Agreed, In a very pragmatic sense, employers value a degree as a form of risk mitigation. The idea is that some respected institution has already done the vetting process. The accuracy of this process is certainly debatable, but it's certainly a shortcut for employer to have to perform very deep screening of potential hires.
Greg
This "Mac clones nearly killed Apple" is always brought up as some sort of gospel proof that open hardware is bad for Apple. While there is probably some truth to this, the main things that nearly killed Apple in the mid 90s were lackluster machines with clone-like industrial design sold at a premium and an aging operating system. Jobs came in and rectified these issues starting with the iMac and then OSX. That the clone Mac were competitive is really more an indicator of Apple's mid 90s lack on innovation.
Recall however Apple spent the better part of the 90s on failed (and unreleased) attempts (pink, Taligent) to produce OSX and in the end they ended up buying much of the underlying architecture (NextStep).
Under options section "When I first visit mail" select "Show me my Inbox" instead of "Show Me the Home Tab".
They picked the wrong default when they added this feature (I'm sure on purpose), but you can change it.
We certainly can't trust the military to get advanced technology like this working and then let it thrive in research and eventually become commercialized. Maybe instead we can get those guys that helped make beginnings of the internet . . . oh wait never mind.
Thanks for taking a single line out of my post and commenting on it out of context. I'm sure you have a bright future as a tabloid journalist in front of you.
If you really need it spelled out:
Rest of World = Non G8 (USSR did invest in research)
Contribute = Investing capital into Research and Development and hence innovation.
Clearly ancient civilizations (China, India, etc.) have contributed significantly to human knowledge in the past, but post-colonial/post-WW2 these societies have not (for many reasons) had the ability (economic, political) to invest in innovation. Their recent efforts at expanding their efforts in research, development, and innovation are welcome.
I welcome the rest of the world starting to step up to plate and contribute. Innovation isn't a zero sum game and the more creative people working in integrated and "open" economies the better. A successful China doesn't need to be a negative to the world. The competition between G7 countries results in a net positive. Admittedly China still poses many concerns with it's repressive government. However the more integrated and successful they become, the more they have to lose by not playing by international rules. There are a billion Chinese looking to take your job, but hopefully there will also be a billion Chinese consumers looking for your goods and services.
I don't completely disagree with what you are saying, but Apple is not unique in providing a full web browser on a phone. Nokia provides Safari on many of their phones. Most phone browsers support hooks for dialing and email already. The big issues with phone are having enough memory to render a page, have a screen that is large enough and having enough bandwidth. I don't know what the iPhone RAM specs are, their screen is a bit larger, but they certainly fail bandwidth unless you go wifi. The other option is that you create web applications designed to run on these small screens. I don't see using Yahoo's AJAX email application on this phone.
While I think it is unlike Apple to cede a potential market, I do think this is good for the mobile internet in general. Apple is basically saying they will run applications that are server centric and designed to run against a standards based client (i.e. AJAX applications). Nokia has many phones that run the Safari browser and should be as capable as the iPhone for running smallscreen authored AJAX applications. HTML/JavaScript/CSS is not the optimal platform for developing applications, but it is the most neutral platform.
I'm sure Apple will figure out some way to screw with this (custom iPhone dom extensions), but killer apps will thrive when they can reach lots of high-end phone browsers, as opposed to just Apple's share.
I don't think Apple is being particularly virtuous here, rather they had too much hubris to plan for a development platform and rushed this so called "sweet" after-the-fact solution out to placate the demand.
The thing I hate most about SUVs is their impact on road safety (to others). Since these are all classified as trucks, they are not required to be bumper compatible with automobiles. Lot of people I know buy them because they want "the safest thing on the road", but it certainly seems at the expense of everyone else. Barrelling down road by oneself in a 1+ ton death machine seems incredibly selfish.
Desktop applications like office applications won't go away, but nothing makes your product more irrelevant than when it becomes a commodity. I don't think on-line word processors are going to destroy MS near as much as the movement away from proprietary data formats. Office applications are not where the industry's growth is going to come from.
