all staying as faithful to the book as possible, without Hollywood's story-twisting and sensationalism spoiling it all.
Wait a minute, as faithful as "possible"? By stating that you're saying that you ARE willing to make changes that you deem approriate for whatever reason you are deeming it appropriate. Is this not what Hollywood does? If are willing to change the source material at all, then you shouldn't go around blasting others for changing the source material regardless of how "morally superiour" you consider your changes.
Meaning that at least with a unified Microsoft/IBM product and a (seemingly) clear migration to 32bit, developers "knew" that they had could migrate to the "more powerful" system as their app's required. When Microsoft split, developers were faced with the fact that to move to 32bit would be taking a huge risk suddenly. So for most developers, they were left with no choice but to stick with the 16bit Win api as the move to both 32bit AND now a competing OS was way to much of a risk. That was my point, that by causing the rift, MS effectively "took away" the incentive to move to 32bit at that time.
This is the late 80's/early 90's: At the time there were still plenty of people who thought OS/2 would be successful, and if people had bought it it would have been. Nobody held a gun to anyone's head and said "you may only write for Windows."
True, but having Microsoft suddenly become a "competing" OS when there was effectively no wide spread application support was lethal. If you were an isv at the time, you still had to choose between writing for an os with a fairly large market share or one where the market share was small and IBM pushed the OS as a high end corp solution. I managed to convince my company to take that risk, mainly due to OS/2 excellent support for DOS, but trying to convince someone to come out with an office suite to compete with Office would be tough (I know people tried, but again, market share is/was king and MS was already established with Word and Excel).
BTW, there was a 16-bit OS/2 you know, and developers could have written to it if they wanted. There were 16-bit versions of Word and Excel, 1-2-3/G, Describe (of course).
I know, I was using OS/2 starting with 1.0 (waiting pateiently for IBM to release 1.1 with the wonderful new Presentation Manager:) AFAIK, Microsoft never officially shipped Word for OS/2 (the company I worked at had beta copies) and I don't ever remember seeing Excel. 123/G was nothing and even 123 was well on the way out by then. And I always hated Describe, it was buggy, the interface clunky, and it just didn't feel like a polished app (maybe later versions did, but not the ones I was using with 1.2 and 1.3).
Don't underestimate the power of market share and "do as Microsoft does" when it comes to making decisions about what platforms to write software for. Yes, OS/2 had a very small window (NPI) of opportunity, but it was too late and MS nailed the coffin shut when they dropped it. Developers could see this happening and coding for OS/2 was considered risky compared to coding for Windows, so to try to say that Windows won based on a fight with equal footing would be misunderstanding the market totally. At the time most developers would have loved to have chucked their kludgy Win16 pieces of junk and start fresh with a more sane API (never mind also having a more robust OS around it), but they were scared by the marketplace.
It's apples and oranges, yes their both fruits but they just can't compare. google does have a lot of computing power, but then can more easily scale their infrastructure to meet their needs (both up and down). Add cpu's and fatter/more pipes, takes some time, but not that much. Compare this to manufacturing. The cost for UNDERESTIMATING manufacturing requirements is death for your company. How long does it take to get a new factory up and going? Employing workers, training them, setting up logistics to get raw materials in and finished product out, etc, etc. This is totally different than slapping some more servers in the server room (there have already been discusions here about how easily googles application scales).
Again, I agree that they were too pie in the sky, but the two business models are completely different and a much better comparison is needed.
But now we're talking chicken/egg. This was all going on about the time of Win 3. Before then there was Win286/386 and there were not that many apps written and it didn't have the market penetration that it currently enjoys. It could (not would, but could) have been a natural point to migrate apps over to 32bit. Remember, the migration didn't really start happening until NT, NOT 3.0/3.1. With 3.x we got the bastard Win32s, which wasen't true 32bit anyway.
Anyway, Microsoft was right. Developers did migrate their Win16 programs to Win32 and the market success of both drew more developers and more users to Windows.
