while in flight. All of these rely on synchronization with some form of groupware. My personal experience was that the synchronization was problematic, which limited my ability to use it for what I deemed to be important. I also thought the Zaurus was bigger than a PDA should be. It was very unwieldy to carry, especially since you have to carry a phone as well.
My summary would be that the ability to edit Vi, to use SSH and SCP, and the general fun of using bash from a PDA are great, but as far as filling the needs of a traditional PDA, I thought it fell a bit short. I also found that it was fairly unstable, requiring a hard reset every few months.
So let me get this straight, on Slashdot, a broadband provider cuts off access to a website, and there's an outrage and accusations of vigilante-justice. But someone kills a spammer, and it's "good riddance to bad rubbish"?
I hate to point this out, but this man was brutally murdered, and people just think that because it's a spammer it's okay to be a vigilante? I hate spam as much as the next guy, but cold blooded killing is not the answer to something as trivial as pressing a delete button and installing a spam filter.
Does anyone know why NASA is dismantling the computers if there really is such a potential treasure-trove of knowledge on these tapes? It seems like NASA would be interested in the same type of discoveries that TFA anticipates....
RTFP, I was talking about 6 years ago. Here's a chart: http://quicktake.morningstar.com/Stock/Valuation10.asp?Country=USA&Symbol=MSFT&stocktab=valuation
You can see that I may have exaggerated, but you'll see a P/E of ~65 for 1999. Quite a different story than the current ~25. And a P/E of 50? you don't "normally" look for a general P/E ratio. Different industries have different ratios based on expectations of growth. Again, if you'd RTFP, I was talking about the fact that MS is a very mature company and not likely to have a much higher P/E than say an Altria or a GM.
Some investors should buy stocks for *dividends*. Some do not care about dividends today. A company that pays dividends is effectively saying that the money is worth more in the hands of the owners of the company that is worth if they were to plow that money back into the business. If I owned part of a company, and the treasurer told me that he could either give me $1M in cash, or take that money and turn it into $2M in three years, I'd have to ask myself what I could turn that $1M into, and compare the two.
This really just shows that MS is no longer considered a "growth" company. The software they sell is mature and other than their groups that are currently losing money, there's not enough room to grow to support a P/E ratio of 100 or whatever it was 6 or 7 years ago. And even the divisions that are in "growth" categories look like small peanuts compared to the sheer size of their OS and office revenue.
Once MS started paying a dividend, it was clear they themselves had come to grips with the fact that they were no longer a ocmpany that can expect near triple digit growth every year.
Not just in the OSS community, and that's why I figured I'd make a joke about it. But judging from the overall responses and the late troll modifier, it wasn't taken that way.
I thought it would be apparent and maybe painfully obvious from the context that I wasn't serious. It's not like normal every day users ever get to see source code, and they're ostensibly the ones who need documentation.
I don't think the point is to get users to be suspicious, I think it's that the phisher can't use JUST the password, which is all they can get from you. So the phisher gets your password, goes to the real site, and cannot access your information. Maybe I'm missing something??
I guess there's a distinction there when you put it that way, but it still seems odd to me. It's like I leave my car keys out in the open.
One person takes the car and uses it to pick up people that are too drunk to drive themselves home. Another person uses the car to transport people to the bar so they can get drunk and buy drugs. Just because I may disapprove of the way the second person uses my car, it doesn't mean I can now say they've stolen my car unless I'm willing to level the same accusation at the first....
I think it's interesting to note the difference in language between this post and others in the thread. When MS uses code from BSD, it's "stolen", when open source projects use code from OS/2, it's referred to as "integrate". Seems like a general double standard within the OS community (not specifically the parent).
I would prefer that to giving me antibiotics that I build up a resistance to. But I wasn't talking about simple colds, I'm talking about when it has morphed into something worse than a cold and I'm kept in the dark about what went wrong.
I've always been under the impression that when you have green or yellow mucous, it's a sign of infection and you should go to the doctor. I didn't mean to imply that I see the doctor after the first appearance of a symptom of a common cold. But when I haven't been able to beat a cold, or sinus infection, etc. and I'm worried about bronchitis, strep, pneumonia, I tend to schedule an appointment. My orinial point was that I'd like to know what kind of infection I have and what I could do to avoid it the next time a simple cold attacks me.
I can't really empathize with doctors on this one. The last 4 or 5 times I've seen a doctor over probably the past 10 years, they have completely kept me in the dark with what's been wrong. I come in with congestion, or a cough, or a sore throat, and the result is always the same, they give me a new antibiotic, an inhaler, and some pseudophedrine.
I end up going to web md or some other website to do research and deduce what my symptoms point to. It seems like doctors no longer take the time to assess symptoms and determine what is actually wrong, they just dispense a few prescriptions, sign some paperwork, and send the patient on their way. It's not wonder that people want to get more info than what the MD profession is offering.
