You can be sure that at a Google company conference, Turner's counterpart is telling their staff that Enterprise searches are their right and they are going to take them from MS.
I beg to differ. I would expect that at the Google conference, the one thing I could be sure of is that MS's name isn't mentioned at all. That's b/c since the arrival of the Internet and Web, MS has never seen the "next big thing" coming until it was already there. It's the same with Enterprise Search - the Google appliance has been filling this space nicely for years, and MS is only now getting around to doing, er saying, something about it. Google is too busy innovating to waste much attention on MS's attempts to catch up to where they were years ago.
The few of us who stay past 7 have all come to the conclusion that heat will make your brain slow down a LOT.
Next time you get a chance, try cooling your brain to absolute zero and see if it turns into a superconductor. Get a year's worth of work done in an hour.;)
One of the most appealing aspects of Turbogears imho is the work to supersede the db layer, currently SQLObject, with SQLAlchemy. The problem with most web frameworks is that their ORM db layers treat the db as just an object store, rather than as a relational database. This works for relatively simple 37signals-esque websites, but not for more complicated sites that require a relational algebra engine, for example any relativley complicated web-based BI application or booking engine. For example, one of the fundamental features of the relational model is that the result of any query against a table or number of tables is another table. In that respect, SQLAlchemy lets you map classes not just to tables, but also to joins, unions, and subqueries (which are themselves tables). Turbogears is the only framework I know of so far that is attempting to integrate SQLAlchemy. They're still in the relatively early stages of the integration, it seems, but are working to provide an easy migration from SQLObject to SQLAlchemy when the latter is ready, making TurboGears top on my list of webframeworks to consider/recommend for new projects.
...Intel's future would be as shortlived as IBMs was, as Atari's was, as GM's was... I said Intel would have its down days, just as I say today that someone will beat Microsoft fair and square some day, too.
But how long before it takes before someone finally beats the monopoly? Years and decades in your examples. Humans only live so long, and the whole point of a justice system is to right wrongs in this lifetime and, in legal parlance, to "make whole" or undo the damage done by the perpetrator. Anticompetitive behavior that stunts both innovation and consumer choice and artificially maintains market share or prices for the perpetrator comes with significant costs. How many true innovators and innovations were anti-competitively quashed by MS, for example? Your analysis of the situation is naively rose-tinted.
Like what? Lowering prices below market value? That is _good_ for consumers because NO business can sell for a loss forever -- the minute that they raise their prices after they've wiped the competition clean, new competition will turn up the beat them down again.
Someone already elaborated on the barriers-to-entry problem you're conveniently ignoring.
Again, this is all acceptable if the contract stipulates these situations -- most suppliers are happy to sign agreements if they know what the customers want.
Or when they're being played off against their competitors by a monopoly that supplies the only parts for the market...
I'm glad to see these big companies fall because they're all colluding with the various governments to maintain their power through what I consider negative rights -- copyright, patents and ridiculous mandates requiring their products.
I'm not against big companies so much, but both our political and IP systems are certainly screwed.
It also helps optimize server resource utilization. Many datacenters have, say 50 blade servers, each with an application that uses on average 50% of that server's cpu time and memory, in which case the business is only getting 50% of its money's worth out of the hardware. Virtualizing your servers in such a situation makes it possible to move applications to underutilized servers without taking them offline and reinstalling them, allowing datacenters to better optimize hardware resource useage on the fly. For large datacenters, virtualiztion is the latest killer app.
Who cares whether it is top-of-the-range or next best, as long as it is good enough for what you need?
Because if he can wait, it's b/c his current pc is good enough for what he needs, so in that case, why not wait for something significantly better? The new product rollouts this year aren't just die shrinks or clockspeed increases of the same part, they're entirely new platforms. Both AM2 and Conroe/Merom/Woodcrest require buying new motherboards in addition to new chips, and for those of us still on DDR, new memory. Some of us don't want to buy now with expectation of upgrading the mobo again within the year, which requires the PITA of rebuilding entire computer. In this case, it's more cost and time effective to buy something with longetivity rather than something you'll have to keep incrementally upgrading.
The sad part here is that this guy feels qualified to stand up and lecture everyone on why he voted like he did, despite the fact that he knows nothing about the subject.
That's Americans for you. We're ignorant, entitled, and proud of it. Don't need that newfangled knowledge and reason stuff here, I tell you! That's for those godless Europeans and heathen Asians. God will continue to make our economy strong, the same way he makes our sports teams win when we pray. Nothing to worry about!
"While it's not enough to make me switch from Firefox yet--I still love certain Firefox features such as inline search--it's no longer an object of ridicule either."
