"The movie "2001" had "laptops" that seemed to work."
Don't remember those. In what scene(s) did they appear? I remember tablets that played TV images (during the "TV dinner" scene) but were no data displays.
"We're using a network-transparent protocol for the display server, but most people aren't running apps from remote hosts, and applications aren't being written with this in mind."
I can say that. It's really painful to run, say, gedit across a 256 Kbps link. OTOH, running emacs (as someone pointed out earlier) is quite painless (for the X part of it, at least).
Windows users can do almost anything via Remote Desktop. It's always a shame when they have toys we don't.
There is a minor problem in your logic: the Touch has no bluetooth functionality. At least mine does not. BT is part of the "phone side", which encompasses the stuff you usually find in a cheap phone: voice, data, bluetooth and a camera. The rest is an iPod/PDA.
"As someone who remembers punching holes in 5.25" floppies so you could turn 'em over and another 360K by using both sides"
I remember poking values in memory to upgrade my 140K disks to 160K and then punching the side of the disk (index holes were not needed in the brilliant Wozniak design) to be able to flip it over.
Boy... We are old. I bet I have icons in my desktop that would not fit in an Apple II floppy disk.
Well... My netbook has 2 GB of memory, 160 GB of storage, gigabit networking and thinks it has two 32 bit cores. It's a veritable late 80's, early 90's supercomputer that fits in my backpack. And I bought it cheap.
"I didn't feel safe. Not that I'd ever been safe, but my perception had always been so."
You were, and still are, pretty safe. There was not much an improvement in your personal safety against terrorists since 2001.
911 was a single, spectacular, event but I seriously doubt anyone would pull that off today even if there were no change in security procedures. They were able to take the planes because, at that time, the basic orientation was to cooperate with highjackers in order to safeguard the security of the crew, passengers and aircraft. Highjacked planes were used to negociate, not as guided bombs. 911 changed those rules. Nobody will ever again be able to highjack a plane that easily.
As for other terrorist attacks... Well... Let's just say your chances of dying very old have always been very good.
They feel threatened because so much of their value proposition comes from network economics. The value of running Sharepoint drops drastically with a slight drop in the Office usage. One of the main drivers of Office sales is that other people send you Office documents and Office is the obvious choice for opening them. If people start sending documents as links to Google Documents, the incentive is removed and people would be just fine with a browser. The more people rely on browsers, the less reason there is to buy a computer without Windows and go for one of the Linux distros being installed in them.
They have every reason to feel threatened by anything with a measurable market share.
Apple users, at least the more loyal of them, know their machines intimately. they don't edit configuration files, but they know more about how their computers work than the average Windows user.
How so? Consider the hands on approach to where your files are stored, the disk icons on the desktop. Also consider the application installation procedure - dragging an icon into an Applications folder. Mac users _know_ application files belong to that folder and know their computers have that many disks and they are named such and such. They even have a notion of what a hard disk looks like.
This is an example of a great product - users learn about it and are able to create mental models (however crude they can be) of how they work. Those models are then used to observe, learn more and anticipate how their computers will behave under a given set of conditions. Mac users grow considerably more sophisticated than their Windows counterparts.
Contrast that with the Windows way, where you give a program the authority to execute the miriad steps necessary to install a program. Windows users learn nothing from normal, dumbed down, computer operation.
"People might be getting more sophisticated and knowing what operating system is running on all of their personal devices, but it's not because they want to, it's because the products are crap and don't shield the consumers from their underlying workings properly."
A great product doesn't shield you from its workings. It educates you about them. It makes you curious and makes you want to know it.
As for the phones, you no longer talk to the operator, you dial numbers into a computer that connects calls. You are the operator talking to the computer at the switch (which is pretty much what later day operators did.
"You answered yourself with the second sentence; iPods and iPhones aren't targetted at geeks."
There was a time only a few people came close to a computer. They were used and understood by even fewer. Then computers became smaller, cheaper and more useful, and a lot of people started to use them, first as terminals, then as personal computers and then disguised as PDAs, phones, music players, DVRs and a host other small electronic devices, to the point that one in four human beings own one, even without knowing. Terms like "operating system", "firmware", "proprietary" and, sadly, "crash" became part of common vocabulary to an ever increasing number of people.
