Sure, this is the part where we spend the next 4 years dinking around, hoping the next release of Moonlight will catch up with the evolution of Silverlight, which it never does.
Similarly, I still fire up Wine every couple years to make sure it still doesn't work. But speaking of Wine, Silverlight won't even install without passing Windows Genuine Advantage, so the rise of Silverlight is another big nail in that coffin.
So count me among the sceptics for re-implementing Microsoft APIs. Samba works often enough to be useful, but not always, and that's about as good as it gets.
I do that already. I sit on my couch with a laptop, start X11VNC on my PVR's TV display, start VNC Viewer on the laptop, start up VMWare on the PVR, start up XP in VMWare, connect the virtual sound card, full-screen VMWare, launch firefox, full-screen firefox, then close VNC Viewer on the laptop. It's completely ridiculous.
PS am I the only one who finds something terribly wrong with a rich guy polluting the world just so he can provide for his own selfish pleasure?
Money is nothing more or less than an entitlement to consume natural resources and tell other people what to do. Consuming resources seems to be a defining characteristic of life itself, increasing in population exponentially until either starving or poisoned by its own excrement. And humans are the champions of all species.
Maybe we start to see DirectX like games directly in web browser too.
Too bad "we" doesn't include "me." My linux-based PVR can't run Netflix on demand because it's silverlight-based, so that's my main association with the technology. Hulu is also linking out to broadcaster's own incompatible streaming sites rather than hosting stuff itself. I fear we are returning to the bad old days of a few years ago when a lot of multimedia on the web was incompatible with linux. Poor linux users, under-represented minority that we are:)
Besides, X, although designed explicitly from the beginning to host remote applications, sucks at it. It is unusable on a link with any significant latency, and cannot migrate a client to a new server. VNC and Remote Desktop, though seemingly less elegant solutions, work much better, mainly because they are synchronized more loosely.
I own a Garmin 60CS, and I am certain that with the number of people who own the iPhone and similar products, there is simply no way Garmin can keep up. The Garmin software, both on the unit and on the PC, is relatively amateurish. For instance, the search function is crude and slow - and look at what you are competing with on the iPhone - google maps. The garmin is dependent on the PC, and the maps are quickly outdated because it has no Internet connectivity.
All that said, I do need the rugged design of the Garmin for hiking and motorcycling. I suspect Garmin will survive for specialized applications, like aviation and maritime. But when GPS is a freebie add-on to everything, specialists like Garmin will have to leave the mass market, or radically up their game while also drastically slashing their prices just to stay alive.
If only you read more than the first sentence of TFSummary: "I like Cacti, but usually I use it only for performance monitoring, since pooling can't be set to 5 or 10 sec interval for huge networks. I'm thinking about Nagios (but the 2D map is hard to understand), or maybe OpManager."
Obviously by "from scratch" he means his company has nothing in place he has to build on; he is free to build a system on whatever tools he likes.
Making software more robust by adding complexity to it (multithreading) is by no means a winning formula - how often does a "rogue" tab bring down the others, vs. the number of race conditions and deadlocks users will experience with the new design? Only time will tell, so forking for a while and trying it seems the perfect solution.
Toyota had and has as many big SUVs as any of the other automakers. Go check out their lineup.
Sure. The question is, why did Toyota invest its profits from the last generation of technology to stay relevant in a changing world, whereas US car companies almost completely failed to do so?
there are as many parts in a small car as a big SUV while the margin on the SUV is much more fulfilling.
You mean "were." SUV's are getting dumped in fire sales. This resulted in the bankruptcy of GM, which only accelerated the trend. When the world economy starts to recover and oil prices surge again, will the traditionalists finally realize that the 90s are not coming back?
Also, good luck with that battery pack - you must not have any laptops, flashlights, or toys to know how frequently batteries fail and have to be replaced.
Now there's the GM mindset in a nutshell: "if toy companies haven't already solved the problem, we're sure not going to try!"
I disagree, simply because Toyota is easily the #1 leader in hybrid auto sales, and is making lots of money from them all by itself. Here's a cite for those assertions and lots more about how the Japanese and Toyota in particular are about to reap a windfall for their forward thinking engineering. Choice quote:
"Toyota has already reached the break-even point on sales of its hybrids; by contrast, its foreign competitors, like GM, still have years of bleeding red ink ahead of them. Toyota says the parts in its next line of hybrids, due for release next year, will cost about half the current bunch, allowing it to drop prices and raise profits. While the company is estimated to have lost about $10,000 on each car produced when the line was launched back in 1997, "the new Prius is going to be hugely profitable," says Nikko's Matsushima, bringing in thousands of dollars per car.
