This kind of work has been going on at CMU, IBM, MIT, and several startups (including Virage) for a number of years. For broadcast TV, you don't even need speech recognition, you can simply use the closed captioning and programming information.
I don't see this being a big hit with home users: the whole point about TV is to be able to lean back and enjoy the show without fiddling around. Finding and arranging video clips is a lot of effort. People who want to jump around and interact are better served with a combination of text, images, and links to video clips, like what you find on today's news sites.
You are quite right. And once you have a couple of decades of experience in this industry, like me, you will appreciate the value of well-designed, stable APIs, as opposed to the stuff Microsoft is shipping.
COM and CORBA aren't comparable. COM is an attempt to give C++ a dynamic object system. You have to compare COM to something like Objective-C(++), and in that comparison, COM fails miserably: it's much less flexible and much more complex. DCOM is comparable to CORBA, and it's not as good.
Similarly, the Win32 API hasn't ever been CHANGED... it has only had things added to it.
Yes, and a steady stream of unnecessary, incompletely documented additions to their APIs is exactly the problem. That is what has kept the Windows platform from being implemented successfully by any other vendor.
*ALMOST EVERY* Time Microsoft wants to make a change that would break something, they just implement it in a separate standard or New API rather than b0rking the old one, which is the way it should be done.
The way it should be done is that you spend some time ahead of time and work out APIs that you can live with for decades. When you do make significant API changes, you give people the tools to convert their code (deprecation, automatic translation). Saddling the platform and their code with dozens of incompatible variants is not the right approach. And the backwards compatibility doesn't really help anyway: you may be able to compile a program written for Windows 3.1 for your XP machine, but its behavior would be so oddball that nobod would want to use it.
If anyone is spouting FUD and nonsense here, it is you.
I don't see any "FUD" here: there is no fear, no uncertainty, and no doubt. As you yourself said, Microsoft constantly extends their APIs and keeps multiple incompatible versions around. Microsoft gets unclonable APIs, quick time to market, no complaints from people too lazy to update their code, and low engineering costs. The people who are screwed are the developers, who have limited choice, poorly thought-out APIs, need to update their code constantly to deal with Microsoft's latest fancies, and too much stuff to learn, and customers, who get locked into a single vendor and get poor quality software. Microsoft's low-quality approach works in terms of their business, but that doesn't make it good engineering.
It isn't whether Microsoft keeps backwards compatibility that matters, it is whether they add extensions to C# that are difficult to replicate.
We don't have to guess there--we already know it: most of the existing Windows APIs are available from C#. So, the situation you get into is that little C# code for Windows will work on Mono, while most of the open source code will work on Windows. That's just what Microsoft likes, and it is foolish for the open source community to deliver all these programmers and all this marketing to Microsoft. It's also unnecessary, since there is nothing in C# that hasn't been present in a number of programming languages with open source implementations.
But, hey, what can we expect from Miguel? He has said clearly that he thinks Microsoft is doing a great job on software and tLinux software should be constructed more like Windows software. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
It's wrong, but it makes sense--if you subscribe to the Republican legal and economic philosophy: only the profit motive propels people to do things efficiently, therefore only by privatizing everything do you lower costs and make innovation move into the marketplace faster. It's the thinking that would have condemned us to decades of Compuserve because it would have kept the Internet from happening. It's a classic instance of the adage that every complex problem has a solution that's simple, easy to implement, easy to understand, and wrong.
The government has a place in developing and deploying basic technologies: roads, space technology, weapons technologies, communications technologies. Government support is what made this nation great and powerful. The market cannot address these needs, and it never has.
These things are called "engineering tradeoffs", and they apply to biological organisms as much as to a processor chip. However, this particular tradeoff may not be inevitable: one of the most fundamental engineering tradeoffs in biological organisms is allowing for food scarcity. This not only puts us at risk for obesity, it also means that bodies have to be careful about wasting energy on repairing themselves. With unlimited food available, you may be able to live long, avoid cancer, and not even get fat. How? By having the body more aggressively replace possibly damaged cells, cells that right now are allowed to hang around because it would require too much energy to replace them.
good businesses know when to quit
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
If something isn't working, it makes a lot of sense for a company to get out of the business.