In addition to XMLHttpRequest MS was also setting up their demise by basically destroying the shrinkwrap software industry. No one could safely compete in this market as MS would eventually build a competing app and tie it into their OS. I liken it to evolutionary jumps, once the ecosystem was destroyed the only way to compete was to come up with a alternative approach. Hence Web applications.
I don't really think Apple is an actual reason for MS demise. It more has to do with Mr. Graham's first point. The desktop is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if its Windows, or Mac or Linux.
The only exception to this and where the real battleground is is in Video/Audio. Here MS, Apple, and Adobe are real problems. The open standards that led to creation of the web do not have strong analogs in the Video/Audio world and none of these companies can be trusted to do what's best for the community. If your cheering for Apple to succeed in this space, get ready to complain about their monopolistic tactics soon.
I think the 2+ miles under the harbor was actually the most trivial part of the project, being completed well ahead of and opened earlier than the rest of the project. The real challenge was building the new underground roads and associated bridges, ramps etc. while keeping the existing transportation infrastructure operational (albeit in a limited form). They had to deal with building close to existing subway tunnels, dealing with soil that was all landfill, and hitting archaeological sites. The project was certainly wrought with corruption, but to imply that it was somehow inefficient by comparing the length of the roads developed makes little sense.
Simpsons, Talking about new Duff Beer Products at the Brewery:
Guide: What does the future hold for us? Heh. Let's just say we have
a few ideas up our sleeve.
Homer: Like what?
Guide: Um, I'd rather not get into it right now.
Homer: Why not?
Guide: All right, we don't have any ideas for the future. We got
nothing. Happy?
Homer: [whiny] No.
-- So much for innovation, "Duffless"
I always find it interesting to see how much argument goes into this. In some ways it's a lot like trying to convince someone to believe in a god. We aren't going to be 100% confident that global warming is a problem until it's probably too late. However it seems to me that there are plenty of good reasons to consider rethinking our fossil fuel enconomy (geo-political, pollution, scarcity, global warming, congestion). Even if global warming turns out not to be an issue, we should be trying to improve our world energy situation. Not much bad can happen if we try to reduce carbon emissions, while plenty of bad can (or may occur) if we continue the way we are.
Now I know there are arguments that we might damage the global economy if we try and limit our fossil fuel use. To me this discounts the one resource we should have plenty of: human ingenuity. Humanity has to figure out an alternative to the fossil fuel economy or as the developing world grows, we will have serious problem, global warming or not. It will just be more like Road Warrior than Water World:)
I completely understand that the Office UI is a separate UI experience outside of what is provided the OS and I think this is the heart of the problem. There's no incentive to put the best UI concepts into the OS, but rather sell a whole application suite that acts as a shell on top of the OS. This is why Windows provides such a poor end user experience.
From what I have seen, I would have to agree that the new UI concepts are an improvement. What drives me nuts however is this just illustrates the conflict of interest of a company that builds the OS and applications. I haven't worked with Vista yet, but from past experience, I'm sure most of these special user controls are not available from MS for 3rd party application development. An OS company whose first priority was to build a consistent user experience across all apps would provide cutting edge UI controls to all developers. Instead MS provides an OS UI dev kit that ensures that 3rd party developers will either create a bland user experience, or one that is unique but inconsistant with the rest of the OS experience. Meanwhile they will provide a "suite" of applications with a dynamic new look that outstrips most of what else is written for the platform. Office is really an improved UI shell on top of a lacking Operating System.
I think HDTV gameplaying may happen at a slower rate than HDTV adoption. In our house the game system (a gamecube) is relegated to the den on a second TV. When we get a big HDTV its going in the family room and I'm not going to let the kids usurp this TV all day to play games. While this comment clearly puts me in the "video games are for kids" camp, I still think this is the predominant demographic. There's a market for adult game playing and it's growing and I'm sure there is money to be made there, but I still think alot of game systems get relegated to secondary TVs in other rooms. In other words this market is maturing and fragmenting into different niches.
Having a networked based calendar is really great. I also love how I can keep my work and personal items in a single calendar and well as overlay with my spouses calendar (+ 4 boys).
I just need two things now:
1) An extension to thunderbird that parses outlook meeting requests and presents a button to add them to my yahoo calendar. It would be nice if Yahoo supported some standard along this line.