No, they weren't right, they left developers no other choice. Before the rift, you were choosing between legacy (16bit) and the future (32bit), all of a sudden the future got split into two, and the choice became Microsoft vs IBM. This came at a time where with OS/2, you HAD to port to 32bit, which developers didn't want to do right away, so they had the easier approach, stick with 16bit and existing market share.
NO, it's a piece made by developers, you know, people who care about code, not all of the politics and conspiracy theory's around them.
But the politics and conspiracies are a part of the development process. After all, the NT group was not free to drive the API they thought was superior, they had to tend to the one that corporate wanted them to. Remember that NT was supposed to be OS2 v3 and the corp. decision to drive it away from this had a major impact on development. As a developer I would think that this would be a major point since I've not talked to a single developer who would have chosen the Win api vs the OS/2 api as the one to drive into the future.
Google did it right, grow at a sustainable rate, and do not try to get too big too fast.
While I generally agree with you, bringing up Google as a comparison is a massive stretch. You can't compare a search engine company to one that manufactures relatively expensive products. The needs, requirements, and pitfalls are vastly different. The infrastructure requirements are vastly different, the ability to adapt to market conditions are vastly different, you just can't say "he shoulda did what google did...".
Again, I'm not disagreeing with the fact that he got too carried away, but please use a company that has remotely similar requirements/structure to compare against, esp. not Google.
"If they don't come up with a Stirling engine or a killer fuel cell, this thing will go the way of the 128K Mac," says Saffo
Kamen could only dream that the current Segway would be like the Mac 128. After all, it's the machine that has now led to a multi billion dollar company on machines that are descended from it. If 12 years from now 7% of his market were riding iSegways and he had billions of cash in the bank, he'd be a happy man.
Perhaps a better comparison is in order, say something like "Betamax".
Most people who have the expertise needed to make meaningful changes to system config at the sector level (or even the/etc level) will already have another method of writing to the hard disk.
The fix-it guy could slam the drive into a computer dedicated for that task, or insert a boot CD
Yes, in an ideal world all these would be true. However there are always times when a) you don't have a bootable cd (at least one that allows you to do anything other than install/etc) b) you don't have another machine that you can take down to plop the offending hd in. The latter can often happen if you're offsite and the former if someone "borrows" your bootable cd, etc. The whole point of this is to allow you to get something done in a worst case scenerio. All of the above has happened to me, and I'm not even an IT guy (though because of my knowledge I get placed into situations where I have to do IT stuff). Being able to tweak something without having to find/gen boot disks or tear apart another machine (that you hope you have, fine for a pc, not so fine if it's something that doesn't lend itself to having a duplicate of, say a large RS/6000).
I'm not talking about power, I don't want a full suite of stuff. I just want something that I can rely on to get the often times simple tweaks done.
The requirement of having robust access control (beyond simple enter your name and password) is not very common outside the corp. world. So those who've not had to deal in that code would not fully understand how big of a deal that this markup language CAN be (assuming it's adopted, robust, etc, etc). This is definitely one of those areas where "everybody rolls their own", or worse, they dumb down their access control to fit things like directory services and the ilk, that were never intended to do what this is trying to.
Funny how in many posts this has degenerated into either "we don't need no more stinkin languages" or "Sun/Java sucks, yadda, yadda".
Does it ever occur to Sun that Java is not the answer to all problems
Did it occur to you that Sun would write the code to match whatever use fits THEM the best. The fact that they then turn around and make the code OS is a gesture on their part. Did you think they sat around and said "hey, lets write an implementation of this for the masses"? Nope, their needs came first, as it should be.
Being stuffed into a locker has nothing to do with intelligence - it has to do with being "nerdy."
Absolutely. Like the original poster, I was one of the "smart" ones in school, but I was also on the football team and the fastest guy on the track team and I didn't get messed with (being 6'1" didn't hurt too). I was definitely a bit of a nerd, but I don't think that I acted tooo nerdy. And I sure knew of plenty of "nerds" that were not the intellectual elite of the school. Just being a nerd didn't get you put into the "stuffed into a locker" (actually in our school it was locked in the display case in the main hall), it was more being a "misfit".