When it comes to software, however, to keep past customers happy, it also makes sense to release the software open source when the company stops developing it commercially. WebObjects, however, is still being sold by Apple.
There are four kinds of IP: trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, and patents. You must protect your trade secrets if you want to enjoy legal protections, but trade secrets obviously stop being trade secrets when you publish, so that's not an issue. You need to protect trademarks actively, but that is independent of publishing the source code. Copyrights and patents do not require enforcement in order to remain valid.
The main obstacle to open sourcing software is that it may contain other people's code and you can't publish or redistribute code that others hold copyrights or trade secrets in if the contractual agreement with them doesn't allow for it.
The device has a great screen compared to any other PDA around, and it seems to work well held horizontally. The rest of the engineering seems a little more dubious: jog dials are horrible from a usability point of view (what is it with Apple and lousy input devices?), the device can't make up its mind whether it wants to be horizontal or vertical, and whether free handwriting recognition is the way to go seems questionable given the history of the Newton and the Palm.
Whether this makes it may depend entirely on the software. If it runs a stripped-down version of OSX, it stands a chance. If it runs yet another oddball proprietary system, it will likely fail.
I think there is a good chance it's real. Video is harder to fake, and this is the kind of device Apple would produce: nice looking, great in some ways, giving the appearance of being intuitive ("natural handwriting"), and so-so in other ways. A fake video would probably have gone overboard on features. If it's fake, kudos to the creators: they did a good job with whatever they did.
Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.
I presume what the poster means is that by giving away the software, the company destroys the market for the competitors.
Well, that isn't quite true, as we have seen again and again. In fact, in real life, the source code and executable are only a small part of the value of a software product. Most of the value is in the ongoing maintenance, business relationships, trademarks, the user base, the books that have been written about it, in short, the "network" that surrounds it.
To the degree that it is true, well, software companies simply have to get used to the fact that, once created, it costs nothing to give software to additional people--that ultimately has a lot of influence over how software can be priced and licensed. There is no use whining about basic economic realities.
The situation with PCBs and GM foods is quite analogous: in both cases, large corporations, driven by short-term profits, assert that a productthey desparately wanted to produce because is safe. In the case of PCBs, those assertions turned out to be false. It would be prudent to assume that the same could happen with GM foods decades from now.
The burden of proof that GM foods (or any other products, for that matter) are safe in the long term for consumption and the environment rests entirely on the shoulders of their proponents, the people who want to release those organisms into the environment. And biotechnology and ecoology are such new fields that we really can say very little about long term effects.
Personally, I think most GMOs are likely to be non-poisonous and non-invasive. But I think they will be harmful indirectly--by allowing human populations to push further into previously non-arable lands. Ultimately, GMOs don't hold the answer for hunger or human suffering; at some point, we have to limit our growth, and we might as well do it as long as there is still a little bit of earth left.
Well, the email seems to mainly focus on Linux making inroads into existing clients' installations. In that case, any good sales manager would want his people to be on top of it. This isn't about world domination,
I think if a company owns 95% of the desktop market, dedicating any resources or time to stamping out a freeware package that has less than 1% of the market is about world domination and obsession. And Microsoft isn't using this kind of language vis-a-vis MacOS either.
Can you write up a clear, understandable business study explaining why it's better and cheaper to have you administrate this custom box rather than pay for a Microsoft solution?
I haven't even seen a clear, understandable business study explaining why it's better and cheaper to run Microsoft software (although I have seen lots of faulty studies).
Linux is out there in some of your accounts and you may not know it. The ground up nature of how Linux is introduced into our accounts [...]
It's ironic that Microsoft is getting a dose of its own medicine. The IT department (which existed pre-PC) tried to get everybody to use their centrally managed platform, but people just kept buying those darn PCs running Microsoft software.
Well, that aside, I wouldn't necessarily trust the authenticity of the E-mail. Can Microsoft management be stupid enough to send out mail with big warnings "don't forward this"? Haven't they learned from painful pas experience that if you don't want it to get forwarded, you don't send it by E-mail? At the same time, the content of the E-mail seem in character for Microsoft.
Most plausible about it is the obsessive need by Microsoft to control the whole market and let no competition appear. And that's exactly why Microsoft needs to be reduced in size: there is nothing wrong with having Microsoft be a big player in the market, but there is a lot wrong with any OS or software vendor being the only significant player in its market segment.