2) Always available network access from multiple devices. Syncing sucks. It would be great to have high speed access to my yahoo stuff from a phone, use that calendar and address book directly without syncing.
Slashdot Mirror
lunch is when I read Slashdot!
Agreed, In a very pragmatic sense, employers value a degree as a form of risk mitigation. The idea is that some respected institution has already done the vetting process. The accuracy of this process is certainly debatable, but it's certainly a shortcut for employer to have to perform very deep screening of potential hires. Greg
This "Mac clones nearly killed Apple" is always brought up as some sort of gospel proof that open hardware is bad for Apple. While there is probably some truth to this, the main things that nearly killed Apple in the mid 90s were lackluster machines with clone-like industrial design sold at a premium and an aging operating system. Jobs came in and rectified these issues starting with the iMac and then OSX. That the clone Mac were competitive is really more an indicator of Apple's mid 90s lack on innovation.
Yahoo! Bookmarks has had this feature for a long time. Well before the more "innovative" Google (at least since 2001).
Recall however Apple spent the better part of the 90s on failed (and unreleased) attempts (pink, Taligent) to produce OSX and in the end they ended up buying much of the underlying architecture (NextStep).
Under options section "When I first visit mail" select "Show me my Inbox" instead of "Show Me the Home Tab". They picked the wrong default when they added this feature (I'm sure on purpose), but you can change it.
We certainly can't trust the military to get advanced technology like this working and then let it thrive in research and eventually become commercialized. Maybe instead we can get those guys that helped make beginnings of the internet . . . oh wait never mind.
If you really need it spelled out:
Rest of World = Non G8 (USSR did invest in research)
Contribute = Investing capital into Research and Development and hence innovation.
Clearly ancient civilizations (China, India, etc.) have contributed significantly to human knowledge in the past, but post-colonial/post-WW2 these societies have not (for many reasons) had the ability (economic, political) to invest in innovation. Their recent efforts at expanding their efforts in research, development, and innovation are welcome.
I welcome the rest of the world starting to step up to plate and contribute. Innovation isn't a zero sum game and the more creative people working in integrated and "open" economies the better. A successful China doesn't need to be a negative to the world. The competition between G7 countries results in a net positive. Admittedly China still poses many concerns with it's repressive government. However the more integrated and successful they become, the more they have to lose by not playing by international rules. There are a billion Chinese looking to take your job, but hopefully there will also be a billion Chinese consumers looking for your goods and services.
I don't completely disagree with what you are saying, but Apple is not unique in providing a full web browser on a phone. Nokia provides Safari on many of their phones. Most phone browsers support hooks for dialing and email already. The big issues with phone are having enough memory to render a page, have a screen that is large enough and having enough bandwidth. I don't know what the iPhone RAM specs are, their screen is a bit larger, but they certainly fail bandwidth unless you go wifi. The other option is that you create web applications designed to run on these small screens. I don't see using Yahoo's AJAX email application on this phone.
I'm sure Apple will figure out some way to screw with this (custom iPhone dom extensions), but killer apps will thrive when they can reach lots of high-end phone browsers, as opposed to just Apple's share.
I don't think Apple is being particularly virtuous here, rather they had too much hubris to plan for a development platform and rushed this so called "sweet" after-the-fact solution out to placate the demand.
The thing I hate most about SUVs is their impact on road safety (to others). Since these are all classified as trucks, they are not required to be bumper compatible with automobiles. Lot of people I know buy them because they want "the safest thing on the road", but it certainly seems at the expense of everyone else. Barrelling down road by oneself in a 1+ ton death machine seems incredibly selfish.
Desktop applications like office applications won't go away, but nothing makes your product more irrelevant than when it becomes a commodity. I don't think on-line word processors are going to destroy MS near as much as the movement away from proprietary data formats. Office applications are not where the industry's growth is going to come from.