I would assume that this is more true now that being computer literate at an early age is fairly common place. So being a "nerd", at least a computer one, isn't quite the same stigma that it might have once been. And lets face it, a misfit is a misfit, regardless of how smart, dumb, smelly they might be.
Well... in that case, there are nothing but Intel chips on the Desktop PC CPU market right now:P
Um, I'm not sure what you mean by this? I just said that those cpu's listed are either Intel chips or x86 clones and that I originally misspoke. Are you implying that I was implying something?
A dupe with only one intervening article, this has to be a record? Next will come the side by side dupe, and finally as a crowning achievement/. editors will manage the heretofore deemed impossible, dupe within a dupe where an article will be a duplicate of itself. Beyond that of course will require time travel/visions of the future, the editors will manage to post a dupe for an article has they haven't actually posted yet, but will in the future.
1 12 yo color tv
1 5 yo vcr that gets a lot of use (kids)
1 4 yo 29" tv - pro model (i.e. monitor), used every day
1 4 yo 19" tv - same as above
1 PS2 - used almost every day
1 1 yo minidv camcorder
Various other and sundry Sony items (cd roms, stereo, walkman, etc)
The only non working Sony item we have is one of the 19" tv/monitors that I got in non working form.
Now with as many products as Sony sells, you can ALWAYS find people with both good and bad experiences, but I personally have had excellent luck with their products. The only Sony items I don't buy are high-end hi-fi, just because the sonic quality is marginal (except for some of their higher end dvd players).
Sorry to hear that you've had problems, but if you've found alternatives that make you happy, then more power to ya.
Welcome to the bleeding edge. Or would you rather that Sony just update their products every couple of years so that everyone who buys their products doesn't have to go through the pain of seeing it updated/more powerful/cheaper?
You miss the point. If content providers suddenly start requiring you to have a palladium enabled system, then you're in a bad place. If your company relies on a data feed and the source of that feed switches to palladium, then guess what, so are you. It's not the hardware manuf. adoption of the technology that presents the problem, it's the content providers (including software manuf). So while, "don't upgrade" may be fine if nothing you use or enjoy switches, it may not be a viable option for a great many others.
Re:this article is complete bullshit
on
WiFi Woes With .11g
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Not saying anything about the correctness of the Reg article or of your assesment of it. HOWEVER, you use an example of them claiming the IEEE being "forced" to make a decision, you state that statement is incorrect, and then offer up a couple of examples of how the IEEE was on schedule. What does one have to do with the other? How does the IEEE being on schedule relate to them being "forced" into a choice? Do you have more info to clarify your point?
This phone is ruining my life... I want my old Nokia back.
Question, couldn't you purchase another phone and activate it? I know that they'll charge you, but if you have another phone (I know less likely since the i is a gsm) and it really is making your life so bad, this may be an expensive, but more pleasing option. After all, it's the service that you have to keep for a year, not the phone, right?
My question is why are there no "big names" out there pounding on congress for software patent reform? Seems like one of those things where "everybody" knows it's broken, but yet no one really does anything about. I'm assuming it's because anyone with deep enough pockets (i.e. has congress's ear) benefits from the way things currently are. Does anyone know of any "real" efforts going on out there to try to do something about this?
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all staying as faithful to the book as possible, without Hollywood's story-twisting and sensationalism spoiling it all.
Wait a minute, as faithful as "possible"? By stating that you're saying that you ARE willing to make changes that you deem approriate for whatever reason you are deeming it appropriate. Is this not what Hollywood does? If are willing to change the source material at all, then you shouldn't go around blasting others for changing the source material regardless of how "morally superiour" you consider your changes.
What do you mean they had no choice?