Mod me troll or whatever, but IE7b3 is still an object of ridicule, for Firefox and especially for Opera 8+ users. It comes up short in two important areas - power user features and standards support. It just can't compete with Opera's MDI, customizeable shortcut keys, and mouse/rocker gestures, among a plethora of other features. I just uninstalled IE7b3, it's just not an option for power users, except webdev's needing to test for compliance. And as for standards compliance, another/.'er provides succinct insight on that point.
Note to editors, keep your tenses consistent. The headline and abstract use both present and future tense, and without reading the article I can't tell whether these technologies are actually in use now, or will be in the future. It seems like just a few months ago that monkeys were controlling robotic arms with just their brainwaves, has technology advanced so quickly that we can now physically and neurologically integrate electronic machines with people? The article confuses that crucial point.
"U.S. Soldiers Recipients of Newest Prosthetic Technologies
The next generation of naturalistic and touch-sensitive artificial limbs are being worn by U.S. Soldiers. Instead of the old velcro strap and cup these new models are fused directly to the bone and are controlled by the wearer's brain. From the article: 'Future prosthetic arms will fuse to existing bone, eliminating the need for awkward attachment systems. These more naturalistic limbs will use bionic nerves attached to natural nerves to send and receive signals from the brain. Chips embedded in the user's brain will help command artificial-muscle-activated, touch-sensitive, fully articulating hands.'"
Maybe if they actually released their stuff from Beta and tried some marketing besides techie/early-adopter word-of-mouth, they'd pick up some more market share.
"W3C isn't the bottleneck, browsers are. The dominant browser on the web hasn't been updated for years, and it doesn't make sense for specifications to get too far ahead."
I tend to disagree. Just b/c MS can't/won't keep up doesn't mean that others can't. Opera and Mozilla are not too far behind the advancing CSS spec, and slowing down for IE will only stunt the other browsers' development. It's like putting the advanced kids in the remedial classes; it helps neither the advanced kids nor the struggling ones.
In fact, possibly the only way to force IE to update is by advancing the CSS spec at whatever pace is feasible, and as Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc. implement it, IE is left behind. That's the only reason why MS finally reinstated the IE team to push out IE7, except it was over security concerns rather than platform advancement concerns. Not advancing the spec prevents the other browsers from leaving IE behind, giving MS no reason to upgrade IE.
"I doubt the PC would be quite as popular today as it is if it weren't for Gates."
Of course it would have, the simple fact of Moore's Law continuously decreasing the size and power-requirements of silicon-based electronics made the popularity of personal computing devices an inevitability. Apple, IBM, or most likely DEC would have carried that torch had Bill and Microsoft never existed.
"...its worth mentioning that almost everytime anyone here on/. asks what makes the iPod any better than other players, they always rave about how easy and smooth the control interface is and because of that Apple is the one who "really gets it", etc, etc."
They're not raving about the heirarchial menu system that Creative claims to have patented, they're raving about the scroll wheel. Period. Every small music device uses a heirarchial menu system, but it's the clean and elegant mechanical interface to that standard menu system that sets the iPod apart.
Why composite? Seems like a complete waste of money. First, anyone able to afford $999 for a BD player, or whatever reduced but still expensive price this thing will cost until PS3 arrives, will not be watching it on a TV so cheap/antiquated that its best input is composite. Second, I'm not a videophile/home theater buff, but I can clearly remember the vast difference in image quality on my Xbox and PS2 when going from composite to component and composite to s-video, respectively. Seems like composite on a BD player negates the primary selling point of the BD player in the first place - image quality. The only reason I can think of for including composite is that composite is now so cheap that its inclusion has a negligible effect on the unit's manufacturing cost, in which case, why not? Anyone know?
...lose their logo certification status, which would be bad news for OEMs and the device manufacturers...
As if people even pay attention to the logo certification status anyway. If I had a nickel for everything I've installed that Windows warned me did not have logo certification, well, I'd have a lot of nickels. Some of those warnings were even for Nvidia, stuff. Of course I installed it anyway. If people spend money on some hardware or software, a little warning about something obscure like driver certification is not going to deter most people from installing it anyway. And regardless, if something goes wrong, there's always driver rollback and system restore....
Slashdot Mirror
Or for the most up-to-date nix & win versions, go here: http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/index.html#downlo ading
You can be sure that at a Google company conference, Turner's counterpart is telling their staff that Enterprise searches are their right and they are going to take them from MS.