This is not new. At the dawn of the phone, people picked it up and a well trained operator listened to your instructions and completed the call. The upper-limit on the number of phones in the world was given by the availability of operators. Now, we are long past that upper limit and everybody is a phone operator - we don't give instructions to an operator anymore - we know how to operate a planet-wide phone system and to patch international calls over different telcos.
Woz is right. An increasing number of consumers will get increasingly more sophisticated with time, as they relate to their technology. That spells doom for technologies that try to shape them instead of allowing themselves to be shaped by them.
Somehow, I am not very sure MS will keep the deadline.
OTOH, they have announced they are slimming it down to a bare minimum and pushing their downloadable stuff instead.
It's fun to watch how buzzword-compliant they are. "Multi-touch" and "Cloud" are terms they constantly associate with their future product line. It's textbook vaporware tactics at work.
We don't have a million dedicated hobbyists. We need something that is a drop-in replacement for a PC motherboard, something that could be used everywhere to power decent cheap, power-efficient and, hopefully, solid performance workstations.
There are zillions of company drones that spend all day between SAP, e-mail and spreadsheets. As soon they get an easy to deploy and manage non-Windows solution, they will be migrated. If the hardware is Windows-proof, better, as they won't be able to turn back.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they sell the electronic ballots. This _is_ distributing the software and, as far as I understand the GPL, it's also a copyright violation.
It would be sweet if by some courtroom magic we could use Diebold to fund lots of open source development.
"The movie "2001" had "laptops" that seemed to work."
Don't remember those. In what scene(s) did they appear? I remember tablets that played TV images (during the "TV dinner" scene) but were no data displays.
"We're using a network-transparent protocol for the display server, but most people aren't running apps from remote hosts, and applications aren't being written with this in mind."
I can say that. It's really painful to run, say, gedit across a 256 Kbps link. OTOH, running emacs (as someone pointed out earlier) is quite painless (for the X part of it, at least).
Windows users can do almost anything via Remote Desktop. It's always a shame when they have toys we don't.
No xlogo and xclock then?
Oh no!
If I got it correctly, one could port the rest of X to run on top of this lightweight server.
So, if you need X functionality, you could get it along a more modern environment.
That was mean. They deserve it.
"it is hard to find any negative articles on PGP"
Most probably because it's not common to find it abused in such a stupid way...
Too much tweaking, OTOH, can ruin it.
Win 98 to Win Me
But in the 3.x series, wfw 3.11 was a killer. It took me a while to switch to 95.
Well... I prefer the Acer Aspire One. And, before we enter a religious war, I prefer it because I find it slightly prettier than the Eee.
It's too ugly to compete in this segment
On the other hand, Scandinavian programmers will probably learn other better languages. See? There is always a bright side.
"If you think raid is protecting your data, you're crazy."
BTW, RAID will do nothing if you accidentally "sudo rm -rf /" it.
There is a minor problem in your logic: the Touch has no bluetooth functionality. At least mine does not. BT is part of the "phone side", which encompasses the stuff you usually find in a cheap phone: voice, data, bluetooth and a camera. The rest is an iPod/PDA.
"As someone who remembers punching holes in 5.25" floppies so you could turn 'em over and another 360K by using both sides"
I remember poking values in memory to upgrade my 140K disks to 160K and then punching the side of the disk (index holes were not needed in the brilliant Wozniak design) to be able to flip it over.
Boy... We are old. I bet I have icons in my desktop that would not fit in an Apple II floppy disk.
Well... My netbook has 2 GB of memory, 160 GB of storage, gigabit networking and thinks it has two 32 bit cores. It's a veritable late 80's, early 90's supercomputer that fits in my backpack. And I bought it cheap.
"I didn't feel safe. Not that I'd ever been safe, but my perception had always been so."
You were, and still are, pretty safe. There was not much an improvement in your personal safety against terrorists since 2001.