:) AFAIK, Microsoft never officially shipped Word for OS/2 (the company I worked at had beta copies) and I don't ever remember seeing Excel. 123/G was nothing and even 123 was well on the way out by then. And I always hated Describe, it was buggy, the interface clunky, and it just didn't feel like a polished app (maybe later versions did, but not the ones I was using with 1.2 and 1.3).
Meaning that at least with a unified Microsoft/IBM product and a (seemingly) clear migration to 32bit, developers "knew" that they had could migrate to the "more powerful" system as their app's required. When Microsoft split, developers were faced with the fact that to move to 32bit would be taking a huge risk suddenly. So for most developers, they were left with no choice but to stick with the 16bit Win api as the move to both 32bit AND now a competing OS was way to much of a risk. That was my point, that by causing the rift, MS effectively "took away" the incentive to move to 32bit at that time.
This is the late 80's/early 90's: At the time there were still plenty of people who thought OS/2 would be successful, and if people had bought it it would have been. Nobody held a gun to anyone's head and said "you may only write for Windows."
True, but having Microsoft suddenly become a "competing" OS when there was effectively no wide spread application support was lethal. If you were an isv at the time, you still had to choose between writing for an os with a fairly large market share or one where the market share was small and IBM pushed the OS as a high end corp solution. I managed to convince my company to take that risk, mainly due to OS/2 excellent support for DOS, but trying to convince someone to come out with an office suite to compete with Office would be tough (I know people tried, but again, market share is/was king and MS was already established with Word and Excel).
BTW, there was a 16-bit OS/2 you know, and developers could have written to it if they wanted. There were 16-bit versions of Word and Excel, 1-2-3/G, Describe (of course).
I know, I was using OS/2 starting with 1.0 (waiting pateiently for IBM to release 1.1 with the wonderful new Presentation Manager
Don't underestimate the power of market share and "do as Microsoft does" when it comes to making decisions about what platforms to write software for. Yes, OS/2 had a very small window (NPI) of opportunity, but it was too late and MS nailed the coffin shut when they dropped it. Developers could see this happening and coding for OS/2 was considered risky compared to coding for Windows, so to try to say that Windows won based on a fight with equal footing would be misunderstanding the market totally. At the time most developers would have loved to have chucked their kludgy Win16 pieces of junk and start fresh with a more sane API (never mind also having a more robust OS around it), but they were scared by the marketplace.
It's a stretch
It's apples and oranges, yes their both fruits but they just can't compare. google does have a lot of computing power, but then can more easily scale their infrastructure to meet their needs (both up and down). Add cpu's and fatter/more pipes, takes some time, but not that much. Compare this to manufacturing. The cost for UNDERESTIMATING manufacturing requirements is death for your company. How long does it take to get a new factory up and going? Employing workers, training them, setting up logistics to get raw materials in and finished product out, etc, etc. This is totally different than slapping some more servers in the server room (there have already been discusions here about how easily googles application scales).
Again, I agree that they were too pie in the sky, but the two business models are completely different and a much better comparison is needed.
But now we're talking chicken/egg. This was all going on about the time of Win 3. Before then there was Win286/386 and there were not that many apps written and it didn't have the market penetration that it currently enjoys. It could (not would, but could) have been a natural point to migrate apps over to 32bit. Remember, the migration didn't really start happening until NT, NOT 3.0/3.1. With 3.x we got the bastard Win32s, which wasen't true 32bit anyway.
Anyway, Microsoft was right. Developers did migrate their Win16 programs to Win32 and the market success of both drew more developers and more users to Windows.
No, they weren't right, they left developers no other choice. Before the rift, you were choosing between legacy (16bit) and the future (32bit), all of a sudden the future got split into two, and the choice became Microsoft vs IBM. This came at a time where with OS/2, you HAD to port to 32bit, which developers didn't want to do right away, so they had the easier approach, stick with 16bit and existing market share.
NO, it's a piece made by developers, you know, people who care about code, not all of the politics and conspiracy theory's around them.