Meanwhile, as of just six weeks ago, you have GM clinging to the old line: "as long as gas is cheap, Americans will want big, powerful vehicles. He compared [Obama's] policy to trying to fight obesity by having the government require that clothing only be made in small sizes." This after GM already went broke pursuing that strategy, while Toyota is poised to make a killing on their small fuel-efficient cars!
Chameleon uses gaze-tracking software and camera equipment to track an authorized reader's eyes... "Check, that's doable now."
Well, sort of. A decent eye tracker (example 1, example 2) costs $15,000 to $30,000 (please do not request a link to a price quote - the fact that they don't list prices on their pages should be a good clue). And this scrambling system would be worse than useless with a bad eye tracker. (PS, please, please prove me wrong by posting a link to a cheap, robust, accurate eye-tracking solution!)
American Soldiers fight for the Constitution (and freedom).
The main reason people are willing fight dangerous battles (and other potential sacrifices) is because it is expected of them by the people near and dear to them - their squad, disciples, buddies, parents, comrades, bretheren, or whatever you want to call it in whatever context. Long-lived organizations always have a structure and activities to enhance camaraderie, such as organizing people into relatively small groups with a stable membership, and exposing them to peril together (even manufactured hardship if necessary). Loyalty, peer pressure, honor, whatever you want to call it, it's a very powerful motivator for tribal creatures such as ourselves, much more so than abstract nationalistic interests or ideology - which is why so many varied nations and ideologies have little trouble raising armies to fight and die for them. I quote:
The squad or section of ten or a dozen men was the basic building block of the infantry and its smallest tactical body - what some German instructions called the 'fire unit'. Just as importantly, it was the corerstone of morale. Few veterans cite patriotic idealism, still fewer a political creed, as the impulse which made them pull the trigger or march the extra mile; almost invariably, the talk of the fear of letting their comrades down. As signaller Ronald Elliott of the 16th Durhams put it, the motivation was respect for yourself and 'for your mates.'
- World War II Infantry Tactics
By Stephen Bull, Mike Chappell
Motion control is a gimmick. It can never, ever be the main way of controlling video games.
I agree the modern control is the result of an evolutionary process. But at the same time, conventional video games have evolved with the limitations and possibilities of the controllers. Meanwhile, conventional, real-world sports have not died out, even though they require (gasp) moving your body! So I think we should look for novel controls to expand the scope of games, rather than displacing conventional controllers for conventional games.
Interesting, but those are inventions, not companies (except for Altair engineering which is not in the league of google, apple, ebay, etc).
Now, I will readily agree that inventions are ultimately all-important. But we were talking about Marc Andreesen's venture capital investment firm. You can't invest in "The Internet," or "C". How many items in your list made millions for their investors, or even for the inventors themselves? It's a very small number, which is perhaps an indictment of intellectual property in the US. And of course, ultimately wealth isn't a great indicator of personal wealth anyways. But if we're going to have a discussion about "stuff that made lots of money for early investors," the items in your list don't stack up. The other interesting thing is the list doesn't offer a whole lot of hope for people beyond their 30's.
Amazing. You respond to a challenge of selection bias with an even narrower bias.
You would be right if it were a narrow bias. What IT sectors are more important than the ones I listed, and which of those sectors are lead by companies founded by older people? Come on, if you are correct and I am ignoring lots of counter examples, this should be an easy one.
The lesson is simple: No matter how much of a cash cow your current product line is, you need to be investing in the R&D to compete in the next generation of products. Otherwise your competitors will get there first and make you ancient history.
Really? Look at Microsoft, they have been paranoid of being eclipsed since day #1, and followed exactly the strategy you suggest, pouring untold billions into R&D - with scarcely any effect. Look at google, spinning off services madly, yet all their profit comes from their original business.
So I am leaning towards another simple conclusion: it's hard to make lighting strike twice. Maybe Microsoft's investors should have taken home the company's windfall profits home as dividends all these years instead of plowing them all into making sure google would be invented at Microsoft, which it wasn't.
do you really want to argue based on such an obvious deliberate selection bias?
