Most people in the real world don't use linux, and don't want to.
I think a substantial portion of that "most" don't decide to use Microsoft either. I'm typing on a IBM ThinkPad running Windows because my company handed it to me. If they had asked, I would have preferred an Apple PowerBook, or a workstation with a 20 inch screen running SuSE. So, like many I think, I'm running a Windows license and don't want to.
The hard part about trying to have the single answer to the "best operating system" is that a generalized operating system like Windows, Linux, or OS X is trying to be a platform that does everything for everyone. The answer will always be flawed because there will always be someone that has requirements that don't fit this "best one". For some, the answer has to be Windows because it only has these "far better dev tools", whatever that means. For others, it will be Linux because they're plenty happy with the development tools they don't have to subscribe for several thousand $/annual to use.
I sometimes think that's related to the influx of people who do it for the money.
For me it was the emergence of object models and frameworks. When I started (1978), each language had about 100 commands and functions that you had to string together to make the logic of the application. You could literally have the entire grammar of the language in your head to build whatever you wanted.
Now, you have to know the object model, the APIs, the various tools and debuggers. The programming experience is a lot more about how to look up the existing thing you need to invoke out of thousands of possibilities, not counting Googling around for something to download that solves some of the problem at hand. So, it's less about having everything in your head and applying creativity than it is about knowing the framework and how to interact with others on the same framework.
Not really trying to create a rant about the good ol' days ("just give me ones and zeros"), but it feels to me that most software development has gone from computer science to vacational training. This creates the disconnect where users of the thing don't care about the magic that makes it work.
Only the tuning knob is particularly prominent, or even particularly visible from 10 feet. It is also designed to stand out visually, and for the 1950s this would have been a striking, attractive design. Kind of like the iPod.
Or maybe the big tuning disk was not so much a design element as much as it was an engineering choice to allow a normal movement of a thumb to turn the tiny capacitor enough to allow fine tuning of frequencies. Given the state of design in the 1950's (tailfins, anyone?), it's probably a mechanic thing more than a design thing. Which, of course, creates a wonderfully retro design in its wake. Or, a common metaphor that gets ingrained in all the humans doing design work into the future.
Outlook dominates the market because they give it away with Office. Just like Outlook Express dominates with those that don't buy Office. The reason all the other PIM/Email clients disappeared is because the ROI disappears when the competitor is free.
And your caveat is the most important (and should be a) deciding factor in a purchase decision.
Yea 87.2% according to this article, some stats say other things. 87% is a LOT, and if making my website in IE would serve that 87% more then it would serve that 12%, then guess who loses out?
I just try to keep things browser independent, then I get 100% with no extra work. Targeting IE is a way of saying you don't want non-IE browsers on your site. Depending on the purpose of the site, it might be at least rude and at most wrong to block the others.
Walt didn't draw Mickey then sit on his butt and collect royalties. This character has been refined, developed, and promoted continuously since it was first invented. To declare them "evil" to protect this is silly, and ultimately would push creators to make a quick hit and never refine or nuture their creations. Mickey isn't in the same category as a creation that was written once.
So Disney fights for all the financial advantage they can. Nothing evil about this, I think its just capitalism at work. Let's save "evil" for breaking kneecaps and blowing up pizza joints.
Since they have so many programmers, I'm sure some of them could get together and write some good software. I just can't think of any that are Microsoft products.
I keep thinking about products like MS Project, MS PowerPoint, MS Visio, etc. Things Microsoft acquired 10 years ago and has done very little to advance the product since the acquisition outside of rebranding. PowerPoint is the worst offender, I don't think this product has added a substantial feature since 1997.
My "enforcement mechanism" comment reflects that there are no federal auditors for HIPAA compliance, unlike banking regulations. The government is not pro-active (yet) in enforcing this, as citizens have to discover the problem then bring suit. The punishment is well written (and strong), but its not like there's a HIPAA cop on the street enforcing the law.
I'm sure that someone who sues is glad at least the requirement for compliance is there, but most organizations have been sluggish in their understanding and adoption of the regulations.