Slow down tiger.
First point: it's a joke. It's from the Charlie Murphy Real Hollywood Stories. Lighten up.
Second point: the claim about Microsoft calling the shots in the industry is probably more based on emotion and knee jerk than on reality. As another poster pointed out, there are many more parts involved in security than the OS. And even in the OS arena, there are still plenty of non-MS servers.
Third point: Microsoft helped put Bush in office? Come on, claims like this have no factual basis, whether you like Bush or not. In the scheme of things Microsoft does not contribute all that much money to the two parties (not compared to pharma, law firms, banks, oil, and tobacco).
I guess it depends on how you define competency. In the commercial world, in theory it should. But the reality is that many companies evaluate the CIO on how much they cut costs, not on the amount of value they drive. To me, that doesn't seem like it aligns pay with performance of the IT dept. And the CIO position is such a revolving door position. I think I read somewhere that the average tenure for a Fortune X00 CIO was on the order of 18 months.
I agree with your assessment, but I think it might not have always been this way. I think there was a short period of time when the founding fathers of the US moved from being revolutionaries to government officials that they were able to get actual work done. (Such as Hamilton's construction of the Treasury Department or Jefferson's State Department). I know the lack of partisan bickering didn't last long and modern political BS soon found its way, but I'd at least like to think there were at least a few years of real work being done by the govt.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say quality software. There's more to opening up a market than quality software. I think usable, affordable software is a better way to put it. As far as your examples of Commodore et. al, I would hardly call their sales volumes an explosion compared to what happened after DOS and especially after Windows 95.
Your shit talking makes me laugh, do you really take an online forum that seriously? Your ad hominem attacks are all the more pathetic based on the fact that you're making them against an alias on a message board. Grow up, and thanks for the chuckle.
You're right, I forgot, all you need is fast chips to drive the level of demand required to support the production volumes that enable Moore's law to be practical from a business perspective.
As far as the cost of hiring a secretary, that's what it would require for me to create the documents that I'm able to create in Word, Excel, and Powerpoint and to continue to do my work. Generally speaking, a good way to value a product is to compare the pricing of your alternatives. Most of the world ostensibly does this and decides that it's cheaper to buy an Office license than it is to buy a secretary who knows how to format typewritten documents and prepare financial reports. There are other alternatives in the computer world, but for whatever reason those aren't chosen very often (otherwise Office wouldn't be the cash cow it is today)
$600 for Office is not a lot of money, try hiring a personal secretary to do what you're able to do with the Office tools. $300 for an OS? Do you have any idea what OS's used to cost before MS came out? There are a lot of things not to like about MS, but I really don't think anyone can claim they've done anything but drive prices down to the point where computers are affordable for the masses.
Wow, a respectful and erudite disagreement on /. :-)
I can see where running KDE on a desktop could increase the utility of the Zaurus. Thanks again for the polite disagreement, I can see where other situations than mine would call for a Zaurus. As it was, I got plenty of value out of showing it to the other developers in my company; there's nothing out there with quite the "cool" factor.
I owned one and found it to be the coolest palm device I ever owned, but too limited to be practical. IMO, the most important aspect of a palm is to carry around reminders, calendars, and for checking emails while in flight. All of these rely on synchronization with some form of groupware. My personal experience was that the synchronization was problematic, which limited my ability to use it for what I deemed to be important. I also thought the Zaurus was bigger than a PDA should be. It was very unwieldy to carry, especially since you have to carry a phone as well.
My summary would be that the ability to edit Vi, to use SSH and SCP, and the general fun of using bash from a PDA are great, but as far as filling the needs of a traditional PDA, I thought it fell a bit short. I also found that it was fairly unstable, requiring a hard reset every few months.
So let me get this straight, on Slashdot, a broadband provider cuts off access to a website, and there's an outrage and accusations of vigilante-justice. But someone kills a spammer, and it's "good riddance to bad rubbish"?
I hate to point this out, but this man was brutally murdered, and people just think that because it's a spammer it's okay to be a vigilante? I hate spam as much as the next guy, but cold blooded killing is not the answer to something as trivial as pressing a delete button and installing a spam filter.
Does anyone know why NASA is dismantling the computers if there really is such a potential treasure-trove of knowledge on these tapes? It seems like NASA would be interested in the same type of discoveries that TFA anticipates....
RTFP, I was talking about 6 years ago. Here's a chart: http://quicktake.morningstar.com/Stock/Valuation10 .asp?Country=USA&Symbol=MSFT&stocktab=valuation
You can see that I may have exaggerated, but you'll see a P/E of ~65 for 1999. Quite a different story than the current ~25. And a P/E of 50? you don't "normally" look for a general P/E ratio. Different industries have different ratios based on expectations of growth. Again, if you'd RTFP, I was talking about the fact that MS is a very mature company and not likely to have a much higher P/E than say an Altria or a GM.