I beg to differ. I would expect that at the Google conference, the one thing I could be sure of is that MS's name isn't mentioned at all. That's b/c since the arrival of the Internet and Web, MS has never seen the "next big thing" coming until it was already there. It's the same with Enterprise Search - the Google appliance has been filling this space nicely for years, and MS is only now getting around to doing, er saying, something about it. Google is too busy innovating to waste much attention on MS's attempts to catch up to where they were years ago.
The few of us who stay past 7 have all come to the conclusion that heat will make your brain slow down a LOT.
;)
Next time you get a chance, try cooling your brain to absolute zero and see if it turns into a superconductor. Get a year's worth of work done in an hour.
One of the most appealing aspects of Turbogears imho is the work to supersede the db layer, currently SQLObject, with SQLAlchemy. The problem with most web frameworks is that their ORM db layers treat the db as just an object store, rather than as a relational database. This works for relatively simple 37signals-esque websites, but not for more complicated sites that require a relational algebra engine, for example any relativley complicated web-based BI application or booking engine. For example, one of the fundamental features of the relational model is that the result of any query against a table or number of tables is another table. In that respect, SQLAlchemy lets you map classes not just to tables, but also to joins, unions, and subqueries (which are themselves tables). Turbogears is the only framework I know of so far that is attempting to integrate SQLAlchemy. They're still in the relatively early stages of the integration, it seems, but are working to provide an easy migration from SQLObject to SQLAlchemy when the latter is ready, making TurboGears top on my list of webframeworks to consider/recommend for new projects.
...Intel's future would be as shortlived as IBMs was, as Atari's was, as GM's was... I said Intel would have its down days, just as I say today that someone will beat Microsoft fair and square some day, too.
But how long before it takes before someone finally beats the monopoly? Years and decades in your examples. Humans only live so long, and the whole point of a justice system is to right wrongs in this lifetime and, in legal parlance, to "make whole" or undo the damage done by the perpetrator. Anticompetitive behavior that stunts both innovation and consumer choice and artificially maintains market share or prices for the perpetrator comes with significant costs. How many true innovators and innovations were anti-competitively quashed by MS, for example? Your analysis of the situation is naively rose-tinted.
Like what? Lowering prices below market value? That is _good_ for consumers because NO business can sell for a loss forever -- the minute that they raise their prices after they've wiped the competition clean, new competition will turn up the beat them down again.
Someone already elaborated on the barriers-to-entry problem you're conveniently ignoring.
Again, this is all acceptable if the contract stipulates these situations -- most suppliers are happy to sign agreements if they know what the customers want.
Or when they're being played off against their competitors by a monopoly that supplies the only parts for the market...
I'm glad to see these big companies fall because they're all colluding with the various governments to maintain their power through what I consider negative rights -- copyright, patents and ridiculous mandates requiring their products.
I'm not against big companies so much, but both our political and IP systems are certainly screwed.
It also helps optimize server resource utilization. Many datacenters have, say 50 blade servers, each with an application that uses on average 50% of that server's cpu time and memory, in which case the business is only getting 50% of its money's worth out of the hardware. Virtualizing your servers in such a situation makes it possible to move applications to underutilized servers without taking them offline and reinstalling them, allowing datacenters to better optimize hardware resource useage on the fly. For large datacenters, virtualiztion is the latest killer app.
welcome our new Emergent Bloat overlords!
Who cares whether it is top-of-the-range or next best, as long as it is good enough for what you need?
Because if he can wait, it's b/c his current pc is good enough for what he needs, so in that case, why not wait for something significantly better? The new product rollouts this year aren't just die shrinks or clockspeed increases of the same part, they're entirely new platforms. Both AM2 and Conroe/Merom/Woodcrest require buying new motherboards in addition to new chips, and for those of us still on DDR, new memory. Some of us don't want to buy now with expectation of upgrading the mobo again within the year, which requires the PITA of rebuilding entire computer. In this case, it's more cost and time effective to buy something with longetivity rather than something you'll have to keep incrementally upgrading.
While this might be helpful for many /. posters, it's completely irrelevant navel-gazing. We all need to be learning Mandarin Chinese now anyway.
The sad part here is that this guy feels qualified to stand up and lecture everyone on why he voted like he did, despite the fact that he knows nothing about the subject.
That's Americans for you. We're ignorant, entitled, and proud of it. Don't need that newfangled knowledge and reason stuff here, I tell you! That's for those godless Europeans and heathen Asians. God will continue to make our economy strong, the same way he makes our sports teams win when we pray. Nothing to worry about!
"While it's not enough to make me switch from Firefox yet--I still love certain Firefox features such as inline search--it's no longer an object of ridicule either."
/.'er provides succinct insight on that point.