And the line about Lisa being a "blatant clone of Xerox" is pretty much wrong. Certainly Xerox (and SRI, for that matter) did a lot of groundbreaking GUI work that inspired Apple, but (1) Xerox was an investor in Apple at the time, and (2) Apple is responsible for many of the basic innovations that people expect in GUI's (e.g. the menu bar, the desktop/Finder, dragging window and icons with the mouse, document-centric user view)
You are getting lost in technical details. The point of the Xerox work was to create a machine with an easy-to-use, intuitive WIMP interface for business and publishing applications. That's what Xerox delivered, and that's what Apple delivered as well.
I'd have to support the original poster -- the Lisa was the first GUI-based personal computer that I recall. Sure, there was one obscure workstation line (from Xerox) that was GUI based,
Why is one company's obscure product (Apple Lisa) any better than another company's obscure product (Xerox workstations) if they both were intended to serve the same purpose?
Apple is a company that does good engineering, good design, and good marketing. Apple created the first commercially successful personal computer with a GUI (the Macintosh). Why isn't all of that enough? Why this obsessive need to create a mythology around that company?
When we started the Lisa project in late 1978 our goal was to build a computer that would propel Apple in the business market of the 1980's.
If you actually look at the references I gave you, you'll see that the WIMP interface goes back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Apple made some engineering enhancements, but they didn't invent the GUI.
You can find some information about the history of some of this, as well as Jobs's comments here. Man of these ideas go back to Doug Engelbart in the 1960's, see here.
Apple did an admirable job popularizing some of these ideas and bringing to market a successful product, although in the process, they cut many corners. But Apple neither developed the groundbreaking ideas nor were they even first to market.
You can spell, but apparently not think very clearly. What do you think is more "personal" about a dedicated, overpriced single-user machine from Apple compared to a dedicated, overpriced single-user machine from Xerox, Sun, or Apollo? It can't be the applications, because all of those machines were used for business and desktop publishing applications.
Look up the history of the Alto, Smalltalk, and Dynabook. It's all on the web and goes back to the 1960's and 1970's. No, Apple didn't just visit Xerox and duplicate the project, but they built on years of published research, much of it by people at Xerox, SRI, and other places. And the fact remains that Xerox shipped an business-oriented personal computer running a GUI before Apple.
the Lisa (pictured below left) was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. It was the first personal computer to use a Graphical User Interface.
The Lisa was not the first GUI-based personal computer: Xerox, Apollo, and Sun all beat them to it by several years. The Lisa was a pretty blatant clone of Xerox's machines and it failed for the same reasons: it was too expensive and marketed to the wrong people. Only when Apple shipped a very stripped down machine called the "Mac" and marketed it to a different group of people did they finally succeed.
What we really need is decent privacy legislation so that we don't have to opt out of these things. The default shold be privacy; if you see a benefit in some business sharing or retaining your information for marketing purposes, you can always opt in.
Re:Congrats to the Brits
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So, you congratulate the Brits for being selfish and nationalistic? The irony is, of course, that the British economy and currency are in pretty sad shape. Britain isn't a wealthy empire anymore, it has become a second-rate nation. Britain only stands to gain by joining the monetary union, as many businesses might prefer to have their European offices in an English-speaking country. But until Britain adopts the Euro, it just doesn't make much sense for businesses to go there.
Re:How does devaluing happen now??
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
It's no different from the different states in the US: people, goods, and services can move freely among different states, but their laws and the economy are still different.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see this being a big hit with home users: the whole point about TV is to be able to lean back and enjoy the show without fiddling around. Finding and arranging video clips is a lot of effort. People who want to jump around and interact are better served with a combination of text, images, and links to video clips, like what you find on today's news sites.
You are quite right. And once you have a couple of decades of experience in this industry, like me, you will appreciate the value of well-designed, stable APIs, as opposed to the stuff Microsoft is shipping.
(Of course, functionally, you can do almost everything you can do in CORBA in DCOM and vice versa, but to me that's not the issue.)
COM and CORBA aren't comparable. COM is an attempt to give C++ a dynamic object system. You have to compare COM to something like Objective-C(++), and in that comparison, COM fails miserably: it's much less flexible and much more complex. DCOM is comparable to CORBA, and it's not as good.