But the politics and conspiracies are a part of the development process. After all, the NT group was not free to drive the API they thought was superior, they had to tend to the one that corporate wanted them to. Remember that NT was supposed to be OS2 v3 and the corp. decision to drive it away from this had a major impact on development. As a developer I would think that this would be a major point since I've not talked to a single developer who would have chosen the Win api vs the OS/2 api as the one to drive into the future.
Google did it right, grow at a sustainable rate, and do not try to get too big too fast.
...".
While I generally agree with you, bringing up Google as a comparison is a massive stretch. You can't compare a search engine company to one that manufactures relatively expensive products. The needs, requirements, and pitfalls are vastly different. The infrastructure requirements are vastly different, the ability to adapt to market conditions are vastly different, you just can't say "he shoulda did what google did
Again, I'm not disagreeing with the fact that he got too carried away, but please use a company that has remotely similar requirements/structure to compare against, esp. not Google.
"If they don't come up with a Stirling engine or a killer fuel cell, this thing will go the way of the 128K Mac," says Saffo
Kamen could only dream that the current Segway would be like the Mac 128. After all, it's the machine that has now led to a multi billion dollar company on machines that are descended from it. If 12 years from now 7% of his market were riding iSegways and he had billions of cash in the bank, he'd be a happy man.
Perhaps a better comparison is in order, say something like "Betamax".
Most people who have the expertise needed to make meaningful changes to system config at the sector level (or even the /etc level) will already have another method of writing to the hard disk.
The fix-it guy could slam the drive into a computer dedicated for that task, or insert a boot CD
Yes, in an ideal world all these would be true. However there are always times when a) you don't have a bootable cd (at least one that allows you to do anything other than install/etc) b) you don't have another machine that you can take down to plop the offending hd in. The latter can often happen if you're offsite and the former if someone "borrows" your bootable cd, etc. The whole point of this is to allow you to get something done in a worst case scenerio. All of the above has happened to me, and I'm not even an IT guy (though because of my knowledge I get placed into situations where I have to do IT stuff). Being able to tweak something without having to find/gen boot disks or tear apart another machine (that you hope you have, fine for a pc, not so fine if it's something that doesn't lend itself to having a duplicate of, say a large RS/6000).
I'm not talking about power, I don't want a full suite of stuff. I just want something that I can rely on to get the often times simple tweaks done.
Usually the two most critical items needed to help a problem system is file system access and then some basic editing tool. If this bios can come with
1 - your choice of file system driver (ntfs, ufs, whateverfs)
2 - a raw sector editor
3 - a simple text file editor
That would be a godsend. A tcp/ip stack with telnet/ftp would also be very useful, but I could live without that.
The requirement of having robust access control (beyond simple enter your name and password) is not very common outside the corp. world. So those who've not had to deal in that code would not fully understand how big of a deal that this markup language CAN be (assuming it's adopted, robust, etc, etc). This is definitely one of those areas where "everybody rolls their own", or worse, they dumb down their access control to fit things like directory services and the ilk, that were never intended to do what this is trying to.
Funny how in many posts this has degenerated into either "we don't need no more stinkin languages" or "Sun/Java sucks, yadda, yadda".
Does it ever occur to Sun that Java is not the answer to all problems
Did it occur to you that Sun would write the code to match whatever use fits THEM the best. The fact that they then turn around and make the code OS is a gesture on their part. Did you think they sat around and said "hey, lets write an implementation of this for the masses"? Nope, their needs came first, as it should be.
I assume that they mean that Sun tools that support the language are in Java and are OS, not the language itself.
Being stuffed into a locker has nothing to do with intelligence - it has to do with being "nerdy."
Absolutely. Like the original poster, I was one of the "smart" ones in school, but I was also on the football team and the fastest guy on the track team and I didn't get messed with (being 6'1" didn't hurt too). I was definitely a bit of a nerd, but I don't think that I acted tooo nerdy. And I sure knew of plenty of "nerds" that were not the intellectual elite of the school. Just being a nerd didn't get you put into the "stuffed into a locker" (actually in our school it was locked in the display case in the main hall), it was more being a "misfit".