I think its all part of the cost of doing business at this point.
The sad fact is that identify theft is a major disaster to some individuals, but is just noise to the banks themselves. Like shoplifting in retail. They won't do anything about it until some other bank solves the problem and customer flock to them. But, many customers don't even know who their banks is anymore between consolidation and on-line banking.
What angers me the most is when I get a solicitation for a credit monitoring service for them to protect unusual activity. These guys created this mess where they'll open a line of credit for anyone without identification, and now they want to charge us to help protect us from them.
The mob would probably be in this business if it wasn't so morally distasteful.
HIPAA addresses this, but is pretty squishy, I believe.
The "law" uses words like "reasonable measures", so there's lots of legal loopholes. And, HHS has not identified an enforcement mechanism, so no government agency has jursidiction on enforcing the law outside of complaining to the secretary of HHS in writing. You'd probably have to sue for damages, but you could do that HIPAA or no HIPAA. I'm also not aware of any reporting you need to do to show you're in compliance.
At least last I checked...
The act itself had got to be 1200 pages in length, at least.
I used to think this, too, but I bought my first iMac a few months ago and am completely satisfied (err, well, aside from wishing for a free "tiger" upgrade).
If you're going to compare an iMac to a $500 stripped down Dell, then yes, they are expensive. But, if you compare an iMac to any other name brand "premium" configuration than there all in the same price range. Compare a well configured machine with a 20 inch wide screen LCD panel and a compliment of good bundled apps and they're in the same ball park.
And, the Mini fits in the budget category now.
Apple's not going to take over the world because its a world ruled by inertia of the masses and most people picking the cheapest regardless of long term value. But, they are staying relevant and showing they know design better than any other IT product company.
Re:Why do we measure things with money?
on
Star Wars Sickout
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· Score: 1
I think, unless someone comes up with easily understood units for "God" or "happiness", money is used because it is a somewhat well understood unit of value.
I'm not reading too much into the story. Sick and vacation time has value, is missed productivity, and is part of the compensation and planning process in most businesses. Frankly, they probably prefer its eaten up (whether for Star Wars or anything else) because its a liability that is on their books (vacation, anyway, since employees get paid for it when they leave usually).
I don't think politicians actually "think", either.
I know lots of people that don't have cable or satelite (counting myself). It doesn't seem to make sense to me to pay $75 a month (or more) for television when its free for a $25 antenna.
I'm kind of thinking that when broadcast stops I can just stop watching. There's rarely anything good on anyway and there's usually better things to do.
To be honest, as much as I dispise Microsoft, I would rather DOC files be the standard. I find most PDF's I need over the net to be bloated. Acrobat Reader is ploted as well.
DOC files can't be the standard, because they look different on different machines or when you change printers. The whole point of PDF is so the printed format is the same regardless of OS/printer capabilities.
PDFs aren't that magical a thing - its just PostScript with a wrapper. If the file is bloated it's because it included fonts that weren't needed or some data is in there as a scan and not test or something. PostScript, in general, is much more terse than Word unless the PostScript build was crappy.
Maybe they are against having public libraries, also?
I would guess that bookstores aren't really happy about libraries. And RIAA. And Blockbuster, at this point.
Public libraries are a great a noble thing to help those that can't afford it get a hold of books and to make sure that non-popular books are available for research. But, when public libraries purchase 100 copies of "Da Vinci Code", start lending out popular movies, and letting people take CDs home there are absoutely complaints about it.
In the case of Wi-Fi ISPs, they have spent a lot of capital installing lines and equipment and are still trying to figure out the pricing model that makes sense to them. In the middle of all this, municipalities (which also happen to charge taxes to regulate these business) are installing duplicate services for free, which at the very least completely changes the business cases by which ISPs made their investments. As a non-ISP employee, any of us that are not public sector employees look at this with a little concern about what else the government might decide to provide for free. What if they decide there should be a free service for web hosting? Site design? Application development?