Yes, and a steady stream of unnecessary, incompletely documented additions to their APIs is exactly the problem. That is what has kept the Windows platform from being implemented successfully by any other vendor.
*ALMOST EVERY* Time Microsoft wants to make a change that would break something, they just implement it in a separate standard or New API rather than b0rking the old one, which is the way it should be done.
The way it should be done is that you spend some time ahead of time and work out APIs that you can live with for decades. When you do make significant API changes, you give people the tools to convert their code (deprecation, automatic translation). Saddling the platform and their code with dozens of incompatible variants is not the right approach. And the backwards compatibility doesn't really help anyway: you may be able to compile a program written for Windows 3.1 for your XP machine, but its behavior would be so oddball that nobod would want to use it.
If anyone is spouting FUD and nonsense here, it is you.
I don't see any "FUD" here: there is no fear, no uncertainty, and no doubt. As you yourself said, Microsoft constantly extends their APIs and keeps multiple incompatible versions around. Microsoft gets unclonable APIs, quick time to market, no complaints from people too lazy to update their code, and low engineering costs. The people who are screwed are the developers, who have limited choice, poorly thought-out APIs, need to update their code constantly to deal with Microsoft's latest fancies, and too much stuff to learn, and customers, who get locked into a single vendor and get poor quality software. Microsoft's low-quality approach works in terms of their business, but that doesn't make it good engineering.
We don't have to guess there--we already know it: most of the existing Windows APIs are available from C#. So, the situation you get into is that little C# code for Windows will work on Mono, while most of the open source code will work on Windows. That's just what Microsoft likes, and it is foolish for the open source community to deliver all these programmers and all this marketing to Microsoft. It's also unnecessary, since there is nothing in C# that hasn't been present in a number of programming languages with open source implementations.
But, hey, what can we expect from Miguel? He has said clearly that he thinks Microsoft is doing a great job on software and tLinux software should be constructed more like Windows software. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
The government has a place in developing and deploying basic technologies: roads, space technology, weapons technologies, communications technologies. Government support is what made this nation great and powerful. The market cannot address these needs, and it never has.
These things are called "engineering tradeoffs", and they apply to biological organisms as much as to a processor chip. However, this particular tradeoff may not be inevitable: one of the most fundamental engineering tradeoffs in biological organisms is allowing for food scarcity. This not only puts us at risk for obesity, it also means that bodies have to be careful about wasting energy on repairing themselves. With unlimited food available, you may be able to live long, avoid cancer, and not even get fat. How? By having the body more aggressively replace possibly damaged cells, cells that right now are allowed to hang around because it would require too much energy to replace them.
When it comes to software, however, to keep past customers happy, it also makes sense to release the software open source when the company stops developing it commercially. WebObjects, however, is still being sold by Apple.
The main obstacle to open sourcing software is that it may contain other people's code and you can't publish or redistribute code that others hold copyrights or trade secrets in if the contractual agreement with them doesn't allow for it.
Whether this makes it may depend entirely on the software. If it runs a stripped-down version of OSX, it stands a chance. If it runs yet another oddball proprietary system, it will likely fail.
I think there is a good chance it's real. Video is harder to fake, and this is the kind of device Apple would produce: nice looking, great in some ways, giving the appearance of being intuitive ("natural handwriting"), and so-so in other ways. A fake video would probably have gone overboard on features. If it's fake, kudos to the creators: they did a good job with whatever they did.
I presume what the poster means is that by giving away the software, the company destroys the market for the competitors.
Well, that isn't quite true, as we have seen again and again. In fact, in real life, the source code and executable are only a small part of the value of a software product. Most of the value is in the ongoing maintenance, business relationships, trademarks, the user base, the books that have been written about it, in short, the "network" that surrounds it.
To the degree that it is true, well, software companies simply have to get used to the fact that, once created, it costs nothing to give software to additional people--that ultimately has a lot of influence over how software can be priced and licensed. There is no use whining about basic economic realities.
The burden of proof that GM foods (or any other products, for that matter) are safe in the long term for consumption and the environment rests entirely on the shoulders of their proponents, the people who want to release those organisms into the environment. And biotechnology and ecoology are such new fields that we really can say very little about long term effects.