Some investors should buy stocks for *dividends*. Some do not care about dividends today. A company that pays dividends is effectively saying that the money is worth more in the hands of the owners of the company that is worth if they were to plow that money back into the business. If I owned part of a company, and the treasurer told me that he could either give me $1M in cash, or take that money and turn it into $2M in three years, I'd have to ask myself what I could turn that $1M into, and compare the two.
This really just shows that MS is no longer considered a "growth" company. The software they sell is mature and other than their groups that are currently losing money, there's not enough room to grow to support a P/E ratio of 100 or whatever it was 6 or 7 years ago. And even the divisions that are in "growth" categories look like small peanuts compared to the sheer size of their OS and office revenue.
Once MS started paying a dividend, it was clear they themselves had come to grips with the fact that they were no longer a ocmpany that can expect near triple digit growth every year.
Not just in the OSS community, and that's why I figured I'd make a joke about it. But judging from the overall responses and the late troll modifier, it wasn't taken that way.
I thought it would be apparent and maybe painfully obvious from the context that I wasn't serious. It's not like normal every day users ever get to see source code, and they're ostensibly the ones who need documentation.
Crap, that's what preview is for...... I meant:
;-)
I'm sorry, I forgot to include the <sarcasm> tags for those of you in the UK.
I'm sorry, I forgot to include the marks for those of you in the UK. ;-)
if you cannot explain what you've done, then what you did was worthless
If you can't understand what I've done by my source code, then you're worthless.
I don't think the point is to get users to be suspicious, I think it's that the phisher can't use JUST the password, which is all they can get from you. So the phisher gets your password, goes to the real site, and cannot access your information. Maybe I'm missing something??
I guess there's a distinction there when you put it that way, but it still seems odd to me. It's like I leave my car keys out in the open.
One person takes the car and uses it to pick up people that are too drunk to drive themselves home. Another person uses the car to transport people to the bar so they can get drunk and buy drugs. Just because I may disapprove of the way the second person uses my car, it doesn't mean I can now say they've stolen my car unless I'm willing to level the same accusation at the first....
I think it's interesting to note the difference in language between this post and others in the thread. When MS uses code from BSD, it's "stolen", when open source projects use code from OS/2, it's referred to as "integrate". Seems like a general double standard within the OS community (not specifically the parent).
I would prefer that to giving me antibiotics that I build up a resistance to. But I wasn't talking about simple colds, I'm talking about when it has morphed into something worse than a cold and I'm kept in the dark about what went wrong.
I've always been under the impression that when you have green or yellow mucous, it's a sign of infection and you should go to the doctor. I didn't mean to imply that I see the doctor after the first appearance of a symptom of a common cold. But when I haven't been able to beat a cold, or sinus infection, etc. and I'm worried about bronchitis, strep, pneumonia, I tend to schedule an appointment. My orinial point was that I'd like to know what kind of infection I have and what I could do to avoid it the next time a simple cold attacks me.
I can't really empathize with doctors on this one. The last 4 or 5 times I've seen a doctor over probably the past 10 years, they have completely kept me in the dark with what's been wrong. I come in with congestion, or a cough, or a sore throat, and the result is always the same, they give me a new antibiotic, an inhaler, and some pseudophedrine.
I end up going to web md or some other website to do research and deduce what my symptoms point to. It seems like doctors no longer take the time to assess symptoms and determine what is actually wrong, they just dispense a few prescriptions, sign some paperwork, and send the patient on their way. It's not wonder that people want to get more info than what the MD profession is offering.
Slow down tiger. First point: it's a joke. It's from the Charlie Murphy Real Hollywood Stories. Lighten up. Second point: the claim about Microsoft calling the shots in the industry is probably more based on emotion and knee jerk than on reality. As another poster pointed out, there are many more parts involved in security than the OS. And even in the OS arena, there are still plenty of non-MS servers. Third point: Microsoft helped put Bush in office? Come on, claims like this have no factual basis, whether you like Bush or not. In the scheme of things Microsoft does not contribute all that much money to the two parties (not compared to pharma, law firms, banks, oil, and tobacco).
I guess it depends on how you define competency. In the commercial world, in theory it should. But the reality is that many companies evaluate the CIO on how much they cut costs, not on the amount of value they drive. To me, that doesn't seem like it aligns pay with performance of the IT dept. And the CIO position is such a revolving door position. I think I read somewhere that the average tenure for a Fortune X00 CIO was on the order of 18 months.
I agree with your assessment, but I think it might not have always been this way. I think there was a short period of time when the founding fathers of the US moved from being revolutionaries to government officials that they were able to get actual work done. (Such as Hamilton's construction of the Treasury Department or Jefferson's State Department). I know the lack of partisan bickering didn't last long and modern political BS soon found its way, but I'd at least like to think there were at least a few years of real work being done by the govt.