Anyway, my own personal opinion is that there probably is space in there for some public WiFi services in areas not well serviced or desiring a somewhat slow, congested, unsecure Internet access, that the commercial outfits can differentiate themselves with. But no one should be surprised if ISPs and Telcos are a little upset at a free competing service built with public money coming along to take away some of the business.
And taxpayers who aren't sitting in Starbucks typing on their laptop should probably be a little upset about government money going to such a yuppie service while schools, roads, police, and the things the public sector can't provide are crying for budget money.
I also thought the comment about "Tiger" being like a service pack wasn't quite on. I don't recall Service Packs adding functionality like Spotlight and Dashboard. They mostly seem to be roll ups of bug fixes. Unless he thinks "now less pop ups" is on a par with Dashboard.
However, I thought it was a well done column and mostly fair. As someone who bought their Mac 3 months ago, I'm probably passing on the $129 hit. If it was $49 I would have done it, but it seems like I might as well wait 2 years for the next one to get more.
From this perspective, hiring someone as a "Microsoft Distinguished Engineer" for something that they did outside of Microsoft seems like a boneheaded thing to do and is very likely setting him and the rest of his new team up for failure.
And not very different from purchasing a product and slapping your brand on it, then bragging about your innovation.
I think everyone there was at some time from "outside the Microsoft culture", but it sure seems to overwrite their code quickly.
A long time ago John Dvorak wrote a column about how impossible it was for Microsoft to hire talent from MIT, CMU, and other top notch CS schools. Their recruiters show up on campus and all those smart young people would cringe at the thought of writing the next Word icon or some other trivial thing. Fast forward to today and you find out Microsoft can throw buckets of money to recruit with and they have no trouble picking up people.
There probably is some observation about the personal motivation of younger people or a generational shift in there somewhere, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to make it.
The amazing this is how little impact it seems to have had on their product or their business approach or their customer relationships. They still add functionality by acquiring innovative companies, they still piss off their partners by encroaching on their business, and they still piss off their customers by charging us for the same undeveloped crap while sitting on the worlds biggest pile of cash.
I'm too lazy to pull up the link just now but there was a story recently mentioning an ex-MS employee who was a bit peeved off I think at how long OS code was sat in the pot.
Might be this one. Not so much peeved as wondering what kind of job satisfaction you can have at Microsoft compared to companies that put their product out as fast as Google.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people in the real world don't use linux, and don't want to.
I think a substantial portion of that "most" don't decide to use Microsoft either. I'm typing on a IBM ThinkPad running Windows because my company handed it to me. If they had asked, I would have preferred an Apple PowerBook, or a workstation with a 20 inch screen running SuSE. So, like many I think, I'm running a Windows license and don't want to.
The hard part about trying to have the single answer to the "best operating system" is that a generalized operating system like Windows, Linux, or OS X is trying to be a platform that does everything for everyone. The answer will always be flawed because there will always be someone that has requirements that don't fit this "best one". For some, the answer has to be Windows because it only has these "far better dev tools", whatever that means. For others, it will be Linux because they're plenty happy with the development tools they don't have to subscribe for several thousand $/annual to use.
Probably the advantage with this one is the Army can buy it for $129 at Sharper Image.
I sometimes think that's related to the influx of people who do it for the money.
For me it was the emergence of object models and frameworks. When I started (1978), each language had about 100 commands and functions that you had to string together to make the logic of the application. You could literally have the entire grammar of the language in your head to build whatever you wanted.
Now, you have to know the object model, the APIs, the various tools and debuggers. The programming experience is a lot more about how to look up the existing thing you need to invoke out of thousands of possibilities, not counting Googling around for something to download that solves some of the problem at hand. So, it's less about having everything in your head and applying creativity than it is about knowing the framework and how to interact with others on the same framework.
Not really trying to create a rant about the good ol' days ("just give me ones and zeros"), but it feels to me that most software development has gone from computer science to vacational training. This creates the disconnect where users of the thing don't care about the magic that makes it work.
Only the tuning knob is particularly prominent, or even particularly visible from 10 feet. It is also designed to stand out visually, and for the 1950s this would have been a striking, attractive design. Kind of like the iPod.