Personally, I think most GMOs are likely to be non-poisonous and non-invasive. But I think they will be harmful indirectly--by allowing human populations to push further into previously non-arable lands. Ultimately, GMOs don't hold the answer for hunger or human suffering; at some point, we have to limit our growth, and we might as well do it as long as there is still a little bit of earth left.
I think if a company owns 95% of the desktop market, dedicating any resources or time to stamping out a freeware package that has less than 1% of the market is about world domination and obsession. And Microsoft isn't using this kind of language vis-a-vis MacOS either.
I haven't even seen a clear, understandable business study explaining why it's better and cheaper to run Microsoft software (although I have seen lots of faulty studies).
It's ironic that Microsoft is getting a dose of its own medicine. The IT department (which existed pre-PC) tried to get everybody to use their centrally managed platform, but people just kept buying those darn PCs running Microsoft software.
Well, that aside, I wouldn't necessarily trust the authenticity of the E-mail. Can Microsoft management be stupid enough to send out mail with big warnings "don't forward this"? Haven't they learned from painful pas experience that if you don't want it to get forwarded, you don't send it by E-mail? At the same time, the content of the E-mail seem in character for Microsoft.
Most plausible about it is the obsessive need by Microsoft to control the whole market and let no competition appear. And that's exactly why Microsoft needs to be reduced in size: there is nothing wrong with having Microsoft be a big player in the market, but there is a lot wrong with any OS or software vendor being the only significant player in its market segment.
You are getting lost in technical details. The point of the Xerox work was to create a machine with an easy-to-use, intuitive WIMP interface for business and publishing applications. That's what Xerox delivered, and that's what Apple delivered as well.
I'd have to support the original poster -- the Lisa was the first GUI-based personal computer that I recall. Sure, there was one obscure workstation line (from Xerox) that was GUI based,
Why is one company's obscure product (Apple Lisa) any better than another company's obscure product (Xerox workstations) if they both were intended to serve the same purpose?
Apple is a company that does good engineering, good design, and good marketing. Apple created the first commercially successful personal computer with a GUI (the Macintosh). Why isn't all of that enough? Why this obsessive need to create a mythology around that company?
When we started the Lisa project in late 1978 our goal was to build a computer that would propel Apple in the business market of the 1980's.
If you actually look at the references I gave you, you'll see that the WIMP interface goes back to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Apple made some engineering enhancements, but they didn't invent the GUI.
Apple did an admirable job popularizing some of these ideas and bringing to market a successful product, although in the process, they cut many corners. But Apple neither developed the groundbreaking ideas nor were they even first to market.
You can spell, but apparently not think very clearly. What do you think is more "personal" about a dedicated, overpriced single-user machine from Apple compared to a dedicated, overpriced single-user machine from Xerox, Sun, or Apollo? It can't be the applications, because all of those machines were used for business and desktop publishing applications.
Look up the history of the Alto, Smalltalk, and Dynabook. It's all on the web and goes back to the 1960's and 1970's. No, Apple didn't just visit Xerox and duplicate the project, but they built on years of published research, much of it by people at Xerox, SRI, and other places. And the fact remains that Xerox shipped an business-oriented personal computer running a GUI before Apple.
the Lisa (pictured below left) was supposed to be the Next Big Thing. It was the first personal computer to use a Graphical User Interface.
The Lisa was not the first GUI-based personal computer: Xerox, Apollo, and Sun all beat them to it by several years. The Lisa was a pretty blatant clone of Xerox's machines and it failed for the same reasons: it was too expensive and marketed to the wrong people. Only when Apple shipped a very stripped down machine called the "Mac" and marketed it to a different group of people did they finally succeed.
What we really need is decent privacy legislation so that we don't have to opt out of these things. The default shold be privacy; if you see a benefit in some business sharing or retaining your information for marketing purposes, you can always opt in.
So, you congratulate the Brits for being selfish and nationalistic? The irony is, of course, that the British economy and currency are in pretty sad shape. Britain isn't a wealthy empire anymore, it has become a second-rate nation. Britain only stands to gain by joining the monetary union, as many businesses might prefer to have their European offices in an English-speaking country. But until Britain adopts the Euro, it just doesn't make much sense for businesses to go there.
It's no different from the different states in the US: people, goods, and services can move freely among different states, but their laws and the economy are still different.