In addition to XMLHttpRequest MS was also setting up their demise by basically destroying the shrinkwrap software industry. No one could safely compete in this market as MS would eventually build a competing app and tie it into their OS. I liken it to evolutionary jumps, once the ecosystem was destroyed the only way to compete was to come up with a alternative approach. Hence Web applications. I don't really think Apple is an actual reason for MS demise. It more has to do with Mr. Graham's first point. The desktop is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if its Windows, or Mac or Linux. The only exception to this and where the real battleground is is in Video/Audio. Here MS, Apple, and Adobe are real problems. The open standards that led to creation of the web do not have strong analogs in the Video/Audio world and none of these companies can be trusted to do what's best for the community. If your cheering for Apple to succeed in this space, get ready to complain about their monopolistic tactics soon.
I think the 2+ miles under the harbor was actually the most trivial part of the project, being completed well ahead of and opened earlier than the rest of the project. The real challenge was building the new underground roads and associated bridges, ramps etc. while keeping the existing transportation infrastructure operational (albeit in a limited form). They had to deal with building close to existing subway tunnels, dealing with soil that was all landfill, and hitting archaeological sites. The project was certainly wrought with corruption, but to imply that it was somehow inefficient by comparing the length of the roads developed makes little sense.
Simpsons, Talking about new Duff Beer Products at the Brewery: Guide: What does the future hold for us? Heh. Let's just say we have a few ideas up our sleeve. Homer: Like what? Guide: Um, I'd rather not get into it right now. Homer: Why not? Guide: All right, we don't have any ideas for the future. We got nothing. Happy? Homer: [whiny] No. -- So much for innovation, "Duffless"
The first time I saw the brown Zune, I thought this looked like something that Wookies would have developed.
I always find it interesting to see how much argument goes into this. In some ways it's a lot like trying to convince someone to believe in a god. We aren't going to be 100% confident that global warming is a problem until it's probably too late. However it seems to me that there are plenty of good reasons to consider rethinking our fossil fuel enconomy (geo-political, pollution, scarcity, global warming, congestion). Even if global warming turns out not to be an issue, we should be trying to improve our world energy situation. Not much bad can happen if we try to reduce carbon emissions, while plenty of bad can (or may occur) if we continue the way we are. Now I know there are arguments that we might damage the global economy if we try and limit our fossil fuel use. To me this discounts the one resource we should have plenty of: human ingenuity. Humanity has to figure out an alternative to the fossil fuel economy or as the developing world grows, we will have serious problem, global warming or not. It will just be more like Road Warrior than Water World :)
I completely understand that the Office UI is a separate UI experience outside of what is provided the OS and I think this is the heart of the problem. There's no incentive to put the best UI concepts into the OS, but rather sell a whole application suite that acts as a shell on top of the OS. This is why Windows provides such a poor end user experience.
From what I have seen, I would have to agree that the new UI concepts are an improvement. What drives me nuts however is this just illustrates the conflict of interest of a company that builds the OS and applications. I haven't worked with Vista yet, but from past experience, I'm sure most of these special user controls are not available from MS for 3rd party application development. An OS company whose first priority was to build a consistent user experience across all apps would provide cutting edge UI controls to all developers. Instead MS provides an OS UI dev kit that ensures that 3rd party developers will either create a bland user experience, or one that is unique but inconsistant with the rest of the OS experience. Meanwhile they will provide a "suite" of applications with a dynamic new look that outstrips most of what else is written for the platform. Office is really an improved UI shell on top of a lacking Operating System.
I second the praise for Word 5 for Mac. Fast, straightforward UI. 6 was just awful and slow.
I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Ham! Did anyone else think this when read this post?
I think HDTV gameplaying may happen at a slower rate than HDTV adoption. In our house the game system (a gamecube) is relegated to the den on a second TV. When we get a big HDTV its going in the family room and I'm not going to let the kids usurp this TV all day to play games. While this comment clearly puts me in the "video games are for kids" camp, I still think this is the predominant demographic. There's a market for adult game playing and it's growing and I'm sure there is money to be made there, but I still think alot of game systems get relegated to secondary TVs in other rooms. In other words this market is maturing and fragmenting into different niches.
How about ... Get off your fat ass and go running with this thing!
I just need two things now:
1) An extension to thunderbird that parses outlook meeting requests and presents a button to add them to my yahoo calendar. It would be nice if Yahoo supported some standard along this line.
2) Always available network access from multiple devices. Syncing sucks. It would be great to have high speed access to my yahoo stuff from a phone, use that calendar and address book directly without syncing.