Or maybe the big tuning disk was not so much a design element as much as it was an engineering choice to allow a normal movement of a thumb to turn the tiny capacitor enough to allow fine tuning of frequencies. Given the state of design in the 1950's (tailfins, anyone?), it's probably a mechanic thing more than a design thing. Which, of course, creates a wonderfully retro design in its wake. Or, a common metaphor that gets ingrained in all the humans doing design work into the future.
This is a joke, right?
Outlook dominates the market because they give it away with Office. Just like Outlook Express dominates with those that don't buy Office. The reason all the other PIM/Email clients disappeared is because the ROI disappears when the competitor is free.
And your caveat is the most important (and should be a) deciding factor in a purchase decision.
I just try to keep things browser independent, then I get 100% with no extra work. Targeting IE is a way of saying you don't want non-IE browsers on your site. Depending on the purpose of the site, it might be at least rude and at most wrong to block the others.
Technically, I think it was a "slug" and not a "bomb".
Thank you.
Walt didn't draw Mickey then sit on his butt and collect royalties. This character has been refined, developed, and promoted continuously since it was first invented. To declare them "evil" to protect this is silly, and ultimately would push creators to make a quick hit and never refine or nuture their creations. Mickey isn't in the same category as a creation that was written once.
So Disney fights for all the financial advantage they can. Nothing evil about this, I think its just capitalism at work. Let's save "evil" for breaking kneecaps and blowing up pizza joints.
Since they have so many programmers, I'm sure some of them could get together and write some good software. I just can't think of any that are Microsoft products.
I keep thinking about products like MS Project, MS PowerPoint, MS Visio, etc. Things Microsoft acquired 10 years ago and has done very little to advance the product since the acquisition outside of rebranding. PowerPoint is the worst offender, I don't think this product has added a substantial feature since 1997.
My "enforcement mechanism" comment reflects that there are no federal auditors for HIPAA compliance, unlike banking regulations. The government is not pro-active (yet) in enforcing this, as citizens have to discover the problem then bring suit. The punishment is well written (and strong), but its not like there's a HIPAA cop on the street enforcing the law.
I'm sure that someone who sues is glad at least the requirement for compliance is there, but most organizations have been sluggish in their understanding and adoption of the regulations.
I think its all part of the cost of doing business at this point.
The sad fact is that identify theft is a major disaster to some individuals, but is just noise to the banks themselves. Like shoplifting in retail. They won't do anything about it until some other bank solves the problem and customer flock to them. But, many customers don't even know who their banks is anymore between consolidation and on-line banking.
What angers me the most is when I get a solicitation for a credit monitoring service for them to protect unusual activity. These guys created this mess where they'll open a line of credit for anyone without identification, and now they want to charge us to help protect us from them.
The mob would probably be in this business if it wasn't so morally distasteful.
HIPAA addresses this, but is pretty squishy, I believe.
The "law" uses words like "reasonable measures", so there's lots of legal loopholes. And, HHS has not identified an enforcement mechanism, so no government agency has jursidiction on enforcing the law outside of complaining to the secretary of HHS in writing. You'd probably have to sue for damages, but you could do that HIPAA or no HIPAA. I'm also not aware of any reporting you need to do to show you're in compliance.
At least last I checked...
The act itself had got to be 1200 pages in length, at least.
I used to think this, too, but I bought my first iMac a few months ago and am completely satisfied (err, well, aside from wishing for a free "tiger" upgrade).
If you're going to compare an iMac to a $500 stripped down Dell, then yes, they are expensive. But, if you compare an iMac to any other name brand "premium" configuration than there all in the same price range. Compare a well configured machine with a 20 inch wide screen LCD panel and a compliment of good bundled apps and they're in the same ball park.
And, the Mini fits in the budget category now.
Apple's not going to take over the world because its a world ruled by inertia of the masses and most people picking the cheapest regardless of long term value. But, they are staying relevant and showing they know design better than any other IT product company.
I think, unless someone comes up with easily understood units for "God" or "happiness", money is used because it is a somewhat well understood unit of value.