Fair enough, but the number of tech sectors is small enough to take a census rather than a survey. Microsoft is #1 in desktop software, Dell is #1 in desktop hardware, google is #1 in search, ebay (Pierre Omidyar) is #1 in auctions, facebook is #1 in social networking, Apple must be #1 in something:), all founded by youngsters. So the question is, can you come up with an equally impressive list of tech companies founded by older people? If so I would agree the whiz kid myth is nothing more. Oracle wasn't founded by Ellison until he was 33, so I guess that's a counter-example, sort of.
My 60+ year old dad keeps up with technology, especially internet technology, better than any of them.
Keeping up is one thing, pioneering is another. The myth of silicon valley whiz-kids is distasteful. But When you look at Microsoft, Apple, google, facebook, Sun, netscape,... it is hard to dismiss entirely.
We are not talking about "professional homes," but rather the super rich. Somebody with 5 million dollars is rich. You might get that rich being, say, a renowned neurosurgeon. 5 million is a lot, enough to afford a nice $200K Ferrari, but a $2M Veyron? No. So we are talking about people with hundreds of millions of dollars here. Even if they marry some hard-working professional worth $5M, it would increase the poorer spouse's spending power by about a factor of 100 - i.e. a negligible fraction of their newfound spending power was earned. So, when you talk about people buying a $2M car, you are talking about perhaps 10,000 eligible buyers worldwide (there are about 1000 billionaires worldwide), most of them later in life (look at the Forbes top 10). You want us to believe a significant percentage of those people are marrying each other?
And again, this is without considering heirs at all. The two richest women in America, for instance, are Wal Mart heirs who had nothing to do with the business.
I'm awfully tired of this jealous-of-people-with-money attitude. They probably earned it.
They probably didn't. First, most people have at least one significant other who shares their riches. This fact alone means about 50% of the people with super spending power did not earn it. And that doesn't even include their heirs.
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Similarly, I still fire up Wine every couple years to make sure it still doesn't work. But speaking of Wine, Silverlight won't even install without passing Windows Genuine Advantage, so the rise of Silverlight is another big nail in that coffin.
So count me among the sceptics for re-implementing Microsoft APIs. Samba works often enough to be useful, but not always, and that's about as good as it gets.
I do that already. I sit on my couch with a laptop, start X11VNC on my PVR's TV display, start VNC Viewer on the laptop, start up VMWare on the PVR, start up XP in VMWare, connect the virtual sound card, full-screen VMWare, launch firefox, full-screen firefox, then close VNC Viewer on the laptop. It's completely ridiculous.
Money is nothing more or less than an entitlement to consume natural resources and tell other people what to do. Consuming resources seems to be a defining characteristic of life itself, increasing in population exponentially until either starving or poisoned by its own excrement. And humans are the champions of all species.
Stuff happens, at least he lived a very full life.
How does undercutting the competition by giving away the store do any good? It might help Flash, but would Flash still help Adobe?
What difference does running in a browser make?
Too bad "we" doesn't include "me." My linux-based PVR can't run Netflix on demand because it's silverlight-based, so that's my main association with the technology. Hulu is also linking out to broadcaster's own incompatible streaming sites rather than hosting stuff itself. I fear we are returning to the bad old days of a few years ago when a lot of multimedia on the web was incompatible with linux. Poor linux users, under-represented minority that we are :)
Besides, X, although designed explicitly from the beginning to host remote applications, sucks at it. It is unusable on a link with any significant latency, and cannot migrate a client to a new server. VNC and Remote Desktop, though seemingly less elegant solutions, work much better, mainly because they are synchronized more loosely.
All that said, I do need the rugged design of the Garmin for hiking and motorcycling. I suspect Garmin will survive for specialized applications, like aviation and maritime. But when GPS is a freebie add-on to everything, specialists like Garmin will have to leave the mass market, or radically up their game while also drastically slashing their prices just to stay alive.
Obviously by "from scratch" he means his company has nothing in place he has to build on; he is free to build a system on whatever tools he likes.
Making software more robust by adding complexity to it (multithreading) is by no means a winning formula - how often does a "rogue" tab bring down the others, vs. the number of race conditions and deadlocks users will experience with the new design? Only time will tell, so forking for a while and trying it seems the perfect solution.
Sure. The question is, why did Toyota invest its profits from the last generation of technology to stay relevant in a changing world, whereas US car companies almost completely failed to do so?