I would assume that this is more true now that being computer literate at an early age is fairly common place. So being a "nerd", at least a computer one, isn't quite the same stigma that it might have once been. And lets face it, a misfit is a misfit, regardless of how smart, dumb, smelly they might be.
Well... in that case, there are nothing but Intel chips on the Desktop PC CPU market right now :P
Um, I'm not sure what you mean by this? I just said that those cpu's listed are either Intel chips or x86 clones and that I originally misspoke. Are you implying that I was implying something?
Athlon's aren't Intel chips
I know, neither are/was the K6/6x86/Nx586/etc. I spotted my bad wording too late, oh well.
And those are just the intel chips :)
Oh and before anyone jumps on me, I meant to say Intel and x86 clones.
OK, from memory:
:)
8080
8085
8086
8088
80188
80186
80286
i860
i890
80386 (sx/dx)
80486 (sx/dx/dx2/dx4) Nx586
6x86
Pent (60/90/100/133)
Pent Pro
K6
K62
PIII Xeon
Athlon (slot A/socket A)
And those are just the intel chips
BTW, anyone have a i432 they want to get rid of?
A dupe with only one intervening article, this has to be a record? Next will come the side by side dupe, and finally as a crowning achievement /. editors will manage the heretofore deemed impossible, dupe within a dupe where an article will be a duplicate of itself. Beyond that of course will require time travel/visions of the future, the editors will manage to post a dupe for an article has they haven't actually posted yet, but will in the future.
That's funny we have
1 12 yo color tv
1 5 yo vcr that gets a lot of use (kids)
1 4 yo 29" tv - pro model (i.e. monitor), used every day
1 4 yo 19" tv - same as above
1 PS2 - used almost every day
1 1 yo minidv camcorder
Various other and sundry Sony items (cd roms, stereo, walkman, etc)
The only non working Sony item we have is one of the 19" tv/monitors that I got in non working form.
Now with as many products as Sony sells, you can ALWAYS find people with both good and bad experiences, but I personally have had excellent luck with their products. The only Sony items I don't buy are high-end hi-fi, just because the sonic quality is marginal (except for some of their higher end dvd players).
Sorry to hear that you've had problems, but if you've found alternatives that make you happy, then more power to ya.
Well you could always go with a T68i and bluetooth to the Clie. No concerns about wires and you can keep the T68 in your pocket/backpack/waist.
Welcome to the bleeding edge. Or would you rather that Sony just update their products every couple of years so that everyone who buys their products doesn't have to go through the pain of seeing it updated/more powerful/cheaper?
DO NOT UPGRADE and use THE OLD STANDARD.
You miss the point. If content providers suddenly start requiring you to have a palladium enabled system, then you're in a bad place. If your company relies on a data feed and the source of that feed switches to palladium, then guess what, so are you. It's not the hardware manuf. adoption of the technology that presents the problem, it's the content providers (including software manuf). So while, "don't upgrade" may be fine if nothing you use or enjoy switches, it may not be a viable option for a great many others.
Not saying anything about the correctness of the Reg article or of your assesment of it. HOWEVER, you use an example of them claiming the IEEE being "forced" to make a decision, you state that statement is incorrect, and then offer up a couple of examples of how the IEEE was on schedule. What does one have to do with the other? How does the IEEE being on schedule relate to them being "forced" into a choice? Do you have more info to clarify your point?
This phone is ruining my life... I want my old Nokia back.
Question, couldn't you purchase another phone and activate it? I know that they'll charge you, but if you have another phone (I know less likely since the i is a gsm) and it really is making your life so bad, this may be an expensive, but more pleasing option. After all, it's the service that you have to keep for a year, not the phone, right?
My question is why are there no "big names" out there pounding on congress for software patent reform? Seems like one of those things where "everybody" knows it's broken, but yet no one really does anything about. I'm assuming it's because anyone with deep enough pockets (i.e. has congress's ear) benefits from the way things currently are. Does anyone know of any "real" efforts going on out there to try to do something about this?