I'm not reading too much into the story. Sick and vacation time has value, is missed productivity, and is part of the compensation and planning process in most businesses. Frankly, they probably prefer its eaten up (whether for Star Wars or anything else) because its a liability that is on their books (vacation, anyway, since employees get paid for it when they leave usually).
I don't think politicians actually "think", either.
I hate being such a nerd here, but R2D2 isn't the protocol droid, C-3PO is.
I know lots of people that don't have cable or satelite (counting myself). It doesn't seem to make sense to me to pay $75 a month (or more) for television when its free for a $25 antenna.
I'm kind of thinking that when broadcast stops I can just stop watching. There's rarely anything good on anyway and there's usually better things to do.
DOC files can't be the standard, because they look different on different machines or when you change printers. The whole point of PDF is so the printed format is the same regardless of OS/printer capabilities.
PDFs aren't that magical a thing - its just PostScript with a wrapper. If the file is bloated it's because it included fonts that weren't needed or some data is in there as a scan and not test or something. PostScript, in general, is much more terse than Word unless the PostScript build was crappy.
Uh, I remember that one from OS/2.
Nice to know their IBM partnership fed into the development of Windows. I guess it does take years for code to find its way out the door.
It's nice to know I'll never climb out of the learning curve...
I would guess that bookstores aren't really happy about libraries. And RIAA. And Blockbuster, at this point.
Public libraries are a great a noble thing to help those that can't afford it get a hold of books and to make sure that non-popular books are available for research. But, when public libraries purchase 100 copies of "Da Vinci Code", start lending out popular movies, and letting people take CDs home there are absoutely complaints about it.
In the case of Wi-Fi ISPs, they have spent a lot of capital installing lines and equipment and are still trying to figure out the pricing model that makes sense to them. In the middle of all this, municipalities (which also happen to charge taxes to regulate these business) are installing duplicate services for free, which at the very least completely changes the business cases by which ISPs made their investments. As a non-ISP employee, any of us that are not public sector employees look at this with a little concern about what else the government might decide to provide for free. What if they decide there should be a free service for web hosting? Site design? Application development?
Anyway, my own personal opinion is that there probably is space in there for some public WiFi services in areas not well serviced or desiring a somewhat slow, congested, unsecure Internet access, that the commercial outfits can differentiate themselves with. But no one should be surprised if ISPs and Telcos are a little upset at a free competing service built with public money coming along to take away some of the business.
And taxpayers who aren't sitting in Starbucks typing on their laptop should probably be a little upset about government money going to such a yuppie service while schools, roads, police, and the things the public sector can't provide are crying for budget money.
I also thought the comment about "Tiger" being like a service pack wasn't quite on. I don't recall Service Packs adding functionality like Spotlight and Dashboard. They mostly seem to be roll ups of bug fixes. Unless he thinks "now less pop ups" is on a par with Dashboard.
However, I thought it was a well done column and mostly fair. As someone who bought their Mac 3 months ago, I'm probably passing on the $129 hit. If it was $49 I would have done it, but it seems like I might as well wait 2 years for the next one to get more.
And not very different from purchasing a product and slapping your brand on it, then bragging about your innovation.
I think everyone there was at some time from "outside the Microsoft culture", but it sure seems to overwrite their code quickly.
A long time ago John Dvorak wrote a column about how impossible it was for Microsoft to hire talent from MIT, CMU, and other top notch CS schools. Their recruiters show up on campus and all those smart young people would cringe at the thought of writing the next Word icon or some other trivial thing. Fast forward to today and you find out Microsoft can throw buckets of money to recruit with and they have no trouble picking up people.
There probably is some observation about the personal motivation of younger people or a generational shift in there somewhere, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to make it.
The amazing this is how little impact it seems to have had on their product or their business approach or their customer relationships. They still add functionality by acquiring innovative companies, they still piss off their partners by encroaching on their business, and they still piss off their customers by charging us for the same undeveloped crap while sitting on the worlds biggest pile of cash.
Might be this one. Not so much peeved as wondering what kind of job satisfaction you can have at Microsoft compared to companies that put their product out as fast as Google.