You mean "were." SUV's are getting dumped in fire sales. This resulted in the bankruptcy of GM, which only accelerated the trend. When the world economy starts to recover and oil prices surge again, will the traditionalists finally realize that the 90s are not coming back?
Now there's the GM mindset in a nutshell: "if toy companies haven't already solved the problem, we're sure not going to try!"
Meanwhile, as of just six weeks ago, you have GM clinging to the old line: "as long as gas is cheap, Americans will want big, powerful vehicles. He compared [Obama's] policy to trying to fight obesity by having the government require that clothing only be made in small sizes." This after GM already went broke pursuing that strategy, while Toyota is poised to make a killing on their small fuel-efficient cars!
Well, sort of. A decent eye tracker (example 1, example 2) costs $15,000 to $30,000 (please do not request a link to a price quote - the fact that they don't list prices on their pages should be a good clue). And this scrambling system would be worse than useless with a bad eye tracker. (PS, please, please prove me wrong by posting a link to a cheap, robust, accurate eye-tracking solution!)
The main reason people are willing fight dangerous battles (and other potential sacrifices) is because it is expected of them by the people near and dear to them - their squad, disciples, buddies, parents, comrades, bretheren, or whatever you want to call it in whatever context. Long-lived organizations always have a structure and activities to enhance camaraderie, such as organizing people into relatively small groups with a stable membership, and exposing them to peril together (even manufactured hardship if necessary). Loyalty, peer pressure, honor, whatever you want to call it, it's a very powerful motivator for tribal creatures such as ourselves, much more so than abstract nationalistic interests or ideology - which is why so many varied nations and ideologies have little trouble raising armies to fight and die for them. I quote:
- World War II Infantry Tactics By Stephen Bull, Mike Chappell
I agree the modern control is the result of an evolutionary process. But at the same time, conventional video games have evolved with the limitations and possibilities of the controllers. Meanwhile, conventional, real-world sports have not died out, even though they require (gasp) moving your body! So I think we should look for novel controls to expand the scope of games, rather than displacing conventional controllers for conventional games.
Sorry, I meant "wealth isn't a great indicator of personal worth."
Now, I will readily agree that inventions are ultimately all-important. But we were talking about Marc Andreesen's venture capital investment firm. You can't invest in "The Internet," or "C". How many items in your list made millions for their investors, or even for the inventors themselves? It's a very small number, which is perhaps an indictment of intellectual property in the US. And of course, ultimately wealth isn't a great indicator of personal wealth anyways. But if we're going to have a discussion about "stuff that made lots of money for early investors," the items in your list don't stack up. The other interesting thing is the list doesn't offer a whole lot of hope for people beyond their 30's.
You would be right if it were a narrow bias. What IT sectors are more important than the ones I listed, and which of those sectors are lead by companies founded by older people? Come on, if you are correct and I am ignoring lots of counter examples, this should be an easy one.
PS props to Apple for bucking the trend and making lighting strike seemingly at will. I think Jobs must have sold his soul to the devil.
Really? Look at Microsoft, they have been paranoid of being eclipsed since day #1, and followed exactly the strategy you suggest, pouring untold billions into R&D - with scarcely any effect. Look at google, spinning off services madly, yet all their profit comes from their original business.
So I am leaning towards another simple conclusion: it's hard to make lighting strike twice. Maybe Microsoft's investors should have taken home the company's windfall profits home as dividends all these years instead of plowing them all into making sure google would be invented at Microsoft, which it wasn't.
Fair enough, but the number of tech sectors is small enough to take a census rather than a survey. Microsoft is #1 in desktop software, Dell is #1 in desktop hardware, google is #1 in search, ebay (Pierre Omidyar) is #1 in auctions, facebook is #1 in social networking, Apple must be #1 in something :), all founded by youngsters. So the question is, can you come up with an equally impressive list of tech companies founded by older people? If so I would agree the whiz kid myth is nothing more. Oracle wasn't founded by Ellison until he was 33, so I guess that's a counter-example, sort of.
Keeping up is one thing, pioneering is another. The myth of silicon valley whiz-kids is distasteful. But When you look at Microsoft, Apple, google, facebook, Sun, netscape,... it is hard to dismiss entirely.
And again, this is without considering heirs at all. The two richest women in America, for instance, are Wal Mart heirs who had nothing to do with the business.
They probably didn't. First, most people have at least one significant other who shares their riches. This fact alone means about 50% of the people with super spending power did not earn it. And that doesn't even include their heirs.