Mod me troll or whatever, but IE7b3 is still an object of ridicule, for Firefox and especially for Opera 8+ users. It comes up short in two important areas - power user features and standards support. It just can't compete with Opera's MDI, customizeable shortcut keys, and mouse/rocker gestures, among a plethora of other features. I just uninstalled IE7b3, it's just not an option for power users, except webdev's needing to test for compliance. And as for standards compliance, another
Note to editors, keep your tenses consistent. The headline and abstract use both present and future tense, and without reading the article I can't tell whether these technologies are actually in use now, or will be in the future. It seems like just a few months ago that monkeys were controlling robotic arms with just their brainwaves, has technology advanced so quickly that we can now physically and neurologically integrate electronic machines with people? The article confuses that crucial point.
"U.S. Soldiers Recipients of Newest Prosthetic Technologies
The next generation of naturalistic and touch-sensitive artificial limbs are being worn by U.S. Soldiers. Instead of the old velcro strap and cup these new models are fused directly to the bone and are controlled by the wearer's brain. From the article: 'Future prosthetic arms will fuse to existing bone, eliminating the need for awkward attachment systems. These more naturalistic limbs will use bionic nerves attached to natural nerves to send and receive signals from the brain. Chips embedded in the user's brain will help command artificial-muscle-activated, touch-sensitive, fully articulating hands.'"
Maybe if they actually released their stuff from Beta and tried some marketing besides techie/early-adopter word-of-mouth, they'd pick up some more market share.
Who cares, as long as consumers consume, and producers can create what new consumers desire.
You mean, '...and producers can create new consumer desires.'
[Enter the modern marketing department, stage left.]
I'm a Mac user, you insensitive clods!
"main contributing factors to a shrinking of social networks among Americans."
What are they talking about, I have over 9000 friends on MySpace alone! Shrinking social networks my arse...
"W3C isn't the bottleneck, browsers are. The dominant browser on the web hasn't been updated for years, and it doesn't make sense for specifications to get too far ahead."
I tend to disagree. Just b/c MS can't/won't keep up doesn't mean that others can't. Opera and Mozilla are not too far behind the advancing CSS spec, and slowing down for IE will only stunt the other browsers' development. It's like putting the advanced kids in the remedial classes; it helps neither the advanced kids nor the struggling ones.
In fact, possibly the only way to force IE to update is by advancing the CSS spec at whatever pace is feasible, and as Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc. implement it, IE is left behind. That's the only reason why MS finally reinstated the IE team to push out IE7, except it was over security concerns rather than platform advancement concerns. Not advancing the spec prevents the other browsers from leaving IE behind, giving MS no reason to upgrade IE.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish takes on a whole new meaning...
He actually seems to have mellowed a bit from his youth...
How about a new icon of Balmer throwing Chaiman Bill across the room at the latest Google defector?
"I doubt the PC would be quite as popular today as it is if it weren't for Gates."
Of course it would have, the simple fact of Moore's Law continuously decreasing the size and power-requirements of silicon-based electronics made the popularity of personal computing devices an inevitability. Apple, IBM, or most likely DEC would have carried that torch had Bill and Microsoft never existed.
"...its worth mentioning that almost everytime anyone here on /. asks what makes the iPod any better than other players, they always rave about how easy and smooth the control interface is and because of that Apple is the one who "really gets it", etc, etc."
They're not raving about the heirarchial menu system that Creative claims to have patented, they're raving about the scroll wheel. Period. Every small music device uses a heirarchial menu system, but it's the clean and elegant mechanical interface to that standard menu system that sets the iPod apart.
Why composite? Seems like a complete waste of money. First, anyone able to afford $999 for a BD player, or whatever reduced but still expensive price this thing will cost until PS3 arrives, will not be watching it on a TV so cheap/antiquated that its best input is composite. Second, I'm not a videophile/home theater buff, but I can clearly remember the vast difference in image quality on my Xbox and PS2 when going from composite to component and composite to s-video, respectively. Seems like composite on a BD player negates the primary selling point of the BD player in the first place - image quality. The only reason I can think of for including composite is that composite is now so cheap that its inclusion has a negligible effect on the unit's manufacturing cost, in which case, why not? Anyone know?
What IE team?
...lose their logo certification status, which would be bad news for OEMs and the device manufacturers...
As if people even pay attention to the logo certification status anyway. If I had a nickel for everything I've installed that Windows warned me did not have logo certification, well, I'd have a lot of nickels. Some of those warnings were even for Nvidia, stuff. Of course I installed it anyway. If people spend money on some hardware or software, a little warning about something obscure like driver certification is not going to deter most people from installing it anyway. And regardless, if something goes wrong, there's always driver rollback and system restore....