911 was a single, spectacular, event but I seriously doubt anyone would pull that off today even if there were no change in security procedures. They were able to take the planes because, at that time, the basic orientation was to cooperate with highjackers in order to safeguard the security of the crew, passengers and aircraft. Highjacked planes were used to negociate, not as guided bombs. 911 changed those rules. Nobody will ever again be able to highjack a plane that easily.
As for other terrorist attacks... Well... Let's just say your chances of dying very old have always been very good.
I wonder how long until it becomes "cheer up or be tased to death".
They feel threatened because so much of their value proposition comes from network economics. The value of running Sharepoint drops drastically with a slight drop in the Office usage. One of the main drivers of Office sales is that other people send you Office documents and Office is the obvious choice for opening them. If people start sending documents as links to Google Documents, the incentive is removed and people would be just fine with a browser. The more people rely on browsers, the less reason there is to buy a computer without Windows and go for one of the Linux distros being installed in them.
They have every reason to feel threatened by anything with a measurable market share.
Probably because, unlike the products of the Ansari X-Prize competition, these teams have little or no incentive outside the competition prize itself.
There is no market for lunar landers right now.
Apple users, at least the more loyal of them, know their machines intimately. they don't edit configuration files, but they know more about how their computers work than the average Windows user.
How so? Consider the hands on approach to where your files are stored, the disk icons on the desktop. Also consider the application installation procedure - dragging an icon into an Applications folder. Mac users _know_ application files belong to that folder and know their computers have that many disks and they are named such and such. They even have a notion of what a hard disk looks like.
This is an example of a great product - users learn about it and are able to create mental models (however crude they can be) of how they work. Those models are then used to observe, learn more and anticipate how their computers will behave under a given set of conditions. Mac users grow considerably more sophisticated than their Windows counterparts.
Contrast that with the Windows way, where you give a program the authority to execute the miriad steps necessary to install a program. Windows users learn nothing from normal, dumbed down, computer operation.
Most humans don't like to be called stupid.
"People might be getting more sophisticated and knowing what operating system is running on all of their personal devices, but it's not because they want to, it's because the products are crap and don't shield the consumers from their underlying workings properly."
A great product doesn't shield you from its workings. It educates you about them. It makes you curious and makes you want to know it.
As for the phones, you no longer talk to the operator, you dial numbers into a computer that connects calls. You are the operator talking to the computer at the switch (which is pretty much what later day operators did.
"You answered yourself with the second sentence; iPods and iPhones aren't targetted at geeks."
There was a time only a few people came close to a computer. They were used and understood by even fewer. Then computers became smaller, cheaper and more useful, and a lot of people started to use them, first as terminals, then as personal computers and then disguised as PDAs, phones, music players, DVRs and a host other small electronic devices, to the point that one in four human beings own one, even without knowing. Terms like "operating system", "firmware", "proprietary" and, sadly, "crash" became part of common vocabulary to an ever increasing number of people.
This is not new. At the dawn of the phone, people picked it up and a well trained operator listened to your instructions and completed the call. The upper-limit on the number of phones in the world was given by the availability of operators. Now, we are long past that upper limit and everybody is a phone operator - we don't give instructions to an operator anymore - we know how to operate a planet-wide phone system and to patch international calls over different telcos.
Woz is right. An increasing number of consumers will get increasingly more sophisticated with time, as they relate to their technology. That spells doom for technologies that try to shape them instead of allowing themselves to be shaped by them.
It's sad. MySQL does not deserve a lot of its user base ;-).
Somehow, I am not very sure MS will keep the deadline.
OTOH, they have announced they are slimming it down to a bare minimum and pushing their downloadable stuff instead.
It's fun to watch how buzzword-compliant they are. "Multi-touch" and "Cloud" are terms they constantly associate with their future product line. It's textbook vaporware tactics at work.
We don't have a million dedicated hobbyists. We need something that is a drop-in replacement for a PC motherboard, something that could be used everywhere to power decent cheap, power-efficient and, hopefully, solid performance workstations.
There are zillions of company drones that spend all day between SAP, e-mail and spreadsheets. As soon they get an easy to deploy and manage non-Windows solution, they will be migrated. If the hardware is Windows-proof, better, as they won't be able to turn back.